Only once did Nicholai have a brush with death. He was with other street urchins in the district of the great department stores, the Wing On and The Sincere, when one of the common “mistakes” brought Chinese dive-bombers over densely packed Nanking Road. It was the lunch hour, and the crowds were thick when The Sincere received a direct hit, and one side of the Wing On was sheared away. Ornate ceilings caved in upon the faces of people staring up in horror. The occupants of a crowded elevator screamed in one voice as the cable was cut, and it plunged to the basement.
An old woman who had been facing an exploding window was stripped of flesh in front, while from behind she seemed untouched. The old, the lame, and children were crushed under foot by those who stampeded in panic. The boy who had been standing next to Nicholai grunted and sat down heavily in the middle of the street. He was dead; a chip of stone had gone through his chest. As the thunder of bombs and the war of collapsing masonry ebbed, there emerged through it the high-pitched scream from thousands of voices. A stunned shopper whimpered as she searched through shards of glass that had been a display counter. She was an exquisite young woman clothed in the Western “Shanghai” mode, an ankle-length dress of green silk slit to above the knee, and a stiff little collar standing around her curved, porcelain neck. Her extreme pallor might have come from the pale rice powders fashionable with the daughters of rich Chinese merchants, but it did not. She was searching for the ivory figurine she had been examining at the moment of the bombing, and for the hand in which she had been holding it.
Nicholai ran away.
A quarter of an hour later, he was sitting on a rubble heap in a quiet district where weeks of bombing had left blocks of empty and toppling shells. Dry sobs racked his body and seared his lungs, but he did not cry; no tears streaked the plaster dust that coated his face. In his mind, he repeated again and again: “Northrop bombers. American bombers.”
When at last the Chinese soldiers were driven out, and their barricades broken, thousands of civilians fled the nightmare city of bombed-out buildings on the interior walls of which could be seen the checkerboard patterns of gutted apartments. In the rubble: a torn calendar with a date encircled, a charred photograph of a young woman, a suicide note and a lottery ticket in the same envelope.
By a cruel perversity of fate, the Bund, monument to foreign imperialism, was relatively unscathed. Its empty windows stared out over the desolation of the city the taipans had created, drained, then deserted.
Nicholai was among the small gaggle of blue-clad Chinese children who lined the streets to watch the first parade of Japanese occupation troops. Army news photographers had passed out pieces of sticky candy and small hinomaru rising-sun flags, which the children were ordered to wave as the motion picture cameras recorded their bewildered enthusiasm. An officious young officer conducted the event, adding greatly to the confusion with his barked instructions in heavily accented Chinese. Uncertain of what to make of an urchin with blond hair and green eyes, he ordered Nicholai to the back of the crowd.
Nicholai had never seen soldiers like these, rough and efficient, but certainly no parade-ground models. They did not march with the robot synchronization of the German or the British; they passed in clean but rumpled ranks, marching jerkily behind serious young officers with moustaches and comically long swords.
Despite the fact that rather few dwellings were intact in the residential areas when the Japanese entered the city, Alexandra Ivanovna was surprised and annoyed when a staff car, little flags fluttering from its fenders, arrived in her driveway and a junior officer announced in a metallic French that General Kishikawa Takashi, governor of Shanghai, was to be billeted upon her. But her vivid instinct for self-preservation persuaded her that there might be some advantage to cultivating friendly relations with the General, particularly as so many of the good things of life were in short supply. Not for an instant did she doubt that this General would automatically enlist himself among her admirers.
She was mistaken. The General took time from a busy schedule to explain to her in a curiously accented but grammatically flawless French that he regretted any inconvenience the necessities of war might bring to her household. But he made it clear that she was a guest in his house, not he in hers. Always correct in his attitude toward her, the General was too occupied with his work to waste time on flirtations. At first Alexandra Ivanovna was puzzled, later annoyed, and finally intrigued by this man’s polite indifference, a response she had never inspired from a heterosexual man. For his part, he found her interesting, but unnecessary. And he was not particularly impressed by the heritage that had made even the haughty women of Shanghai stand in reluctant awe. From the point of view of his thousand years of samurai breeding, her lineage appeared to be only a couple of centuries of Hunnish chieftainship.
Nevertheless, as a matter of politeness, he arranged weekly suppers, taken in the Western style, during the light conversation of which he learned a great deal about the Countess and her withdrawn, self-contained son; while they learned very little about the General. He was in his late fifties—young for a Japanese general—and a widower with one daughter living in Tokyo. Although an intensely patriotic man in the sense that he loved the physical things of his country—the lakes, mountains, misted valleys—he had never viewed his army career as the natural fulfillment of his personality. As a young man, he had dreamed of being a writer, although in his heart he had always known that the traditions of his family would ultimately conduct him into a military career. Pride in self and devotion to duty made him a hard-working and conscientious administrative officer but, although he had passed more than half his life in the army, his habits of mind caused him to think of the military as an avocation. His mind, not his heart; his time, not his passions, were given to his work.
In result of unstinting effort that often kept the General in his office on the Bund from early morning until midnight, the city began to recover. Public services were restored, the factories were repaired, and Chinese peasants began to trickle back into the city. Life and noise slowly returned to the streets, and occasionally one heard laughter. While not good by any civilized standards, living conditions for the Chinese worker were certainly superior to those he had experienced under the Europeans. There was work, clean water, basic sanitary services, rudimentary health facilities. The profession of begging was banned, but prostitution of course throve, and there were many acts of petty brutality, for Shanghai was an occupied city, and soldiers are men at their most beastly.
When General Kishikawa’s health began to suffer from his self-imposed work load, he began a more salubrious routine that brought him to his home on Avenue Joffre in time for dinner each evening.
One evening after dinner, the General mentioned in passing that he was devoted to the game of Gô. Nicholai, who seldom spoke save in brief answer to direct questions, admitted that he also played the game. The General was amused and impressed by the fact that the boy said this in flawless Japanese. He laughed when Nicholai explained that he had been learning Japanese from textbooks and with the assistance of the General’s own batman.
“You speak it well, for only six months’ study,” the General said.
“It is my fifth language, sir. All languages are mathematically similar. Each new one is easier to learn than the last. Then too”—the lad shrugged—”I have a gift for languages.”