Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

Apart from being a Chichikoff, Hovans is a swan—as a matter of fact, the swan in Swan Lake; he is a man driven to suicidal madness in a single night, by a tenacious mouse pitter-pattering across the floor of the man’s mind; he is Raskolnikov, whose murder of the old lady is not justified philosophically, but by the fact that she is Jewish—an interpretation that goes over much better with his audience; and, finally, he is the Russian Hamlet. The Hamlet performances are crowned—as Fortinbras looms over Hamlet’s body—with the audience (whose wounds from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have not healed, and never will) sonorously singing: “Do not close your eyes, Mother Russia, for it is not time to sleep.”

  But when he isn’t bringing his audiences to an orgasm of nostalgia, Captain Pick supplements his fame with the lucre reaped in the rich, filthy fields of Shanghai’s lawlessness. He blackmails an American judge who, he has discovered, is a homosexual. One day, the judge’s body washes off the shores of the Whangpoo, with his rectum cut out. In 1929, Captain Pick is sentenced to nine months in jail for having sold, under the name of Joseph Pronek, bonds of nonexistent foreign countries to a few seducible French mademoiselles and greedy English ladies. Then, Wasserstein says, he hawks worthless pamphlets and books stolen for him by the coolies from the Soviet consulate, wrapped nicely in the preposterous embroidery of Pick’s tales of their conspiratorial significance. He writes a column for a Shanghai-published Russian paper, in which he exposes the weaknesses in the pillars of the community, unless the pillars provide a recompense that would make him look at the frailties of other pillars instead. In 1931, under the name of Dr. Montaigne, he represents himself as a military adviser to the Chinese government and takes millions of dollars for arms that do not exist, which is what will ultimately prevent him from supplying them. His clients spend months imagining their future power, waiting for the arms to arrive and retelling Pick’s stories, until he is arrested and sentenced to a year in prison. In prison, he acquires a few Chinese friends, some of them loyal members of the Green Gang, hiding from the law in their comfortable prison cells (the Gang kindly providing everything from opium and girls to heroin and boys) until the memory of their crimes is erased by the newer crimes of their colleagues and acquaintances. Once out of jail, Pick shacks up with a Georgian woman who owns a brothel just behind the Astor House Hotel, and starts a modest white-slavery ring of his own. Both his fallen Russian lady friends and his Green Gang comrades come in handy in his new venture—which a sanctimonious Russian paper in Harbin unwisely makes public.

  But no one cares about those self-righteous accusations (although a little nick is left on Pick’s heart)—Shanghai is a far different place from the priggish Harbin, people do what they have to and what they can to make a decent living. Furthermore, Captain Pick is a well-liked man, “the soul of every party he attends”—and he, God help him, attends many. He is the heart of the Russian community, always able to express the deep, true feelings of the Russian people. An acquaintance describes him as “a highly emotional individual,” someone who is “very trusting.” But, on the other hand, the acquaintance asserts, “he could be very suspicious . . . He met many people, but quickly tired of them. Therefore, he had many enemies and no intimate friends . . . He used to say: ‘Drama and music are my best friends and the stage my entire life.’ ” Another acquaintance describes him as having “a Mongolian cast of countenance . . . no hair at all, wears a black skull cap, has burn scars on his head . . . a heavy vodka drinker . . . usually goes around with a rosewood-handle knife . . . a friendly, decent fellow.”

  The scars on his head are not the result of burning oil, as he claims, poured on him during a Bolshevik torture session, let alone the result of a Pacific wind strong enough to rip the skin off his face. Rather, it is a result of his opium stupor, in which he rolled off his opium-den divan and into a hearth.

  Even a typically earnest American intelligence report has a hard time resisting Captain Pick’s charms, describing him as “well-educated, a good linguist, accomplished actor, fascinating story teller, but a facile writer. He is also a smuggler of arms, pimp, intelligence agent, and a competent murderer.”

  Ever sensitive to the changing winds of history, Captain Pick has groomed his Japanese contacts with particular care from the beginning of his life in Shanghai, but in 1937, after the Japanese invasion of China, he begins working for the Japanese Naval intelligence Bureau in Shanghai. He assembles a ring of some forty European agents (not counting the gaggle of drugged-up Russian ladies), who are supposed to spy on other Europeans in Shanghai, believing themselves to be protected from the Japanese might in the International Settlement and the French Concession. His ring is the elite of Shanghai’s underworld: Baron N. N. Tipolt, a blackmailer, swindler, and informer for the Gestapo; Count Victor Plavchuk, handy with the blade, who would often entertain brothel staff by throwing knives at a terrified novice prostitute, occasionally pinning down her ears, just for a laugh; Admiral Marcus Templar, purportedly a member of the Greek Royal House, whose specialty is taking surreptitious photographs, used for blackmailing; Bernie and Ernie McDunn, Siamese Chicago twins, conjoined at the hip, who would do anything for a dose of heroin; Alex Hemmon, a former member of the Purple Gang in Detroit, a hit man who has to kill somebody every time he gets drunk (which he does habitually), and who moonlights as a professional trombonist in an orchestra regularly performing at the Far Eastern Grand Opera.

  In the late thirties, under Japanese protection, Captain Pick’s is a cozy living. He’s providing plausible information to his employees, running his criminal (which in Shanghai is a term of endearment) enterprises and lovingly managing his Far Eastern Grand Opera. In 1940, Pick goes to Japan for a holiday, where he meets Commander Otani Inaho, the Japanese officer who will later head Naval Intelligence in Shanghai and become Pick’s chief Japanese patron. Commander Otani and Captain Pick become the closest friends, often publicly pronouncing their utmost respect and admiration for each other’s honor and manhood. Indeed, malicious rumor has it that besides sharing a deeply seated belief in the value of discipline and patriotism, they occasionally shared a messy bed. In 1941, a week or so after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese troops march leisurely into the International Settlement, encountering no resistance, and practically besiege the French Concession, run by a herd of confused, dim-witted Vichy loyalists. Pick becomes Commander Otani’s left hand and, thanks to his kind assiduousness, moves into room 741 at the luxurious Cathay Hotel.

  The years spent in room 741 at the Cathay Hotel, dozing in the lap of the great power, are the best years of Pick’s life: comfortable, pleasant, not requiring a lot of work. A postwar American intelligence report, quoted by Wasserstein (prepared by one Captain Owen), describes Pick’s typical day: he gets up before dawn, watches the sun rise through the humid haze over the Whangpoo River, where robust Japanese ships are anchored in the harbor, junks sheepishly squeezing between them; he listens to the radio news from Moscow, London, Honolulu (enjoying the Glen Miller Band, humming along with Glen’s trombone); from six to seven A.M. he is on the phone, receiving and dispatching Shanghai intelligence, conveyed often as plain, candid gossip. He reads Russian newspapers and eats breakfast (two eggs, a mountain of bacon, a river of coffee), sometimes spurting a fleet of yolky spit all over the papers, infuriated by their dishonorable lies. Then he goes to the office at the Naval Intelligence, where he organizes files or masturbates in anticipation of lunch with his newest young-lady acquisition. Unless, that is, he goes to the Japanese Thought Police Headquarters to supervise the interrogation of a foreigner, occasionally adding a Russian touch: whipping the prisoner with a knotted whip, until chunks of flesh fall off. At one o’clock he eats lunch with a young lady whom he plans to bed after it. After dessert, he takes her to room 741, makes passionate love to her, and then has a comprehensive nap. The hotel staff risks being shot if they enter the room during his nap, which ends at exactly three o’clock. Between three and four he telephones his Japanese superiors, de
manding benevolence toward one of his acquaintances and, sometimes, an iron-fist treatment of the Shanghai Jews. He then sets off for meetings regarding his theatrical, musical, or charity interests. Every Sunday he performs an important role in a play or a concert, aiming to uplift the Russian spirit in these daunting times, always ending the event with “Do Not Close Your Eyes, Mother Russia.” After the show he dines with friends and admirers, regaling them with tales of his peregrinations, loves, and suffering, never failing to bring his audience to cramps of laughter or a deluge of tears, sometimes both within moments. After that he goes for a lazy pipe or two of opium in a brothel, where he may or may not join in an elaborate orgy, frequently featuring midgets, animals, and children.

  In the spring of 1944, Pick is awakened from his nap by the stirring of a mouse and emerges from his nightmare with a claustrophobic uneasiness and a tingling in his heart, which he recognizes as foreshadowing evil times. He screams at the cowering Cathay Hotel staff, storms down Nanking Road in his black pajamas, like a devil apparition, and charges into Commander Otani’s office, requesting, before even sitting down, to be sent off to another place, far from this stinking pit of hell. Commander Otani puts his hand on Pick’s shoulder, then strokes his cheek, until Pick calms down.

  In the summer of 1944, Captain Pick goes to the Philippines. He arrives under the name of Koji, followed by his usual entourage, reinforced by the playboy boxer Mihalka; a Portuguese black marketeer Francisco Carneiro (Mihalka’s manager); and an Italian lawyer and chemist, Dr. Vincente, capable of concocting all kinds of joys. Pick’s orchestra does little, almost nothing, in Manila. They help catch and kill a Danish gunrunner. They set a trap for Father Kirkpatrick, an Irish priest, suspected of smuggling food and medicine to American internees—one source claims that it is Pick himself who oversees Father Kirkpatrick’s crucifixion. They intercept U.S. naval intelligence talking about imminent attacks all around the Pacific. The information is rejected by the Japanese as “dangerous thoughts,” whereupon Pick’s men use the equipment solely to record the American hit parade. American music is played at their parties, which instantly become all the rage among the idle Manila elite and prostitutes bored with the never-changing clientele.

  But other than those few little jobs and parties, Captain Pick and his crew spend time racketeering, setting up a little, classy, and expensive prostitution ring, and hanging out in nightclubs. Pick’s favorite haunt is the Gastronome, because the jukebox there has a record of him singing “Tea for Two” in English, though in the manner of a poignant Russian ballad, a rendition made all the more convincing by his atrocious Russian accent. The B-side of the record contains “Do Not Close Your Eyes, Mother Russia,” sung, as it well should be, heartbreakingly.

  At the end of the summer, Pick gets uneasy again and returns to Shanghai, complaining of ill health, and taking the entire budget of the Manila operation with him. It was on the ship to Shanghai, with the Pacific winds in his face, that the uneasiness crystallizes into a sense of something coming to an end, into a painful, tormenting anticipation of a future loss.

  Indeed, everybody can smell the end, and it has the smell of burning flesh—Tokyo has been leveled, Hiroshima annihilated. On August 9, between the bombs, Evgenij Pick has his last supper with Commander Otani at his home, room 741 at the Cathay. They eat a magnificently prepared yellow croaker, washed down by superbly aged sake, saved by Otani for a special occasion. Having kissed Otani on both cheeks, Pick goes to join the farewell orgy at the Yar restaurant, arranged by a posse of girls known as Mihalka’s Harem (Mihalka is still stuck in Manila). Pick complains to the girls, who could not care less in their opiatic daze, that he has reason to believe that the Japanese plan to kill him. Thus no one, apart from Otani, notices when he disappears from Shanghai the next day.

  In the fall of 1945, Wasserstein notes, the American authorities in China fruitlessly search for Pick. He is seen in a barbershop in Shanghai; he is seen on a train to Beijing, telling the interested co-passengers how he cut off the head of a Japanese officer trying to rape a Chinese girl, and then had to spend a year behind the double wall of a magician’s trunk; he is seen praying in a Russian Orthodox Church in Beijing; he is seen performing a Hamlet monologue, delivering “To be or not to be . . .” with a strange, untraceable accent, in front of an audience of American missionaries, who do not recognize the song he sings at the end.

  Pick, in fact, takes a boat to Japan, which then hits a mine. Everyone on the boat dies, except Pick, who is miraculously found floating unconscious but alive, surrounded by a school of corpses and body parts. Pick goes to Tokyo, straight to the navy ministry, on crutches—his leg mauled—and finds Commander Otani, who transfers one million yen to Pick under the name of Koji, beseeching him to open a Russian theater in Tokyo and not to neglect his considerable thespian talents. Pick waits for the right moment to start the theater (for which he already has the name: the New World Theatre), but spends all his money waiting. And with the astute instinct of a veteran survivor he can sense that the American hounds are on his scent.

  Hence in February 1946, he walks, limping dramatically, into an American intelligence headquarters and offers to tell them the truth. He consequently delivers to his involved listeners (a Captain Aaron and a Major Maxwell) a cycle of interlocking stories, from the beginning of his life to this day: he tells them about escaping the Germans; about giving information to the British; about subverting Japanese intelligence operations in Shanghai; about his mother, who was an American, and who could be living in America today with her new husband. He tells them that he was the one who tipped off the Japanese about the Sorge spy ring, having remembered him as the Comintern colleague. He slaps his crippled leg, exhibiting it as a result of Japanese torture, and rolls a couple of nacreous tears down his sunken cheeks. He tells the Americans that his motive for going to Japan was to share with them all he knew, and to see the Japanese beasts suffering in defeat. He tells them everything he knows about every Japanese officer he ever met. He tells them everything he knows about Otani, the disgusting, opium-addicted sodomite, and about Otani’s liking for torturing prisoners.

  The American intelligence officers are very happy with the quality of information coming from Pick. Everything makes a lot of sense, unverifiable though it may be, and they forgive and release Pick, in return for future cooperation. He goes back to Shanghai and attempts to restore his network to serve the Americans, but to no avail—Shanghai is not the same, and it never will be. Captain Pick swallows his loss with glass after glass of vodka; he eschews looking into the dark future by looking only as far as the next opium dose. Before the People’s Liberation Army enters Shanghai in 1949, he flees it. In the spring of 1950, he is in possession of an entry visa to Siam. In the summer of 1950, he is in a prison in Taiwan, where he entertains his fellow prisoners with stories told in broken Shanghai dialect about the wild thirties, singing the songs popular once upon a time, all in return for sexual favors and cigarettes. Then he disappears.

  There are few photos of Pick. One of them is a police photo: a balding man, crowned by the remnants of his gray hair; a square, violent jaw; a triangular nose; a pointed Adam’s apple; glaring, manic eyes. Another one is a publicity photograph from the Far Eastern Grand Opera days: he wears a top hat and a black cape, like a magician; there is an elegant white scarf casually thrown over his shoulder; in his gloved left hand he holds the other glove; in his right hand he holds a cigarette, with the ashes about to fall off. His face is heavily made up: thick, penciled eyebrows; glittering pomade; rouged lips. He glances at you sideways, as if about to turn to you full face and begin mesmerizing you. And you have to turn your gaze away, but you simply cannot.

  In the summer of 2000, my wife and I went to Shanghai for our honeymoon, because that was where her grandparents met (her parents unromantically met in a Chicago bar called Jimmy’s). We’d saved enough money from our teaching and took a leave from Ort Institute. We’d promised all our students we would send them
postcards and we’d let Marcus teach us a few phrases in the Shanghai dialect. We were in love and spent the flight holding hands and reading—she read The Idiot, and I read Wasserstein’s Secret War in Shanghai, occasionally kissing her lean neck. We stayed at the Peace Hotel, which used to be the Cathay, and we liked it—they changed our towels regularly, the staff who could speak English always asked us how we were, and we would tell them, for they seemed to care. Pretty soon, we started referring to our hotel room, room 741, as our home. We loved Shanghai, went walking everywhere, despite the incredible heat, wiping sweat off each other’s bodies upon returning to our room, and then making love. We bought cheap silk, authentic souvenirs, and Mao posters we knew our lefty, ironical friends would like. We walked the Bund and went to museums. We roamed the Old Chinese Town, fueled by the belief that we were getting the real China for very few dollars. In Sun Yat-sen’s former residence in the former French Concession, we looked at a saber on the wall, the map of China, and a silk painting of a cat (the guide said: “Please, look at the cat’s eyes—they follow you everywhere in the room”). We ate at restaurants in old Western buildings, including a French restaurant in an old Russian Orthodox church, the dome pressing down on us with all the might of an unfriendly Slavic God. We went to Suzhou for a day to look at the magnificent gardens. We rented jalopy bikes, and rode from garden to garden, taking a break only to succumb to a craving for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  And it was in Suzhou, in the Humble Administrator’s garden—reading Wasserstein in the shade of one of the pavilions, carps splashing the placid surface, lotus leaves spreading as far as the eye could see, gentle trees leaning over water, as if over a looking-glass—it was there that I found out that we had been staying in and were going back to Pick’s room, room 741 at the former Cathay Hotel. Need I say I was overwhelmed, with delight and unraveling fear at the same time? The coincidence—or better, the convergence—implied, glaringly, the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, but not necessarily benevolent being. When I told my wife about my discovery, she hugged me gently, as if it were all my fault and she were forgiving me. I remembered the first time she hugged me, after I had stumbled down the stairs. “Are you good?” she had asked me, in Russian, for some reason.