by Jody Shields
“I have the grandest invitations. I’m second to no guest and have skills useful for all.”
“What’s your history?” the Baron asked. The dwarf was young, but he couldn’t have been born here.
“I came into the world between Tashinchiao and Anshan on a river ferry. Later, I was sold for a good price to a kind British gentleman who saved me from my murderous mother, who intended to drown me and avoid the shame of a cursed child. The next man who bought me wasn’t a gentleman. A Chinese.”
“You escaped from your master.” Andreev was genuinely impressed.
Chang was quite drunk, cheeks deeply flushed. He stood up on his chair, looking down at them, holding a napkin as if about to perform a magic trick. For a moment, the Baron feared he intended to stand on the table.
“I escaped with a lady who brought me to Kharbin. I can beg for money in ten languages. I can sing in an additional two languages. I can dance and juggle. I can do a handstand on a donkey’s back. I moved from entertaining in the market to Churin’s door.” He sat down with a jolt in the chair and giggled. “You wouldn’t believe the offers that I receive. Offers of money. Travel. A seat at the head of a table. Gamblers make bets about me.” He smoothed his queue, lowered his voice. “There isn’t a woman or man that I cannot please. Women are curious about me. And children tell me their secrets, as I can pass for one of them. That is, if I’ve had a good shave. My chin must be clean or they don’t trust me.”
They drank to the health of innocent children. Andreev stared at Chang, the glass tipping in his thick hand on the table. Chang gently put his hand over Andreev’s.
“Flesh and blood. Exactly like you, see?”
His face scarlet, Andreev jerked his hand away and a knife clattered to the floor. Chang silently kept his eyes on Andreev, and the Baron sensed some kind of exchange had been made between them.
Two musicians began to play scales on a violin and a cimbalom across the room. The Baron swayed slightly as he stood up, hand fumbling at the back of his chair. “It’s late.” To his surprise, Andreev remained seated, mumbling that he’d stay for the music.
The Baron moved unsteadily between the tables as he left the restaurant.
CHAPTER THREE
The first double gate to the Baron’s home, the zhalan men, opened into a wide paved courtyard off a narrow lane. At its far end, a second elaborately pierced gate led to another courtyard bordered by servants’ quarters and the kitchen. A formal entrance gate of carved brick and wood painted with auspicious characters guarded the third courtyard and the small buildings of the living quarters. In summer, oleander, pomegranate, and fig trees bloomed and a lotus floated in the cistern next to the steps. Potted chrysanthemums grew in containers in the inner courtyard, and by October, the faint scratch of their drying petals in the wind was a reminder of the temporality of life, considered the flower’s purest expression.
The house was a traditional Chinese residence in Fuchiatien, the district occupied by Chinese. The innermost room in the house was the Baron’s old-fashioned scholar’s study, simply furnished with a plain square table, chairs of blackwood, pigskin trunks, and a felt-covered k’ang bed. The room was heated by small iron stoves in the corners that held burning balls of compacted coal dust and clay. A pair of carved wooden screens were set at an angle to the door. If evil spirits entered the room, they’d strike the screens and be stopped. All the furniture was aligned to face south to ensure feng shui. Even blindfolded, the Baron could have found his way through every room, as the furniture was all identically oriented. This arrangement was common in Chinese households.
The rare visitors were startled by the severity of the house, the spare furniture, the lack of bric-a-brac, the brick floor. But there’s no comfort here, they said. This was true. How well he’d learned from the Chinese. His family would have considered the house cold, bare, suited only for the poor who could not afford furnishings.
A large painted metal box in the study contained his family’s voluminous correspondence, his most precious possession. The letters dated back to the eighteenth century, when the czar had elevated the family to the aristocracy. The letters had been written in gilded rooms in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Krakow, Copenhagen, and Helsinki, where his grandfather and father had had diplomatic postings. He’d memorized each word, stroke, ornate ink flourish, watermark, wrinkle, and fold of the letters. The distinct styles of handwriting on the envelopes were as familiar as his own hand. For years, he’d corresponded with his brother and cousins in St. Petersburg, adding their letters to the stacks of ribbon-tied envelopes and papers in the metal box. Posting a letter from Kharbin and receiving a reply was a process that spanned three or four months. Although it was not a conscious decision, he had gradually stopped writing and lost all contact with his family. In Manchuria, the family and personal history could be erased like a sentence in a diary. He was untethered. With the detachment of an observer, he realized that he’d pass the rest of his life here and would be buried in Manchuria.
The Baron thought his wife would understand him better if she knew his background, the many places he’d lived in St. Petersburg and diplomatic postings across Europe. He described the family house in St. Petersburg and their dacha, surrounded by birch trees and gardens, on the Île des Apothecaires on the Neva near St. Petersburg. His family homes were filled with things of value and valueless things: stationery with the family crest, engraved silver picture frames, mother-of-pearl caviar spoons, buttonhooks, niello bibelots, his father’s gold-tipped fountain pens, a collapsible rubber washtub for bathing, gold-painted porcelain dishes. A life weighed and given value by possessions and then the renunciation of the possessions. He had stepped away from this torrent of objects, assigned everything to his brother, when he left St. Petersburg. But it seemed the objects followed him, as they were replicated in the residences of the wealthy in Kharbin.
He tried to describe the details of the family homes for Li Ju as if they were photographs or postcards. But there was a space where their languages didn’t overlap. What was the Chinese word for mantelpiece? For attic? For eaves? He struggled to translate the nuances of Russian into equivalent words in Chinese or English.
“We’ll visit St. Petersburg someday,” he had half-promised Li Ju, and she smiled. But he couldn’t imagine returning to Russia. Manchuria had so thoroughly transformed him that he would marvel along with her at the city’s tramcars, the gilded spire atop the Admiralty building, the view from the Strelka, the life-size jeweled icons and pillars of lapis lazuli in St. Isaac’s Cathedral.
Chinese calligraphy was the Baron’s solace in the evening. On the narrow stage of his desk, under lamplight, a rectangle of white paper was the shape of discipline. He could barely fathom the perimeters of its difficulty, the years of practice, but this elusiveness and uncertainty was part of calligraphy’s seduction. When he was lost, nervous about executing a brushstroke, he had learned to wait calmly until the character was visualized and wavered into shape, opening like a novelty flower of folded paper in water. He sometimes dreamed about written Chinese characters, angular brushstrokes, thick and thin, scattered like dark hay over a field of white paper or his wife’s hair loose against a pale cushion, black as sticks. Paper was a surface with the impermanence of snow.
Unlike the majority of Chinese women, his wife, Li Ju, could read and write. She had also learned English and a little Russian at the Scottish Presbyterian orphanage, memorizing text from the standard prayer book so that her speech was fractured, curiously old-fashioned, laced with thees and thous. Li Ju solemnly recited passages from hymnals, gesturing at the proper places as she’d been instructed. “‘My heart swells, O Lord / I am a river beside you.’” Her hand flickered in the direction of her heart. He didn’t always correct her or offer an explanation of text that was unclear, but this allowed him to keep something back from her just as she hid within her own language. At times, he believed that he wasn’t subtle enough for his extraordinary young wife.
> Once, she had playfully given him a calligraphy lesson, blackening the tip of her finger on a cake of ink. She sat in front of a dark screen, and her upraised finger with its black spot slowly stroked Chinese characters in the air so he could follow the long lines and dots as she described each one. Finished with the lesson, he cupped her hands in his and inhaled the scent of her skin, identifying the incense she’d handled earlier that day. “I know you microscopically” was his joke, but it was an unfamiliar word to her. He couldn’t properly explain it so one day he brought Li Ju to his office. She squinted into the microscope at the bright piece of transparent glass securely balanced inside, the light sharp as a cut.
Another time, she gently shaped his lips into the correct speaking position with her fingertips. His mouth could not find the Chinese pronunciation of hs from the Russian ch. He stuttered. “It is because of your mustache,” she had teased. But it wasn’t only his lips. His ears couldn’t distinguish the tones, the emphasis on words with their complicated inflections. One syllable could have four different tones of voice and four different interpretations, simply by the way it was pronounced.
Li Ju was young, a kernel, perfect as a bud. The underside of her lip was as pale as melon, her fingernails the beige of almonds. He was convinced that nothing was finer than her skin, opaque as milk at the roots of her black hair. He was ashamed of his own skin, slack, sun-mottled with age, and his hands, huge and rough, aching at night. He was almost fifty years old and the time spent at army camps and prisons working in freezing temperatures had permanently marked him.
He knew nothing about her family. She was silent about her life before the orphanage. Did she remember a home, her mother, father, sisters or brothers? Or had she been too young for memory? Or was memory too painful? Li Ju was her original name, the sisters at the Scottish Presbyterian orphanage claimed, but the identity of the person who had delivered her was unknown. He could have requested the immense registration book be taken from the shelf at the orphanage and opened to the page where information about her was recorded. Each child was documented in case a relative or family member wished to reclaim him or her in the future. Some parents who gave up their child left a small memento for identification, an item as simple as a button, a toy, coin, a scrap of paper with a verse. But an investigation into his wife’s past seemed like a betrayal. He left her history in the book at the orphanage. It was hers alone.
Li Ju owned nothing of her own as a child. The clothing, shoes, and books provided by the sisters at the orphanage passed from her possession to others. He bought the few things Li Ju requested—silver-embroidered fabric, a stone seal carved by a master, a fighting cricket in a cage.
He was always urging her to eat. Take this, he would say, please taste this, and it became a tender joke between them. Eat more cake, noodles, lamb, ask for my attention, my eyes, my hand. In their house, they alternated creating a place setting for each other at the table. She disliked the rich Russian food he had specially prepared, the dark heavy meats, pashtet, kholodets, pork in jelly, lamb with pickled and salted fruits. It tastes thick, she said, shaking her head. I won’t eat.
Li Ju was cautious. Careful about taking space in a room, food from a plate, blocking light from a window, heat from a stove, becoming breathless when she spoke. Perhaps the sisters had been overly strict with the children? He encouraged her to be less deferential, more spontaneous. He did not expect complete obedience. But she craved routine, predictability. He told himself that she was just timid. Not fearful. Once, as a joke, he’d silently slid a teacup to the edge of the table when she was distracted and had looked away. She noticed the cup immediately and covered her mouth in distress. She did not cry.
“Please,” he said. “It’s not important that the cup has been moved. Everything is made to be moved. It cannot be stopped.”
She shook her head.
He gently put his hand on her arm and she closed her eyes. “But my touch changes you too.” Li Ju kept her eyes closed. But he knew her entire focus was on his hand against her skin.
Even after their years together, he studied her constantly, marveling that she stayed with him. Over time, his memories of her changing face and body were a honeycomb of multiple images. The sisters at the orphanage had infused all the children with lessons of gratitude. Their lives depended on it. He wondered if Li Ju’s gratitude, like her appearance, would continue to alter, and then she’d leave him. After all, a woman who has been rescued once may seek another man for aid or a transformation. Another rescue.
The orphanage established by missionaries was one of the few safe places for abandoned children in Kharbin. The Baron had visited to find a servant, a child to train as an apprentice, one who could learn a trade. He’d first considered rescuing a child from the street but reasoned that adopting an orphan would free a place for another child. The sisters were unable to feed every mouth. It was an endless chain.
The orphanage was poorly furnished, with only a long table, small chairs, and a wardrobe. A cage near the window held a pair of canaries. He stepped around the rolled-up sleeping mats in the largest room, his boots aggressive on the wooden floor, a brisk tattoo over the voices of children singing a hymn in the courtyard outside.
A plainly dressed sister entered the room, stared at him suspiciously until he introduced himself as a doctor who needed a household servant.
Her expression changed immediately. “I’m Sister Margaret. Please, would you take a moment to examine some of the children? I cannot pay you, but—”
He waved a hand to stop her pleading. “I have my medical case.” He indicated his stout leather bag.
Her face relaxed. “Let me call the children.”
An older girl, fourteen or perhaps fifteen years old, ushered a group of children into the room and they lined up facing him in the chair provided for visitors. She stood behind them, hushing the smaller children who leaned against her, as they were afraid of him. He knew they couldn’t bear the scent of a Russian, his breath, skin, the coarse odor of his body in a wool jacket. The Chinese called Russians “the hairy ones” or “the red beards.”
He felt clumsy as he bent close to a boy, listened to his shallow exhalations, asking him to cough. A lung infection. Nothing he hadn’t seen in an army barracks. The infected boy should be isolated, but that was probably impossible here with so many children. He promised to bring the boy medicine and he’d be better in a week.
One of the youngest girls began to cry.
“Close your eyes. He won’t hurt you,” the older girl said in Chinese and comfortingly stroked the child’s shoulder. She was tall, very thin, and her skin had a pale luster that didn’t betray her troubled history. She looked straight at him and boldly repeated her words in Russian.
The Baron’s decision was immediate. It was simple to change a life. Li Ju left the orphanage with him, to Sister Margaret’s regret. She had been sorry to lose a good worker.
He had made other choices in this manner, alert to something that revealed a person’s character. An animating spark. Sometimes patients could be diagnosed in the same way, revealing themselves with a word or an expression. He knew who could be saved or save themselves.
That was his first encounter with his wife, Li Ju, and he could never remember if she introduced herself, had said her name, and it frustrated him, the only glimpse of her character before time and intimacy shaped it like a folded page. He later told Li Ju that her true heart was revealed by her tenderness with the children. She always giggled at this affectionate teasing. But when she had reached a certain age, her rescue from the orphanage was never again discussed between them.
But he’d wanted to say, You stood in line before. Stood in line for other men and women, strangers who had come to adopt a Chinese child, choose a servant, slave, concubine, or prostitute. Other eyes had evaluated her, measured her for obedience, acquiescence. Her face and body.
“I remember our first meeting very clearly,” he later said to her, not quite trut
hfully. “You comforted a child and caught my eye. So we left together.”
“I was chosen.” She clasped his hand. “My gesture must have been very graceful.”
He was silent. He’d seen her make the gesture of someone who was drowning.
* * *
The Baron had been privileged his entire life and had tried to dismantle it. To some Chinese, he was a blue-eyed white devil. To the Russian community, he was a renegade and a mystery. He wed Li Ju and she became the Baronin. The aristocratic title meant nothing to her. Many Kharbinskiis believed that the Baron had disgraced his Russian heritage by marrying outside their circle. Even the czar himself did not approve of his wife. The marriage was scandalous not because of her tender age but because she was considered a pagan. A nonbeliever. An inferior Chinese. Certain individuals who had known the Baron for years as a solitary figure whispered he’d been bewitched by a young Chinese prostitute. He’d crossed too many meridians for them, with his foreign bride and fluency with the Chinese language. He ignored their gossip and hid his intimate relationship from critical eyes, unbending only to his wife and patients, to those who needed him.
But his title deflected criticism like a holy relic and after his marriage, he continued to receive invitations from high society, although it was expected that she wouldn’t accompany him. These dinners and receptions were rarely entertaining, as he was constantly asked for medical advice, recommendations, and news about individuals in St. Petersburg whom he hadn’t seen in years. Prominent Kharbinskiis were proud their sacrifices in Manchuria had built an empire for the czar and the motherland. They had little curiosity about China. Truthfully, he didn’t mind that his wife was excused from social gatherings, as it was easier for him to socialize alone. There was her youthfulness and shy hesitation to speak, his apprehension that she’d be mocked.