Quin’s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  The old priest unbuttoned his coat the wrong way. He took the glass of whiskey and studied it. The windows were rattling violently. Gusts of air shot across the room. Although it was only early afternoon the sky was already dark. The whole house seemed to be swaying in the wind.

  Father Lamereaux drank. He raised the glass again and emptied it. His hands relaxed and he smiled gently. All at once his eyes sparkled.

  I think that’s better, he said. I think that’s much better.

  Father, I wonder if you could tell me why you named the child Gobi? I assume that was your doing.

  Yes, it was, although I haven’t thought about it in many years. Sometimes we forget certain things when we go into retirement. I believe I’d like another, please.

  Quin refilled the glass.

  Not in years. Didn’t remember it at all, but now I do.

  How did you happen to choose the name?

  First of all because the infant was brought to me nameless. Hasn’t it always been so? The Emperor arrives in the world nameless, yet centuries later we know the era by his name and no other. It’s an old custom and an important one. No other name will do.

  And what did the name Gobi mean?

  Ultimately who is to say? We know it was the name of an espionage network that once existed here and in China. We know that Adzhar suggested it that afternoon we had the picnic on the beach, he and I and your parents, the time we wore gas masks. We know your father said our group should have a name and Adzhar said it should be Gobi. We know the four of us laughed and that was that.

  And who was Adzhar?

  I’m not sure. Marco Polo perhaps? I’ll have another, please.

  Quin poured. Father Lamereaux smiled.

  Do you know I’m beginning to think I might come out of retirement? This would be an appropriate day to do it, during a typhoon.

  And Adzhar?

  Yes indeed, a very dear friend. He and I and Lotmann were inseparable in those days. Have you ever heard of him? Do you know anything at all about this unique little man who had such a miraculous way with languages?

  No I don’t, Father. Nothing at all.

  Well, then you should. It would be folly to visit the East and not know something about the man who spent his whole life getting here. Lotmann never drank, but Adzhar certainly did. Well, I think I’ll just have one more before I go on. One or possibly two in memory of both of them.

  Quin filled the Jesuit’s glass. Father Lamereaux sipped. He smiled gently and began to whisper.

  • • •

  He was born the son of a shoemaker in Gori, a town in Georgia, a few years before Alexander II freed the serfs. He was sent to a seminary in Tiflis to study for the Orthodox priesthood but was soon expelled as an anarchist and a nihilist. He was a restless man, Adzhar or whatever his real name was, once he hinted it might be Dzugashvili. In any case, when he was expelled from the seminary he went to St. Petersburg to study chemistry. A few years later, in the spring of 1880, he fell in love with a beautiful woman.

  Sophia was a member of the nobility, the daughter of the governor of St. Petersburg. When she was a baby her autocratic father cast off his wife and sent her to Switzerland so that he would be better able to carry on his many affairs with women.

  Sophia grew up not knowing she had a mother. When she discovered the truth about her father she decided to kill the Czar.

  She visited her mother in Geneva and there contacted the Russian nihilist exiles who were also plotting to assassinate the Czar. With her beauty and her position she was a valuable asset to them. She moved in court circles, and her hatred for her father was so great she was more than willing to use her body to obtain information on the Czar’s security arrangements. It wasn’t long before the Czar’s courtiers, in bed in her arms, had told her everything the plotters needed to know.

  Sophia brought Adzhar into the plot because of his knowledge of chemistry. She didn’t love him and he knew it, her obsession with humiliating her father left no room for loving anyone. But when she asked him to design the bombs for the group he agreed. Sophia took his prescriptions to Geneva and smuggled the materials back in a suitcase. Adzhar then put the bombs together in a shoemaker’s shop he had rented on the route through St. Petersburg that the Czar would be using during the first week of March 1881. In all there were eight men and two women in the plot.

  On March 1, near the shoemaker’s shop, a bomb was thrown at the Czar’s carriage. The Czar was dazed and stepped down into the street. A second man ran forward and threw a bomb at their feet, killing himself and the Czar but no one else.

  Of the plotters one man was killed in the explosion, one shot himself, two escaped, and the remaining men and women were sentenced to death. Because of Sophia’s rank Alexander III himself had to sign her death warrant. He was reluctant to do so, but his courtiers persuaded him out of fear that she might reveal their indiscretions with her. As it turned out she said nothing. She had disgraced her father and that was enough. She was hanged without betraying anyone.

  Adzhar, one of the two men who had escaped, was then in his early twenties. The news of Sophia’s execution reached him in Helsinki, where he had gone into hiding. He also learned that the Russian government was sending agents abroad to try to catch him and the other man.

  Adzhar knew he had to find as remote a spot as possible, so he went north to the land of the Lapps. For the next half-dozen years he lived with the Lapps in isolation, wandering with them and their reindeer herds across the wastes of the Arctic Circle. When he left them he went to Iceland and worked as a shoemaker. While with the Lapps he had learned Lappish, an Asian language, as well as the Scandinavian tongues. Now he learned Icelandic. He still had not forgotten Sophia, and the discipline of learning languages, he discovered, was a way of putting aside his unhappiness.

  After a half-dozen years reading the Icelandic sagas he went to the Faroe Islands and learned Faroese, then to the Isle of Man to learn Manx. During this period he also acquired Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and English. With English behind him he went to America, as did so many East Europeans at that time.

  The St. Petersburg uprising of 1905 came and went, as did the artillery pieces later placed around the Shinto shrines in Japan. In New York he met Trotsky, the hero of the 1905 uprising who was now traveling to various countries soliciting aid for his cause. Although Trotsky was nearly twenty years younger than Adzhar, he revived Adzhar’s political idealism.

  One evening there was a famous encounter between the two men that resulted in Adzhar delivering his incredible prophecy, a prophecy that later caused Trotsky to give him his remarkable code name.

  It happened in the Bronx. Trotsky had gone to Adzhar’s shoemaker’s shop for blintzes and borscht. Trotsky was in a bad temper that evening because he had spent the day working on his history of the 1905 failure. He refused to eat anything, and all the food, which Adzhar had spent the day preparing, seemed about to go to waste. Adzhar decided to enliven the gathering with a story. Trotsky replied that there wasn’t a story in the world that could lift his gloom at that moment. Adzhar smiled and answered in an unknown tongue.

  What’s that? asked Trotsky.

  Passamaquoddy, said Adzhar.

  What?

  An Indian tribe, a branch of the Algonquins. I lived with them for a few weeks one winter in order to pick up their language.

  And what did you learn in this useless tongue?

  How the world was created.

  How?

  Like this.

  Adzhar recounted the epic. He told it first in Russian and then in the original Passamaquoddy. As related by Adzhar, the exploits of the central character strongly resembled Trotsky’s life up until then. Trotsky listened more and more intently, delighted to hear his struggles described in such an odd-sounding language. Although he didn’t believe for a moment that Adzhar’s version was authentic, he still found it amusing to imagine that a half-naked Indian with a bow and arrow and a feather in his hair had once e
xperienced in North America the same struggles he was now undergoing in Russia. He laughed and joked and ate quantities of blintzes and borscht. By the end of the evening he had forgotten all about 1905 and was talking enthusiastically about the next uprising, which he was certain would succeed.

  When will it come? asked someone.

  Trotsky frowned. He calculated. He searched for obscure quotations from the holy books of revolutions. He was about to squeeze all of history into one ironbound Marxist harangue when his gaze happened to fall on Adzhar. What stopped him then? The mischief in Adzhar’s eyes? The slight smile that was always hovering around the little man’s mouth?

  The harangue never came. The frown flew from Trotsky’s face and he burst into wild laughter, the kind of unrestrained, totally goodhumored laughter seldom heard from a dedicated revolutionary whose work, like that of God’s, leans heavily on the serious side of life.

  Adzhar, he said, your blintzes were superb tonight. Your borscht was excellent, and what’s more you’ve already answered that question for me, for mother Russia and the world. How long did you say your brave Passamaquoddy labored in his act of creation?

  A dozen years.

  Just so. Well we failed in 1905 and that means we will succeed in 1917.

  Adzhar winked. Once more Trotsky went off into a burst of wild laughter. In revolutionary circles around the world Trotsky was often called The Pen because of the power of his writing. He made reference to this now.

  Adzhar, he said, on the basis of that epic you told us tonight you should always be known as The Holy Ghost, and if you ever join us that’s what your code name will have to be.

  The two men embraced, Trotsky insisting that a photograph be taken in order to memorialize the evening of Adzhar’s prophecy.

  When the Third International was founded in 1919 The Holy Ghost was in Paris working for Trotsky, using his knowledge of French and German and Italian and Spanish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Lettish, Flemish, Dutch, Romansh, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, and several other tongues to recruit European agents and pass information from one movement to another. A Guatemalan, for example, spoke only his native Tzotzil dialect, and if Adzhar hadn’t learned Tzotzil in a cafe one afternoon in order to talk to the man the Comintern would never have known of the existence of this potentially valuable agent in Central America.

  An innovation of his in Paris was a unit of moles, Jewish tailors he brought from Odessa and taught to make clothes characteristic of various regions in the world, and to plant ticket stubs and tobacco and other items in the linings of the pockets, so that Comintern agents could travel freely without fear of being recognized.

  In 1919 he returned briefly to Russia to see Trotsky and was almost shot at the border as a White Russian. Fortunately he had with him the photograph taken at the shoemaker’s shop in the Bronx that showed him and Trotsky arm in arm beaming at the camera. He presented it to the guards and it saved his life.

  Back in Paris one of his many new recruits was a young American who had been wounded in the First World War and wanted to end all wars. Quin, shall we call him? Adzhar even knew the neighborhood in the Bronx where the young man had grown up, for it happened to be the same as that of the shoemaker’s shop in the photograph.

  He found Quin an intelligent young man, confident of himself, eager to learn, and eager to put his skills to work. He also found his enthusiasm naive perhaps, but Adzhar wasn’t so old that he couldn’t remember his own feelings when he left Tifiis and went to St. Petersburg.

  He gave Quin some training and received orders to send him on to Moscow. It was not until several years later in Shanghai, after Adzhar had removed himself from espionage work, that he learned from a young American woman that his former pupil Quin had received intensive training at the school outside Moscow and been assigned to a mission in China.

  Adzhar was disturbed by Lenin’s New Economic Policy after the Russian civil war. When Lenin died in 1924 he decided to give up his clandestine activities and return to the study of languages. He was then over sixty. The time had come to retire, he felt.

  Thus he severed forever all connections with the Comintern.

  From Paris he went to the Middle East, intending to learn Punic and Ugaritic, Mandaean and Nuzi Akkadian. He did learn them, but while in Jerusalem he met for the second time a man he had known five years before in France, a man he admired exceedingly, a Japanese diabetic who had converted to Judaism since they had last seen each other.

  This man was Rabbi Lotmann, formerly Baron Kikuchi of the powerful landowning clan in northern Japan. Lotmann discussed the Orient with Adzhar, and it was because of him that Adzhar decided not to tarry in the Middle East but to continue his journey as far east as one could go.

  In Malabar, where he stopped briefly to acquire fluency in Kulu and Kota and Toda, he fell in love with a young woman of wealth and married her, the only time he ever married, so long had it taken him to recover from the loss of Sophia.

  His wife was a Nestorian Christian, a member of that nearly extinct sect that had flourished in the early Middle Ages. As a child she had fed her horse from a helmet that had been worn by a soldier in Tamerlane’s army. Either that experience or the trading traditions of her fathers, who had sold their peppercorns to both East and West, had caused the young woman to dream of someday going to Samarkand to visit the tomb of Tamerlane, from where she hoped to follow the silk route of antiquity through central Asia, perhaps as far as Peking. In the thirteenth century, after all, a Nestorian monk from Peking had traveled west to discuss theology with the pope and had continued on to Bordeaux, where he gave communion to Edward I of England. Why not reverse the journey? Lastly there was the inducement of a pilgrimage to the famous monument that Chinese Nestorians had erected at Hsian-fu in the eighth century.

  Adzhar was delighted when he heard all of this. He and his wife went to Goa to organize a caravan and there found an omen of the misfortune to come.

  Goa is built on hills and the sewerage system consisted of open drains cleaned by pigs that wandered the city. At the time they arrived there a band of Arabs had just sailed into port with a shipload of powerful drugs, some suspected of being from as far away as Mexico. The Portuguese were celebrating Easter with these drugs, the Arabs were celebrating Ramadan, and the Indians were supplicating their usual multitude of spring deities.

  The problem was that the drugs were much stronger than anyone suspected. They were so lasting that many of their properties passed right through the body of the user, causing a phenomenon known as the high hogs of Goa. For several weeks the entire population had to remain locked indoors on their hills, without food or water, terrorized by marauding hordes of tipsy, careening pigs driven mad by the sewerage in the open drains.

  Finally Adzhar and his young wife and the infant daughter recently born to them were able to set out in their caravan. They reached Samarkand without incident and turned east to cross central Asia. Along the trail of the ancient silk route Adzhar continued to acquire new languages, Kashgarian and Yakandian, Taranchi, Uzbek and Sart, Harachin, Chanar. All went well until they sighted the Gobi Desert. At an oasis on the fringe of the desert they were attacked without warning by a tribe of bandits appearing from nowhere.

  Adzhar was away from the camp at the time. His daughter was playing under a blanket and escaped notice, but his wife and all the bearers were decapitated. Adzhar shouldered his daughter and crossed the Gobi on foot, his daughter dying of thirst before he reached another oasis.

  At last he arrived in Shanghai in 1927, the year the Communist uprising failed there, the same year Trotsky fell from power in Russia.

  • • •

  Father Lamereaux paused to pour himself another glass of whiskey.

  As it happened, he whispered, a remark Adzhar made during his first days in Shanghai had an enormous influence on modern Chinese history.

  When he arrived in the city his only interest was in learning the Kiangsi and Hakka dialects, to go with those he alr
eady knew, so that he could read the regional commentaries on the Chinese classics before continuing on to Japan. But at the same time, remembering his own experiences with the czarist police, he could not help but be sympathetic with the revolutionaries who were being hunted down in Shanghai and shot. Consequently he hid a number of them in his home until a way could be found for them to escape from the city.

  One of these Chinese was an urbane scholarly man who had studied in Europe and had been one of the leaders of the uprising. He and Adzhar got into the habit of having long philosophical discussions to pass the hours. Not surprisingly, like Trotsky in the Bronx, the Chinese was depressed over the recent disaster to his cause.

  Sometimes, he said one evening, despair paralyzes us. We become like an animal in the dark that can neither see nor hear nor smell.

  I know that despair, said Adzhar. On one occasion I knew it particularly well. I was living with the Lapps and it seemed I would never escape those frozen regions where the darkness closes around you and closes in. But then the Lapps with their reindeer taught me what to do and taught me well, for remember no one knows such a night as they do above the Arctic Circle.

  And what did they tell you?

  What I’ve done all my life since then. Move. March.

  Where?

  What does it matter? All good roads are within. Mine has been a long one and perhaps your march must be long as well.

  The scholarly Chinese smiled at Adzhar, for as they both knew, the Lapp proverb he had quoted was nothing more than the way of the Tao. He smiled at Adzhar, but he remembered the wisdom of the remark because it came from a man who had known many strange corners of the world.

  A few days later the Chinese was able to escape from Shanghai. During the next few years he knew many more disasters, until finally a moment came when he and his comrades were completely surrounded by armies that far outnumbered them.

  By then the scholarly revolutionary had risen high in the ranks of the party. Each night after a day of hopeless warfare the weary leaders sat down on the ground to discuss their desperate situation, and each night Adzhar’s friend argued with the others to accept the advice he had heard while hiding in Shanghai.