Quin?s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  And what is that?

  A little trick of his that’s supposed to prove the tale’s authentic. At the end he waits a minute or two and then asks innocently if anyone is inclined to disbelieve him. When neither Lamereaux nor I say anything, he smiles.

  Just as well, he says in the small voice of a child. Just as well, my friends. Just as well, as it turns out. For although I’m old now and it happened long ago, the boy on that dragon’s back was me.

  During the next two years she saw the General more than she had expected, for he frequently flew to Tokyo for a meeting of the General Staff. Often he had no more than an hour to be with her but he never failed to come, encouraging her during her confinement and later admiring their son.

  Her love for the General continued to grow while he was away. Thus her confusion was complete when she learned that despite the vague suggestion made by his brother in Kamakura, she had never known anything at all about his real life.

  The revelation came in the summer of 1937. Although they didn’t know it, it was the last time they were to see each other. Once more the General was being transferred, this time to a high command post in central China. He was to lead one of the armies advancing on Nanking.

  His visit coincided with O-bon, the midsummer Festival of the Dead, the day when dead souls returned to those who loved them to receive prayers and offer blessings in return. Having always been superstitious, she felt uneasy when he suddenly appeared that day.

  He seemed restless when she played the koto in the evening, so she stopped and encouraged him to talk. Again she noticed in his manner the inexplicable hint of fear she had seen so briefly the night he told her he was going to Manchuria.

  He began curiously. He talked about his childhood in the north, about the suffering he had seen among the tenant farmers who worked his family’s estates. He talked about China and the corruption of the Chinese government, the resistance the Japanese army was encountering in China, the power of militarism in Japan. He mentioned a Japanese monk who had been murdered in Shanghai in 1932, immediately reminding her of his brother’s reference to a cousin who had been killed there as a result of an order given by the General.

  He grew more agitated. He began to pace the floor. He waved his arms, which was unlike him, and his voice broke, which was also unlike him. She wondered what he was trying to say when all at once he stopped in front of her. He took her hands.

  I’ve loved one other woman in my life, he whispered. I loved her very much and we had a son. That was how it all began.

  Her face showed no expression. She sat absolutely still. He dropped her hands and resumed his pacing, speaking in a low voice.

  Some ten years before he had been sent to Shanghai as a colonel in intelligence. His main task was to gather information on the various Western espionage agencies operating out of Shanghai. An American came to his notice, but before he could learn much about his activities the American left for Canton. Still interested in the case, he arranged an introduction at a reception to the man’s wife, who was apparently staying on in Shanghai.

  Baron Kikuchi was already middle-aged. The wife turned out to be very young. In those days he tried to cultivate a more open manner with foreigners, he had to for his work, and often he was successful. He talked with the young woman about literature and painting. They met again. She asked him about Japan, its traditions, its art and philosophy.

  For his part, what happened was understandable. She was vivacious and beautiful, passionate about everything. But she was also thirty years younger than he was. Why had she become attracted to him?

  A few weeks, no more, and they were living together. They had to keep their relationship secret because it would have damaged his reputation in the army if he were known to be living with a foreign woman. Perhaps that was what spoiled their life together, or perhaps she had only been infatuated with him because of what he could teach her.

  In any case, it didn’t last long. When she left him she was pregnant, but she said she was going to have the child and she did. It was a boy whom she took to Japan. Later he heard she had joined her husband in Canton, without the baby.

  During that time he discovered he wasn’t the first older man to have had an affair with her. Several years before, when she had first arrived in Shanghai, before she was married, she had lived with a Russian named Adzhar, a man close to seventy although he was said to look and act much younger.

  Out of jealousy, vanity, a mixture of pains, Baron Kikuchi had his agents check into the Russian’s life. He found him to be a man devoted entirely to sensuality. Iced vodka, iced caviar, women. Those were his pursuits and his only companions. From a former wife, a rich Indian woman, he had inherited a fortune that allowed him to indulge in a totally dissolute life. There were still jokes told about his insatiable appetites and the ease with which he seduced the women he wanted.

  Baron Kikuchi learned that she had become the Russian’s mistress an hour after they met. The information angered him. He was surprised and hurt.

  She was gone from Shanghai a little over a year. Baron Kikuchi, newly promoted to General, was being transferred to Kempeitai headquarters in Tokyo. A few days before he was to sail she telephoned him. She wanted to see him. They arranged to meet on Bubbling Well Road and walk beside the river.

  The General stopped in front of Mama.

  She talked about our time together, he whispered, about how happy we had been. After a while we came to a houseboat tied to the bank and she said that was where she was living. She asked me on board. I followed her across the gangplank and suddenly a man was welcoming me, shaking my hand.

  It was her husband. Quin was his name.

  Maeve apologized for the trick, I just stood there. She put her hand on my shoulder and thanked me for coming. She smiled, at me, at her husband. Then she laughed the way she always laughed when she had done something she liked, something she was proud of.

  It was an odd sort of laugh, timid in a way, appealing, almost coy, as if she wanted to be praised but would be embarrassed when the praise came. I don’t think I’m trying to make excuses for myself when I say there was a hardness in that laugh I hadn’t noticed before.

  I mentioned that she was passionate about everything, life, people, ideas. But in the year we’d been apart I’d come to suspect that most of that passion had nothing to do with life or people or ideas. Somehow it always seemed directed toward herself, toward proving that she was whoever she thought she was. She was fervent, but what did it mean? Did she really care about people? How they suffered? What was right and wrong in the world? How she could help?

  She talked as if she did, but later I wasn’t so sure. I had a feeling she was acting without knowing it. All those words and opinions were costumes she wore in order to be able to say, this is who I am.

  The baby, for example. She had it because she wanted to have the experience, but then she gave it away for someone else to raise, to bother with, to love. She knew she couldn’t love the child, yet she brought it into the world, which was selfish and even cruel. Another life was involved, after all, not just her own.

  Love. How could she love anyone if she couldn’t love her own child? I suppose she did love her husband in a way, but certainly no one else, and certainly not all those abstractions she pretended to care so much about.

  And even with him I’m not sure. You could say the way she helped him in his work proved she loved him, but did she, or was that just the ultimate costume, the ultimate role, the one deepest inside her? A final way of saying, I love him and therefore this is who I am. Who I am. Me.

  I don’t know. I’m not sure. At the time all I understood was that somehow she wasn’t the person I’d thought she was a year before. But of course love does that to us. We hear with different ears and see with different eyes and I’m glad we do. The peace I saw on my mother’s face has kept me alive for years. For years, even though I’ve known for years it wasn’t peace but a mask hiding a lifetime of pain. Hiding it from my
brother and me because she loved us.

  Maeve. She laughed that laugh of hers, and then she went away and left the two of us standing there.

  I was bewildered. Quin smiled and asked me to sit down. He poured me a drink and began to talk. Politics, China, Japan. He had a gift with words and he was fascinating to listen to. He had enthusiasm, a well-trained mind, an enormous grasp of history and its movements.

  At some point he dismissed my affair with his wife. He said that kind of thing was inevitable when a husband and wife were separated for long periods. He told me it meant nothing to him and I believed him, for he was the kind of man who would have many women himself. He lived too much with ideas to be devoted to her or any woman. Other things were too important to him. She must have been only a small part of his life.

  We talked for a long time and I found we agreed on almost everything, as I suppose he knew we would. Maeve and I had talked a lot when we were together. I suppose she had told him how I felt.

  The General stopped in front of Mama again. He took her hands.

  In other words, I was lying to you a minute ago. I’ve become so used to lying I do it all the time. Obviously the reason she was interested in me in the beginning, or pretended she was interested, was because she thought I would be useful to him. She loved him enough to do something like that for him. Or loved herself that much. I don’t know which it was.

  Anyway, none of that matters now. I’ll just tell you what happened.

  Quin and I became friends on the houseboat that afternoon. Originally, I imagine, he’d asked me there for some minor thing, but the friendship between us was real, we both felt it, we both felt it strongly even though I was old enough to be his father.

  So in the end he told me who he was and what he was doing. He was working for Soviet intelligence to protect China and the Soviet Union from Japanese militarism. He asked me to work with him and I said I would. And so I have, giving him all the plans of the General Staff, where they have intended to move and when, months and years before it has happened.

  And now more recently the most important information of all, information that may someday save Moscow from the Germans. For the Germans will surely attack the Soviet Union before long, and Japan will go to war before long, which means fighting the West, and then the Soviet Union will face the near impossibility of fighting on two fronts.

  Or that is, they would have faced that possibility if we hadn’t told them otherwise. If I hadn’t been able to tell Quin that when the time comes the Japanese army will move south to seize the oil and rubber of Southeast Asia, not north into Siberia. That when the time comes, therefore, the Soviets can pull back their Far Eastern divisions to use against the Germans and not worry about the Kwangtung army in Manchuria, for although it will still be there in name, its officers and men will be fighting elsewhere and the Soviet Far East will be safe. That much we were able to tell Moscow, perhaps thereby to save it.

  But although you don’t understand any of this, you mustn’t think I’m a traitor. What I’ve done has been for the good of Japan. I had to make a decision that afternoon and it was the right one. I believed what Quin believed in, I believed it then and I do now. I loved Go as a child and that’s probably how I got into the army in the first place, but what the army was doing to Japan and beginning to do to China was wrong. Wrong then, now it’s much worse.

  So no matter what happens I know I made the right decision. I know it. And as for Quin, he’s been a brother to me. Whenever I had doubts or was exhausted or thought I couldn’t live through another headache, it was his courage that kept me going, his confidence in me, his will, his determination to finish what we had started, what we were doing together to help people, to help the Japanese and the Chinese by ending their horrible, futile war.

  There have been terrible times, times I can’t forget. And people.

  There was the morning I had to call in the gentle Western scholar who has assisted us by handling our courier system. A kindly man, a good man, a man who has taken many risks for the same cause I have. Of course he didn’t know who I really was and of course I couldn’t tell him, but I had to get him to change his behavior because it might have endangered our security.

  So I insulted him. I blackmailed him. I humiliated him in the most despicable way. Humiliated him, my compatriot. Insulted the man whom I knew was one of my brother’s most treasured friends.

  A small matter. Merely a case of insulting and humiliating a kindly man, a gentle human being. There were worse cases. There were cases of murder.

  Once, about five years ago, I had to get to Shanghai to see Quin, to talk to him about the General Staff’s plan to invade north China. I absolutely had to get there but there was no way to leave Tokyo. My office was involved in the planning and my absence from Tokyo then, for any reason, would have been impossible to explain. I was desperate.

  And then a way turned up. A disgusting, sickening way. It was ghastly.

  The plan called for a man to be assassinated in Shanghai, some well-known Japanese. The assassination would appear to be the work of Chinese patriots, and naturally the repercussions would be great. It was to be the first step, the beginning. A year later the Japanese people would be more than ready for the invasion of China.

  Someone on the General Staff suggested a certain Japanese monk who lived in Shanghai, a man who was loved by the Chinese and respected by the Japanese, an ideal target. What little remained of the good feelings between our people was the work of him and a few men like him.

  That monk was my cousin, descended from my father’s younger brother. But no one knew this because his family had been in China since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and because they had adopted a Chinese name, and because I’d destroyed certain parts of the Kempeitai files so that no harm would come to him.

  Now not only did I have to agree to the plan but suggest it was such a delicate operation it required my presence in Shanghai. Behind my back I saw them smiling at each other, whispering that the real reason I wanted to go was because I was a killer, a murderer, an executioner who liked to sniff and smell and taste the scene of an execution.

  They hated me of course. They’d always hated me because I had the files of the Kempeitai behind me and knew too much about them. They’d have gotten rid of me long ago if they weren’t so jealous among themselves about trusting anyone else with my work.

  So they smiled at me.

  Yes, they said, an excellent idea. Perhaps you should deal with this matter personally. Nothing must go wrong, and with you there it won’t. It will be an efficient murder, that is quite certain, given your skill. Quite certain and most reassuring. An excellent suggestion, Kikuchi.

  I had to let them smile at me and get up and walk out the door. I went to Shanghai and met with the agents, telling them that the monk was to be superficially wounded, one bullet in the arm and the rest in the air, nothing more. But in the end that little effort came to nothing. They lost their heads and fired indiscriminately.

  Five years ago. There have been other things since then and others before then, things you can’t explain to yourself or anyone else, things that just sit there and sit there and never go away, wounds that won’t heal, wounds open to the wind, wounds that reach to the bone. Once I talked to Quin about it and he nodded to himself. He nodded to himself and said nothing, for there was nothing to say. Nothing. He knew what I was talking about.

  The General released her hands. He had finished. He went over to the cupboard and took down an unopened bottle of Irish whiskey that had been left untouched for eight years, a gift from Quin at the end of that afternoon and evening on a houseboat in Shanghai. The General never drank whiskey, but tonight he poured himself a large glass and emptied it.

  She watched him refill the glass. He sat down beside her and bowed his head so that she could not see his eyes, neither the one with vision nor the one without.

  So tell me what you think, he said.

  I think you are a brave
man, she answered, and I think you’ve done what you believe in. And I feel sorry for that other woman who can’t love a man the way she wants to love him. And I feel sorry for him, for someday he may discover why.

  But most of all I don’t think about them at all. I think of my love for you and that’s all I think about, when you’re with me and when you’re not.

  Four months passed. Mama was preparing the special rice cakes with which to welcome the New Year. Late in the afternoon she was given the name of a caller. She bathed and dressed in her finest kimono. Lastly she looked in on her sleeping son.

  It was snowing when she walked down the open corridor that crossed the garden, toward the soft light that lit the rice paper door of the room where she had played the koto for the General. She watched the snow for a moment before sliding back the door on its runners.

  A haggard figure knelt in front of her, his forehead pressed to the tatami. She begged him to rise, to sit by the brazier and warm his hands, surely stiff from the harsh wind of many an unfriendly night. She poured tea and placed the cup before him.

  Dead, whispered the corporal.

  I know, she said.

  But there has been no announcement.

  I knew last summer.

  The corporal kept his head bowed. He cradled the steaming teacup in his hands.

  I feel uncomfortable sitting here, he said. This was his place.

  You need not, my friend. You loved him and tried to make him happy. No one can do more.

  The corporal shuddered, but not from the cold. The spasm came from the fires that still burned behind his eyes. He was too frightened to go on. He felt a hand touch his arm and looked up to see a very old face, a tiny woman smiling gently in the yellow light.

  It’s all right, she said. You can tell me. Life is brief and we must listen to every sound.

  December 1937.

  Nanking.