The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel

by Maureen Lindley

  On the day that he left, he told me that he hated the cold air of parting between us. He said that he would always keep the image of my face in his heart and that he would never fail to protect me in whatever way he could. He begged me to give up opium, which he thought would eventually destroy me.

  'It's the only Chinese thing about you, Yoshiko, and your worst habit.'

  It was true that the Japanese thought little of opium and despised the weak nature of the Chinese for using it, but I didn't agree with him that it would be the ruin of me. It was I that used opium, not opium that used me. I had smoked it since girlhood and knew how to stay on the right side of addiction.

  Tanaka left me a little money, but to save face he had to payoff his own debts, which were considerable. He said that he could not guarantee that his successor would be as generous with my expenses as he had been, so he arranged for me to draw a monthly salary, something that I had never bothered to do before.

  'You will have to live more carefully,' he said. 'It could be months, maybe even a year, before I return.'

  In fact it was to be many years before Tanaka would leave Mongolia and he was never to return to Shanghai. I had already come to my own decision to be more cautious, if not with money then with my emotions. My meeting with Jack Stone had worked on me in a strange way and I could not get him out of my mind. I had been dissatisfied with myself and my way of life for some time and sensed that in Jack's company I might find relief. Tanaka thought that opium was the problem, but opium was only the bandage on the wound of a hollow life. I had come to the conclusion that a constant stream of lovers took away rather than gave comfort, and I was experiencing a desire to change.

  Weeks passed before I was to see Jack Stone again. Meanwhile I was grooming myself to be a different sort of woman. One that would take no more lovers, less opium, and experience, as a result, more restoring sleep and contentment.

  There was a night when I dreamt that I saw Jack on a bridge as he crossed the Huangpu River. I called his name and he turned, held out his cupped hands and showed me happiness lying in a glass bowl. It was a dark little kidney-shaped bean, curled as in sleep. 'We can share it,' he said. I couldn't bring myself to touch it for fear that it was not sleeping, but dead.

  Tanaka's replacement, Major Muto, was a man who counted every yen and did not approve of debt or extravagance. I could see that things were not going to be easy for me under his supervision. He seemed to disapprove of my Chinese blood and declined to address me either by rank or as Princess. He didn't question the salary that Tanaka had arranged, but he was meticulous in scrutinising my expenses, which he often declined to honour, saying Japan should not have to pay for my pleasures. It was obvious he did not have Tanaka's understanding of how a spy needs to live.

  Muto was older than Tanaka by about a decade. He was married and had eight daughters but no sons, which kept him poor and feeling inadequate. He was poisonously cruel to inferiors and slimy in the presence of his superiors. I disliked him at first sight and developed the habit of calling into his office only once or twice a week. I would relay to him any information that Mother had brought me, as well as what I had discovered for myself through my own contacts. The rest of the time I avoided him. This infrequent connection suited Muto, as he was ill at ease in my company and didn't know how to deal with a Japanese woman who had not only aristocratic blood, but also rank.

  Tanaka wrote me letters saying that he missed me, but he felt that he could do well for Japan and for himself in Mongolia. I knew that he had an ambition to return to Japan covered in glory. I believed that he would achieve his desire. But in his absence it was not Tanaka who filled my thoughts, but Jack Stone. Even though I hadn't seen him since that day at the Park Hotel, I knew through Lauren Brodie that he was still in Shanghai.

  One evening when the rain smelled of dust, I made my way to the telegraph office and contrived to bump into Jack as he arrived to file his copy. He didn't seem too pleased to see me, but in the awkward silence between us he blurted out an invitation to join him for dinner if I was free. Of course I accepted. Breathing in his scent of pine and whisky, I waited for him in the small telegraph office while he dispatched his work. I felt oddly shy with him, a most unusual experience for me. When he had finished, we took a rickshaw to an unfashionable Japanese restaurant north of Suzhou Creek, in what was known as Little Tokyo. Jack said he loved the raw fish they served and the fact that no other westerners seemed drawn to the place. He told me that he usually ate there alone, that the simplicity of the surroundings pleased him and that he had never taken anyone there before. I allowed the flattery to melt through me, sweet like honey, bypassing my usual cynicism. Even then, so early on in our relationship, I discovered in his company a less wary self.

  It was perhaps the best and the strangest night of my life, for with Jack I lost my lifelong desire to keep secrets. I surprised myself with a new openness that left me feeling lighter and somehow relieved. We talked for hours about our lives, our hopes and regrets. Jack wanted to know everything about me, and so, against my nature, I allowed him into the labyrinth of my life.

  I told him about the abortion, about Teshima's seduction, about Kawashima and all the other men who had made their way to my rooms in his house. When I had finished the tale of my childhood, Jack reached across the table and stroked my cheek.

  'You never stood a chance,' he said. 'It's a wonder you have survived at all.' There was pity in his voice but for once I didn't object to it.

  He told me about his own childhood in New England.

  'It was quiet and ordered and desperately boring,' he said. 'My father was a math teacher, a subject that, to his bewilderment, I could never grasp. I think that he loved me. He taught me to fish and to play tennis and, without knowing it, instilled in me a desire to be as unlike him as possible. My mother was careful and shy with me, until the day she sank discreetly to the floor of our town library and died without fuss. A massive stroke, they said. I can't tell you how much I regret never attempting to break through her shyness. I realise now that I never truly knew her.'

  Jack confided that he had always felt unsettled in life and that he had a restless nature. Usually when he got what he wanted, he lost interest in it. He had desired marriage, but within weeks of the wedding he was being unfaithful to his wife. He had felt trapped and flight had been his answer. He doubted that he had spent more than a few months of their three-year-long marriage in his bride's company.

  'She's beautiful and intelligent,' he said. 'It won't be hard for her to find someone better than me to spend her life with.'

  Journalism suited him. He was a good reporter and liked not having to accept any version of events but his own. The job allowed him a way of living that didn't require wholehearted commitment, either to family or to country.

  It was still raining when we left the restaurant and Jack made me wear his jacket. We walked together in the rain, his arm around me, until we found a rickshaw to take us to my villa. By dawn I had told him everything about my life. I left nothing out, I wanted him to know the best and the worst of me. In the focus of his intense grey eyes, I found myself weeping. I hadn't realised that I had so much to cry about, or that I felt so deeply for the child who had made the woman that I had become.

  Jack said I should take consolation from the fact that my life, given that we lived in the twentieth century, had been an extraordinary one, especially when judged by the standards of his own dull childhood. Although he had never met anyone like me, part of him was sorry that we had met at all, because now we were linked together and he would never be truly free again.

  I had no food in the villa, so we made a breakfast of sweet tea and, exhausted, we fell into my bed. Jack reached for me in his sleep and I wept again, but he didn't stir.

  When we woke, he said that he was going to get his things from the Park Hotel and move in with me. I liked the way he made such an instant decision and the way he forgot to ask me if I wanted him to move in. I did,
of course, even though I thought that we would make an odd sort of couple. We hadn't even made love and knew little of each other's habits, yet I felt stupidly optimistic.

  Shanghai, cleaned by the rain, smelled intoxicatingly of the new day. The sun was shining and I didn't need opium, or anyone other than Jack, to make me feel that life was worth living. It was true that he was a stranger to me, a man met by chance, but it was as if my body had always known his scent and touch. Nothing about him seemed unfamiliar, although he said it was the opposite for him, that everything about me was a new delight.

  Jack's lovemaking turned out to be as complex as his nature. When moody, as he was occasionally, he would take me slowly, as though debating whether he wanted me at all, leaving the bed the moment it was over. Usually, with his humour restored by our closeness, he would return within minutes, two glasses of bourbon and two lit cigarettes in hand. I liked those times better than the ones when he was so distant that I felt unimportant to him, as though I was just anyone, not his girl. He liked variety, to use me when I least expected it, as though his right to me was unquestioned. Once, when I was talking to my Russian maid, he sent her from the room and pushed me to the floor, entering me without looking into my face, then leaving me there on the ground, without a word, when he had finished. After those cold couplings, he would desert the house and be gone for hours. When I asked him what made him like that, he said he thought that those times came out of resentment towards me for owning him, and anger at himself for not being able to resist me.

  Mostly, though, Jack relied on humour to seduce me and we laughed a lot together. At his best he was warm and witty, full of life and passionately demanding. 'Just wear musk to bed,' he would say. He loved the scent so much that I gave up chrysanthemum oil, and can never now smell musk without thinking of him.

  Often after sex he would hold me to him so closely that it was hard to breathe. At those times myoid self surfaced and I felt suffocated and trapped. If I struggled, he only held me tighter, saying, 'You can't die of love, you know, Yoshiko.' I already knew that, but perhaps he was reassuring himself.

  For all my resistance to being contained by him, I never once thought of deceiving him with other men. He was not like Tanaka and may not have forgiven me. I still looked, still felt the habit of desire, but I never, in those long Shanghai days, acted on it with anyone other than Jack.

  I liked myself in his company, felt as though I were being restored to goodness. Strangely, he had more dark days than I did, days when he would drink and smoke to excess. He once took opium with me, but said he didn't care to repeat the experience. It had made him feel so good that he knew he must never use it again. I think he had an addict's nature and sensed that it would destroy him.

  In subtle ways we changed each other, until we became that blended thing called a couple. Jack liked me to wear feminine clothes, and so I gave up my jodhpurs and boots to please him. I still kept my short hair, because he liked it that way. My lips, he said, reminded him of bubblegum, soft and pink. He thought it a crime to disguise them with lipstick, so I didn't.

  Perhaps Jack was testing me, reassuring himself that if I was compliant in little things, eventually I could be brought round to his thinking on the one thing that stood between us, Japan. For myself, if I wanted to change Jack in any other way than in his views on the nature of Japan, I was not aware of it. I loved the way I could pick him out in a crowded room by the halo of his dark hair, loved the outdoor smell of his skin and his square hands, too large to be in proportion with his body. His pale skin and grey eyes, so western, so different to Japanese men's, fuelled my desire. I adored his sense of humour, the way he never repeated a joke, and I was always proud to be at his side. But I didn't care for the secret side of his nature that made him lock his desk drawers and seal his letters before I could read them. Perhaps because he had released me from the tyranny of my own secrets, I could not bear him to have any of his own.

  I believe, though, that I changed Jack more profoundly than he did me. In his past life he had resented emotional ties, had always chosen flight over fight. In our shared one, he couldn't bear the idea that we would be parted; he wanted to keep me to him, and despite his fear of capture I knew that he would never willingly fly from me. I wasn't sure that I could say the same for myself.

  I was surprised at how quickly people in Shanghai accepted that Jack and I were together. My new boss, Major Muto, was one of the few to disapprove, he was outraged by my association with a western journalist and told me that he had reported it to his superiors in Japan. I knew that he had also written to Tanaka in Mongolia, because I found the carbon copy of his letter in his secretary's waste-paper basket.

  Tanaka wrote to me every few months. He never once mentioned Jack in those letters and neither did I in my replies to them. I received them through Muto's office and didn't feel the need to speak of them to Jack. I thought that he wouldn't understand the unbreakable connection between Tanaka and myself and there was no point in arguing about it.

  Jack picked up his own mail from the Park Hotel and I learnt over the months to know when he had received a letter from his wife. On those days he would look for distraction, spending hours in bookshops and usually buying me some little token to show he had been thinking of me. I suspect he felt guilty, as though by reading his wife's words, he had in some way cheated me.

  Major Muto was right to be concerned about my affair with Jack. Jack often tried to persuade me to return to my Chinese roots and to deny Japan. It was one of the few things we argued about, and just as he could not be persuaded of Japan's innate superiority in the world, so I could not be turned back to China. The subject was always alive between us and was often the cause of Jack's moods. He saw China as a country bravely struggling to pull itself into the twentieth century, while I thought it would only prosper under the rule of Japan.

  'Your admiration of Japan is the only vulgar thing about you, Yoshiko,' he would say.

  Despite our arguments, Jack and I complemented each other to such a degree that I became fearful of how easily I could imagine life without him. Indeed it was hard for me to envisage the circumstances that would allow us to be together for ever. He often spoke of me returning to America with him and although I loved him for that, I could not see myself living so far away in a country that disapproved of Japan. Plenty of western men fall in love with and stay in the orient, but much as I wanted to count Jack amongst their number, I knew that he was not likely to be one of them.

  I was glad that I never had to keep Japan's secrets from him. He already knew as much as I did about what was going on internationally. Major Muto's mistrust of me meant that he rarely showed me any correspondence from Japan and only seemed to require me to report on gossip. I was less well informed than in the days when Tanaka had had his finger on the pulse. It was getting harder to find things to report back to Muto. Jack wasn't interested in myoid haunts and we only occasionally went to nightclubs. He never gambled and didn't care for fancy food, preferring the Chocolate Shop's western-style menu to those of the celebrated Russian and French restaurants. We still ate in what we considered to be our restaurant in Little Tokyo, where he was always the only westerner.

  Jack showed me a Shanghai that I had never really been a part of before. The foreign correspondents were an eclectic group, held together by the glue of humour and cynicism. They were mostly well informed and intelligent, but Jack said that seeing too much of the shabby side of life left them without much optimism. But they were good fun and had a different way of enjoying life than I was used to. Talking was their thing and conversations went on late into the night, always accompanied by alcohol and laughter, lots of laughter. At weekends we would often join a party of them and hire one of the many elegant houseboats for rent on the river. The boats had western names like Daphne or Enid, but Jack would rename them Eastern Jewel or Princess for the duration of our journey.

  I wasn't the only oriental in the group. The good-looking Russian report
er Misha Salmonov, who worked for Pravda, had a taste for Chinese girls and would take along a different one each time. He and Jack seemed to have a special connection and would debate politics and philosophy for hours.

  Sailing down the creeks and through the rural areas, where scruffy farm dwellings lined the banks, we would eat delicious lunches of prawns cooked with chilli and drink copious amounts of white wine that tasted of limes. There was beer too, but I didn't care for it, although Jack preferred it to the wine. In the heat of the long afternoons we would sleep in one or other of the small below­deck cabins, making lazy love when we woke. On the journey home, drinking and dancing on the deck to the music from a windup gramophone, Jack was at his most mellow.

  Sometimes we would go to the American Club, one of the few foreign clubs in Shanghai that allowed Chinese members. I went to a Thanksgiving party there with Jack where he got drunk on bourbon, and Teddy Black, the Chicago Tribune reporter, had to help me get him home. It wasn't the first time that I had needed help to get Jack home, but, as if to excuse himself, he told me it was because he missed America and that the club and the bourbon reminded him of the bars he frequented in New York.

  I knew that ache, that longing to be home. I still had it somewhere in me, still knew that nowhere would ever belong to me again in the same way that Kawashima's house had. I didn't tell Jack that I understood, though. I couldn't bear the idea that he would one day return to America. He often said that he could be recalled to New York at any time, but, as I knew his going would wound me, I pushed the thought from my mind. Jack never wanted to hear about my work; it made him angry that I still worked for Japan's Special Service Organ. He never stopped asking me to give it up and he never understood my trust in and love of Japan.