Shibumi (7 page)

As always at this season, cool evening breezes are drawn over the city from the sea, toward the warm land mass of China; and the draperies billow out from the glass doors to the veranda of the large house on Avenue Joffre in the French Concession.

General Kishikawa Takashi withdraws a stone from his lacquered
Gô ke
and holds it lightly between the tip of his middle finger and the nail of his index. Some minutes pass in silence, but his concentration is not on the game, which is in its 176th gesture and has begun to concrete toward the inevitable. The General’s eyes rest on his opponent who, for his part, is completely absorbed in the patterns of black and white stones on the pale yellow board. Kishikawa-san has decided that the young boy must be sent away to Japan, and tonight he would have to be told. But not just now. It would spoil the flavor of the game; and that would be unkind because, for the first time, the young man is winning.

The sun has set behind the French Concession, over mainland China. Lanterns have been lighted in the old walled dry, and the smell of thousands of cooking suppers fills the narrow, tangled streets. Along the Whangpoo and up Soochow Creek, the sampan homes of the floating city are alive with dim lights, as old women with trousers tied at the ankle arrange stones to level cooking fires on the canted decks, for the river is at low tide and the sampans have heeled over, their wooden bellies stuck in the yellow mud. People late for their suppers trot over Stealing Hen Bridge. A professional letter writer flourishes his brush carelessly, eager to finish his day’s work, and knowing that his calligraphic insouciance will not be discovered by the illiterate young girl for whom he is composing a love letter on the model of one of his Sixteen Never-Fail Formulas. The Bund, that street of imposing commercial houses and hotels, gaudy statement of imperial might and confidence, is silent and dark; for the British taipans have fled; the
North China Daily News
no longer prints its gossip, its pious reprimands, its complaisant affirmations of the world situation. Even Sasson House, the most elegant facade on the Bund, built on profits from the opium trade, has been demoted to the mundane task of housing the Headquarters of the Occupation Forces. The greedy French, the swaggering British, the pompous Germans, the opportunistic Americans are all gone. Shanghai is under the control of the Japanese.

General Kishikawa reflects on the uncanny resemblance between this young man across the Gô board and his mother: almost as though Alexandra Ivanovna had produced her son parthenogenetically—a feat those who had experienced her overwhelming social presence would consider well within her capacity. The young man has the same angular line of jaw, the same broad forehead and high cheekbones, the fine nose that is spared the Slavic curse of causing interlocutors to feel they are staring into the barrels of a shotgun. But most intriguing to Kishikawa-san are comparisons between the boy’s eyes and the mother’s. Comparisons and contrasts. Physically, their eyes are identical: large, deepset, and of that startling bottle-green color unique to the Countess’s family. But the polar differences in personality between mother and son are manifest in the articulation and intensity of gaze, in the dimming and crystallizing of those sinople eyes. While the mothers glance was bewitching, the son’s is cool. Where the mother used her eyes to fascinate, the boy uses his to dismiss. What in her look was coquetry, in his is arrogance. The light that shone from her eyes is still and internal in his. Her eyes expressed humor; his express wit. She charmed; he disturbs.

Alexandra Ivanovna was an egotist; Nicholai is an egoist.

Although the General’s Oriental frame of reference does not remark it, by Western criteria Nicholai looks very young for his fifteen years. Only the frigidity of his too-green eyes and a certain firm set of mouth keeps his face from being too delicate, too finely formed for a male. A vague discomfort over his physical beauty prompted Nicholai from an early age to engage in the most vigorous and combative of sports. He trained in classic, rather old-fashioned jiujitsu, and he played rugby with the international side against the sons of the British taipans with an effectiveness that bordered on brutality. Although Nicholai understood the stiff charade of fair play and sportsmanship with which the British protect themselves from real defeat, he preferred the responsibilities of victory to the comforts of losing with grace. But he did not really like team sports, preferring to win or lose by virtue of his own skill and toughness. And his emotional toughness was such that he almost always won, as a matter of will.

Alexandra Ivanovna almost always won too, not as a matter of will, but as a matter of right. When she appeared in Shanghai in the autumn of 1922 with an astonishing amount of baggage and no visible means of support, she relied upon her previous social position in St. Petersburg to grant her leadership in the growing community of displaced White Russians—so called by the ruling British, not because they came from Belorosskiya, but because they were obviously not “red.” She immediately created about her an admiring court that included the most interesting men of the colony. To be interesting to Alexandra Ivanovna, one had to be rich, handsome, or witty; and it was the major annoyance of her life that she seldom found two of these qualities in one man, and never all three.

There were no other women near the core of her society; the Countess found women dull and, in her opinion, superfluous, as she could fully occupy the minds and attentions of a dozen men at one time, keeping a soirée atmosphere witty, brisk, and just naughty enough.

In retaliation, the unwanted ladies of the International Settlement declared that nothing in this world could tempt them to be seen in public with the Countess, and they fervently wished their husbands and fiancées shared their fine sense of propriety. By shrugs and hums and pursings of lips, these peripheral ladies made it known that they suspected a causal relationship between two social paradoxes: the first being that the Countess maintained a lavish household although she had arrived penniless; and the second being that she was constantly surrounded by the most desirable men of the international community, despite the fact that she lacked all those sterner virtues the ladies had been assured by their mothers were more important and durable than mere charm and beauty. These women would have been glad to include the Countess within that body of White Russian women who trickled into China from Manchuria, sold what pitiful goods and Jewelry they had managed to escape with, and finally were driven to sustain themselves by vending the comfort of their laps. But these arid, righteous women were denied that facile dismissal by the knowledge that the Countess was one of those not uncommon anomalies of the Tzarist court, a Russian noblewoman without a drop of Slavic blood in her all-too-visible (and possibly available) body. Alexandra Ivanovna (whose father’s given name had been Johann) was a Hapsburg with connections to a minor German royal family that had immigrated to England with nothing but their Protestantism to recommend them, and which had recently changed its name to one of less Hunnish sound as a gesture of patriotism. Still, the proper ladies of the settlement averred that even such deep quarterings were not proof of moral rectitude in those Flapper days; nor, despite the Countess’s apparent assumption, an adequate substitute for it.

During the third season of her reign, Alexandra Ivanovna appeared to settle her attentions upon a vain young Prussian who possessed that pellucid, superficial intelligence untrammelled by sensitivity that is common to his race. Count Helmut von Keitel zum Hel became her companion of record—her pet and toy. Ten years younger than she, the Count possessed great physical beauty and athletic prowess. He was an expert horseman and a fencer of note. She thought of him as a decorative setting for her, and the only public statement she ever made concerning their relationship was to speak of him as “adequate breeding stock.”

It was her practice to pass the heavy, humid months of summer in a villa in the uplands. One autumn she returned later than usual to Shanghai, and thenceforward there was a baby boy in the household. As a matter of form, young von Keitel zum Hel proposed marriage. She laughed lightly and told him that, while it had been her intention all along to create a child as a living argument against mongrel egalitarianism, she did not feel the slightest impulse to have
two
children about the house. He bowed with the rigid petulance that serves Prussians as a substitute for dignity, and made arrangements to return to Germany within the month.

Far from concealing the boy or the circumstances of his birth, she made him the ornament of her salon. When official requirements made it necessary that she name him, she called him Nicholai Hel, taking the last name from a little river bordering the Keitel estate. Alexandra Ivanovna’s view of her own role in the production of the lad was manifest in the fact that his full name was Nicholai Alexandrovitch Hel.

A series of English nannies followed one another through the household, so English joined French, Russian, and German as the languages of the crib, with no particular preference shown, save for Alexandra Ivanovna’s conviction that certain languages were best for expressing certain classes of thought. One spoke of love and other trivia in French; one discussed tragedy and disaster in Russian; one did business in German; and one addressed servants in English.

Because the children of the servants were his only companions, Chinese was also a cradle language for Nicholai, and he developed the habit of thinking in that language because his greatest childhood dread was that his mother could read his thoughts—and she had no Chinese.

Alexandra Ivanovna considered schools appropriate only for merchants’ children, so Nicholai’s education was confided to a succession of tutors, all decorative young men, all devoted to the mother. When it developed that Nicholai displayed an interest in, and a considerable capacity for, pure mathematics, his mother was not at all pleased. But when she was assured by the tutor of the moment that pure mathematics was a study without practical or commercial application, she decided it was appropriate to his breeding.

The more practical aspects of Nicholai’s social education—and all of his fun—came from his practice of sneaking away from the house and wandering with street urchins through the narrow alleys and hidden courtyards of the seething, noisome, noisy city. Dressed in the universal loose-fitting blue, his close-cropped hair under a round cap, he would roam alone or with friends of the hour and return home to admonitions or punishments, both of which he accepted with great calm and an infuriating elsewhere gaze in his bottle-green eyes.

In the streets, Nicholai learned the melody of this city the Westerners had confected for themselves. He saw supercilious young British “griffins” being pulled about by cadaverous rickshaw “boys” cachectic with tuberculosis, sweating with effort and malnutrition, wearing gauze masks to avoid offending the European masters. He saw the compradores, fat and buttery middlemen who profited from the Europeans’ exploitation of their own people, and who aped Western ways and ethics. After making profit and gorging on exotic foods, the greatest pleasure of these compradores was to arrange to deflower twelve– or thirteen-year-old girls who had been bought in Hangchow or Soochow and who were ready to enter the brothels licensed by the French. Their tactics of defloration were… irregular. The only revenge the girl might have was, if she had a gift for theatrics, the profitable ploy of being deflowered rather often. Nicholai learned that all of the beggars who threatened passers-by with contact with their rotting limbs, or stuck pins into babies to make them cry pitifully, or mobbed and frightened tourists with their demands for
kumshah
—all of them, from the old men who prayed for you or cursed you, to the half-starved children who offered to perform unnatural acts with one another for your entertainment, were under the control of His Heinous Majesty, the King of Beggars, who ran a peculiar combination of guild and protection racket. Anything lost in the city, anyone hiding in the city, any service wanted in the city, could be found through a modest contribution to His Majesty’s treasury.

Down at the docks, Nicholai watched sweating stevedores dog-trot up and down the gangplanks of metal ships and wooden junks with strabismic eyes painted on their prows. In the evening, after they had already worked eleven hours, chanting their constant, narcotizing
hai-yo, hai-yo
the stevedores would begin to weaken, and sometimes one would stumble under his load. Then the Gurkhas would wade in with their blackjacks and iron bars, and the lazy would find new strength… or lasting rest.

Nicholai watched the police openly accept “squeeze money” from withered amahs who pimped for teenaged prostitutes. He learned to recognize the secret signs of the “Greens” and the “Reds,” who constituted the world’s largest secret societies, and whose protection and assassination rackets extended from beggars to politicians. Chiang Kai-shek himself was a “Green,” sworn to obedience to the gang. And it was the “Greens” who murdered and mutilated young university students who attempted to organize the Chinese proletariat. Nicholai could tell a “Red” from a “Green” by the way he held his cigarette, by the way he spat.

During the days, Nicholai learned from tutors: Mathematics, Classical Literature, and Philosophy. In the evenings, he learned from the streets: Commerce, Politics, Enlightened Imperialism, and the Humanities.

And at night he would sit beside his mother as she entertained the cleverest of the men who controlled Shanghai and wrung it dry from their clubs and commercial houses of the Bund. What the majority of these men thought was shyness in Nicholai, and what the brightest of them thought was aloofness, was in fact cold hatred for merchants and the merchant mentality.

Time passed; Alexandra Ivanovna’s carefully placed and expertly guided investments flourished, while the rhythms of her social life slowed. She became more comfortable of body, more languid, more lush; but her vivacity and beauty ripened, rather than waned, for she had inherited that family trait that had kept her mother and aunts looking vaguely thirtyish long after they passed the half-century mark. Former lovers became old friends, and life on Avenue Joffre mellowed.