“No,” Nicholai answered.
“Ah!” the officer said with obvious relief. “Thought not.” And he strode off toward the elevators.
For half an hour, Nicholai sat on a wooden bench outside the office, awaiting his turn; while in the corridor around him people chatted in English, Russian, French, and Chinese. The San Shin Building was one of the few anodes on which the various occupying powers collected, and one could feel the reserve and mistrust underlying their superficial camaraderie. More than half the people working here were civilian civil servants, and Americans outnumbered the others by the same ratio as their soldiers outnumbered the others combined. It was the first time Nicholai heard the growled r ’s and metallic vowels of American speech.
He was becoming ill and sleepy by the time an American secretary opened the door and called his name. Once in the anteroom, he was given a form to fill in while the young secretary returned to her typing, occasionally stealing glances at this improbable person in dirty clothes. But she was only casually curious; her real attention was on a date she had for that night with a major who was, the other girls all said, real nice and always brought you to a real fine restaurant and gave you a real good time before.
When he handed over his form, the secretary glanced at it, lifted her eyebrows and sniffed, but brought it in to the woman in charge of Pay and Accounts. In a few minutes, Nicholai was called into the inner office.
The woman in charge was in her forties, plumpish and pleasant. She introduced herself as Miss Goodbody. Nicholai did not smile.
Miss Goodbody gestured toward Nicholai’s voucher form. “You really have to fill this out, you know.”
“I can’t. I mean, I can’t fill in all the spaces.”
“Can’t?” Years of civil service recoiled at the thought. “What do you mean…” She glanced at the top line of the form. “…Nicholai?”
“I can’t give you an address. I don’t have one. And I don’t have an identification card number. Or a—what was it?—sponsoring agency.”
“Sponsoring agency, yes. The unit or organization for which you work, or for which your parents work.”
“I don’t have a sponsoring agency. Does it matter?”
“Well, we can’t pay you without a voucher form filled out correctly. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I’m hungry.”
For a moment, Miss Goodbody was nonplussed. She leaned forward. “Are your parents with the Occupation Forces, Nicholai?” She had come to the assumption that he was an army brat who had run away from home.
“No.”
“Are you here alone?” she asked with disbelief.
“Yes.”
“Well…” She frowned and made a little shrug of futility. “Nicholai, how old are you?”
“I’m twenty-one years old.”
“Oh, my. Excuse me. I assumed—I mean, you look no more than fourteen or fifteen. Oh, well, that’s a different matter. Now, let’s see. What shall we do?” There was a strong maternal urge in Miss Goodbody, the sublimation of a life of untested sexuality. She was oddly attracted to this young man who had the appearance of a motherless child, but the age of a potential mate. Miss Goodbody identified this mélange of contradictory feelings as Christian concern for a fellow-being.
“Couldn’t you just give me my ten dollars? Maybe five dollars?”
“Things don’t work like that, Nicholai. Even assuming we find a way to fill out this form, it will be ten days before it clears AP&R.”
Nicholai felt hope drain away. He lacked the experience to know that the gossamer barriers of organizational dysfunction were as impenetrable as the pavements he trod all day. “I can’t have any money then?” he asked atonally.
Miss Goodbody half-shrugged and rose. “I’m sorry, but… Listen. It’s after my lunch hour. Come with me to the employees’ cafeteria. We’ll have a bite to eat, and we’ll see if we can work something out.” She smiled at Nicholai and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Is that all right?”
Nicholai nodded.
The next three months before Miss Goodbody was transferred back to the United States remained forever thrilling and shimmering in her memory. Nicholai was the closest thing to a child she would ever have, and he was her only prolonged affair. She never dared to talk out, or even to analyze for herself, the complex of feelings that tingled through her mind and body during those months. Certainly she enjoyed being needed by someone, enjoyed the security of dependency. Also, she was a genuinely good person who liked giving help to someone who needed it. And in their sexual relations there was a tang of delicious shame, the spice of being at one time mother and lover, a heady brew of affection and sin.
Nicholai never did get his ten dollars; the task of sending through a voucher without an identification card number proved too much even for Miss Goodbody’s twenty-odd years of bureaucratic experience. But she did manage to introduce him to the director of translation services, and within a week he was working eight hours a day, translating documents, or sitting in interminable conferences, repeating in two or three languages such overworded and cautious statements as a given representative dared to make in public. He learned that, in diplomacy, the principal function of communication is to mask meaning.
His relations with Miss Goodbody were friendly and polite. As soon as possible he repaid, over her protests, her outlay for clothes and toilet articles, and he insisted on assuming his share of their living expenses. He did not like her enough to be willing to owe her anything. This is not to say he disliked her—she was not the kind one could dislike; she did not arouse feelings of that intensity. At times her mindless babble was annoying; and her hovering attention could be burdensome; but she tried so hard, if clumsily, to be considerate, and she was so dewily grateful for her sexual experiences that he tolerated her with some real affection, affection of the kind one has for a maladroit pet.
Nicholai suffered only one significant problem in living with Miss Goodbody. Because of the high concentration of animal fat in their diets. Westerners have a faintly unpleasant smell that offends the Japanese olfactory sense and dampens ardor notably. Before he became acclimated to this, Nicholai had some difficulty giving himself over to physical transports, and it took him rather a long time to achieve climax. To be sure, Miss Goodbody benefited experientially from her unconscious taint; but as she had minimal grounds for comparison, she assumed that Nicholai’s sexual endurance was common. Emboldened by her experience with him, after she returned to the United States she launched into several short-lived affairs, but they were all relative disappointments. She ended with becoming the “grand old woman” of the Feminist Movement.
It was not totally without relief that Nicholai saw Miss Goodbody off on her homeward-bound ship and returned to move out of her government-allotted quarters to a house he had rented in the Asakusa district of northwest Tokyo where, in this rather old-fashioned quarter, he could live with invisible elegance—nearly shibumi —and deal with Westerners only during the forty hours a week that produced his living, a luxurious level of living by Japanese standards because of his relatively high pay and, even more important, his access to goods at American post exchanges and commissaries. For Nicholai was now in possession of that most important of human endowments: identification papers. These had been obtained by means of a little winking collusion between Miss Goodbody and friends in the civil service. Nicholai had one ID card that identified him as an American civilian employee, and another that identified him as Russian. On the unlikely event that he might be questioned by American military police, he could produce his Russian identity; and for all other curious nationals, his American papers. Relations between the Russians and Americans were founded in mistrust and mutual fear, and they avoided interfering with one another’s nationals over petty events, much as a man crossing the street to rob a bank might avoid jaywalking.