The Binding Chair (4 page)

C
ONSTRUCTION
T
RAIN

“A
DRILL
, O
LGA!”
C
APTAIN
L
ITOVSKY CRIED
. “A drill will pass the time!”

He’d met the sisters and their governess on his way from the dining car to his compartment, and he was carrying a glass of hot tea in a silver-plate holder. “I shall teach you how to march like a good Russian soldier, with a straight back and level head.”

“Yes!” Alice said.

“I don’t think—” said Miss Waters. But already he had removed his hat, replaced it with the steaming glass. “Please!” the governess said. “The train is lurching.”

“Watch now, Olga!” he said, looking at Alice. He’d made the mistake several times, calling Alice Olga, and it was a mistake he’d made only in reference to Alice, never Cecily or their mother or Miss Waters. He let go of the tea glass’s handle and began marching, legs held straight, knees unbending, through the empty corridor. Despite the train’s rocking on the tracks, he kept his head perfectly level; the tea did not spill. He made an about-face at the end of the car, and saluted. “Shall I teach you?” he asked, his face moist with exertion.

“Please!” Alice said.

“You’ll be burned.” Cecily folded her arms.

“Well, an empty glass to start—”

“No, thank you.” Miss Waters caught Alice’s shoulder in an attempt to redirect her toward the library car.

But she gave in—“Oh all right”—when Alice begged to return with the captain to his compartment.

They were approaching Chita, the train pressing forward through a white landscape dusted in places with soot from locomotives. As they had been on the train together for three days, the captain’s engaging, essentially harmless demeanor had convinced the girls’ mother that he was perhaps not a drunk or a madman but a diversion.

“Who
is
Olga?” Alice asked him. Cecily was across the corridor with Miss Waters, reciting a French exercise. Through the open door came the sound of her bored, perfected accent.

“Did you expect there to be this much snow?” the captain asked, not answering her question. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked it.

“Oh, yes,” Alice said. “At night, in Shanghai, I’d close my eyes and see all the silent miles of snow. Everything white and clean.”

At home, when she’d thought of the great train trip across Siberia, she pictured a land that was silver-white and splotched with lakes that gleamed like mercury, like burst thermometers. Before her brother died, the nurse had dropped a thermometer in the hall, and the shiny bright beads of the stuff bounced along the floor and into the cracks between the floorboards. Alice chased some with her fingers, and they skidded away from the heat of her flesh.

“What’s the part they’re going to cut off?” Alice had asked Cecily. Together they’d undressed David; they’d looked at his penis, touched it. Because their mother was afraid of the Shanghai rabbi’s grimy fingernails, their little brother had not been circumcised. The family was waiting to take him to London, to a clean rabbi in clean London, when he was older.

“What part?” Alice asked, standing on a stool and leaning over the crib rail.

“The end,” Cecily said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s dirty to leave it on.”

But as it happened, David succumbed to meningitis subsequent to a teething infection and died just days before his second birthday, and before he had been circumcised. The rabbi with the gray fingernails buried him in the Jewish cemetery off Bubbling Well Road. The following week his grave was desecrated.

“If you had circumcised the body …” Alice had overheard a man talking to her father in the parlor. A noise of a teacup against its saucer. It was four in the afternoon. Already her mother had gone to bed. Or perhaps she hadn’t gotten up.

Her father’s voice, almost too low to hear: “Dolly didn’t want it.”

“Well—”

“To break up a baby’s gravestone!”

“People feel strongly about certain things. There are … Some things are not …” A loud sigh. The noise, like the hiss of a snake’s tongue, of feet on the thick carpet. “You must, for your own peace of mind, find it in yourself to forgive.”

Alice watched the man depart. His rickshaw had a long red fringe on its canopy.

T
HE CAPTAIN LOOKED
out the window. “Often there isn’t so much snow, sometimes just bare ground. A lot has fallen for the past month.” As he spoke, he rehearsed the familiar motions of touching his hat brim, mustache, and pockets. “This enterprise,” he said excitedly, “will have a more important influence on the progress of man than any other undertaking.” His voice grew loud, as if he were making an announcement to a crowd. “On the progress of civilization!”

Alice watched the empty landscape. “What enterprise?”

“Why, the train! The great Siberian railroad, of course!”

“Oh.” Alice had never considered a land so impoverished that it lacked trains.

“I helped in its construction,” the captain said.

“Did you?”

“Yes. That is to say, as engineer … And the army … What I mean to say is, the people who are indigenous, the … they were savages. They threw rocks and knives. Bones. Anything they could. They threw themselves at the workers to prevent them from laying the tracks.”

Litovsky described the construction process. A train filled with men and equipment moved across the frozen landscape, every tree and rock and hill rendered white, a veritable tabula rasa—that was how they had understood it, Litovsky and the others. It was the ready page: the eager, empty future upon which the team of engineers would inscribe their extraordinary gift to posterity. According to the plans they drew, the construction train proceeded, laying track in front of itself, some days progressing no farther than a half a mile, creating the steel road that would offer to the far eastern reaches of Siberia things of which her people hadn’t yet dreamed: Coffee and vanilla from South America! Books from Paris! Glass from Venice! Medicines from New York! Seventeen-jewel watches from Geneva! Whatever Siberia lacked, whatever she desired, would come to her.

“Picture this train, this train that invents itself, that chooses its own direction. It can happen only the one time.” Litovsky put his hand up to the window. “If only … if only I could convey the majesty of it,” he said. “The impossible, grand audacity. It was beautiful. Even after … No one could deny its beauty.” He fell silent, staring out at the fields of snow. On cloudless days, the setting sun had lit up the new steel rails; it made them into a burning path, at the end of which some saw a light that was heaven, some an inferno. The native people had been frightened. They possessed instincts he lacked.

“Were they really savages?” Alice had looked carefully at the people at the last station. As they stood together in silent groups, their faces had possessed a squashed look, flattened as if by fatigue. Their eyes were narrow, like Chinese eyes. Except for a few gypsies, begging to tell the passengers’ fortunes for a kopeck or two, the Mongol people on the platform stared in wordless awe at the towering blue train, its locomotive shuddering dyspeptically on its great grinding wheels while belching black clouds. The station house was filled with men dragging huge bundles of skins, the air heavy with the smell of tanneries, acrid and nauseating.

“Savages?” Alice asked the captain again. “Are you sure?” The people on the platform had seemed incapable of the energy required for violence.

“Certainly! They thought the train was a beast! An apparition! They attacked it. And the workers, some of them, were not much better. Being convicts.” He stopped, remembering the gaunt, expressionless men chained to their wheelbarrows by day and to their bunks at night. It was misery that had made those men dangerous. One had to assume that having lost everything, they were capable of anything.

He’d had to use convict labor on the battlefileds of Mukden as well, to supplement his forces, an infantry corps so battle-fatigued that the only bullets the men were deemed responsible to handle were those that had already been fired. An insulting appointment—punitive—the judgment against him still pending. Soldiers and convicts worked side by side, ragged, silent, the former distinguished only by their uniforms, their unfettered ankles. Under his command, the men began at one end of a scorched plain and made their way slowly across it, using hoes to harvest the abandoned lumps of lead, some of which were twisted into fantastically sinister shapes.

Sometimes at night, when Captain Litovsky closed his eyes, the brown plain of Mukden stretched out before him forever; and if he slept, he dreamed of having to rake through the hard earth with his bare fingers. In one such dream, which he could not dismiss even when awake, he suffered an enchantment by the czar, who severed his hands from his wrists and his feet from his ankles and switched them around. Hands sewn to the ends of his legs with black wires, he was compelled by the czar to go on digging.

“How many wives do you have?” Alice asked, interrupting his thoughts.

“Well! What a question! One, to be sure!” Captain Litovsky touched his mustache and collar.

“Are you not a Mohammedan?”

“Most certainly not! Here, look.” And he pulled a little round circle of gold metal from his pocket, a coin bearing an image of the Virgin, and held the icon out to Alice. The Virgin’s face was worn as smooth and as flat as one of the savage’s, so often did the captain, his hand hidden in his pocket, rub his thumb over her features.

“I am an understanding man,” he said. “Particularly with young persons. But you mustn’t ask such questions. I am as Orthodox as the day is long!”

“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “Your wife—is she named Olga?”

“No,” he said. “My wife is named Tamara. After her mother.”

“But then who is Olga?” Alice asked.

“Why don’t you tell me about living in China?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you would like to tell me.”

Alice looked assessingly at the captain as she sorted through her Westerner’s repertoire of the alien and picturesque. Walking with her amah past a Chinese dentist’s stall? Extracted teeth were arranged in tidy rows on a piece of black cloth, as if the rotten brown lumps were jewels. Amah had pointed proudly to one of the lumps. “That one belong mine,” she’d said, and she opened her mouth to indicate a red gap where the tooth had been just a week before.

Men smaller than her father carrying whole tea shops on their backs, bamboo frames bearing braziers, pots, cups. Native children with slits in their trousers squatting to defecate in the gutters. Streets boiling with life. The only thing Alice could compare to the sight of a Shanghai street was what she’d seen once when she’d turned over the body of a dead raccoon with a stick; seeing the maggots, the packed, churning crowd of them, she’d thought:
Shanghai
.

Every morning Alice held up her arms for her amah to dress her. She watched the woman’s back bend as she got down on her knees to button all twelve buttons on each of Alice’s white kid shoes. When David died, Amah had wept, she’d struck her fists into her eyes, she’d beat her head against the wall and the floor. But apart from that day, how quiet she was, and how silently Chinese servants moved, wearing felt slippers. They picked up what had been dropped, cleaned what had been dirtied, wiped up whatever had spilled. They never saw nakedness or indisposition. Nameless, ageless. Cook Boy, Rickshaw Boy. Boy Number Six. Number Seven. Eight. Old men with gray hair, eyes blue with cataracts:
Boy
.

Litovsky asked Alice what it was like, China, and she rehearsed a few of these emblematic encounters with the East, but when she opened her mouth what she said was “Did you know that the Chinese are expert torturers? One of the things they do is slice open missionaries’ wives from here to here.” She pointed to her breastbone, then her lap. “They grab one end of a woman’s intestines and thread it on a spool, turn a crank and wind up her insides like a garden hose. If she’s brave and doesn’t faint, she gets to watch it happen. I once saw a girl cut in half, but she wasn’t a missionary.”

“Who has allowed you to know of such shocking things!” the captain spluttered.

“Why, my aunt,” Alice said. “Her father—he cranked the spool. And the cut-up girl was in the Old City. We went to see her ourselves.”

“I
T’S A PLAN
with that one,” Miss Waters had reported darkly, after she caught Alice and May coming home. “A campaign.”

“What sort of plan?” Dolly asked.

The governess narrowed her eyes, she looked past Alice’s mother as if seeing into the future. “
Indoctrination.
”

“Into what?”

“The woman undermines me! Tries to teach her just what life isn’t!”

And Miss Waters hadn’t even known about the trip to the Old City. Her objection was to the book of Russian folktales May had bought Alice at Kelley and Walsh. Stories about Baba Yaga in her hut that walked about on the legs of a chicken, tall and yellow and scaly, with knees that bent backwards. In one night, the hut could travel great distances. Baba Yaga had sharp teeth and ate children. Jewish children especially. After reading about Baba Yaga, Alice looked warily at the chickens they kept at home in Shanghai. White Orpingtons, shipped across the Pacific on the SS
Tacoma
. Their eyes were gold and cruel, the color of poison. Their beaks looked dipped in blood.

It was a sparkling day; as they left the bookstore the sky seemed unusually clear and high, and Alice imagined she could see all the way to the Yangtze. “Please please,” she begged. “Let’s go to the Old City.” She expected a refusal—she knew how her aunt hated the Chinese Quarter—but May indulged Alice. The fine weather, perhaps, or her awareness of their imminent separation. She asked the rickshaw man to take them to the North Gate.

Once inside the wall that divided old from new, Chinese from European, the wide street splintered into alleys overhung with signboards and banners, dark, squalid passages that Alice found mysterious, even romantic. Every so often a finger of light revealed freshly bleached binding cloths trailing from a washpole and stirring in the faint breeze.