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Nicholai had the good fortune to find a place under one of the benches where he would not be trod upon by people seeking to relieve themselves during the night. On the bench above him was a woman with two children, one a baby. She talked softly to them until they fell asleep after reminding her, without insistence, that they were hungry. She told them that grandfather was not really dead after all, and was coming to take them away soon. Later, she confected word pictures of her little village on the coast. After they fell asleep, she wept silently.
The old man on the floor beside Nicholai took great pains to set out his valuables on a folded bit of cloth close to his face before nestling down. They consisted of a cup, a photograph, and a letter that had been folded and refolded until the creases were thin and furry. It was a form letter of regret from the army. Before closing his eyes, the old man said good night to the young foreigner beside him, and Nicholai smiled and said good night.
Before a fitful sleep overtook him, Nicholai composed his mind and escaped from the acid gnaw of hunger into mystic transport. When he returned from his little meadow with its waving grasses and yellow sunlight, he was full although hungry, peaceful although desperate. But he knew that tomorrow he must find work or money, or soon he would die.
When the police rousted them shortly before dawn, the old man was dead. Nicholai wrapped the cup, photograph, and letter into his own bundle because It seemed a terrible thing to let all the old man had treasured be swept up and thrown away.
By noon Nicholai had drifted down to Hibiya Park in search of work or something to steal. Hunger was no longer a matter of unsatisfied appetite. It was a jagged cramp and a spreading weakness that made his legs heavy and his head light. As he drifted on the tide of desperate people, waves of unreality washed over him; people and things alternated between being indiscriminant forms and objects of surprising fascination. Sometimes he would find himself flowing within a stream of faceless people, allowing their energy and direction to be his, permitting his thoughts to spiral and short-circuit in a dreamy carousel without meaning, His hunger brought mystic transport close to the surface of his consciousness, and wisps of escape ended with sudden jolts of reality. He would find himself standing, staring at a wall or the face of a person, sensing that this was a remarkable event. No one had ever examined that particular brick with care and affection before. He was the very first! No one had ever looked at that man’s ear in such sharp focus. That must mean something.
Mustn’t it?
The lightheaded hunger, the shattered spectrum of reality, the aimless drifting were all seductively pleasant, but something within him warned that this was dangerous. He must break out of it or be would die. Die? Die? Did that sound have any meaning?
A dense rivulet of humanity carried him out of the park through an entrance where two broad avenues intersected with a congestion of military vehicles, charcoal automobiles, clanging tramcars, and wobbling bicycles pulling two-wheeled carts loaded down with incredibly heavy and bulky cargoes. There had been a minor accident, and traffic was snarled for a block in every direction while a helpless Japanese traffic policeman in huge white gloves was trying to settle things between a Russian driving an American Jeep and an Australian driving an American jeep.
Nicholai was pushed forward unwillingly by the curious crowd that seeped into the spaces around the congealed traffic, intensifying the confusion. The Russians spoke only Russian, the Australians only English, the policeman only Japanese; and all three were engaged in a vigorous discussion of blame and responsibility. Nicholai was pressed against the side of the Australian jeep, whose officer occupant was sitting, staring ahead with stoic discomfort, while his driver was shouting that he would gladly settle this thing man-to-man with the Russian driver, the Russian officer, both at once, or the whole fucking Red Army, if it came to that!
“Are you in a hurry, sir?”
“What?” The Australian officer was surprised to be addressed in English by this ragged lad in a tarnished Japanese student’s uniform. It was a couple of seconds before he realized from the green eyes in the gaunt young face that the boy was not Oriental. “Of course I’m in a hurry! I have a meeting—” He snapped his wrist over and looked at his watch. “—twelve minutes ago!”
“I’ll help you,” Nicholai said. “For money.”
“I beg your pardon?” The accent was comic-opera British raj, as is often the case with colonials who feel called upon to play it for more English than the English.
“Give me some money, and I’ll help you.”
The officer gave his watch another petulant glance. “Oh, very well. Get on with it.”
The Australians did not understand what Nicholai said, first in Japanese to the policeman, then in Russian to the Red officer, but they made out the name “MacArthur” several times. The effect of evoking the Emperor’s emperor was immediate. Within five minutes a swath had been forced through the tangle of vehicles, and the Australian jeep was conducted onto the grass of the park, whence it was able to cross overland to a wide gravel path and make its way through astonished strollers, finally bouncing down over a curb into a side street that was beyond the jam of traffic, leaving behind a clotted chaos of vehicles sounding horns and bells angrily. Nicholai had jumped into the jeep beside the driver. Once they were free from their problem, me officer ordered the driver to pull over.
“Very well, now what do I owe you?”
Nicholai had no idea of the value of foreign money now. He clutched at a figure. “A hundred dollars.”
“A hundred dollars? Are you mad?”
“Ten dollars,” Nicholai amended quickly.
“Out for whatever you can get, is that it?” the officer sneered. But he tugged out his wallet. “Oh, God! I haven’t any scrip at all. Driver?”
“Sorry, sir. Stony.”
“Hm! Look. Tell you what. That’s my building across the way.” He indicated the San Shin Building, center of communications for Allied Occupation Forces. “Come along, and I’ll have you taken care of.”
Once within the San Shin Building, the officer turned Nicholai over to the office of Pay and Accounts with instructions to make out a voucher for ten dollars in scrip, then he left to make what remained of his appointment, but not before fixing Nicholai with a quick stare, “See here. You’re not British, are you?” At that period, Nicholai’s English had the accent of his British tutors, but the officer could not align the lad’s public school accent with his clothes and physical appearance.
“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.
During the next year, Nicholas’s life and work expanded. So far as work went, he was sometimes called upon to serve in the cryptography section of Sphinx/FE, before that intelligence organization was consumed by the insatiable new bureaucratic infragovernment of the CIA. Upon one occasion it was not possible to translate the decoded message into English because the Russian into which it had been reduced was almost gibberish. Nicholai asked to see the original cryptograph. Combining his childhood penchant for pure mathematics, his ability to conceive in abstract permutations as developed and displayed in his Gô training, and his native facility in six languages, he was able to locate the errors in decoding fairly easily. He discovered that the original message had been wrongly encoded by someone who wrote a stilted Russian that was organized, quaintly enough, in the Chinese word order, producing by chance a message that baffled the complicated decoding machines of Sphinx/FE. Nicholai had known Chinese who spoke their imperfectly learned Russian in this stilted way, so once he stumbled on the key, the content of the communication fell into place easily. But the clerk/accountant mentalities of the Cryptology Section were impressed, and Nicholai was heralded a “boy wonder”—for most of them assumed he was still a boy. One thoroughly “hep” young code clerk fanned his fingers at Nicholai, calling him a real “quiz kid” and describing the decoding job as “reet, neat, and com-plete!”
So Nicholai was transferred to Sphinx/FE on a permanent basis, given a raise in rank and salary, and allowed to pass his days in a small secluded office, amusing himself with the game of untangling and translating messages in which he had not the slightest interest.
In time, and somewhat to his surprise, Nicholai arrived at a kind of emotional truce with the Americans among whom he worked. This is not to say that he came to like them, or to trust them; but he came to realize that they were not the amoral, depraved people their political and military behavior suggested they were. True, they were culturally immature, brash and clumsy, materialistic and historically myopic, loud, bold, and endlessly tiresome in social encounters; but at bottom they were good-hearted and hospitable; willing to share—indeed insistent upon sharing—their wealth and ideology with all the world.
Above all, he came to recognize that all Americans were merchants, that the core of the American Genius, of the Yankee Spirit, was buying and selling. They vended their democratic ideology like hucksters, supported by the great protection racket of armaments deals and economic pressures. Their wars were monumental exercises in production and supply. Their government was a series of social contracts. Their education was sold as so much per unit hour. Their marriages were emotional deals, the contracts easily broken if one party failed in his debt-servicing. Honor for them consisted in fair trading. And they were not, as they thought, a classless society; they were a one-class society—the mercantile. Their elite were the rich; their workers and farmers were best viewed as flawed and failed scramblers up the middle-class monetary ladder. The peasants and proletariat of America had values identical to those of the insurance salesmen and business executives, the only difference being that these values were expressed in more modest fiscal terms: the motor boat rather than the yacht; the bowling league rather than the country club; Atlantic City rather than Monaco.
Training and inclination had combined to make Nicholai respect and feel affection for all members of the real classes: farmers, artisans, artists, warriors, scholars, priests. But he could feel nothing but disdain for the artificial class of the merchant, who sucks up his living through buying and selling things he does not create, who collects power and wealth out of proportion to his discrimination, and who is responsible for all that is kitsch, for all that is change without progress, for all that is consumption without use.
Following the advice of his mentors to maintain a diffident facade of distant shibumi, Nicholai was careful to mask his attitudes from his fellow workers. He avoided their envy by occasionally asking advice on some simple decoding problem, or phrasing his questions so as to guide them to the correct answers. For their parts, they treated him as a kind of freak, an intellectual phenomenon, a boy wonder who had dropped from another planet. To this degree, they were numbly aware of the genetic and cultural gulf separating him from them, but as they saw it, it was they who were within, and he who was without.
And that suited him perfectly, for his real life was centered on his house, built around a courtyard, off a narrow side street in the Asakusa district. Americanization was slow to penetrate this old-fashioned quarter in the northwest section of the city. To be sure, there were little shops engaged in producing imitations of Zippo lighters and cigarette cases bearing the image of the one-dollar bill, and from some bars came the music of Japanese orchestras imitating the “big band” sound, and peppy girl singers squeaking their way through “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me,” and one saw the occasional young man dressed like a movie gangster in the thought that he looked modern and American, and there were radio advertisements in English promising that Akadama wine would make you bery-bery happy. But the veneer was thin, and still in late May the district celebrated the Festival of Sanja Matsuri, the streets blocked by sweating young men staggering under the weight of black-lacquered, lavishly gilted palanquins, their eyes shining with saki-reinforced trance as they reeled under the weight of their burdens and chanted washoi, washoi, washoi, under the direction of magnificently tattooed men wearing only fundoshi breech-cloths that revealed the complicated “suits of ink” covering their shoulders, backs, arms, and thighs.
Nicholai was returning home through the rain, somewhat fogged with saki after participating in the Festival, when he met Mr. Watanabe, a retired printmaker who was selling matches on the street because his pride would not allow him to beg, although he was seventy-two and all his family was gone. Nicholai declared himself to be in desperate need of matches and offered to buy the entire stock. Mr. Watanabe was delighted to be of service, as the sale would forestall hunger for another day. But when he discovered that the rain had made the matches useless, his sense of honor would not allow him to sell them, despite the fact that Nicholai declared he was particularly seeking soggy matches for an experiment he had in mind.
The next morning, Nicholai woke up with a heavy saki hangover behind his eyes, and no very clear recollection of his conversation with Mr. Watanabe as they had taken a supper of soba eaten standing beside the booth, hunched over to keep the rain out of the noodle soup; but he soon learned that he had a permanent house guest. Within a week, Mr. Watanabe came to feel that he was essential to Nicholai and the daily routine of the Asakusa house, and that it would be unkind of him to abandon the friendless young man.
It was a month later that the Tanaka sisters became part of the household. Nicholai was taking a lunchtime stroll in Hibiya Park when he encountered the sisters, robust country girls of eighteen and twenty-one who had fled the starvation that followed floods in the north, and who were reduced to offering themselves to passersby. Nicholai was their first prospective client, and they approached him so awkwardly and shyly that his compassion was mixed with laughter, for more experienced hookers had equipped them with a scant vocabulary of English consisting solely of the most graphic and vulgar names for items of anatomy and sexual variants. Once installed in the Asakusa house, they reverted to their hard-working, merry, giggling peasant selves, and were the constant concern—and objects of harried affection—for Mr. Watanabe, who had very strict views of proper behavior for young girls. In the natural course of things, the Tanaka sisters came to share Nicholai’s bed, where their natural rural vigor was expressed in playful explorations of uncommon and often ballistically improbable combinations. They satisfied the young man’s need for sexual expression, unencumbered by emotional involvement beyond affection and gentleness.
Nicholai was never sure just how Mrs. Shimura, the last addition to the family, first entered the household. She simply was there when he returned one evening, and she stayed on. Mrs. Shimura was in her mid-sixties, dour, crabby, constantly grumbling, infinitely kind, and a wonderful cook. There was a brief struggle for territorial domination between Mr. Watanabe and Mrs. Shimura, which was fought out on the grounds of daily marketing, for Mr. Watanabe was in charge of household funds, while Mrs. Shimura was responsible for their daily menus. They came finally to doing the food shopping together, she in charge of quality, he in charge of price; and hard was the lot of the poor greengrocer caught in the crossfire of their bickering.
Nicholai never thought of his guests as a staff of servants because they never thought of themselves in that way. Indeed, it was Nicholai who seemed to lack any precise role with concomitant rights, save that he procured the money on which they all lived.
During these months of freedom and new experience, Nicholai’s mind and sensations were exercised in many directions. He maintained body tone through the study and practice of an occult branch of martial arts that accented the use of common household articles as lethal weapons. He was attracted by the mathematical clarity and calculating precision of this rarefied system of combat, the name of which was, by tradition, never spoken aloud, but was formed by a superimposition of the symbols hoda (naked) and korosu (kill). Throughout his future life, although he was seldom armed, he was never unarmed; for in his hands a comb, a matchbox, a rolled magazine, a coin, even a folded piece of writing paper could be put to deadly use.
For his mind, there was the fascination and intellectual cushion of Gô. He no longer played, because for him the game was intimately tied to his life with Otake-san, to rich and gentle things now gone; and it was safer to close the gates of regret. But he still read commentaries of games and worked out problems for himself on the board. The work at the San Shin Building was mechanical and had no more intellectual challenge than solving crossword puzzles; so, to sop up some of his mental energy, Nicholai began work on a book called Blossoms and Thorns on the Path Toward Gô, which was eventually published privately under a pseudonym and enjoyed a certain popularity among the most advanced aficionados of the game. The book was an elaborate joke in the form of a report and commentary on a fictional master’s game played at the turn of the century. While the play of the “masters” seemed classic and even brilliant to the average player, there were little blunders and irrelevant placements that brought frowns to the more experienced of the readers. The delight of the book lay in the commentary by a well-informed fool who found a way to make each of the blunders seem a touch of audacious brilliance, and who stretched the limits of imagination by attaching to the moves metaphors for life, beauty, and art, all stated with great refinement and demonstrations of scholarship, but all empty of significance. The book was, in fact, a subtle and eloquent parody of the intellectual parasitism of the critic, and much of the delight lay in the knowledge that both the errors of play and the articulate nonsense of the commentary were so arcane that most readers would nod along in grave agreement.
The first of every month, Nicholai wrote to Otake-san’s widow and received in reply fragments of family news concerning ex-pupils and the Otake children. It was by this means that Mariko’s death in Hiroshima was confirmed.
When he had learned of the atomic bombing, he had feared that Mariko might be among the victims. He wrote several times to the address she had given him. The first letters simply disappeared into the vortex of disorder left by the bombing, but the last one was returned with the note that this address no longer existed. For a time he played avoidance games in his mind, imagining that Mariko might have been visiting a relative when the bomb was dropped, or she might have been fetching something from a deep cellar, or she might… he constructed dozens of improbable narratives accounting for her survival. But she had promised to write him through Mrs. Otake, and no letter ever came.
He was emotionally prepared to receive the final news when it came from Otake-san’s widow. Still, for a time, he was diminished and voided, and he felt acid hate for the Americans among whom he worked. But he struggled to cleanse himself of this hate, because such black thoughts blocked the path to mystic transport wherein lay his salvation from the draining effects of depression and sadness. So for all of one day he wandered alone and sightless through the streets of his district, remembering Mariko, turning images of her over with the fingers of his mind, recalling the delight and fear and shame of their sexual unions, smiling to himself over private jokes and nonsense. Then, late in the evening, he said good-bye to her and set her aside with gentle affection. There remained autumnal emptiness, but no searing pain and hate, so he was able to cross into his triangular meadow and become one with the sunlight and the waving grass, and he found strength and rest there.
He had also come to peace with the loss of General Kishikawa. After their last long chat among the snowing cherry trees of the Kajikawa, Nicholai received no further word. He knew that the General had been transferred to Manchuria; he learned that the Russians had attacked across the border during the last days of the war when the action involved no military risk and great political gain; and he knew from talking to survivors that some ranking officers had escaped into seppuku, and none of those captured by the communists survived the rigors of the “reeducation” camps.
Nicholai consoled himself with the thought that Kishikawa-san had at least escaped the indignity of facing the brutal machinery of the Japanese War Crimes Commission, where justice was perverted by deeply imbedded racism of the kind that had sent Japanese-Americans into concentration camps, while German— and Italian-Americans (formidable voting blocs) were free to profit from the defense industry; this despite the fact that Nisei soldiers in the American army proved their patriotism by being the most decorated and casualty-ridden of all units, although insulted by restriction to the European theater for fear of their loyalty if faced by Japanese troops. The Japanese War Crimes Trials were infected by the same racist assumptions of subhumanity as had condoned the dropping of a uranium bomb on a defeated nation already suing for peace, and the subsequent dropping of a larger plutonium bomb for reasons of scientific curiosity.
What troubled Nicholai most was that the mass of the Japanese condoned the punishment of their military leaders, not for the Japanese reason that many of them had placed their personal glorification and power lust before the interests of their nation and people, but for the Western reason that these men had somehow sinned against retroactive rules of human behavior based on a foreign notion of morality. Many Japanese seemed not to realize that the propaganda of the victor becomes the history of the vanquished.
Young and emotionally alone, surviving precariously in the shadow of the Occupying Forces, whose values and methods he did not care to learn, Nicholai needed an outlet for his energies and frustrations. He found one during his second year in Tokyo, a sport that would take him out of the crowded, sordid city to the unoccupied, un-American mountains: caving.
It was his practice to take lunch with the young Japanese who worked in the San Shin motor pool, because he felt more comfortable with them than with the wisecracking, metal-voiced Americans of the Crypto Center. Since knowing some English was a prerequisite for even the most menial job, most of the men in the motor pool had attended the university, and some of those who washed jeeps and chauffeured officers were graduate mechanical engineers unable to sustain themselves in a jobless, ruined economy.
At first the young Japanese were stiff and uncomfortable in Nicholai’s company, but it was not long before, in the open and free way of youth, they accepted him as a green-eyed Japanese who had had the misfortune to misplace his epicanthic fold. He was admitted to their circle and even joined in their hoarse, bawdy laughter concerning the sexual misadventures of the American officers they chauffeured. All these jokes had the same central figure of ridicule: the stereotypic American who was constantly and blindly randy, but tactically incompetent.
The subject of caving came up during one of these lunch breaks when they were all squatting under the corrugated metal roof of a rain shelter, eating from metal boxes the rice and fish that were the rations for Japanese workers. Three of the ex-university men were caving enthusiasts, or had been, before the last desperate year of the war and the chaos of the Occupation. They talked about the fun and difficulty of their expeditions into the mountains and lamented their lack of money and basic supplies to return. By this time, Nicholai had been long in the city, and its noise and congestion were eroding his village-life sensibilities. He drew the young men out on the subject of exploring caves and asked what supplies and equipment were needed. It turned out that their requirements were minimal, although inaccessible on the pittance they were paid by the Occupation Forces. Nicholai suggested that he collect whatever was needed, if they would take him along and introduce him to the sport. The offer was snatched up eagerly, and two weeks later four of them passed a weekend in the mountains, cave-bashing by day and spending their nights at cheap mountain inns where they drank too much saki and talked late into the night in the way of bright young men the world over, the conversation drifting from the Nature of Art, to bawdy double entendre, to plans for the future, to strained puns, to improvised haiku, to horseplay, to politics, to sex, to memories, to silence.
After his first hour underground, Nicholai knew this was the sport for him. His body, lithe and wiry, seemed designed for slithering through tight spots. The rapid and narrow calculations of method and risk were consonant with the mental training Gô had given him. And the fascination of danger was seductive to him. He could never have climbed mountains, because the public bravado of it offended his sense of shibumi and dignified reserve. But the moments of risk and daring in the caves were personal, silent, and unobserved; and they had the special spice of involving primitive animal fears. In vertical work down a shaft, there was the thrill and fear of falling, native to all animals and honed keener by the knowledge that the fall would be into a black void below, rather than into the decorative landscape beneath the mountain climber. In the caves, there was the constant presence of cold and damp, primordial fears for man, and real ones for the caver, as most grave accidents and deaths result from hypothermia. There was also the animal dread of the dark, of endless blackness and the ever-present thought of getting lost in mazes of slits and belly crawls so tight that retreat was impossible because of the jointing of the human body. Flash flooding could fill the narrow caves with water with only minutes of warning, or none. And there was the constant mental pressure of knowing that just above him, often scraping against his back as he wriggled through a tight cave, were thousands of tons of rock that must inevitably one day obey gravity and fill in the passage.
It was the perfect sport for Nicholai.
He found the subjective dangers particularly attractive and exhilarating. He enjoyed pitting mental control and physical skill against the deepest and most primitive dreads of the animal within him, the dark, fear of falling, fear of drowning, the cold, solitude, the risk of being lost down there forever, the constant mental erosion of those tons of rock above. The senior ally of the caver is logic and lucid planning. The senior foes are imagination and the hounds of panic. It is easy for the caver to be a coward and difficult to be brave, for he works alone, unseen, uncriticized, unpraised. Nicholai enjoyed the foes he met and the private arena in which he met them. He delighted in the idea that most of the foes were within himself, and the victories unobserved.
Too, there were the unique delights of emerging. Dull, quotidian things took on color and value after hours inside the earth, particularly if there had been danger and physical victory. The sweet air was drunk in with greedy breaths. A cup of bitter tea was something to warm stiff hands, something to delight the eye with its rich color, something to smell gorgeously, a rush of heat down the throat, a banquet of subtly varying flavors. The sky was significantly blue, the grass importantly green. It was good to be slapped on the back by a comrade, touched by a human hand. It was good to hear voices and make sounds that revealed feelings, that shared ideas, that amused friends. Everything was novel and there to be tasted.
For Nicholai, the first hour after emerging from a cave had almost the quality of the life he knew during mystic transport. For that brief hour before objects and experiences retreated again into the commonplace he was almost united with the yellow sunlight and the fragrant grasses.
The four young men went into the mountains every free weekend, and although their amateur class and jury-rigged equipment limited them to bashing about in cave networks that were modest by international caving standards, it was always a thorough test of their will, endurance, and skill, followed by nights of fellowship, talk, saki, and bad jokes richly appreciated. Although in later life Nicholai was to gain a wide reputation for his participation in significant underground expeditions, these apprentice outings were never surpassed for pure fun and adventure.
By the time he was twenty-three, Nicholai had a lifestyle that satisfied most of his needs and compensated for most of his losses, save that of General Kishikawa. To replace the household of Otake-san, he had filled his home in Asakusa with people who took roughly the territorial roles of family members. He had lost his boyhood, and largely boyish, love; but he satisfied his body needs with the irrepressible and inventive Tanaka sisters. His once consuming involvement with the mental disciplines and delights of Gô had been replaced by the emotional and physical ones of caving. In a peculiar and not altogether healthy way, his training in Naked/Kill combat gave vent to the most corrosive aspects of his hatred for those who had destroyed his nation and youth; for during his practice periods he fantasized round-eyed opponents, and felt better for it.
Most of what he had lost was personal and organic, most of his substitutes were mechanical and external; but the gap in quality was bridged in large part by his occasional retreats into the soul-rest of mystic experience.
The most onerous part of his life was the forty hours a week he passed in the basement of the San Shin Building in remunerative drudgery. Breeding and training had given him the inner resources to satisfy his needs without the energy sponge of gainful employment so vital to the men of the egalitarian WAD who have difficulty filling their time and justifying their existence without work. Pleasure, study, and comfort were adequate to him; he did not need the crutch of recognition, the reassurance of power, the narcotic of fun. Unfortunately, circumstance had made it necessary to earn a living, and yet more ironic, to earn it amongst the Americans. (Although Nicholai’s co-workers were a mixture of Americans, Britons, and Australians, American methods, values, and objectives were dominant, so he soon came to think of Britons as incompetent Americans and Australians as Americans-in-training.)
English was the language of the Crypto Center, but Nicholai’s sense of euphony recoiled at the swallowed mushiness or effete whine of upper class British speech, and the metallic clatter and bow-string twang of American, so he developed an accent of his own, one that took a middle course between the American and the British noises. The effect of this artifice was to cause his Anglophonic associates, throughout his life, to assume he was a native English speaker, but from “somewhere else.”
Occasionally, his co-workers would seek to include Nicholai in their plans for parties or outings, never dreaming that what they intended as benevolent condescension toward the foreigner was regarded by Nicholai as presumptuous egalitarianism.
It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure—in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.
In his most benevolent moods, he thought of Americans as children—energetic, curious, naïve, good-hearted, badly brought up children—in which respect he could detect very little difference between Americans and Russians. Both were hale, vigorous, physical peoples, both excelling in things material, both baffled by beauty, both swaggeringly confident that theirs was the ultimate ideology, both infantile and contentious, and both terribly dangerous. Dangerous because their toys were cosmic weapons that threatened the existence of civilization. The danger lay less in their malice than in their blundering. It was ironic to realize that the destruction of the world would not be the work of Machiavelli, but of Sancho Panza.
He never felt comfortable, having his source of survival dependent on these people, but there was no alternative, and he lived with his discomfort by ignoring it. It was not until the damp and blustery March of his second year that he was forced to learn that, when one dines with wolves, it is moot if one is guest or entrée.
Despite the melancholy weather, the eternal resilience of the Japanese spirit was expressed by the light, optimistic song “Ringo no Uta,” which was sweeping the nation and could be heard sung at half voice or hummed under the breath by thousands of people rebuilding from the physical and emotional rubble of the war. The cruel winters of famine were past; the springs of flood and poor harvest were behind; and there was a feeling abroad that the world was on the mend. Even beneath the damp winds of March, trees had begun to collect the faint greenish haze of early spring, the ghost of plenty.
When he arrived at his office that morning, his mood was so benevolent that he even found comic charm in the precious military obscurantism of the sign on his door: SCAP/COMCEN/SPHINX-FE (N-CODE/D-CODE).
His mind ranging elsewhere, he set himself to cleaning up a machine breakout of intercepted messages from the Soviet Occupation Forces of Manchuria, routine communications framed in low-grade code. As he had no interest in the military and political games of the Russians and Americans, he normally worked messages without attending to their content, much as a good stenographer types without reading. It was for this reason that he had already begun on another problem when the import of what he had just read blossomed in his mind. He pulled the sheet from his out box and read it again.
General Kishikawa Takashi was being flown to Tokyo by the Russians to face trial as a Class A War Criminal.
Washington
The old man on the floor beside Nicholai took great pains to set out his valuables on a folded bit of cloth close to his face before nestling down. They consisted of a cup, a photograph, and a letter that had been folded and refolded until the creases were thin and furry. It was a form letter of regret from the army. Before closing his eyes, the old man said good night to the young foreigner beside him, and Nicholai smiled and said good night.
Before a fitful sleep overtook him, Nicholai composed his mind and escaped from the acid gnaw of hunger into mystic transport. When he returned from his little meadow with its waving grasses and yellow sunlight, he was full although hungry, peaceful although desperate. But he knew that tomorrow he must find work or money, or soon he would die.
When the police rousted them shortly before dawn, the old man was dead. Nicholai wrapped the cup, photograph, and letter into his own bundle because It seemed a terrible thing to let all the old man had treasured be swept up and thrown away.
By noon Nicholai had drifted down to Hibiya Park in search of work or something to steal. Hunger was no longer a matter of unsatisfied appetite. It was a jagged cramp and a spreading weakness that made his legs heavy and his head light. As he drifted on the tide of desperate people, waves of unreality washed over him; people and things alternated between being indiscriminant forms and objects of surprising fascination. Sometimes he would find himself flowing within a stream of faceless people, allowing their energy and direction to be his, permitting his thoughts to spiral and short-circuit in a dreamy carousel without meaning, His hunger brought mystic transport close to the surface of his consciousness, and wisps of escape ended with sudden jolts of reality. He would find himself standing, staring at a wall or the face of a person, sensing that this was a remarkable event. No one had ever examined that particular brick with care and affection before. He was the very first! No one had ever looked at that man’s ear in such sharp focus. That must mean something.
Mustn’t it?
The lightheaded hunger, the shattered spectrum of reality, the aimless drifting were all seductively pleasant, but something within him warned that this was dangerous. He must break out of it or be would die. Die? Die? Did that sound have any meaning?
A dense rivulet of humanity carried him out of the park through an entrance where two broad avenues intersected with a congestion of military vehicles, charcoal automobiles, clanging tramcars, and wobbling bicycles pulling two-wheeled carts loaded down with incredibly heavy and bulky cargoes. There had been a minor accident, and traffic was snarled for a block in every direction while a helpless Japanese traffic policeman in huge white gloves was trying to settle things between a Russian driving an American Jeep and an Australian driving an American jeep.
Nicholai was pushed forward unwillingly by the curious crowd that seeped into the spaces around the congealed traffic, intensifying the confusion. The Russians spoke only Russian, the Australians only English, the policeman only Japanese; and all three were engaged in a vigorous discussion of blame and responsibility. Nicholai was pressed against the side of the Australian jeep, whose officer occupant was sitting, staring ahead with stoic discomfort, while his driver was shouting that he would gladly settle this thing man-to-man with the Russian driver, the Russian officer, both at once, or the whole fucking Red Army, if it came to that!
“Are you in a hurry, sir?”
“What?” The Australian officer was surprised to be addressed in English by this ragged lad in a tarnished Japanese student’s uniform. It was a couple of seconds before he realized from the green eyes in the gaunt young face that the boy was not Oriental. “Of course I’m in a hurry! I have a meeting—” He snapped his wrist over and looked at his watch. “—twelve minutes ago!”
“I’ll help you,” Nicholai said. “For money.”
“I beg your pardon?” The accent was comic-opera British raj, as is often the case with colonials who feel called upon to play it for more English than the English.
“Give me some money, and I’ll help you.”
The officer gave his watch another petulant glance. “Oh, very well. Get on with it.”
The Australians did not understand what Nicholai said, first in Japanese to the policeman, then in Russian to the Red officer, but they made out the name “MacArthur” several times. The effect of evoking the Emperor’s emperor was immediate. Within five minutes a swath had been forced through the tangle of vehicles, and the Australian jeep was conducted onto the grass of the park, whence it was able to cross overland to a wide gravel path and make its way through astonished strollers, finally bouncing down over a curb into a side street that was beyond the jam of traffic, leaving behind a clotted chaos of vehicles sounding horns and bells angrily. Nicholai had jumped into the jeep beside the driver. Once they were free from their problem, me officer ordered the driver to pull over.
“Very well, now what do I owe you?”
Nicholai had no idea of the value of foreign money now. He clutched at a figure. “A hundred dollars.”
“A hundred dollars? Are you mad?”
“Ten dollars,” Nicholai amended quickly.
“Out for whatever you can get, is that it?” the officer sneered. But he tugged out his wallet. “Oh, God! I haven’t any scrip at all. Driver?”
“Sorry, sir. Stony.”
“Hm! Look. Tell you what. That’s my building across the way.” He indicated the San Shin Building, center of communications for Allied Occupation Forces. “Come along, and I’ll have you taken care of.”
Once within the San Shin Building, the officer turned Nicholai over to the office of Pay and Accounts with instructions to make out a voucher for ten dollars in scrip, then he left to make what remained of his appointment, but not before fixing Nicholai with a quick stare, “See here. You’re not British, are you?” At that period, Nicholai’s English had the accent of his British tutors, but the officer could not align the lad’s public school accent with his clothes and physical appearance.
“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.
During the next year, Nicholas’s life and work expanded. So far as work went, he was sometimes called upon to serve in the cryptography section of Sphinx/FE, before that intelligence organization was consumed by the insatiable new bureaucratic infragovernment of the CIA. Upon one occasion it was not possible to translate the decoded message into English because the Russian into which it had been reduced was almost gibberish. Nicholai asked to see the original cryptograph. Combining his childhood penchant for pure mathematics, his ability to conceive in abstract permutations as developed and displayed in his Gô training, and his native facility in six languages, he was able to locate the errors in decoding fairly easily. He discovered that the original message had been wrongly encoded by someone who wrote a stilted Russian that was organized, quaintly enough, in the Chinese word order, producing by chance a message that baffled the complicated decoding machines of Sphinx/FE. Nicholai had known Chinese who spoke their imperfectly learned Russian in this stilted way, so once he stumbled on the key, the content of the communication fell into place easily. But the clerk/accountant mentalities of the Cryptology Section were impressed, and Nicholai was heralded a “boy wonder”—for most of them assumed he was still a boy. One thoroughly “hep” young code clerk fanned his fingers at Nicholai, calling him a real “quiz kid” and describing the decoding job as “reet, neat, and com-plete!”
So Nicholai was transferred to Sphinx/FE on a permanent basis, given a raise in rank and salary, and allowed to pass his days in a small secluded office, amusing himself with the game of untangling and translating messages in which he had not the slightest interest.
In time, and somewhat to his surprise, Nicholai arrived at a kind of emotional truce with the Americans among whom he worked. This is not to say that he came to like them, or to trust them; but he came to realize that they were not the amoral, depraved people their political and military behavior suggested they were. True, they were culturally immature, brash and clumsy, materialistic and historically myopic, loud, bold, and endlessly tiresome in social encounters; but at bottom they were good-hearted and hospitable; willing to share—indeed insistent upon sharing—their wealth and ideology with all the world.
Above all, he came to recognize that all Americans were merchants, that the core of the American Genius, of the Yankee Spirit, was buying and selling. They vended their democratic ideology like hucksters, supported by the great protection racket of armaments deals and economic pressures. Their wars were monumental exercises in production and supply. Their government was a series of social contracts. Their education was sold as so much per unit hour. Their marriages were emotional deals, the contracts easily broken if one party failed in his debt-servicing. Honor for them consisted in fair trading. And they were not, as they thought, a classless society; they were a one-class society—the mercantile. Their elite were the rich; their workers and farmers were best viewed as flawed and failed scramblers up the middle-class monetary ladder. The peasants and proletariat of America had values identical to those of the insurance salesmen and business executives, the only difference being that these values were expressed in more modest fiscal terms: the motor boat rather than the yacht; the bowling league rather than the country club; Atlantic City rather than Monaco.
Training and inclination had combined to make Nicholai respect and feel affection for all members of the real classes: farmers, artisans, artists, warriors, scholars, priests. But he could feel nothing but disdain for the artificial class of the merchant, who sucks up his living through buying and selling things he does not create, who collects power and wealth out of proportion to his discrimination, and who is responsible for all that is kitsch, for all that is change without progress, for all that is consumption without use.
Following the advice of his mentors to maintain a diffident facade of distant shibumi, Nicholai was careful to mask his attitudes from his fellow workers. He avoided their envy by occasionally asking advice on some simple decoding problem, or phrasing his questions so as to guide them to the correct answers. For their parts, they treated him as a kind of freak, an intellectual phenomenon, a boy wonder who had dropped from another planet. To this degree, they were numbly aware of the genetic and cultural gulf separating him from them, but as they saw it, it was they who were within, and he who was without.
And that suited him perfectly, for his real life was centered on his house, built around a courtyard, off a narrow side street in the Asakusa district. Americanization was slow to penetrate this old-fashioned quarter in the northwest section of the city. To be sure, there were little shops engaged in producing imitations of Zippo lighters and cigarette cases bearing the image of the one-dollar bill, and from some bars came the music of Japanese orchestras imitating the “big band” sound, and peppy girl singers squeaking their way through “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me,” and one saw the occasional young man dressed like a movie gangster in the thought that he looked modern and American, and there were radio advertisements in English promising that Akadama wine would make you bery-bery happy. But the veneer was thin, and still in late May the district celebrated the Festival of Sanja Matsuri, the streets blocked by sweating young men staggering under the weight of black-lacquered, lavishly gilted palanquins, their eyes shining with saki-reinforced trance as they reeled under the weight of their burdens and chanted washoi, washoi, washoi, under the direction of magnificently tattooed men wearing only fundoshi breech-cloths that revealed the complicated “suits of ink” covering their shoulders, backs, arms, and thighs.
Nicholai was returning home through the rain, somewhat fogged with saki after participating in the Festival, when he met Mr. Watanabe, a retired printmaker who was selling matches on the street because his pride would not allow him to beg, although he was seventy-two and all his family was gone. Nicholai declared himself to be in desperate need of matches and offered to buy the entire stock. Mr. Watanabe was delighted to be of service, as the sale would forestall hunger for another day. But when he discovered that the rain had made the matches useless, his sense of honor would not allow him to sell them, despite the fact that Nicholai declared he was particularly seeking soggy matches for an experiment he had in mind.
The next morning, Nicholai woke up with a heavy saki hangover behind his eyes, and no very clear recollection of his conversation with Mr. Watanabe as they had taken a supper of soba eaten standing beside the booth, hunched over to keep the rain out of the noodle soup; but he soon learned that he had a permanent house guest. Within a week, Mr. Watanabe came to feel that he was essential to Nicholai and the daily routine of the Asakusa house, and that it would be unkind of him to abandon the friendless young man.
It was a month later that the Tanaka sisters became part of the household. Nicholai was taking a lunchtime stroll in Hibiya Park when he encountered the sisters, robust country girls of eighteen and twenty-one who had fled the starvation that followed floods in the north, and who were reduced to offering themselves to passersby. Nicholai was their first prospective client, and they approached him so awkwardly and shyly that his compassion was mixed with laughter, for more experienced hookers had equipped them with a scant vocabulary of English consisting solely of the most graphic and vulgar names for items of anatomy and sexual variants. Once installed in the Asakusa house, they reverted to their hard-working, merry, giggling peasant selves, and were the constant concern—and objects of harried affection—for Mr. Watanabe, who had very strict views of proper behavior for young girls. In the natural course of things, the Tanaka sisters came to share Nicholai’s bed, where their natural rural vigor was expressed in playful explorations of uncommon and often ballistically improbable combinations. They satisfied the young man’s need for sexual expression, unencumbered by emotional involvement beyond affection and gentleness.
Nicholai was never sure just how Mrs. Shimura, the last addition to the family, first entered the household. She simply was there when he returned one evening, and she stayed on. Mrs. Shimura was in her mid-sixties, dour, crabby, constantly grumbling, infinitely kind, and a wonderful cook. There was a brief struggle for territorial domination between Mr. Watanabe and Mrs. Shimura, which was fought out on the grounds of daily marketing, for Mr. Watanabe was in charge of household funds, while Mrs. Shimura was responsible for their daily menus. They came finally to doing the food shopping together, she in charge of quality, he in charge of price; and hard was the lot of the poor greengrocer caught in the crossfire of their bickering.
Nicholai never thought of his guests as a staff of servants because they never thought of themselves in that way. Indeed, it was Nicholai who seemed to lack any precise role with concomitant rights, save that he procured the money on which they all lived.
During these months of freedom and new experience, Nicholai’s mind and sensations were exercised in many directions. He maintained body tone through the study and practice of an occult branch of martial arts that accented the use of common household articles as lethal weapons. He was attracted by the mathematical clarity and calculating precision of this rarefied system of combat, the name of which was, by tradition, never spoken aloud, but was formed by a superimposition of the symbols hoda (naked) and korosu (kill). Throughout his future life, although he was seldom armed, he was never unarmed; for in his hands a comb, a matchbox, a rolled magazine, a coin, even a folded piece of writing paper could be put to deadly use.
For his mind, there was the fascination and intellectual cushion of Gô. He no longer played, because for him the game was intimately tied to his life with Otake-san, to rich and gentle things now gone; and it was safer to close the gates of regret. But he still read commentaries of games and worked out problems for himself on the board. The work at the San Shin Building was mechanical and had no more intellectual challenge than solving crossword puzzles; so, to sop up some of his mental energy, Nicholai began work on a book called Blossoms and Thorns on the Path Toward Gô, which was eventually published privately under a pseudonym and enjoyed a certain popularity among the most advanced aficionados of the game. The book was an elaborate joke in the form of a report and commentary on a fictional master’s game played at the turn of the century. While the play of the “masters” seemed classic and even brilliant to the average player, there were little blunders and irrelevant placements that brought frowns to the more experienced of the readers. The delight of the book lay in the commentary by a well-informed fool who found a way to make each of the blunders seem a touch of audacious brilliance, and who stretched the limits of imagination by attaching to the moves metaphors for life, beauty, and art, all stated with great refinement and demonstrations of scholarship, but all empty of significance. The book was, in fact, a subtle and eloquent parody of the intellectual parasitism of the critic, and much of the delight lay in the knowledge that both the errors of play and the articulate nonsense of the commentary were so arcane that most readers would nod along in grave agreement.
The first of every month, Nicholai wrote to Otake-san’s widow and received in reply fragments of family news concerning ex-pupils and the Otake children. It was by this means that Mariko’s death in Hiroshima was confirmed.
When he had learned of the atomic bombing, he had feared that Mariko might be among the victims. He wrote several times to the address she had given him. The first letters simply disappeared into the vortex of disorder left by the bombing, but the last one was returned with the note that this address no longer existed. For a time he played avoidance games in his mind, imagining that Mariko might have been visiting a relative when the bomb was dropped, or she might have been fetching something from a deep cellar, or she might… he constructed dozens of improbable narratives accounting for her survival. But she had promised to write him through Mrs. Otake, and no letter ever came.
He was emotionally prepared to receive the final news when it came from Otake-san’s widow. Still, for a time, he was diminished and voided, and he felt acid hate for the Americans among whom he worked. But he struggled to cleanse himself of this hate, because such black thoughts blocked the path to mystic transport wherein lay his salvation from the draining effects of depression and sadness. So for all of one day he wandered alone and sightless through the streets of his district, remembering Mariko, turning images of her over with the fingers of his mind, recalling the delight and fear and shame of their sexual unions, smiling to himself over private jokes and nonsense. Then, late in the evening, he said good-bye to her and set her aside with gentle affection. There remained autumnal emptiness, but no searing pain and hate, so he was able to cross into his triangular meadow and become one with the sunlight and the waving grass, and he found strength and rest there.
He had also come to peace with the loss of General Kishikawa. After their last long chat among the snowing cherry trees of the Kajikawa, Nicholai received no further word. He knew that the General had been transferred to Manchuria; he learned that the Russians had attacked across the border during the last days of the war when the action involved no military risk and great political gain; and he knew from talking to survivors that some ranking officers had escaped into seppuku, and none of those captured by the communists survived the rigors of the “reeducation” camps.
Nicholai consoled himself with the thought that Kishikawa-san had at least escaped the indignity of facing the brutal machinery of the Japanese War Crimes Commission, where justice was perverted by deeply imbedded racism of the kind that had sent Japanese-Americans into concentration camps, while German— and Italian-Americans (formidable voting blocs) were free to profit from the defense industry; this despite the fact that Nisei soldiers in the American army proved their patriotism by being the most decorated and casualty-ridden of all units, although insulted by restriction to the European theater for fear of their loyalty if faced by Japanese troops. The Japanese War Crimes Trials were infected by the same racist assumptions of subhumanity as had condoned the dropping of a uranium bomb on a defeated nation already suing for peace, and the subsequent dropping of a larger plutonium bomb for reasons of scientific curiosity.
What troubled Nicholai most was that the mass of the Japanese condoned the punishment of their military leaders, not for the Japanese reason that many of them had placed their personal glorification and power lust before the interests of their nation and people, but for the Western reason that these men had somehow sinned against retroactive rules of human behavior based on a foreign notion of morality. Many Japanese seemed not to realize that the propaganda of the victor becomes the history of the vanquished.
Young and emotionally alone, surviving precariously in the shadow of the Occupying Forces, whose values and methods he did not care to learn, Nicholai needed an outlet for his energies and frustrations. He found one during his second year in Tokyo, a sport that would take him out of the crowded, sordid city to the unoccupied, un-American mountains: caving.
It was his practice to take lunch with the young Japanese who worked in the San Shin motor pool, because he felt more comfortable with them than with the wisecracking, metal-voiced Americans of the Crypto Center. Since knowing some English was a prerequisite for even the most menial job, most of the men in the motor pool had attended the university, and some of those who washed jeeps and chauffeured officers were graduate mechanical engineers unable to sustain themselves in a jobless, ruined economy.
At first the young Japanese were stiff and uncomfortable in Nicholai’s company, but it was not long before, in the open and free way of youth, they accepted him as a green-eyed Japanese who had had the misfortune to misplace his epicanthic fold. He was admitted to their circle and even joined in their hoarse, bawdy laughter concerning the sexual misadventures of the American officers they chauffeured. All these jokes had the same central figure of ridicule: the stereotypic American who was constantly and blindly randy, but tactically incompetent.
The subject of caving came up during one of these lunch breaks when they were all squatting under the corrugated metal roof of a rain shelter, eating from metal boxes the rice and fish that were the rations for Japanese workers. Three of the ex-university men were caving enthusiasts, or had been, before the last desperate year of the war and the chaos of the Occupation. They talked about the fun and difficulty of their expeditions into the mountains and lamented their lack of money and basic supplies to return. By this time, Nicholai had been long in the city, and its noise and congestion were eroding his village-life sensibilities. He drew the young men out on the subject of exploring caves and asked what supplies and equipment were needed. It turned out that their requirements were minimal, although inaccessible on the pittance they were paid by the Occupation Forces. Nicholai suggested that he collect whatever was needed, if they would take him along and introduce him to the sport. The offer was snatched up eagerly, and two weeks later four of them passed a weekend in the mountains, cave-bashing by day and spending their nights at cheap mountain inns where they drank too much saki and talked late into the night in the way of bright young men the world over, the conversation drifting from the Nature of Art, to bawdy double entendre, to plans for the future, to strained puns, to improvised haiku, to horseplay, to politics, to sex, to memories, to silence.
After his first hour underground, Nicholai knew this was the sport for him. His body, lithe and wiry, seemed designed for slithering through tight spots. The rapid and narrow calculations of method and risk were consonant with the mental training Gô had given him. And the fascination of danger was seductive to him. He could never have climbed mountains, because the public bravado of it offended his sense of shibumi and dignified reserve. But the moments of risk and daring in the caves were personal, silent, and unobserved; and they had the special spice of involving primitive animal fears. In vertical work down a shaft, there was the thrill and fear of falling, native to all animals and honed keener by the knowledge that the fall would be into a black void below, rather than into the decorative landscape beneath the mountain climber. In the caves, there was the constant presence of cold and damp, primordial fears for man, and real ones for the caver, as most grave accidents and deaths result from hypothermia. There was also the animal dread of the dark, of endless blackness and the ever-present thought of getting lost in mazes of slits and belly crawls so tight that retreat was impossible because of the jointing of the human body. Flash flooding could fill the narrow caves with water with only minutes of warning, or none. And there was the constant mental pressure of knowing that just above him, often scraping against his back as he wriggled through a tight cave, were thousands of tons of rock that must inevitably one day obey gravity and fill in the passage.
It was the perfect sport for Nicholai.
He found the subjective dangers particularly attractive and exhilarating. He enjoyed pitting mental control and physical skill against the deepest and most primitive dreads of the animal within him, the dark, fear of falling, fear of drowning, the cold, solitude, the risk of being lost down there forever, the constant mental erosion of those tons of rock above. The senior ally of the caver is logic and lucid planning. The senior foes are imagination and the hounds of panic. It is easy for the caver to be a coward and difficult to be brave, for he works alone, unseen, uncriticized, unpraised. Nicholai enjoyed the foes he met and the private arena in which he met them. He delighted in the idea that most of the foes were within himself, and the victories unobserved.
Too, there were the unique delights of emerging. Dull, quotidian things took on color and value after hours inside the earth, particularly if there had been danger and physical victory. The sweet air was drunk in with greedy breaths. A cup of bitter tea was something to warm stiff hands, something to delight the eye with its rich color, something to smell gorgeously, a rush of heat down the throat, a banquet of subtly varying flavors. The sky was significantly blue, the grass importantly green. It was good to be slapped on the back by a comrade, touched by a human hand. It was good to hear voices and make sounds that revealed feelings, that shared ideas, that amused friends. Everything was novel and there to be tasted.
For Nicholai, the first hour after emerging from a cave had almost the quality of the life he knew during mystic transport. For that brief hour before objects and experiences retreated again into the commonplace he was almost united with the yellow sunlight and the fragrant grasses.
The four young men went into the mountains every free weekend, and although their amateur class and jury-rigged equipment limited them to bashing about in cave networks that were modest by international caving standards, it was always a thorough test of their will, endurance, and skill, followed by nights of fellowship, talk, saki, and bad jokes richly appreciated. Although in later life Nicholai was to gain a wide reputation for his participation in significant underground expeditions, these apprentice outings were never surpassed for pure fun and adventure.
By the time he was twenty-three, Nicholai had a lifestyle that satisfied most of his needs and compensated for most of his losses, save that of General Kishikawa. To replace the household of Otake-san, he had filled his home in Asakusa with people who took roughly the territorial roles of family members. He had lost his boyhood, and largely boyish, love; but he satisfied his body needs with the irrepressible and inventive Tanaka sisters. His once consuming involvement with the mental disciplines and delights of Gô had been replaced by the emotional and physical ones of caving. In a peculiar and not altogether healthy way, his training in Naked/Kill combat gave vent to the most corrosive aspects of his hatred for those who had destroyed his nation and youth; for during his practice periods he fantasized round-eyed opponents, and felt better for it.
Most of what he had lost was personal and organic, most of his substitutes were mechanical and external; but the gap in quality was bridged in large part by his occasional retreats into the soul-rest of mystic experience.
The most onerous part of his life was the forty hours a week he passed in the basement of the San Shin Building in remunerative drudgery. Breeding and training had given him the inner resources to satisfy his needs without the energy sponge of gainful employment so vital to the men of the egalitarian WAD who have difficulty filling their time and justifying their existence without work. Pleasure, study, and comfort were adequate to him; he did not need the crutch of recognition, the reassurance of power, the narcotic of fun. Unfortunately, circumstance had made it necessary to earn a living, and yet more ironic, to earn it amongst the Americans. (Although Nicholai’s co-workers were a mixture of Americans, Britons, and Australians, American methods, values, and objectives were dominant, so he soon came to think of Britons as incompetent Americans and Australians as Americans-in-training.)
English was the language of the Crypto Center, but Nicholai’s sense of euphony recoiled at the swallowed mushiness or effete whine of upper class British speech, and the metallic clatter and bow-string twang of American, so he developed an accent of his own, one that took a middle course between the American and the British noises. The effect of this artifice was to cause his Anglophonic associates, throughout his life, to assume he was a native English speaker, but from “somewhere else.”
Occasionally, his co-workers would seek to include Nicholai in their plans for parties or outings, never dreaming that what they intended as benevolent condescension toward the foreigner was regarded by Nicholai as presumptuous egalitarianism.
It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure—in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.
In his most benevolent moods, he thought of Americans as children—energetic, curious, naïve, good-hearted, badly brought up children—in which respect he could detect very little difference between Americans and Russians. Both were hale, vigorous, physical peoples, both excelling in things material, both baffled by beauty, both swaggeringly confident that theirs was the ultimate ideology, both infantile and contentious, and both terribly dangerous. Dangerous because their toys were cosmic weapons that threatened the existence of civilization. The danger lay less in their malice than in their blundering. It was ironic to realize that the destruction of the world would not be the work of Machiavelli, but of Sancho Panza.
He never felt comfortable, having his source of survival dependent on these people, but there was no alternative, and he lived with his discomfort by ignoring it. It was not until the damp and blustery March of his second year that he was forced to learn that, when one dines with wolves, it is moot if one is guest or entrée.
* * *
Despite the melancholy weather, the eternal resilience of the Japanese spirit was expressed by the light, optimistic song “Ringo no Uta,” which was sweeping the nation and could be heard sung at half voice or hummed under the breath by thousands of people rebuilding from the physical and emotional rubble of the war. The cruel winters of famine were past; the springs of flood and poor harvest were behind; and there was a feeling abroad that the world was on the mend. Even beneath the damp winds of March, trees had begun to collect the faint greenish haze of early spring, the ghost of plenty.
When he arrived at his office that morning, his mood was so benevolent that he even found comic charm in the precious military obscurantism of the sign on his door: SCAP/COMCEN/SPHINX-FE (N-CODE/D-CODE).
His mind ranging elsewhere, he set himself to cleaning up a machine breakout of intercepted messages from the Soviet Occupation Forces of Manchuria, routine communications framed in low-grade code. As he had no interest in the military and political games of the Russians and Americans, he normally worked messages without attending to their content, much as a good stenographer types without reading. It was for this reason that he had already begun on another problem when the import of what he had just read blossomed in his mind. He pulled the sheet from his out box and read it again.
General Kishikawa Takashi was being flown to Tokyo by the Russians to face trial as a Class A War Criminal.
Washington
Conducted by Miss Swivven, the four men entered the elevator and stood in silence as she slipped her magnetically coded card into the slot marked “Floor 16.” The Arab trainee-in-terror whose code name was Mr. Haman lost his balance when, contrary to expectation, the elevator dropped rapidly into the bowels of the building. He bumped into Miss Swivven, who made a slight squeak as his shoulder brushed hers.
“I am so sorry, Madame. I had the assumption that the direction from the first floor to the sixteenth was upward. It should be so, mathematically speaking, but—”
A frown from his OPEC superior stemmed the falsetto babble, so he turned his attention to the taut nape of Miss Swivven’s neck.
The OPEC troubleshooter (codetermed Mr. Able, because he was top man in an able-baker-charlie-dog sequence) was embarrassed by his fellow Arab’s twittering voice and blundering ways. A third-generation Oxford man whose family had long enjoyed the cultural advantages of participating with the British in the exploitation of their people, Mr. Able scorned this parvenu son of a goatherd who had probably struck oil while overzealously driving a tent peg.
“I am so sorry, Madame. I had the assumption that the direction from the first floor to the sixteenth was upward. It should be so, mathematically speaking, but—”
A frown from his OPEC superior stemmed the falsetto babble, so he turned his attention to the taut nape of Miss Swivven’s neck.
The OPEC troubleshooter (codetermed Mr. Able, because he was top man in an able-baker-charlie-dog sequence) was embarrassed by his fellow Arab’s twittering voice and blundering ways. A third-generation Oxford man whose family had long enjoyed the cultural advantages of participating with the British in the exploitation of their people, Mr. Able scorned this parvenu son of a goatherd who had probably struck oil while overzealously driving a tent peg.