The Binding Chair (2 page)

T
HE
C
ZAR’S
C
LOCK

A
LICE
B
ENJAMIN HAD BEEN SEPARATED FROM
May only once, in 1913, when she was twelve years old and was discovered in her aunt’s dressing room, rolling up sticky balls of opium for May to smoke in her long ivory-and-silver pipe. Alice had made a dozen or more of them, the size of marbles, and had lined them up on the vanity table among perfumes and creams, when her mother walked in. Was that the moment that everything changed?

Until then, all the family had lived together in the same big house on Bubbling Well Road in Shanghai: Aunt May and Alice and Alice’s sister, Cecily; the girls’ father, Dick Benjamin, and their mother, Dolly, and their mother’s brother, Uncle Arthur, who had fallen in love with a Chinese prostitute and then indulged the bad taste or poor judgment or whatever it took to induce an otherwise intelligent white man to marry a native—a whore!—even so beautiful and cultured a one as May.

“Now that,” Dolly said, looking at the dark crescents of opium under Alice’s fingernails. “That is the final final straw.”

“It’s not as if anything were happening,” May said. “You know I love Alice as if she were my own. I’d never smoke in her presence.” But May’s declarations of love were no comfort to Dolly. In the inevitable alignments of familial sympathies, Cecily belonged to Dolly, Alice to May, and Dolly had long worried about her sister-in-law’s influence over her younger daughter.

“Anyway, Alice prepares her pipe all the time,” Cecily said, eager to tattle. “She’s been doing it for years.”

“She most certainly has not!” the girls’ governess protested.

“Yes I have!” Alice said, for how could she resist arguing with the know-it-all Miss Waters, with her face that looked as if it would shatter if dropped? The governess was as vain as a debutante about her pale skin and swallowed arsenic tablets to maintain its china-like luster.

“You see,” May said, when Alice told her about the little white pills, “I was right when I said she was poisonous. I wouldn’t kiss her if I were you.”

But Abelard’s Complexion Tablets were one thing, and opium was quite another. Just like that, Alice and Cecily were taken out of day school and enrolled in a London boarding school, far far away. “Seven thousand, eight hundred and forty-some-odd miles,” calculated Uncle Arthur, who had an amateur’s delight in geography.

“High time, too,” said their father, and he made the usual observations about Shanghai’s climate, the malarias and miasmas and Whangpoo River gases.

To get to London, the sisters and their mother and governess and amah went by train. First to Harbin on the Chinese Eastern Railway, its cars dusty and black, and then all the way west to Moscow on the beautiful blue Great Siberian Express, and then on to Paris via the Nord-Express, and from Paris to Calais and on across the Channel. A very long trip and one that would convince Alice’s mother that it was too late, Alice ought to have been separated from her aunt years before. For when she at last arrived in London at Miss Robeson’s Academy for Young Ladies, Alice Benjamin was immediately famous. Infamous: stared at and whispered about, as the girl who had gotten off a train with a strange man. And admitted it!

Yes, Alice had stepped off the express into a city in Siberia, a place she’d never been, holding the hand of a man she didn’t know, an army captain. Only twelve years old, but not so young that she didn’t know better than to go willingly off with a stranger. The police had come, of course, a
gorodovoi
in his shining boots. And for three days the family was delayed in Kuybyshev, a place that wasn’t even a place, as no one had ever heard of it. But Alice wouldn’t say any more. She did answer questions about the express. Yes, it was luxurious, if a bit stuffy. The windows didn’t open.

As insurance against claustrophobia—to which her mother particularly was susceptible—Alice’s father had reserved three train compartments for the five of them, enough room, according to the booking agent, for twelve persons.

May went with them to the railway station, and at the prospect of separation from her aunt, Alice cried all the way along North Honan Road, right up to the unfailingly overwhelming sight of the station’s crowds of beggars and peddlers and lepers and thieves, a smattering of addicts lying insensate underfoot.

“The whole damn
danse macabre,
” Alice’s father said, and he took his handkerchief from his pocket, rubbed it between his palms. He was irritable, as he always was on those days he took off from his brokerage, leaving his fortunes—the future!—even briefly in the hands of his partners.

May kissed Alice and said, “Now you must stop crying, really you must, darling,” and Alice did. For as her mother feared, Alice was entirely in thrall to her aunt; she did anything to please her.

Because of a mishap with the brougham (a broken axle as they turned out of their private drive), the family disembarked at the station from a convoy of rickshaws: Alice and May in the vanguard, followed by Alice’s mother and father, then Cecily and Miss Waters and at last the amah, squeezed between two precariously swaying towers of luggage.

“It says,” Miss Waters said once again, “that the dining-car attendants speak English, German, French, and Russian. And that the bathrooms have marble tile.” She had a brochure from the Wagon-Lits Company and, when not afflicted with migraine, consulted its pages frequently, reading over and over of the comforts it promised. “A stateroom with lounges, armchairs, and writing tables. Private toilet rooms with porcelain bathing tubs. Hot water, and fresh linen daily.

“Since the completion, in 1904, of the Circumbaikal Loop,” she announced, “a train can cross Siberia in eight days.”

“You read that already,” said Cecily, sitting down on a trunk, watching as their father disappeared into the crowds in pursuit of a porter.

“We have our own food,” their mother said.

“Yes,” said the governess.

“So we don’t need waiters who speak four languages.”

“No,” Miss Waters conceded.

They did have food: three hampers full. Fifty bottles of Vichy water, twenty packages of Lu biscuits, jars of peaches and pears, apples and apricots, all canned by Dah Su and his slavish staff of cookboys. Packets of tea and cocoa, imported oranges, each wrapped in pink tissue paper printed with a honeycomb design, sixteen tins of Portuguese sardines, four jars of lemon curd, four tubes of anchovy paste (looking like toothcream, only brown), two dozen eggs (laid by their own chickens and hard cooked in their own kitchen), five pounds of chocolates filled with liqueurs (a gift from May, who eschewed the purely practical), a bottle of L’Angoustin bitters, eight tins of potted meat, twelve tins of Bear Brand Swiss condensed milk, and two Dutch cheeses sealed up in black wax—all packaged items imported at considerable expense only to journey back toward Europe. But who in his or her right mind would buy Chinese staples?

Besides the food, they carried towels and linens, a rubber lining to put between them and the train’s bathtub, books, stationery, pens, ink, decks of playing cards, and boxes of stereopticon cards, as well as the viewer, needlework, toys, and of course clothes and toilet articles, everything packed into three leather-bound trunks with brass fittings, a set of matching train cases, and one hatbox.

Two larger, dark blue trunks, filled with what the sisters needed for school, would travel in the express train’s luggage car at a surcharge of twenty-one rubles, forty kopecks. Nothing was inspected by the Chinese Eastern, but at Harbin and innumerable stops along the way west, each piece of luggage would have to be carried off the train by Russian porters (who would have to be tipped generously if they weren’t to mishandle and drop them), opened, and examined on the platform.

As usual when under the care of their father, the family arrived at the station early and were forced to fill time. In the crowded first-class lounge, Dick read the
North China Daily News
, and Dolly walked around and around the hampers, mentally reviewing their contents: servings that had been added up, divided by five, added up again, and then doubled in case of disasters or delays, so that the traveling party could last for weeks without using the dining cars, whose fare the Wagon-Lits Company declared equal to that of the best restaurants in Europe.

Dolly Benjamin was convinced that cholera and typhus and hepatitis—every imaginable tragedy—were waiting for her to relax her vigilance. Disease would enter the bodies of her family through the indulgence of a suspect ice cream, an unwrapped sweet. Who knew what went on in the train’s kitchen, or in the kitchens of the best restaurants of Europe, for that matter?

B
UT THE GRAND
express
was
grand, especially after two days on a dirty Chinese train. Its compartments contained all the promised amenities, seats upholstered in a dark blue brocade, walls covered with embossed leather. A large mirror tilted out from the wall above the divan, and Cecily stood on the cushion and looked in it. She smoothed her eyebrows with her finger, licking its tip and then applying a sheen of saliva to the fine dark hairs. The large windows were of double panes of thick glass to protect against the cold, their tops etched with a design of urns and garlands. The writing desk was stocked with paper and envelopes bearing the words
Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-lits
, just as in a hotel. On the wall was a framed print of the icebreaker
Baikal
, its three stacks belching black smoke. The ship was moving across the frozen lake, cutting a dark trench through the surface. In its wake, great white slabs of ice floated on black water. To the left of the ship, on unbroken ice, rested huge sledges, three reindeer harnessed to each; and between them stood a small group of men, shapeless in layers of furs.

Alice sucked the end of her brown braid as she looked at the photograph. Her braid was as thick as her mother’s arm and long enough to sit on. She wasn’t a pretty child when compared, as she inevitably was, with her older sister, Cecily, with her serene eyes and pink cheeks, her smooth curls. Alice was dark and fierce, with lips too full, too hungry, for a little girl.

She brought her eyes close to the glass covering the picture. Beneath his fur hat, each man had a beard and a mustache like her father’s. The print was dated 1900 and there was a copy of it in each of the three compartments they had booked, side by side in the long blue coach with the number 578 painted in white on the side. Miss Waters and the amah were to share the compartment closest to the front of the train; after them came Alice and Cecily; and last their mother, who had an entire compartment to herself in order to prevent anxiousness brought on by sleeping too close to another person, or in case of headache or stomachache, or whatever might keep the shades drawn, the sleeping berth down, and the door locked, as it sometimes was at home.

After a guard came to check their passports, another man, in a belted black blouse and voluminous trousers tucked into shining black boots, knocked at each compartment door and introduced himself as the
provodnik
, or porter, who would come back at nine o’clock with their linen and make up the berths.

“What time is it now, if you please,” Cecily said.

And the man took off his hat to answer. “Half past noon,” he said, in his good English.

“But how can that be?” said Cecily. “We’ve already had lunch and tea.”

“Yes,” said Alice. “It must be time for supper.”

The
provodnik
withdrew a leather folder from under his arm and from it a printed table of local times throughout Russia. He handed this to their mother, and another copy to the governess, evidently lumping the diminutive amah in with the children and deciding, as might a waiter who needs to economize on menus, that such a document would be wasted on her. As the women looked at the table, printed both in Russian and in French, he explained that these real times were irrelevant in that between Harbin and Moscow meals would be served and beds made up according to imperial time, and that arrival and departure times as well were always based on the czar’s clock. He paused, audibly inhaling and then releasing air through his nostrils, then handed them another long folded paper, the timetable of the International Express stops. Were they to get off the train, he cautioned, they must lock their compartments, they must carry their passports, and they must remember that three bells would announce each station departure: one a quarter of an hour before, another five minutes before, and the last immediately before. At Irkutsk, they would be changing carriages, as the imperial Russian track that lay west of that city was of a narrower gauge than the one to the east.

“The dining car?” Miss Waters asked, her voice rising an octave, a function of hope despite Mrs. Benjamin’s insistence that they wouldn’t be using it.

“Open from seven in the morning, imperial time, until nine at night.”

“But,” said the governess, noting from the table of local times that Harbin was six hours and twenty-five minutes ahead of St. Petersburg, “Doesn’t that mean that breakfast will be served in the middle of the … That is to say, when it’s … well, lunchtime?”

The
provodnik
looked at her. “Seven, imperial time, until nine.”

“Yes,” said the governess, moving quickly on to the other object of her devoted interest. “The bathtub, it is—”

“Porcelain. In the lavatory to the rear of the carriage.”

The amah made a sour face. “No washee train tub! No belong clean! Belong dirty! Dirty!” She turned on the governess. “What you belong fooloo woman! Make too much care for porcelain! Who know who go tub before! Porcelain no count for no matter.”

The
provodnik
looked witheringly down at the old Chinese woman in her blue tunic and trousers and flat black shoes, and then turned back to the governess. Clearly he felt she was the only one of the party of travelers who had any real appreciation of the marvels of this train, which would carry them thousands of miles westward, toward Europe, toward the czar and civilization. And away from the ignorant Chinese, this one in their midst no more than a generation’s distance from savages who defecated in their own rice paddies and washed their armpits with urine. What could such a person—a person who wasn’t even a person—understand about hygiene?