Quin?s Shanghai Circus (33 page)

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 Lameraux 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 already 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.

Almost all the other leaders disagreed with him. What he was proposing was failure and defeat. They still controlled this one area of the country, and the peasants there were loyal to them. If they left it they would have nothing. They would be nothing.

So they argued, but Adzhar's friend was clever and eventually he won them over. The order was given to march and they did, six thousand miles in all, a march that saved them from extinction and became a mystical unifying force that brought them to power in the end.

A long voyage? Perhaps. Yet not as long as the voyage of a shoemaker's son from Georgia.

Adzhar busied himself with Chinese dialects, but very soon he was experiencing a new kind of restlessness, the most profound he had ever known. He used to speculate that it had come to him because he had crossed the Gobi Desert on foot, although frankly I see no connection whatsoever between the two. Then at other times he claimed the original cause of the restlessness might have been more general and unspecified than one would expect, perhaps merely a routine result of having arrived in the East after so many decades of wandering. Lotmann favored the latter explanation and as proof quoted the story of Elijah and the ravens, which had saved his own life, but in the end who is to say? In any case the restlessness amounted to this.

Adzhar had loved only two women in his life, his wife and before that Sophia. Now he asked himself why the way of the Lapps should only be applied to geography. People were more important than places, and hadn't he wasted too many years moving from place to place remembering or anticipating love?

He decided he had. He decided that in the years he had left to live, it would be criminal not to make up for the loss, to add an overall balance to his life. Once more he went on the march, only now it was from embrace to embrace.

They must be a vigorous people, the Georgians. Adzhar was over seventy when he became converted to love in Shanghai, yet he began a round of activities that would have exhausted a man fifty years younger. Of course there was no question about his being successful. He had charm learned in a thousand settlements, he could quote poems from any language in the world. Although old and small, his years of lonely wandering had given him an ability to appreciate women that few men have ever possessed. The linguistic genius formerly applied to words now expressed itself through his heart. No matter whether a woman was young or old or short or fat, beautiful or ugly or thin or tall, the moment he saw her he loved her with a genuine and boundless love that completely overwhelmed him.

Could any woman resist such warmth? She could not. Adzhar's lovemaking became a legend and hundreds of women sought him out.

One affair he had then, more significant than the others, was with a young American woman to whom he gave the Nestorian relic treasured in his wife's family for thirteen centuries. Maeve, we might call her.

The reason the affair was significant to him is easy to understand. Maeve was young and beautiful and passionate, to be sure, but more specifically there was a quality in her that reminded him of someone else, a woman he had known half a century before, a quality that often fascinates but seldom brings happiness. As he was ready to admit, that young American woman reminded him of Sophia.

I was there when he met her again at the picnic on the beach in Kamakura. He asked her what had become of the small gold cross, and she told him that she had given it to a Japanese General, a later lover of hers. Adzhar smiled when he heard that. He was glad, he said.

As soon as he learned his old friend Lotmann was returning from the Middle East, to retire in Kamakura, Adzhar moved there to be near him. Lotmann was engaged in translating the Talmud into Japanese, an enterprise that interested Adzhar so much he decided to undertake a major project of his own, a traditional Oriental practice.

Toward the end of life it is customary for an emperor to retire to some spot that pleases him and there write the poetry that will memorialize his reign. This poetic compendium is the means by which future generations can know the name and nature of his era. In Adzhar's case one might have expected a history of all the languages in the world, or perhaps a dictionary of all the languages in the world, so that a scholar ten thousand years from now could know what everything meant.

But no, his great work took quite a different form.

Two factors influenced him. First, Lotmann was doing a translation and that made sense to Adzhar, since it seemed likely that anything worth writing had already been written somewhere.

Second, he decided his subject should deal with the revolution he himself had recently undergone, his insatiable new love of lovemaking.

In the monasteries in the hills above Kamakura he found certain manuscripts to his liking. These manuscripts had been compiled in the thirteenth century by vast armies of monks and were not only whimsical and fantastic but totally pornographic. Originally Adzhar had thought of rendering them into his native Russian, but he realized he was still too disgusted with Lenin's New Economic Policy to do that. On the other hand, Roosevelt had just announced his New Deal in America and a new deal always appealed to Adzhar. For this reason and no other the most stupendous pornographic collection in modern times happened to be rendered into English.

Day and night the retired Emperor could be found laboring in his pavilion to complete the prodigious task he had assigned himself. In addition to translating tens of thousands of documents, he cross-referenced them with an eccentric system of his own invention, numbers written into the margins. These swarming clouds of numbers had overwhelming implications, for the real task Adzhar had set himself was no less than a total description of love by way of endless enumeration, an Oriental concept whereby one blank face turns into an infinite array of masks, a process so unfamiliar in the West it is called inscrutable.

In 1937, in honor of his eightieth birthday, Adzhar planned an extraordinary fortnight of unlimited libertinism. Both Lotmann and I warned him against it, but he was adamant. He wouldn't listen to us.

Early that summer, you see, a party of Kempeitai plainclothesmen had visited his house as they periodically did with foreigners. They perused his manuscripts and were shocked by what they found. In their view the very existence of such documents in English was a clear and present danger to the state, since mountains of ancient Japanese pornography compiled by monks tended to belie the official position that the Japanese were now and always had been morally superior to all races everywhere.

Adzhar argued that he had no intention of showing his collection to anyone. He even offered to destroy the key or code book to his annotations, without which no one could hope to grasp the ultimate significance of the translations.

But the Kempeitai confiscated the collection all the same. They brought a truck convoy down to Kamakura and carted the manuscripts away to their warehouse in Tokyo, where for some obscure reason they were stored in the wing containing secret files on China, perhaps because it was hoped that if the manuscripts were ever discovered they would be considered of Chinese rather than Japanese origin.

Adzhar was outraged. Thus the strenuous abandon with which he planned his eightieth birthday. He called together all the women he had known in Japan over the last eight years, at least several thousand, and rented hotels throughout the Tokyo area to accommodate them. During the fortnight preceding his birthday he shuttled back and forth between these hotels satisfying all of his former mistresses.

It was July and the weather was sultry, dangerous for a man of his years. Still he would not let up. The day before his birthday he returned to his home in Kamakura, to bathe prior to having tea with Lotmann and me. In the bath, however, he came across his housekeeper giving her great-granddaughter a shampoo.

The housekeeper was eighty-eight. Her great-granddaughter was sixteen. Adzhar knew the girl because she sometimes came to clean, but he had always kept away from both her and her great-grandmother out of a notion that it was somehow better not to involve his home life with his sexual affairs.

I'm sure it wasn't part of his plan. Adzhar was a sensualist but he also had a philosophical turn of mind. I'm sure that after tea with Lotmann and me he intended to return home and spend the evening alone quietly welcoming in his birthday. But since his conversion in the Gobi Desert he had taught himself to let his smile fall where it might. Later, when the old woman and the young girl had recovered some of their strength, they told us what had happened.

Adzhar surprised them. He smiled and said he would like to finish shampooing the young girl's hair himself. This he did. He then shampooed the old woman's hair, his own, and suggested they all three get into the large bathing pool together. Immediately he dove underwater and stayed there so long they might have feared he was drowning had they not known otherwise. Every so often he surfaced only to go under again at once, causing both of them to swoon a dozen times before he emerged for another gulp of air.

These vigorous water games lasted for perhaps an hour. Adzhar then tucked one of them under each arm and carried them into the living room. Adzhar lived in Japanese fashion, so the entire room could serve as a bed if one were used to lying on
tatami,
which of course all three were. The great-grandmother was afraid the hot water might have weakened him, and urged him to rest while she gave him a massage. Adzhar agreed to the massage but found it impossible to rest. While she walked on his back he busied himself with the great-granddaughter.

And so it went for hours and hours as the weather grew hotter and hotter. Adzhar never slackened, never stopped making love. Sometime in the course of the evening, small as he was, he managed to carry the two of them out to the kitchen, making love all the while, and get a bottle of iced vodka and a jar of iced caviar out of the refrigerator. These he consumed back in the living room without interrupting himself.

At midnight, while copulating with both of them in alternate thrusts, the heart attack struck.

They heard him groan, naturally they were groaning themselves. The three simultaneous orgasms lasted throughout the twelve chimes of the clock, at which time Adzhar turned eighty and died.