Saving His Life

There is no antidote against the opium of Time.
-- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial

The nursing home is a noisy place. Every time I visit, I feel like I'm in a carnival midway. There are always patients shouting and laughing. One woman is constantly banging on the emergency exit and yelling, "Can somebody here open the door? Can somebody here please tell me how to open the door?" Another lies in her hospital bed all day calling out "Hello? Hello? Give me a cigarette! Give me a cigarette! Hello? Hello?" Someone else is always whistling; it echoes everywhere, like a little melodious brook, never the same tune no matter how long you listen. I'm always startled by the contrast: from outside, this looks like just another other placid, tree-shaded apartment building in the heart of Lakeview; inside is an endless cacaphony of wails, cries, laughter and chattering, like the jungle dawn in a Tarzan movie.

My father-in-law Nick isn't one of the noisemakers. He's a pacer. All day, every day, he walks up and down the corridor, between the nurse's station and the big window at the far end and back again. Sometimes other residents start to tag along with him, and the result is a crowd flowing back and forth through the ward like a tide. Nick is a distinguished-looking man, very tall and gaunt, with an owl-like face, graying hair combed straight back, and a neat moustache; in the midst of this ragged mob he looks like a disgraced politician pursued by reporters.

If you asked him why he was so restless, he wouldn't be able to tell you. Of course, he has a hard time explaining or understanding anything about his situation these days -- he is simply afflicted by mysterious surges of nervous energy, like a lightning rod in an invisible thunderstorm. He jumps out of chairs, fusses endlessly with objects on his nightstand, arranges himself in his bed with elaborate formality and then, the moment he is comfortable, bounds up to look out the window. He is constantly wandering into the rooms of other patients, searching for things he can't remember. His possessions -- eyeglasses, brushes, belt, shoes, alarm clock -- turn up everywhere: scattered around other patients' beds, or in front of the nurse's station, or sometimes strewn down the corridor. One of his shirts was found once behind the big TV in the common room.

Sometimes I think he's looking for clues to what sort of place he's in. One day in the common room he looked around in sudden amazement at the other patients watching TV and said to his daughter Nina, "These people -- how did they all come together like this?"

"They're like you, Dad," Nina answered. "They're all getting older and more confused, and their families can't give them the help they need." She didn't use the word "Alzheimer's" -- that only would cause trouble. Nick will never admit he might have such a problem.

He thought about her answer for a moment. Then he shook his head; it just didn't sound plausible to him. "Oh, well, it doesn't matter," he said, with a grandly indulgent gesture. "However it happened, it's lucky they all found each other."

Another day, when we were out for a walk, he said to me: "The people in that place where I live -- they're a little strange. Sometimes I can't even understand them. But it's a nice kind of strange. I like them."

But there are other times when we get that ominous call from the nursing home: "Nick is agitated." It could mean that he had a screaming fit when the nurse tried to give him his medication, or else that he got into a fistfight with the orderlies who kept him from escaping into the elevator. Nina and I will ask to talk to him to try to calm him down -- but often this doesn't work, because he doesn't remember what it is he's upset about by the time he comes on the phone. He thinks the nursing home staffers are acting like lunatics for some reason he can't imagine. Actually he thinks this even in his calmer moments; when the orderlies inscrutably turn on him, or the doctors and nurses try to treat him for conditions he knows he doesn't have, he thinks that's just typical of the way things always go for him. His current situation has only served to confirm his lifelong certainty that he's surrounded by fools and madmen.

The technical name for his condition is "diffuse degenerative dementia." What this means is that he hasn't sustained a strong localized form of brain damage; his mental faculties are slipping from him in countless untracable ways, steadily and irreversably. Alzheimer's disease is one common type of this condition. Another is called "multi-infarct dementia," meaning brain damage caused by a lot of small strokes. It's not clear which one Nick has; usually that can't be determined without an autopsy of the brain. But the prognosis is the same in either case: it is untreatable and incurable. Nick still functions reasonably well, compared to some of his fellow residents. He still walks around, and talks, and eats on his own. In the later stages, people sometimes forget how to breathe.

It's impossible to say exactly when it began for Nick, but the symptoms became unmistakable four or five years ago. He came to stay with us then, because his girlfriend threw him out. ("He's turning into an old man," she told us; "I can't have an old man in my bed.") He didn't know what was happening to him, or how bad it was. We weren't sure either: he still passed most of the standard tests of mental acuity his doctors gave him. But he was painfully aware that something wasn't right, and wasn't ever going to be fixed.

In some ways, though, his condition hadn't changed him much. He's always been a difficult man. In fact, I often think he's the most exasperating person I've ever met. He does make a good first impression: even today, he's almost always pleasant, soft-spoken, and exquisitely polite; he carries himself with the kind of dignity and reserve that people used to call "old world." When I first knew him, I thought he was like a music teacher from some provincial European capital, some place where schoolchildren are well-behaved in public and the young give up their seats to the elderly on streetcars. But as I got to know him better, I realized that his dignity and reserve were covering over something less pleasant: a bottomless well of self-absorbsion and contempt for other people. I came to think that he was going through his life like a silent-film comedian, blithely oblivious to the trail of debris he left in his wake, self-righteously aggrieved at the slightest suggestion that he could ever be at fault. To this day, he is routinely infuriated by the self-evident stupidity of the people around him -- even Nina, the only person he really trusts. When she corrects his mistakes, or refers to events he knows didn't happen, he lashes out with his old, familiar fury: "Don't talk nonsense! You sound like an idiot!"

Soon after he came to stay with us, he asked me if I would help him with his memoirs. I was reluctant. I knew what the point was likely to be: all Americans are ignorant morons. Since he first came to this country in the 1950's, he's never ceased being appalled at what Americans don't know about world history, or for that matter their own history, and he's seen it as his duty to lecture them about their shortcomings. I had the feeling the memoirs would mainly be an opportunity for him to revisit all the stupid and provincial remarks he's heard Americans make over the last forty years. (He's always had a prodigious memory for stupid remarks; he sometimes gets outraged all over again at something a foolish hardware-store clerk said to him in 1955.)

Still, I agreed to help him. Partly it was because he was so obviously pained by the realization he'd never be able to do it on his own. But also I had an ulterior motive: I wondered if his past would explain why he'd turned out the way he did. I knew this wasn't something he wanted to explore (though he never did set any conditions about what kind of story I could write about him, or what I could or couldn't say) -- he's never had any interest in talking about his inner life. In fact, he usually denies he even has an inner life: he's always claimed that all his thoughts and actions emanate from a core of wholly pure and transparent rationality.

Anyway, I plowed through all his papers -- his letters, his published and unpublished articles, the back issues of the political journal he used to edit, the transcripts of an oral history project he took part in during the 1970's, and some episodes of autobiography he wrote for a small-town newspaper around ten years ago. These, together with the stories and letters of the other people in his family, allowed me to reconstruct his life in depth. When I thought I had a handle on the outline, I asked him to tell me whatever stories he wanted to about his past.

I wasn't certain what to expect. From his papers, I had at least come to understand just why he thought Americans were so provincial: his life has been a weird collage of exotic adventures, of mysterious cities, inexplicable wars, storms and invasions and swarming refugee camps. But what else could he tell me now, when he found it increasingly difficult to remember how to tie his shoes?

I needn't have worried. His long-term memory was intact. He seemed to have forgotten nothing about his past: he could describe the exact layout of all the houses he'd ever lived in, the organizational chart of a Southern California defense plant where he'd worked in 1962, and the brass buttons on the uniforms worn by the traffic cops in 1930's Shanghai. The slightest prompt set him off. One day, he saw a poster in a liquor-store window for Tsingtao beer, and he began reminiscing about what the roofscape of the city of Tsingtao had looked like just before the start of World War II; another time, as we strolled along a beach in Evanston, he saw a little patch of clouds rise above Lake Michigan, and he described with hallucinatory precision what a typhoon looks like as it emerges above the Pacific horizon.

There's an essay by Thomas De Quincey that I often thought about when I was listening to Nick. De Quincey compares the past to the strange city of Savannah-del-Mar, submerged beneath the ocean by a tidal wave. One can, he writes, "in glassy calms ... look down into her courts and terraces, count her gates, and number the spires of her churches. She is one ample cemetery, and has been for many a year; but in the mighty calms that brood for weeks over tropic latitudes, she fascinates the eye with a Fata-morgana revelation, as of human life still persisting in submarine asylums sacred from the storms that torment our upper air."

That's how it seems to have been for Nick. The surface of his brain was racked by his dementia; he was tormented by doubts and inexplicable anxieties (when we dropped off his clothes at the local dry-cleaners, he fretted endlessly that the building would be torn down before we returned); but his memories were somehow preserved, with all their detail mysteriously exact, deep in the calmest waters of his mind.

The real problem was something else: the dementia was eroding his attention span. For as I'd known him, he'd been undeflectable in conversation; he droned on to the bitter end, while fire engines screamed by the window, phones rang, and pots boiled over on the stove -- and if he ever noticed that anybody was trying to interrupt him, he simply glared and raised his voice. But now for the first time he was having a lot of trouble keeping on track. He was so concerned to recall every detail that he exhausted himself, and he would often cut a story short with a curt dismissal at a moment of maximum suspense. He liked to tell me, for instance, how his father had once escaped from a POW camp during the Russian Civil War -- but just as his father had gotten through the last fence and was about to make his dash for freedom, Nick would suddenly say, with a weary, dismissive sigh, "So that was it."

"What was it?" I'd ask. "What did he do?"

"What did he do?" Nick said testily. "Nothing. He did nothing. There was nothing he could do."

At other times he would, without explanation or warning, launch into the second half of a story and leave me to guess what the first half had been. Once at a dinner party he turned to me and said, "Lee, I keep meaning to tell you: the soldiers forced the women to strip naked before they could cross the bridge."

I was able to recognize this as a story about the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the late 1930's -- though I never learned, then or later, whether this was something he'd seen or had only heard about. Our other guests seemed astonished at our choice of dinner-table conversation. One of them said, with a sort of cautious sympathy, "That's terrible."

"Yes, terrible," Nick said mournfully. "But what could they do? There was nothing anybody could do."

As time went on, his stories became more fragmentary. He started telling the same ones over and over again -- but would trail off at an earlier point each time. Then, too, he was having increasing difficulty remembering words. In the middle of a story, he'd hit a mental roadblock where he couldn't think of some ordinary term, and immediately go off on a long detour of paraphrase -- a detour that would invariably lead to further detours, when he forgot one of the words in the paraphrase and had to start paraphrasing that. For a while, I was able to help him out: by then I knew most of the stories by heart, and could unobtrusively supply the word that would get him back on track. But gradually his sentences were unravelling past the point where I had any idea what he was talking about. That's when we had to stop: the struggle to make sense was becoming too painful for him.

In the years since, it's only gotten worse. Today he can barely speak at all, except in jumbled phrases, and it's usually impossible to tell if they're connected by a hidden thread of thought or memory. So I don't know if I ever got his complete story, and I can't ask him any longer what's missing. But I still do ask him questions now and then, and sometimes he surprises me. Typically not: most often, he stares at me with sullen suspicion, or else snaps: "I don't want to talk about that. I've forgotten all of that. Ask me later." But several months ago, in a surge of sudden energy, he began to tell me with his old photorealistic clarity the layout of a racetrack in Shanghai that he used to bicycle past on his way to school. He remembered the banners and pennants flying, the horns sounding at post time, and how unearthly the roar of the crowd sounded, echoing down the tree-lined boulevard... and then he reached for a word, became distracted, and forgot the rest.

"The racetrack in Shanghai," I prompted.

"What are you talking about?" he snapped. "There was one, but I never went to it."

He wouldn't talk after that. I felt as though I had just seen a shaft of sunlight illuminate a submerged line of rooftops, before the waters darkened.

***

The defining event in Nick's life happened before he was born. The Russian Revolution was one of those vast historical calamities that most Americans have been spared: it was a time when people who never thought of themselves as political, who never thought they'd have to choose sides about anything, were forced to make political choices that could easily cost them their homes, their families, and their lives. This was how it was for Nick's parents.

The Cherniavsky family is from the Ukraine. As far back as anybody could remember, they had been peasant farmers. Nick's grandfather had risen in the world, and had become a shopkeeper in a village south of Kiev. Nick's father Nikolai, when he was a child, had an even grander goal: he wanted to go to the big city and study engineering. But that dream was wiped out by the First World War. Nikolai enlisted in the Russian Army instead, and was commissioned as a cavalry officer; he served on the Eastern Front in Austria, until the news reached the troops of the revolution back home.

The news put Nikolai in an impossible situation. On the one hand, he was a loyal military man who'd several times been decorated for bravery; on the other, he'd spent a lot of time in the officers' quarters having earnest debates about politics, and he'd come to think of himself as something of a socialist. And there was a third factor: as the fervor of revolution spread through the army, he was becoming uneasily aware that if he stayed at his post much longer, he'd probably be shot by his own men.

One night, after many whispered consultations, he and the other officers in his regiment decided to solve their problems together. They all deserted. They took the officer's insignia from their shoulders and solemnly threw them away into the nearest ditch, and then they walked off from their posts. Over the following weeks, they made their way eastward, hitching rides with interminable convoys and sneaking onto overcrowded troop trains, back into the storm that had overtaken their homeland.

When Nikolai reached the Ukraine, he found that his family had fallen apart. His father had died and his brothers were joining the various splinter armies that were already turning their guns on each other. His recent experiences had given Nikolai a taste for making bold, non-negotiable decisions, and he came to one now: he would put his socialist beliefs into practice. He would go northward to St. Petersburg, the epicenter of the revolution, and enlist in the Red Army.

It was a perilous journey; the train wound sluggishly past an endless succession of burnt-out villages and tense military checkpoints. But Nikolai didn't regret doing it -- at least not until he arrived at his goal. His first night in St. Petersburg, he heard Lenin himself address a huge open-air rally. The scene was dramatic: the wild swoop of shadows across the ornate buildings ringing the square, the surge and rush of passion in the crowd, and that famous bald-domed head bobbing in the midst of the turmoil like a deep-sea mine. But Nikolai was appalled by the cruelty and fanaticism of what he heard, and decided right then that he was about to enlist on the wrong side. So the next day, he left St. Petersburg in search of the nearest encampment of the White Army that was fighting the Red.

I don't know if he ever really believed the White Army had a chance. But he stuck it out to the end, as the confused and declining fortunes of his cause took him the length of Russia. Everywhere he went, he saw the chaos and brutality of the civil war: pointless battles, endless swarms of refugees, atrocities committed by all sides. The worst came for him personally when he was captured by a Red brigade and thrown into a prison camp on the shores of Lake Baikal. It was the dead of winter; the prisoners were sleeping in unheated barracks by night and working an ancient coal mine by day. Nikolai met a few White officers, but most of the prisoners were Germans captured years before during the World War. They were pleased (or so he later said) to help an enemy of the Reds escape, even if he had so recently been their own enemy. So one moonless night a bunch of them obligingly created a diversion, a mock fight outside one of the barracks, while Nikolai made a break for it. He got through the fences and bolted across a wide snowbound meadow towards a distant line of trees he could dimly make out in the starlight. He always said afterwards those were the worst moments of his life: waiting for the uproar and gunfire of the guards discovering he was gone -- noises that miraculously never came.

His luck held: he was discovered the next day by a White patrol, and he made his way back to his regiment. But by then he had lost the will to go on fighting. The White cause was lost anyway: except for a few remaining White strongholds, the Reds controlled the whole of Russia. The White armies still in the field were disintegrating; troops were deserting en masse, and the few who remained loyal kept waiting for orders that never came. By that spring, Nikolai was idly passing his days in the White city of Vladivostok on the Siberian coast. That was where he met Irina Spalwing.

She was the daughter of a university professor at Vladivostok's prestigious Far Eastern Institute. Her father Eugene Spalwing was a passionate scholar of Japanese language and culture -- an unusual preoccupation for a Russian in those days, because Russians weren't exactly welcome in Japan. During the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, one of Eugene's relatives had been beaten to death by a mob on the streets of Tokyo. But Eugene himself travelled the length of the country without fear, and he eventually became one of the first Westerners to be accepted by Japanese academics as a serious student of their country.

Irina grew up surrounded by the tokens of her father's obsession. A photograph preserved in the family shows the Spalwing children sitting around a little black lacquer table and serving tea; they're all wearing ornate kimonos, and would look just like a perfect Japanese family if it weren't for their flowing blonde hair. Irina was around ten when the photo was taken. I have to say that she looks deathly bored. But she never did have any use for her father's enthusiasms; all her life, her son later said, she was much more inclined to boast about her family's connections among the Russian aristocracy than about how much clout the Spalwing name might have in Kyoto. She grew up to be snobbish, quick, wilful, witty, and restless -- just the sort of young woman who'd fall for a brooding, romantic cavalry officer like Nikolai.

Nikolai and Irina spent the spring and early summer strolling together along the quays and promenades of Vladivostok. They passed hours at a time watching the ships glide in the harbor and the clouds cross over from Manchuria on their way out into the Sea of Japan. They were in love, and it was a love like a classic novel: her parents bitterly disapproved of the match; his life would be in danger if he stayed in Vladivostok much longer. The dramatic crisis arrived in midsummer. That was when word reached the city that the remnants of the White Army in the field were surrendering. Vladivostok could soon expect to be taken. Nikolai knew then that he was out of time.

So he and Irina decided to elope. Nikolai boarded a train overland across the Russian border into Manchuria. Irina followed a few weeks later. She bundled herself up as a peasant woman to attract as little attention as possible. Under normal circumstances, a young upper-class Russian woman would have never travelled alone, but in those days there were swarms and tides of refugees streaming across the border, and she went unnoticed.

They were reunited in the city of Harbin, in northern Manchuria. That was where, a month later, they were married. At the ceremony, they exchanged wedding rings of pale Siberian gold. Each was inscribed around the inner rim with delicate Cyrillic characters: the ring he gave her read "Nikolai," and the ring she gave him read "Irina." Both rings bore the date: 14 IX 1922.

***

Harbin was a strange place. I've looked through some 19th century books on Manchuria, and none of them mention it: in those days, it was a nondescript fishing village, one of dozens that have been scattered for centuries along the banks of the remote Sunghuajiang River. Nothing of note happened in Harbin until the end of the 19th century, when hordes of Russian construction workers came pouring into town. They were building the great Trans-Siberian railway; the Romanov government and the Manchu court (both of them impossibly exotic to the people of Harbin) had cut a deal to extend the last eastward leg of the railway across the flat terrain of Manchuria, rather than the broken mountain ranges of Siberia to the north. This was how Harbin became a major junction connecting western Russia with the Pacific.

It quickly swelled up into a sizable city -- one of the biggest trading centers in Northern Asia. Russian travellers were passing through on every train, and soon Chinese traders were coming in as well, bringing their goods by boat down the Sunghuajiang from the cities of the Chinese interior. Then with the Russian revolution and civil war, the real torrent arrived. Tens of thousands of Russian refugees came across the Siberian border. There were millions of exiled Russians streaming out around the world in those days; Russian enclaves were springing up everywhere from Shanghai to Berlin. All kinds of people were caught up in the flood, from peasants whose villages had been on the wrong side in a factional fight to millionaires who came overland bringing long lines of limousines like herds of purebred cattle.

They were stunned by what they found in Harbin. Back then, nobody talked about ideas like "indigenous architecture" or "site-appropriate design." The builders of Harbin hadn't created a Manchurian city, but a Russian one. It had wide radiating boulevards and big stucco buildings painted in bright pastels; the skyline was tangled by Victorian terracotta ornamentation and dotted everywhere by ornate onion-ball church domes. The refugees said it was like a mirage of St. Petersburg, floating amid the desolate grasslands of Asia.

They treated the place as a kind of substitute Russia without the Bolsheviks. By the early 1920's, Harbin had downtown department stores crammed with more Russian and imported goods than the stores of Petersburg or Moscow. Its cafes and corner newsstands sold newspapers representing the furiously contending monarchist, fascist, liberal and radical factions. Its boulevards were lined with ornate tearooms and restaurants. There were theaters where great actors staged the Russian classics, and movie houses showing the latest films of Chaplin and Valentino. There was even a yacht club, which filled the Sunghuajiang River (a name soon Russified to Sungary) with bright European-style sails in the long summer afternoons.

When Nikolai and Irina arrived, the talk in Harbin was of the imminent fall of Lenin's government. Everyone was daily expecting the news that the Revolution had failed and they could all go home. Nikolai himself, during his first year or two in Harbin, attended lots of urgent meetings about the plans for post-Bolshevik Russia. He had a certain standing in the community, because he'd been a White Russian officer; many of the leading politicians in the city assured him he'd have an important role in the great counter-offensive that was expected to be launched any day now.

He may have believed such talk at first. But in the meantime he had to support himself; Irina was already expecting a child. So he fell into one of the century's newest and most essential trades: auto mechanic. The streets and the countryside surrounding Harbin were crowded with luxury automobiles, and they all needed a reliable garage.

Irina gave birth to their only child, a son, in April 1924. They named him Nikolai, of course. I'm calling him Nick here to keep the names straight -- nobody actually called him that till much later, after he came to America. (His family and Russian friends always called him Kolya, which is the normal shorthand for Nikolai, like Bob for Robert.)

After Nick's birth Nikolai begin to wonder what sort of future his family could have in Harbin. The great re-conquest of Russia was on indefinite hold, and in the meantime Harbin's own situation was growing daily more perilous. Those were years of revolutionary chaos in China; Manchuria was a shadowy and shifty domain of contending warlords. The people of Harbin often saw interminable, dusty armies of one or another faction marching across the grasslands, and silent gunfire in the distant hills on summer nights. Sometimes the armies swept through the villages along the river collecting conscripts; now and then their officers entered the city to hire mercenaries. A lot of Nikolai's comrades from the White Army, bored with waiting for the Russian invasion to begin, hired on with one warlord or another and went off to fight in the annual campaigns.

Then, too, the city itself was changing. After the Reds solidified their hold on Russia, the stream of refugees across the border dried up; but with war and revolution tearing Manchuria apart, people from the surrounding countryside were flooding into Harbin for sanctuary just as the Russians had done a decade earlier. At the start of the 1920's, the population of the city was around a hundred thousand, almost all of it Russian; by the late 1920's, the population had doubled, and almost all the new arrivals were Manchurians and Chinese. Nobody talked about Harbin becoming a melting pot; the Russians kept to their sections of the city and they expected their new neighbors to do the same. But a kind of infiltration of the local culture began even so.

During the long and bitterly cold winters, the Chinese started a tradition of carving ornate ice sculptures in the public parks. There were huge dragons and dreamy cloud spirits and bristlingly-armored ghost warriors silently bellowing and calling and leering among the massed snowdrifts and the thickets of bare trees; sometimes the artisans would hollow out unobtrusive gaps in the sculptures where candles or even incandescent bulbs could be hidden, so that at night the milky ice would glow from within, in wavering and mysterious pastels, like trapped spirits. The Festival of the Ice Lanterns, they called it. Irina and Nikolai and the other Russians found it beautiful but somehow disturbing. It was as though a florid Asian dreamworld was seeping up into Harbin's strict European proprieties.

Was this what finally decided Nikolai it was time to go? He never said, and there were other possible reasons. Maybe it was the rumor that the Japanese were going to invade and take the whole of Manchuria for themselves. Or else maybe he'd been to one political meeting too many, and convinced himself that he and everybody else in Harbin was going to spend all eternity stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, debating a dream of revenge. Whatever it was, one day in the fall of 1926 he told Irina that they were leaving.

They packed up their few possessions and set off by train to the Chinese coast. There they booked passage on one of the tramp steamers that bobbed from port to port all along the shores of Asia. For most of the voyage, there was nothing to look at but the blank ocean and a featureless line of land off to starboard. Then one morning they came out on deck and found something new: the blue water for miles around them was stained by a turbulent tawny-yellow murk. This was the sign that they'd reached their goal, the point where the currents of the great Yangtse River emptied into the China Sea. The steamer turned towards the west and made its way up the wide river delta, to the mouth of one of the Yangtse's tributaries, the Huangpu. The river was a gorgeous swarming riot of freighters, junks, steamers, yachts, sampans, and warships. Upstream, around a slow glittering bend, there came into view the vast sprawl of Shanghai.

***

"My very first recollection," Nick wrote once in a newspaper article, "is of my father holding me by the hand as we walked down a street in the Honkew District of Shanghai. Trucks full of Chinese soldiers were racing up and down the street and there was sporadic gunfire."

That was in 1927. The city was caught in the middle of yet another of the countless convulsions of the Chinese Revolution; units of the Nationalist Army were fighting each other that season. It may seem strange to picture a young Russian man strolling down such a dangerous scene with his three-year-old son at his side, but it actually was a typical sight. There were tens of thousands of Westerners in Shanghai, and they walked its streets as though in an inviolable bubble.

"Shanghai is not China," says a tourist guidebook from those years (All About Shanghai, A Standard Guide, 1934 edition). "It is everything under the sun and in population at least, it is mostly Chinese, but it is not the real China." In some ways, it was a city like Harbin: it had been built by foreign money for foreign interests. At its heart was a crowded zone of banks and stores and trading companies, factories and mansions, apartment blocks and warehouses, known as the "International Settlement." More than a hundred thousand Europeans and Americans lived there; they had their own police and fire department and utility companies and a local administrative council, which operated independently of the Chinese government. (The French in Shanghai insisted on yet another separate set of city services, under their control -- their zone was known as the "French Concession.") Surrounding it were the Chinese districts, where millions of people were crowded together; some estimates put the population density of Shanghai as two or three times higher than Paris or London. If you surveyed the city from a high vantage -- the rooftop of the glamourous Park Hotel, for instance, which billed itself in magazine advertisements as "The Tallest Building In Asia" (it was sixteen storeys) -- it appeared as a kind of doughnut: a central plateau of low, flat European rooftops encircled by a enormous broken mountain range of peaked and serrated Chinese tile.

Inside the Settlement, life was a gaudy cosmopolitan hodgepodge. Something of its character can be made out from the ads in the tourist guidebook. There were French dressmakers, American beauty salons, German breweries, and a British doctor specialising in the treatment of "venereal complaints." There were riding academies and dancing academies. A stop-the-presses ad in the guidebook's 1934 edition announces that the Shanghai Art Store has just gotten in "1935-style shoes." There are listings for brass band concerts, movie theaters, and a municipal symphony orchestra. There are countless ads for nightclubs -- featuring "Charming Dance Hostesses" and "Lovely Dance Partners" and "the Prettiest Dancing Hostesses." The Candidrome Ballroom, "The Rendezvous of Shanghai's Elite," was featuring that season the music of "Buck Clayton and his Harlem Gentlemen." It was a whole compacted world of European glamour; most of the people in the Settlement could go their whole lives without bothering to learn a word of Chinese.

There were thousands of Russians living in the Settlement -- ten thousand from the initial flood during the Russian Civil War (or so Nick estimated, in his oral history); tens of thousands more would arrive in the early 1930s, after Japan invaded Manchuria and the White Russian enclaves there were overrun. Because they were refugees with no political status, they became the lowest caste in the Settlement, barely rating above the Chinese. They took the jobs that the other Europeans wouldn't touch: Russian men worked as rickshaw bearers, which was unheard-of for whites in Asia; young Russian women made up by far the largest percentage of the Settlement's prostitutes, and they had a virtual lock on the "dance hostess" trade. But even if they were destitute, they still had their own strong community, as thrivingly insular as any other in Shanghai. They had Russian language newspapers, groceries, teahouses, and bookstores, and even a radio station. And, like Russians everywhere, they tended to treat any new acquaintance as a long-lost cousin, entitled to the family's inexhaustible support. The moment Nikolai had made a couple of Russian friends in Shanghai he had no problem finding a job or a place for his family.

In the spring and summer of 1927, he worked as a longshoreman on the docks and quays of the Huangpu, while he and Irina and Nick lived in an old boardinghouse in the French Concession. That winter, he took a step upward: he got a job installing burglar alarms. It was steady work; there were a lot of millionaires in Shanghai in those days, both Western and Chinese. Nikolai worked in mansions that were labyrinthine vistas of opulence, studded by antique vases and pieced out by luminous tapestries. He would sometimes laugh about it, and say the butlers were just as snobbish and surly whether they worked for bankers or for ganglords. The next spring, he had a piece of real luck. The Chinese laborers at the Shanghai Water Works went on strike. The British owners fired them all and brought in Russians as scabs. Nikolai got hired as a mechanical engineer (mostly because he'd been an auto mechanic), and the pay included a living space in the company housing complex.

The Water Works was a sprawling Gothic maze of dark turrets and grimy walls that squatted on the banks of the Huangpu river. The silt and filth of Shanghai, the garbage from the floating cities of boat people on the Huangpu, the sewage and debris and the occasional dead gangster, came pouring into the plant's vast system of filters and pipes and pools, and the end product was some of the cleanest tapwater in Asia. Nikolai was proud of his work (he was quickly promoted) and Irina liked their little row house; only young Nick was miserable. He was trapped inside the Water Works like an orphan prisoner in a Dickens novel, because Nikolai absolutely refused to send him to school or let him play with other children.

Why not? There were a lot of reasons. If Nikolai had thought Harbin was a bad place to raise a child, the thronging turmoil of Shanghai seemed infinitely riskier. Then, too, while Nikolai still thought of himself as a socialist, he'd come to take on increasingly aristocratic airs; he liked to think of himself as a man of culture and dignity, while his fellow Russians in Shanghai were too vulgar, too destitute, too desperate, too criminal. He particularly loathed the laxity of their childrearing and thought that the company of Shanghai's Russian children would be a disastrous influence on Nick. And then, too, although there was a good Russian school in Shanghai, he was sure that he could do a better job teaching Nick himself. In a way, it was a grand act of love and parental concern; it certainly never thought that keeping Nick isolated might do him any harm.

But Nick resented it bitterly, and always felt that it had been a disaster for him. It marked him in ways he couldn't wholly trace out for himself. At the least, it ensured that he would always have a hard time making elementary connections with people. He seems never to have picked up the cues everybody else absorbs in childhood about how to read people's faces and interpret their subliminal signals. He can't make small talk; he can't tolerate being contradicted; he's always been unable to strike a balance in a conversation between sullen silence and interminable monologue. It's a typical pattern for an only child, that unconscious sense of always being the center of attention -- and for Nick it was intensified by total social obliviousness. It's as though he spent his earliest years blind and for the rest of his life has walked around with tunnel vision.

His parents loomed over his childhood. He regarded his father with an inextricable tangle of respect, resentment, love, and fear. What stood out the most for him was Nikolai's military manners and emotional aloofness; he had, Nick wrote in one of his reminiscences, "an air of near-Olympian omnipotence" -- perhaps the last quality a lonely boy looks for in a father. Nick was awed by Nikolai's strength (he could drive in screws with his thumbnail), his determination, his air of exhaustive knowledgability, and his pose of culture. He remembered him this way in the oral history: "My father was a poet of above-average ability, and he frequently wrote invitations in verse to our friends for holiday or birthday dinners. He was composing for a couple of years, I think, a novel in verse based on the time when he served in the Russian White Army. Sometimes we would walk hand-in-hand up and down the alley at the employee housing complex and he would recite to me from memory whole chapters from his novel, occasionally changing a verse here and there."

But he was less impressed by his mother. In everything he wrote and said about her, the dominant note is impatience. From an early age, he considered her to be exasperating and irrational. In the oral history, he describes her this way: "She always spoke very fast, so fast that she made her words tumble over each other, and whenever she was at a loss for words she would just make up a term on the spur of the moment. The people who didn't know her well found this confusing and perplexing. She was always very self-conscious of position in society, prestige, and popularity. Both her mother's and her father's families had coats of arms and this meant a great deal to her. Her favorite saying in those days -- she used to say it to me repeatedly -- was: Don't you ever forget that your ancestors were nobles. They were not just common people."

This snobbery sometimes was too much even for Nikolai; Nick says in the oral history that he sometimes wondered if his father kept claiming to be a socialist only because it annoyed Irina so much. But Nick's real grudge against his mother was that she was his jailer. When Nikolai went off to work each morning, he would set Nick's lessons for the day (he'd ordered stacks of schoolbooks from the Russian bookstore), and Irina was supposed to supervise him. But she always had shopping to do -- in Shanghai in those days, refrigerators were a luxury for the very rich, and most people kept only a day's worth of food in the house. At the market she would often run into friends, and stop off at the teahouse for a talk; and Nick ended up being left alone for hours. He would wander by himself along the grass plots behind the row houses, or down the grimy brick alleys behind the filtration plant. He often sat at the little window in his bedroom, peering out forlornly at the water works' intricate roofscape as it was washed by Shanghai's cold winter rains or baked by the sultry summer sunlight. A gap in the angle between two rooftops held a wedge of of the Huangpu River: he could see fishing boats bob along the glinting water, and now and then the steep side of a steamship sweeping past.

Like many kids who grow up in isolation, Nick retreated into a world of daydream. He read Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne, the way most Russian children do; but soon he conceived a different passion: for America. His favorite writers (in Russian translation) were Jack London and James Fenimore Cooper; he had an enduring love for stories of the Wild West and the Gold Rush. Almost as soon as he could read, he was devouring Shanghai's Russian language newspapers, and while he was starved for real life and took a deep interest in everything, from Mao's Long March to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (Halie Salassie was one of his earliest heroes), his particular enthusiasm was for American news. He followed the Presidential elections closely (he supported Roosevelt); and he read everything he could about the Lindburgh kidnapping and the assassination of Huey Long. It often struck him as a profound injustice that he was half a world away from such excitement, stuck in Shanghai where nothing ever happened.

***

When he was twelve, he finally persuaded his father to send him to Shanghai's Russian school. He proved to have an easy time in class; Nikolai actually had done a good job with his home instruction. But he was less successful with his schoolmates. They were merciless. Not only was he a newcomer, but he cut an absurd figure: he was tall, skinny, hopelessly unathletic, and socially incompetent. He couldn't even understand a word they said. He spoke the classically pure Russian he'd learned from his parents; the other kids had their own weird patois, a thickly slanging Russian mixed with English and overlaid by a lot of garbled French. It took him months of patient listening to get the hang of it, and even then he had to be careful not to let it slip out of him at the wrong time. If his father had heard a hint of slang in his speech, that would have been the end of his schooling.

But none of that mattered -- or at least Nick would never admit that it did. He was developing his characteristic form of self-defense in difficult social situations: he simply refused to accept he was having a problem. (In later years, he modified this strategy: if he had to admit there was a problem, he refused to accept that it could be his fault.) As far as he was concerned, he wanted to be liked by the other kids, and so he was -- end of story.

Besides, he was dazzled by Shanghai. He bicycled everywhere through the swarming streets of the Settlement and the tree-lined boulevards of the French Concession; sometimes he would venture out to where the ruler-drawn European districts ended and the tangled Chinese neighborhoods began: an alluring, tumbledown glow of paper lanterns and neon, announcing alchemists, herbalists, necromancers, radical newspapers, opera houses and opium dens. He was never worried; "the crime rate was extremely low," he remembered, "and I could go into any neighborhood in the city, no matter how poor, without fear."

On the other hand, it was a city perpetually on the edge of catastrophe. The Japanese invasion spread throughout China during the 1930s, and by 1937 there was ferocious fighting in the Chinese districts of Shanghai. The area to the west of the Settlement turned into a weird and savage zone of street warfare where the Japanese army, the remnants of the nationalist Chinese forces, the collaborationist Chinese police, and anti-Japanese paramilitary groups run by the Chinese gangs all contended; it came to be known as "the Badlands." The Settlement remained relatively safe; its neutrality and independence had been guaranteed by America and the other Western powers, who kept gunboats perpetually patrolling the waters of the Huangpu. But that didn't mean there weren't a lot of thrilling close calls. Nick recalled in the oral history: "Machine gun bursts, artillery salvos and rifle shots became a a part of our daily environment ... antiaircraft artillery and machine guns, Japanese or Chinese -- we had no way of knowing -- would open up and the spent rounds would bounce off the roof of our house."

As the fighting worsened, the city seemed to grow more surreal. One morning when Nick was on his way to school he saw a wild dogfight unfolding in the clouds overhead, mysteriously ignored by the busy crowds on the street. Another time he was awakened in the middle of the night by a strange light in his bedroom; from his window he saw that the refinery across the river had been bombed, and huge roils of red flame were shimmering on the black waters. A few days later, a ride on a trolleycar took him through the Badlands, and he found that the familiar streets had been transformed: "For blocks and blocks the Japanese put manila ropes around the utility poles and put straw on the sidewalks and they used this area as stables for the cavalry horses. There were hundreds or thousands of horses. It was an unbelievable sight."

The worst came for the Europeans one Friday when a Chinese plane swooped down and -- deliberately or not, nobody ever found out for sure -- dropped its bombs on the Settlement. One bomb fell on an intersection in the busiest commercial street along the river; another landed in a public square that was serving as a holding camp for thousands of newly-arrived refugees. Nick happened to pass by the square soon afterwards. He described the scene in one of his newspaper articles forty years later: "It was total chaos -- blood all over, mangled bodes, torn limbs, dead, wounded, all in one bloody mess. Cars, rickshaw cabs, buses, streetcars all torn apart, smashed upside down, broken glass. Cries for help, groans ..." Nine hundred people died; it was known in Shanghai afterwards as Black Friday.

But the most important thing that happened to Nick in those years had nothing to do with the grand events of history. He and his father had another gigantic battle, filled with desperate pleadings and absolute refusals: this time the issue was whether he could join the Boy Scouts. For Nikolai it was yet another potential cesspool of dissolute company -- but he finally relented, and Nick began attending Scout meetings. For the first time in his life, he made a friend.

***

Victor Velgus was an unusual kid, even for Shanghai. He was half-Russian and half-Chinese, a rare combination -- even rarer because it was his mother who was Russian and his father Chinese. They had met in Siberia during the Civil War, where she was a nurse and he was a laborer. In their long, meandering flight over the following years, into Manchuria and then southward to Shanghai, she had somehow strayed away, and Victor had no idea where she was now. He lived with his father in a big, crumbling apartment block in the Badlands. But he detested that arrangement, and he spent most of his time on the streets, or hanging around in the Russian teahouses and taverns in the Settlement. He was fluent in Russian and Chinese (both Mandarin and the hissing Shanghai dialect that most other Chinese professed to be unable to understand) and he had also picked up a smattering of English and French. He earned his pocket money as a bicycle messenger, taking letters and military dispatches from one sector to another through the Badlands and the Settlement -- dodging heedlessly among the swarms of troop convoys and past the bristling checkpoints run by the police and the gangs. That's why he had joined the Boy Scouts: he wanted the uniform because it made him look more official on his rounds.

Victor was everything Nick wasn't. Nick was timid and priggish; Victor was a hustler, an adventurer, a carouser. "He always had one girlfriend after another," Nick said in the oral history. "He was a good dancer and very good in company. He was a very enjoyable person. He was also a very self-centered person, very effective in promoting himself."

Victor could charm anybody -- particularly those, like Nikolai and Irina, who believed they were impervious to being charmed. They were at first furiously suspicious of him, but soon they were enchanted. After a couple of months of hearing his stories about how he was sleeping on the street after his latest fight with his father, they told him he could move in with them. He proved to be a fitful and unreliable houseguest, useless at chores, ostentatiously baffled when cash or little trinkets went missing -- but Nikolai and Irina doted on him. They even enjoyed the innumerable ways he found to hit them up for loans; Irina was still laughing years later over the way Victor had once danced around her on the street like an organ-grinder's monkey, begging her "Let me have a quarter, please let me have a quarter."

Nick and Victor spent every day together, and came to take each other for granted with the profound taciturn devotion of teenage boys. Victor worked hard to bring Nick out of his shell. He had no luck coaxing him into sampling Shanghai's adult entertainments -- but did at least get him to play hooky. The two attended the Russian school together until the fall of 1940, when the school had to close: it was right on the boundary between the Settlement and the Badlands, and the streetfighting in the Badlands was growing more anarchic and savage. So instead Nick and Victor enrolled for night classes at a college in the French Concession. But the lectures were given in French, which neither of them spoke well enough to follow; so at Victor's instigation, they started skipping classes and going to movies instead.

"Never have I seen so many movies as we saw that winter," Nick remembered. "And Shanghai had beautiful movie theaters, elaborately constructed, huge, and richly furnished." They showed the latest arrivals from Hollywood; when The Hunchback of Notre Dame opened, the Cathay Theatre hired dozens of real hunchbacks to go through the streets of the Settlement wearing sandwichboards advertising the premiere. But Nick didn't actually care much about what was showing. What he loved were the American newsreels: Congressional debates, the Presidential election (Nick was still rooting for Roosevelt, but he had some doubts about the propriety of a third term), wacky doings in the Heartland ... and, of course, the latest ominous news from the war in Europe: the fall of France, the London blitz, the Russian invasion of Finland.

Victor was always robustly scornful. Whenever Nick would talk about the issue that concerned him most -- whether America should enter the war against Germany -- he would snort in contempt. What did FDR or Churchill or Hitler matter here in Shanghai, on the other side of the world? And besides, whatever bigshot government or another was in charge, there would always be a deal to be made or an angle to be found. The real issue was whether Rita Hayworth was prettier than Norma Shearer, or whether the usherette was flirting back with enough of a hint of bawdiness to be worth pursuing.

That's how they would argue as they bicycled home, with their voices ringing off the endless blocks of silent warehouses. The commercial district was always desolate late at night -- there was no movement for miles at a time but the silent glittering ships on the river, and the occasional bright spill of revellers from a late-night club, tumbling out into an alley like jewels from a frayed pocket.

***

That winter was miserably cold and clammy. Towards spring Nick's father fell sick with a serious respiratory infection; nobody knew what it was, but Nikolai's own belief was that it was tuberculosis. He thought he'd had it before, and had cured himself with Ukrainian herbal medicine. This time, though, he couldn't get the right herbs; so instead his doctor advised him to get out of the foul air of Shanghai for a while. He recommended a stay in the resort city of Tsingtao. Nikolai immediately seized on this idea and transformed it into one of his bold life-altering decisions: he would quit his job at the Water Works, buy land in Tsingtao, and become a farmer.

Tsingtao was on the coast a couple of hundred miles north of Shanghai. Like so many cities in China, it had been built by Westerners -- Germans, in this case. It had the Gothic architecture and tree-lined boulevards of a provincial capital deep in the Black Forest; the German settlers had planted the ring of low hills that surrounded the harbor with tens of thousands of pine trees, just to remind them of home. It was a beautiful and peaceful place. For the last several years, it had been under Japanese occupation, but this presence weighed lightly on its citizens; the garrison was well-disciplined and allowed ordinary life to continue unmolested.

Most of the population was Chinese, but several rich old German families still lingered: they lived mostly in the big mansions along the shore. There was also a small but thriving Russian enclave. Nikolai had what he thought was a brilliant idea: he was going to acquire goats, and sell their milk to the Germans and Russians as a luxury health-food novelty item.

Nick was at first pleased by the whole scheme of moving to Tsingtao. For one thing, it meant that he had to drop out of the French college, and so his parents would never find out that he'd stopped attending classes. But he hated the idea of leaving Victor behind, and he was increasingly dreading the prospect of being trapped alone with his parents. Nikolai had no intention of living in Tsingtao itself; the whole point for him was to get back to the land. As soon as they arrived in the spring of 1941, he leased an unpromising acre of land on the outskirts of the city, and supervised Nick in the construction of a ramshackle cabin. Nick resented being ordered around, loathed the work, and detested the result. Nikolai also bought a herd of goats, and leased grazing rights to a stretch of hillside above their land. While he and Irina set out to cultivate their gardens, Nick each day had to keep watch over the goats.

He always remembered that summer as the most wretched time of his life. Each morning he led the goats off to their pasturage -- a difficult task in itself, he said: "goats are extremely obstinate, uncooperative animals." Then, as the herd drifted along the steeps and meadows, nibbling patiently at the acacia leaves, Nick would sit with his back to a treetrunk and feel sorry for himself. There was nothing to do all day but watch the cloud-shadows move from the pine-forested hillsides out across the town and into the shallow bowl of the harbor.

He got to know by heart the roofscape of Tsingtao. Like Harbin or Shanghai, it was a core of squat blockly European buildings surrounded by a fanciful forest of Chinese tile. Here was the big steam-wreathed brewery; there on the outskirts of town was the tight forbidding maze of the local Japanese garrison; in the hazy distance beyond was the airfield, where beat-up one-engine planes, new, sleekly glamorous passenger airliners, and ferocious-looking military fighters and transports (he saw more and more of those as the summer gave way to fall) buzzed and circled and swooped like dragonflies. Enclosing it all in blue-misted splendor was the Sea of China, and out there beyond the horizon where the clouds swarmed and vanished was the world where interesting things happened.

The routine didn't break until the end of fall. One afternoon when he was up in the pasturage he heard an odd sound coming from behind the hills: a low troubled throbbing. It grew louder towards evening, as he led the goats down the slope towards their pen. When he turned to look behind him he was greeted by a terrifying sight: rising above the pine-thick hillcrests was what he later called "the worst thunderstorm I'd ever seen in my life." It was a vast tidal wave of blackness, streaked with purple like a bruise and crowned by flashes of yellow lightning. The rain was already falling by the time he got back to the cabin. The real deluge, though, didn't start until after dark. Nick and his parents spent a dreadful night huddled together as the roof sprang countless leaks and the rainwater streaming under the door and walls turned the dirt floor into a pond of bubbling black mud. Just before dawn, in a great roar of wind and lightning-lit squalling, one wall of their cabin collapsed.

It was the end of Nikolai's dream of becoming a farmer. But he responded to the disaster with characteristic decisiveness. Within a day, he had Nick and Irina put up in a boardinghouse in town, and had arranged storage space for their waterlogged belongings; he sold the herd of goats; and he found a job. There was a big dairy farm on the edge of town run by a Russian Jewish family -- they'd gone to America and become citizens before moving on to China to make their fortune. They hired Nikolai as a foreman and allowed him and his family to move into a little cottage next to the bunkhouse.

The first night in the cottage, Nick barely slept. He couldn't wait for morning, when he would be able to get away from the farm and spend some time in town. But when sunup came and he tried to sneak out unnoticed, he was greeted by a nasty surprise: there was a Japanese soldier guarding the main gate.

The soldier was young and nervous; he brandished his rifle at Nick and ordered him to stand back. A couple of farmhands drifted past to see what was happening, and the soldier waved the rifle wildly in the air and fired off a round. That brought everybody running. Nobody wanted to rush the soldier, who was growing more and more panicky, so instead the crowd stood around vaguely and waited to see what would happen. The stalemate was broken an hour later, when an open-top limousine came up the road, bringing a couple of Japanese officers and an interpreter. One of the officers explained the situation in Japanese; the interpreter translated into English, and the word filtered through the crowd in Chinese and Russian. As of that morning, the officer said, Japan and the United States were at war, and all property owned by American citizens in Tsingtao was being confiscated. This was how Nick first heard about Pearl Harbor.

***

The Russians in China were in limbo. They had no legal citizenship anywhere; the only official document most of them carried was a temporary passport issued to White Russian exiles around the world by the League of Nations -- which gave them a bare legitimacy, at least in those countries that recognized the League. In practice the passports invariably triggered bewildered consultations among customs officials, requests for bribes, curt refusals of permission to enter (or leave), and threats of arrest whenever they tried to cross a border. But now with the coming of the war the League was gone and the passports had gone from marginally useful to wholly worthless; the Russians were now exclusively dependent on the charity or indulgence of local authorities for their survival.

But Tsingtao's Russian enclave believed its status might not change very much. Japan and the Soviet Union weren't at war with each other; and the local Japanese garrison had always left them alone. Their hopes proved justified, at least for a while. In the months after Pearl Harbor, ordinary life in Tsingtao went on as before. Even the dairy farm stayed open -- though the Japanese now ran it, and nobody ever found out what happened to the American owners. The only immediate difference the war brought was for Nick: he got a job.

There were mysterious organizations springing up in all the Russian enclaves throughout Asia. They were called Russian Anti-Communist Committees. Their exact purpose wasn't clear, nor was the source of their financing; mostly they served as a kind of semi-official buffer between the Russian exile communities and the Japanese authorities. Their public activities were benign and philanthropic. They paid for teachers at the Russian schools, for instance; and they ran fundraisers and charity balls to keep the Russian theaters and music societies open. In Tsingtao they put out a weekly Russian-language newspaper. It ran a smattering of what little local news there was, but for the most part it was filled with wire-service stories approved by the Japanese censors. Despite the Japanese occupation, the wire services were still in English, which the editor didn't speak; Nick had picked it up in Shanghai -- he liked reading American newspapers -- and was hired to translate the stories into Russian.

He took this job very seriously. When the editor noticed his unfailing energy he assigned him another task: responsibility for the newspaper's weekly half-page "Youth" section. For the rest of his life, he's called this the best job he ever had. He worried over every detail -- the notices of band concert programs at the local school, the date of the chaperoned dance at Tsingtao's Russian church. When there wasn't enough copy to fill the half page, he wrote articles himself, with headlines like "What Should Youth Do?" and "Youth Responds to the Current Crisis." He took to conducting all his correspondence on the newspaper letterhead, and signed every letter "Editor, Youth Section." He even started smoking because, as he said afterwards, "It befitted my new status as a newspaper editor."

The newspaper office was on the second floor of a somnolent old German bank building in downtown Tsingtao. It was near the end of a dim corridor of pebbled glass doors, between a Chinese accounting firm and a mysterious import-export company. Nick's happiest hours were spent there -- especially after the editor had gone home and he could stay late into the night, smoking his cigarettes and reading the newest wire-service copy. He followed the progress of the war with consuming fascination. It was difficult to make out exactly what was happening, because the copy was censored, but the drift came through unmistakably: major Japanese victories, the Americans desperately falling back throughout the Pacific. Nick was rooting for the Americans, of course: in recent years, his childhood passion for the Wild West and had deepened into an enthusiasm for the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. And then, too, he had come to detest the Japanese for the way they were behaving in China. He hadn't seen anything happen in Tsingtao, but like everybody else he had heard atrocity stories; when the Japanese had captured the city of Nanking in 1937, people said that tens of thousands of Chinese had been massacred. (One history published recently, The Rape of Nanking, puts the number in the hundreds of thousands.)

Nick was particularly worried about Victor in Shanghai. Around the time Nick and his family had left, the growing chaos in the Badlands was threatening to swamp the whole city; and with the coming of the war, the neutrality of the International Settlement was at an end. The whole of Shanghai was under fierce martial law. Most of the Americans and Europeans who hadn't already left were taken off to internment camps; the Russians had been permitted to stay, but they were harassed and tormented by the Japanese occupying army in a way that the people of Tsingtao had been spared. Victor didn't mention any of these problems in his letters -- instead they contained mocking allusions to dirty jokes that made Nick blush -- but Nick found that suspicious in itself: if Victor had been all right, he would have been boasting of his dangerous adventures.

One day Nick mentioned his worries to his editor. He was surprised when the editor responded by questioning him closely on Victor's background and character. A bigger surprise happened a couple of weeks later: without a word of warning, Victor showed up in Tsingtao. He was carrying a pass stamped by dozens of ideographs and an official letter stating in Japanese and Russian that his presence was urgently needed by the local Anti-Communist Committee.

That was obviously untrue; as Nick remembered it in the oral history, "There actually wasn't anything for Victor to do at the newspaper or the Committee." But Nick and his parents was delighted to have him back, even if he did seem oddly subdued. He refused to say anything at all about what had happened to him in Shanghai. But he was surprised that Tsingtao's Russians were so relaxed around Japanese soldiers.

Nick was deeply impressed by his editor's clout. It confirmed all his old daydreams about the glory and importance of newspapers. He didn't stop to wonder how it was that the editor could have this kind of influence with the Japanese -- or at least he didn't wonder until a couple of months later, when letters arrived for him and Victor from the chairman of the Tsingtao Committee informing them they were being drafted by the Japanese Army.

***

They were sent to Tientsin, an industrial port city midway between Tsingtao and Peking. That was where the Japanese had set up a cadet school for Russian boys. The school was outside of town, where a factory district gave way to wide fields and rice paddies. The campus was really nothing more than a battered barracks and a couple of derelict warehouses that had been converted into schoolrooms and a makeshift gym. There were a scattering of Chinese servants, and a couple of bored Japanese guards; one of the teachers was Japanese, while the other two, and the school commandant, were old White Russian soldiers. There were around forty boys from White Russian enclaves the length of the Japanese empire, from Harbin to Singapore.

The boys were drilled endlessly. Much of it was the training they would have gotten at any military school -- parade, rifle practice, calisthenics. But they were also taught Japanese techniques of self-defense, and hand-to-hand combat with bamboo rods. And then there was the core subject, the heart of their routine: every day, three hours a day, they learned Japanese.

Their commandant explained to them why they'd been drafted. The school was a tiny part of Japan's long-range plans for its new empire. Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union with the goal of capturing all its territory eastward to the Urals; once this succeeded -- and the news of the final victory was expected any day -- Japan intended to move in from the other direction and conquer Siberia and Central Asia. They were going to need Russian officers fluent in Japanese who could act as interpreters during a prolonged military occupation, and that was why they had instructed the Committees to keep their eyes out for likely cadets.

Many of the boys at the school were already committed to the cause of overthrowing the Soviet Union, with or without Japanese backing. It was a common daydream of young White Russian exiles in those days, just as boys in the American South dreamed of refighting and winning the Battle of Gettysburg. A few of the other boys thought the whole idea was a farce -- and they would sometimes say so during the surreptitious nightly debates the cadets conducted after lights out. Victor seemed indifferent; he was mostly interested in figuring out if it was possible to sneak away from the school long enough to explore Tsientsin.

Nick had no idea what to think. Such grand issues were impossible for him to take personally: he saw the Russian Revolution as such a vast and primordial event that he couldn't imagine what his life would have been like without it. Nor did he want to collaborate with the Japanese, on this or anything else; he simply felt that he had no choice about being at the school. "If I'd refused to go," he said in the oral history, "I would have undoubtedly been arrested by the Japanese military police." So he resigned himself to his situation, and allowed himself to be carried passively along through the weeks and months of lessons and calisthenics and military drills. His chief feeling for quite a while was sheer relief at being away from his parents.

The school existed apart from the larger world; the boys heard little from home and nothing whatever about the war. During the summer and into the fall they spent hours clacking and slapping their bamboo sticks at each other on the wildflower-strewn fields at the edge of the school grounds. By winter they were being taught more elaborate tactical games, most of them military versions of hide-and-seek; they took great delight crashing along through the veils of ice on the rice paddies and stalking and ambushing each other with unloaded rifles among stands of frozen reeds. In the dead of winter the games were often cancelled and the cadets instead had to police the grounds: the winds often came from the northwest during those months, and brought sifting down everywhere cindery black showers of frozen sand, blown hundreds of miles from the remoteness of the Gobi Desert.

The second year was much the same. The only unusual event came one winter evening when soldiers arrived with a prisoner that they locked in the brig overnight. They took him away the next morning without saying a word. But a rumor went around the school anyway that the prisoner was a downed American pilot.

Nick himself was put in the brig a couple of times that second year. Once was for being five minutes late for dinner -- he got two days for that. Then one of the other cadets had been caught stealing, and Nick was the ringleader who organized the punishment: after lights out the cadets pinned the thief to his bunk and lashed him with their belts. Nick was sentenced to three days in the brig (while the thief was expelled). This time he complained so bitterly about the conditions -- the bad food, the hard bunk, the absence of blankets -- that the guards had to remind him he was being punished.

Still, by then he'd come to love being at the school and was becoming increasingly depressed that his time there was almost up. He idolized the school commandant and the Japanese teacher -- perhaps it's no coincidence that they were men like his father, very aloof and imperious, with a regal military bearing. When graduation day came he was almost in tears at the thought of leaving them. The ceremony was held at the end of summer, in the little parade ground between the barracks -- a desolate plot of cracked concrete, fringed by florid weeds. Nick and Victor were both commissioned as lieutenants. They weren't sure what to expect: a posting to some battle zone deep in Asia, perhaps. But instead they were simply told to return home and await further orders.

So they rode the train back to Tsingtao together. It had been two years since they'd been outside the school grounds, and they were vaguely surprised to see how little changed were the vistas of fields and rice paddies unfolding on either side of the railroad tracks. The passengers looked no different -- they could have been the same crowd of soldiers, businessmen and peasants who'd ridden with them the last time. But then Nick noticed something new: at the other end of the car, a Japanese soldier was drunk and causing a disturbance. All the years Nick had lived in China, he'd never seen any Japanese soldier display such a shocking breach of military discipline. It was at that moment that he understood what was going on: why there had been no talk at the ceremony of the great crusade against the Bolsheviks, why the cadets had all been sent home without orders. Japan was losing the war.

***

Tsingtao had preserved its isolation from the outside world. There were no bombed streets or gutted buildings; the rooftops still glinted peacefully within the ring of the harbor. But Nick and Victor were disturbed to find decay everywhere. The familiar houses had all gotten shabbier, the parks were unkempt, and paint was peeling from balustrades; nothing had been built or repaired in years. The people on the streets, both Chinese and Russian, looked scrawny and unhealthy. While the city was better off than a lot of China -- by then there was famine throughout the country -- food was tightly rationed and there were continual shortages. The soldiers from the Japanese garrison were the most alarming sight of all: they looked like undernourished children. When their superiors weren't looking, they were known to beg the townspeople for food.

But the Russian enclave in Tsingtao was hanging on, and it welcomed the two new lieutenants back like heroes. Friends brought out their hoarded food so there could be a proper banquet; everyone in the taverns bought them drinks; within a day or two of their arrival, people had arranged jobs for them. The Committee's newspaper had ceased publication -- there was a newsprint shortage -- so Nick began teaching Japanese at the Russian school. Victor meanwhile was hired by the biggest law office in town as an interpreter. After that, the next issue to be dealt with was their eligibility on the marriage market. They were good-looking, they had prestige, and they had just turned twenty; it was time for them to find wives.

While Nick had been away, his mother Irina had picked out a bride for him. She was a pretty and sweet girl named Vera, the daughter of a local shop-owner. A dance was arranged so they could be formally introduced. All the young Russians in the town were there. The dance was a disaster, as far as Irina was concerned: Vera only had eyes for Victor, who was being particularly dashing that evening. Irina was furious, and thought Nick should confront Victor over flirting so shamelessly with his intended -- a situation that might have ended up as a scene from a Russian classic novel, with Nick and Victor fighting a duel at dawn. But Nick didn't care about Vera. He'd met somebody else at the dance and had instantly fallen in love.

Her name was Maria Solokovskaya. Her family had been wealthy landholders in Siberia; her father and grandfather had owned gold mines. Since the Revolution, they had followed the same wandering track through China as Nick's family had: first several years in Harbin, where Maria and her brothers and sisters had been born, then Shanghai during the 1930's, and then Tsingtao. But Maria was a couple of years older than Nick, and had led a much less sheltered life in Shanghai. She and her sisters had worked as dance-hall hostesses and movie-theater usherettes, and had gone to all the glamourous parties; there's a photograph from the late Thirties showing Maria, in her most stylish clothes, attending a party on a yacht at anchor in the Huangpu River -- she's surrounded by glittering European aristocrats, and behind them, hanging from the yacht's rigging, are swastika banners.

Maria was beautiful and ferociously intelligent, but her family considered her odd: so odd, in fact, that they thought she was unmarriagable. She could, when she made the effort, be as flirty and charming as her sisters; but she preferred to stay in her room reading books. Sometimes she would refuse at the last minute to come to some party that had been arranged for her benefit. The guests would be waiting downstairs, and her father and mother would plead with her in vain to unlock her door. She had only come to this particular dance as a kind of gesture to her family to prove she could still be agreeable. But she had quickly grown bored, and was more inclined than usual to be tart to any young man who dared address her.

Nick was enchanted. However aloof she seemed, he laughed uproariously at her every insult, and by the end of the evening was pestering her unrelentingly for a date.

What did she see in Nick? By the time I knew her, almost forty years later, she never talked about him at all; the way she told it to me, the one true love of her life had been an American soldier she'd known in Shanghai before the war ("His name was Billy," she said; "and he had beautiful eyes") and when he disappeared she had resigned herself to spinsterhood. But she must have been impressed by Nick's implacable determination to court her. She once told her daughter Nina how Nick had persuaded her to accept his proposal: the first time they were alone together, a couple of weeks after the dance, he had taken his revolver from his pocket, pressed it to his temple, and solemnly promised her that if she didn't immediately agree to marry him he would pull the trigger.

They were married the following spring, in Tsingtao's little Orthodox church. It was the same church where, a month later, Victor married Vera. As Nick and Maria and the rest of their wedding party emerged from the ceremony, a swarm of Japanese planes rose from the airfield into the gorgeous afternoon light and went roaring and sputtering across the sky directly overhead, on their way to bomb something just on the other side of the hills. That was, Nick later said, the closest the war ever got to Tsingtao.

***

Nick was always an early riser, and it was his habit in the first days of his marriage to sneak out of the house at dawn and bring breakfast back for Maria. They were living then in a beautiful apartment in one of the richest sections of Tsingtao, with a spectacular view of the harbor. They'd never have been able to afford it ordinarily, but the war had created a lot of bargains: the landlady was letting them have it in exchange for half their monthly flour ration. Down the road was a little cluster of stores surrounding a German bakery. It was one of Nick's favorite places: in the summer dawn the windblown scents of pine sap and acacia leaves were suffused with the heady odor of hot sugared flour.

One August morning he was standing outside the bakery about to head back home when his eye was caught by the newspapers tacked up outside the Chinese grocery store. The dawn wind was blowing off the harbor, pale shafts of light were falling across the street, and the newspapers were flapping like banners: the huge ideographs wildly blinked as though signalling a warning. Nick still couldn't speak Chinese -- but Chinese and Japanese are close enough so that he was able to do a rough translation of the mysterious headlines. "Thunder From Heaven Destroys Japanese City," they read. He went home to wake Maria with the news of what had happened at Hiroshima.

A few days afterwards, American planes began passing over Tsingtao. They mostly flew so high they couldn't be seen, but it was easy to recognize them: for years, everybody had gotten used to the sound of Japanese airplane engines buzzing and knocking their way across the sky, barely staying aloft on their low-octane fuel; the American planes soared with engines of sweet humming efficiency. Then one morning the town woke to find an American battleship sitting silently in the harbor. The next day, there were a couple more; by week's end, there was a whole bristling forest of them. They were waiting for the official surrender of the Japanese garrison. When the day arrived for the transfer of power, the people of Tsingtao lined the streets and swarmed the rooftops to watch the Americans come ashore. Nick described the scene in the oral history. "We were flabbergasted. The endless lines of six-by-six trucks and jeeps and personnel carriers, artillery battalions, tanks which snaked through the streets of Tsingtao in never-ending columns -- it was beyond description and beyond our comprehension. It was obvious the Japanese didn't have a tenth the firepower and technical support the Americans had."

The Americans took over the airfield and turned it into a major base. Soon the streets of Tsingtao were crowded with American marines, and the old placidity of the city was obliterated by honky-tonk sleaze. Nick remembered: "Every second business on the main street of Tsingtao became a nightclub. A few weeks before, it was a haberdashery, a five and ten store, a drugstore, a small family restaurant -- now it had a bar and a floor show. There were drunken fights on the streets and all kinds of troubles between soldiers and civilians."

But soon even those who resented the Americans' arrival were looking for a way to cash in. Nick's parents Irina and Nikolai found one: they put a sign up on one of the base's bulletin boards saying they would serve home-cooked meals in their kitchen for any soldier who wanted a break from the military mess. "There was a little bit of a problem with that," Nick once told me, in a confidential tone. "My mother wasn't really a very good cook." But it didn't matter; within a day, they had a full seating for eight and a waiting list. Nick himself quit his job at the school -- he had no pupils anyway, since nobody now had a reason to learn Japanese -- and got a job at the base as a laborer. The Americans were always building something new out there, a new runway or bunker or warehouse, and they were always willing to pay somebody else to do the work.

Nick did his job diligently and well -- he was always a good worker, no matter who his employer was -- and he was soon promoted to foreman. This was his first real exposure to Americans. They perplexed him. He had vaguely thought they'd be idealistic, happy, and honest, like they were in the newsreels. But they were cynical, vulgar, bigoted, and mysterious. They lived according to a code of etiquette that he found inscrutable: they were constantly insulting and belittling you and yet were forever bristling at imagined slights. Where was the democratic pride and openness he'd so long admired? He cautiously decided that the soldiers at the base must not be typical.

***

About a year after the Americans arrived, news began to circulate among the Russians of Tsingtao about another unexpected consequence of the war's end. The Soviet Union announced a general offer of repatriation for all White Russians still in exile. Anyone who had fled during the Revolution or the Civil War, or any of their children born in foreign countries, could enter the Soviet Union and receive full citizenship. There was a furious debate about this offer in Tsingtao, as there was in all the surviving White Russian enclaves scattered around the world. Most people assumed it was just one of Stalin's lies. Anyone foolish enough to accept, they said, would be sent immediately to the Gulag or else be shot. But there were a few who were more hopeful. They were worn out by the endless uncertainty of the emigre life, the decades of irrelevant defiance and useless hope; they were sick of subsisting on the dubious tolerance of foreign governments; maybe some of them just wanted to return to a place where everybody spoke Russian. In the end, Nick knew two people who decided to accept the offer. One was Maria's oldest brother Donat; the other was Victor.

Donat was the smartest of the Solokovsky children; he was also the most contrary and contentious. He was an engineer -- the sort of hands-on person who could fix anything around the house with indifferent ease while simultaneously haranguing you about some grotesque stupidity he'd just read in the morning newspaper. He had even less of a social sense than Nick did. The Solokovsky family liked to tell the story of a dinner party they'd once given for a distinguished old White Russian general: as the guest of honor retold several of his favorite anecdotes from the Civil War, Donat began fuming over what he saw as their inaccuracies and improbabilities, and at last, just before dessert, he burst out with the furious cry "You're a liar!" and stormed out of the dining room. The family joked that if he really did try to get into the Soviet Union, he'd probably provoke a fistfight with a KGB agent at the border.

As for Victor -- he was bored with Tsingtao and wanted something new. His marriage was a misery. His wife had proved to be timid, vague, and useless (except when it came to his fondness for carousing -- there she was blazingly furious). His job at the law office was going nowhere. He detested the Americans; he thought they were so pervasively criminal they made him look like the soul of honesty. He began talking about the Soviet Union in terms that he had once contemptuously mocked -- it was the future of the world, the idealistic alternative to the corruptions of the West. Nick couldn't believe he was serious. Besides, there was the matter of how he'd spent the war: as Nick remembered, "I warned him he'd be in incredible danger if they found out what the cadet school was for." But who knew? Maybe Stalin's Russia was exactly the sort of place where he'd flourish.

Donat and Victor set off together. They'd never met before the day of departure; but as they sailed away from Tsingtao they looked to Nick and their other friends and family waving goodbye from the dock like two old companions in an epic poem -- the classically handsome White Russian aristocrat and the exotic half-Chinese ne'er-do-well. The ship took them northward to Vladivostok, where they were to cross into the Soviet Union. Nick and everybody in Tsingtao waited eagerly for word of their further adventures. But no word ever came.

***

Nick never said so, but I think he was relieved to have Victor gone. Their friendship had been slowly dwindling from its peak in Shanghai; in the oral history, Nick barely mentions Victor's presence at the cadet school, and after their return to Tsingtao he talks mostly about how irritating and irresponsible his old friend had become. He says he has no idea what happened to Victor in the Soviet Union, and plainly has no interest in finding out. His whole relationship with Victor was something of an aberration anyway; Nick was not somebody who sought out or could sustain close friendships. Never in his later life did he have another friend like Victor, and he went for long periods with no friends at all.

During those years in Tsingtao, he also began withdrawing from his parents. Their relationship had deteriorated since his return from the cadet school, and his marriage only accelerated it. Nikolai and Irina never liked Maria; they thought she was haughty and strange. (She returned the favor: despite their aristocratic pretensions, she made no secret of regarding them as ill-mannered peasants.) But they also subjected Nick to a steady drone of unsolicited advice and complaint about everything else in his life. They thought it was ridiculous that he was working at such a menial job at the airbase; it proved his basic lack of seriousness as a person. They told him what clothes he should wear, what food he should eat, what books he should read ... he never argued, but would simply stare at them with sullen resentment and then walk away.

But then Nikolai was offered a new job back in Shanghai. The American Navy was looking for mechanical engineers to work at a naval base they'd built near the old Settlement. Nikolai immediately accepted, and he and Irina left Tsingtao in the winter of 1946. From then on, their harassment was reduced to a trickle of erratically-delivered letters and strained phone calls on roaringly loud connections.

Nick was alone with Maria, and that was the way he wanted it. He felt perfectly happy for the first time in his life. He loved being married to her. He did find that she was moodier than she'd seemed at first, but he admired her feistiness and intelligence. She had read more deeply in the Russian classics than he had (he respected the great writers, but fiction and poetry generally bored him) and she was always willing to argue with him about ideas. They spent whole days strolling together around the city and the surrounding countryside, debating and laughing. In the evenings they often took a blanket and picnic basket down to the beach and watched the light fade over the ocean.

But Nick knew their idyll was going to be short-lived. He was still a devoted reader of newspapers, and he was following with increasing concern the progress of the Chinese revolution. He had always felt removed from all that; he never thought he had any stake on what was happening in China. "China was just the place I happened to live," he said in the oral history. "I never learned any Chinese, or had any Chinese acquaintances. There was an insuperable cultural barrier between my life and theirs." Still, he'd never felt this was a problem: "All my years in China," he remembered, "I'd never felt any direct hostility from any Chinese person." But now that was changing. He understood that there must have been a lot of long-smoldering, unappeasable resentment of these millions of invading foreigners who'd built their own cities on Chinese soil, ignored Chinese laws, and trampled on Chinese culture. As the Communist armies spread out from Manchuria into the inner provinces in 1947, Nick realized it was only a matter of time before he and the other foreigners in Tsingtao were driven out.

By 1948, Tsingtao was cut off from the Chinese interior. The Red Army now controlled most of the countryside beyond the ring of sheltering hills; no traffic came through on the roads, and no planes were flying from in-country. The townspeople were dependent for their supplies on the neutral ships still carrying on their trade among the cities of the coast. And then, too, there was the big American base providing protection -- but that prop was gradually being removed. Throughout 1948 the Americans were departing. One by one, the big transport planes flew off eastward and didn't return; the thicket of military ships in the harbor was unobtrusively dwindling. Business began to dry up in the nightclubs and brothels of Tsingtao, and a lot of the townspeople were themselves selling out and departing China for good. Nick kept going out to the base each day, but was almost always told that there was no new construction work for his crew, check back tomorrow.

At the end of the year, the Americans officially announced they were closing the base. That was when the current chairman of the long-moribund Anti-Communist Committee came back to Tsingtao with news of a deal: he and the other Committee bigshots had gotten the new United Nations International Relief Organization to agree to evacuate all Russian exiles still in China.

In January of 1949, one last American ship appeared in the harbor. It was a US Navy LST, sent to pick up the thousand or so Russians who hadn't yet left Tsingtao. The scene was chaotic. The UN relief workers had set an absolute limit of 250 pounds of luggage per person -- "which is almost nothing," Nick says, "when you're talking about a lifetime's worth of possessions." Countless mementoes and treasures were being abandoned on the docks: albums and heirloom silver and hand-crafted furniture and lovingly-assembled libraries that had been saved from the wreckage of Russia were now tossed behind in the scramble to escape. Nick didn't own many such things himself, but he did have one family heirloom: his mother's beloved old china set, rescued from Vladivostok long ago and left behind with him when his parents moved to Shanghai. He had carefully packed it in a steamer trunk for the voyage. Two sailors lifting the trunk into the hold let it slip; it fell to the dock with a crash, and then slid off the planks and vanished into the water.

***

The ship sailed south along the coast to Shanghai. There the refugees were given temporary shelter while the UN arranged for another ship to carry them out of China. They stayed in a deserted French army base. It was the middle of winter, and Shanghai was clammy and cold. Nick and the others spent their days pacing disconsolately around the base grounds among the long lines of rusting barracks and past the abandoned warehouses, and peering out through the barbed-wire fences at the desolate streets of the International Settlement.

The Settlement was a sad remnant of what it once had been. Most of the mansions and big apartment houses had stood empty for a decade, and during the later years of the war, the Japanese had gutted them for anything they could possibly use: furniture, wood panelling, plumbing fixtures, fabrics. They'd torn out the radiators from the floors for the brass and dug the wiring out of the walls for the copper. Afterwards few of the original owners had seen any point in returning and rebuilding, not with the revolution gathering force. Even the Russians who'd lasted through the war had already been evacuated by the UN. For hours at a time, there was no movement in the old, ornate streets but the last American military patrols.

In the middle of February, the refugees were taken from the compound down to the docks along the Huangpu River, where an enormous chartered transport ship was waiting. It crawled down the Huangpu to the mouth of the Yangtse, and from there into the open waters of the China Sea. Nick said later he felt nothing as he watched the low coastline of China sink below the horizon, never to be seen again: "I never really got interested in China as a place until years after I left." Instead he watched impassively as the ship thundered on into the Pacific. For days there was nothing to look at but empty water. But the weather grew gradually warmer, as though the seasons were passing, and green islands began to edge their way across the horizon lines. They were sailing through the Philippine archipelago: island after island glided past them, shrouded in lushness and mist, some of them almost close enough to touch. One morning a smudge appeared dead ahead, and failed to swerve to the side as they came near; it widened and flattened into a tangled line of palm trees. It was the island of Tubabao, just east of Leyte. There, on a derelict American Navy base left over from the invasion of the Philipines, the UN Relief Organization had set up a refugee camp.

***

The camp held several thousand people -- the last remaining White Russian exiles from China. Nick always remembered the shock he felt when he got his first glimpse of the Russians already in the camp. They all looked naked. He was from a culture that believed it was indecent for a man to appear in mixed company with his collar unbuttoned -- and here were thousands of men and women walking around in shorts and rubber-tire sandals. The women had their bare arms exposed; some of the men weren't even wearing shirts. Nick's horror deepened when he made his way through the swarming camp to find his parents. They'd been evacuated here from Shanghai a month earlier, and were already thoroughly at home. They were sprawled out in front of their tent in lawn chairs, dressed in little more than their underwear, complacently accumulating suntans.

Nikolai had already taken charge of the situation with his usual decisiveness. He, like most of the camp, wanted to go on to America; but the UN workers had said that they couldn't get in unless they could find an American citizen to sponsor them. So he and Irina had immediately written to all the soldiers who had come to their daily homecooked lunches in Tsingtao. One of them had quickly written back to say that he and his parents in Rockford, Illinois would be proud to be their sponsors. Nikolai had taken the letter to the camp's administrative office (a rotting quonset hut at the edge of the jungle); and the suprised officials there had told him that he and his family should expect to receive permission to enter America within two months.

So for the moment there was nothing for Nick and Maria and the rest of the family to do but wait with everybody else. That wasn't difficult: the island was a beautiful place. The days were hot and serene, the sunsets ravishing, and the nights so glassy it was like being suspended upside down over a well of stars. There was a big lagoon on the east shore where everyone went swimming: the encircling reef was perpetually exploding with froth, but the waters within were pale and calm; you could see every pebble and darting fish ten or twenty feet down. There were no hidden dangers anywhere, no hostile natives or mysterious predators lurking in the jungle; the worst menace on the whole island was a species of poisonous caterpillar, brilliant and furry red, that would sometimes creep across your exposed skin while you slept and leave a trail of angry welts.

And there were rats. Nick never found out if they were indigenous or had come as stowaways on the American Navy ships, but they had overrun the island. On calm nights you could hear them in the jungle, hundreds of thousands of them, scrabbling up and down the palm trees and rustling the fronds. They got into everything -- the tents, the offices, the warehouses. They ate their way into crates of rations and once devoured an entire shipment of badly-packed soap. The one place they didn't invade was Nick and Maria's tent.

Maria came up with a brilliant solution to the rat problem: she adopted one as a pet. She fed it regularly and allowed it to sleep in a little nest of ragged clothes underneath her cot. It was shy around her and Nick; they went for days without getting more than a glimpse of it. But it was fiercely territorial when it came to other rats, and defended the tent against their incursions with unrelenting savagery. The result was that Nick and Maria were the only people on the island who didn't have to keep their food in a locked trunk. Maria recommended her solution to everybody: but there were no takers. Even Nick was uncomfortable about it. He wasn't so much bothered by the rat as by how it looked; he thought it reinforced the general belief that Maria was crazy.

Meanwhile the months slipped by with no word about their entry into America. Partly out of necessity, and partly out of boredom, the residents worked on elaborate projects around the camp. They salvaged wrecked trucks from the old motor pool and cannibalized their parts to get some of them running. They built big communal open-air kitchens and installed rows of war-surplus propane stoves. They managed to recondition two abandoned electric generators, and hung the camp with crisscrossing spiderwebs of wire; soon the tents were all lit up from within at night like magic lanterns. They dammed one of the island's little freshwater streams and piped the water to tanks scattered through the camp. Nikolai was put in charge of that project, because of his old job with the Water Works, and he ordered people about with great satisfaction.

Nick hoped for an important appointment himself: he wanted to be put in charge of the camp newspaper. (One of the warehouses had yielded an ancient typewriter and a mimeograph machine.) He assumed he was entitled, because he had after all been a newspaper editor. But the posts were filled by a university professor and a couple of reporters from a big Shanghai daily; they snorted in disbelief at Nick's qualifications. Instead he was assigned to break rocks at the quarry for the new roads.

The camp developed its own social life and culture. It was like a concentrated version of Nick's whole past: virtually all the White Russians in Asia were now crammed into this makeshift village. His parents' tent was five rows east and six north; his other in-laws (evacuated from Shanghai and Indonesia) were scattered in a narrow circle to the south. He bumped into classmates from the Russian school in Shanghai and his editor at the Tsingtao paper. Everybody knew everybody else, and they all loved to gossip: who was having affairs, who had found American sponsors, who was a big wheel with the UN officials... they all knew that Nick was the one with the strange wife; they sometimes joked that she had some sort of secret fairytale arrangement with the rats.

Still, Nick wasn't unhappy. The society of the camp may have been a kind of a mirage, with its future unknown and its present circumstances precarious at best -- but that any different from the enclaves and refuges he'd been living in his entire life? Day by day, he was content. He didn't mind working in the quarry; he'd always liked hard work. Back at the tent, he became something of an amateur handyman, trying out new projects and ideas: in an ambitious mood he fashioned a private shower for Maria out of a big old corroded oil drum (it didn't work very well, but she loved having it anyway). And he came to enjoy the cultural life of the camp. Every week the relief workers brought in battered prints of old Hollywood movies, and the whole camp gathered to watch them. The professional musicians gave concerts, as did an amateur choral society. In a clearing by a row of derelict barracks -- it had been the basketball court, in the days of the American navy -- some of the inmates built a raised stage out of palmtree planking and old oil drums, and there the actors from the Russian theaters in Shanghai and Harbin put on plays. That was the first time Nick saw Hamlet: performed in a Russian translation by half-naked actors slashing with wooden swords on a bare stage, against a backdrop of windswept palm trees on a starlit tropical night.

Towards the end of their first year, the camp had an important visitor. The President of the Philippines, Elpidio Quarino, came in for a visit and made a speech to the assembled refugees officially welcoming them all as "honored guests." But he said nothing about how long they would be his guests or what would happen to them afterwards. A few months after that, they got a more hopeful sign: a United States Senator, William Knowland, arrived for an afternoon and made a speech promising them that any time now, the Displaced Persons Bill would be approved by Congress and they would be able to enter America.

The day after he left, the UN officials posted notices informing them that America would not let them in and they should make alternative plans.

A bitter joke went around camp: the Americans had gotten so paranoid and xenophobic they thought an "anti-Communist" must be some particularly horrible variety of Communist. Everyone's mood was sour. Nor did morale improve when, a few days later, an official delegation from Australia arrived and announced that the refugees were welcome to come to their country instead -- that is, assuming they were willing to sign employment contracts as manual laborers at the big sheep farms in the Outback. The delegation handed out color brochures describing the excitement and challenge of Australian frontier; they'd even brought an hour-long movie showing the good life awaiting them. "It had a lot of scenes of farmers plowing fields with teams of horses," Nick said. "It wasn't very enticing to professional people from a big city like Shanghai." The Australians got few takers.

After they left, a senior UN official arrived and made a speech accusing the Russians of being ungrateful and obstructionist. Nick said: "It was very rude, and it was finally too much for us. There was almost a riot. His aides had to hustle him into his jeep and drive him out of the camp as quickly as possible." That was the last important visitor they got.

A month or so later, Nick fell sick with dengue fever. He spent six weeks lying on a cot in the camp infirmary, too weak to move. His recovery afterwards was slow and dispiriting. "I sank into a depression," he remembered: "a deep black apathy." He didn't go back to work at the quarry. Instead he spent whole days sprawled out by the lagoon, idly watching the silent movement of clouds over the ocean. "There we were stuck in the middle of that Godforsaken jungle. Nobody cared about us. We were forgotten by everyone."

That was where he was dozing, one afternoon towards the end of their second year on the island, when he saw something strange on the eastern horizon. The clouds were thickening in a confused mob, as though the sky and the sea were blurred. Little flickers of lightning were illuminating the cauliflower-head cloud tops, rose-tinted in the glow of late afternoon, and clusters of small black clouds were skimming in hurrying platoons across the shadowy offshore waters. Showers began to ruffle the calm lagoon, and the waves were shattering on the reef in a deep relentless rage. By the time Nick got back to the camp, the air was heavy with sinister foreboding. Even Maria's pet rat had fled back to the jungle to hide.

The next day was overcast and blustery, and sourceless grumbles of thunder could be heard underneath the roar of the surf. That afternoon the UN workers ordered everybody to move into the few solid structures on the island: the old navy barracks, the hangar, and the warehouse. They all dragged in their cots and a few necessities each; the rest of their belongings they had to leave behind in their tents. Nick and Maria were in the barracks. They and everyone else spent the remainder of the daylight arranging the cots, boarding up the windows and patching the rotting roof.

The leading edge of the typhoon passed over the island towards sundown. By morning its full fury was falling on them: the roar of rain on the corrugated metal roofing was so loud you couldn't hear anybody speak. The generator failed, and the electric lights went out; the cavernous space was lit only by dim shafts of gray light streaming from gaps in the planking across the windows. The storm seemed to become stronger as they day wore on. Nick remembered: "I kept thinking it couldn't get any worse than this, and then it would." By nightfall the roof was leaking in countless places; runnels of warm rain came cascading down through the darkness, and everyone sat hunched together holding big sheets of plastic over their heads. After nightfall, as they miserably tried to sleep, a big patch gave way and a ragged hole in the metal roofing began to shriek in the wind like a trapped demon. Around midnight there was a shatteringly loud roar from somewhere nearby, one that woke up everybody in terror: just a lightning strike, they told each other reasssuringly, and settled back down to pass the night.

By morning the typhoon had dwindled. The rain was still falling, and the palm trees in the jungle were still tossing and quivering in the wind like exhausted dancers, but the blackest of the clouds were now in the west, and the sky overhead was a routine dreary overcast. Everybody emerged blinking into the gray light to find out what the storm had done to them.

The camp was gone. The thousands of tents had all torn loose from their stakes and had sailed off to sea. Only a stray torn panels could be seen here and there dangling from distant treetops, like the banners of a defeated army. The open-air kitchens were a ruin: one of the propane tanks had exploded (that was the blast they'd heard) and had sent the stoves flying into craters of mud. The generators were useless water-logged hulks. Everyone's belongings, the 250 pounds each they'd rescued from China, were scattered in thin haphazard heaps all through the jungle. Scraps of letters, wadded-up clothes, sodden photographs were tangled in the underbrush; trunks and suitcases were blown open and filled with rainwater. For days afterwards people were spotting gleams of gold and silver -- antique watch chains or irreplacable necklaces -- half-buried in the dried mud around the roots of trees.

After that, everybody seemed to catch Nick's apathy. Nobody wanted to repair the dam or get the generators going again; they could barely bring themselves to stake out fresh tents. (At least there was no shortage there: one of the warehouses contained an inexhaustible supply of them, left behind years before by an advancing marine division). For days, everyone moved in sullen slow motion. But then one morning they were roused by a new noise: people shouting and calling in excitement, a confused uproar of people running up and down the path through the jungle. Everyone followed the shouting down to the lagoon, and there they discovered an amazing sight: a US Navy transport ship had appeared beyond the reef, like a giant metal mushroom that had popped up after the storm. Nick was so lost in gloom that he was convinced it had merely brought fresh supplies for the rebuilding of the camp. But he was wrong. It really was there to take them to America.

***

The first sight Nick had of his new homeland came as the ship sailed into San Francisco Bay. It was a peculiar moment for him. He'd been expecting a scene of swarming confusion like those in the port cities of China; instead there was nothing but stillness and darkness. It was a foggy night in late autumn, and the ship glided slowly across expanses of empty water, past remote hooting fog horns and clanging buoys hidden in the mist. As Nick peered into the fog he could only see hints of the city in the hills -- a distant spangle of blurred glitter, alluring and mysterious.

Then there was a weary wait of several hours in a dockside warehouse, where the customs and immigration officers had set up a makeshift receiving area. The fog pressed in at all the windows and the night was thick with the mysterious sounds of the harbor: shrill bells, metallic thuds and crashes, grinding engines, inexplicable sirens. Nick passed the time by trying to imagine what was going on in the city beyond the warehouse doors. He didn't find out until just before dawn, when he and his family had their last papers stamped. Their sponsors had already mailed them train tickets; the immigration officers painstakingly translated and explained the directions to the station. Then they all stepped out into the night together. The city was deserted. The streets were silent tunnels of mist; the interminable houserows, mounting out of sight on the steep hills, were all dark, shrouded, and threatening. It looked to Nick like Shanghai after the evacuation.

By early morning they were on a train thundering deep into the countryside. Nick couldn't believe how sparsely settled the land was. Hour after hour, the windows showed nothing but slowly shifting vistas of desolate forest and scrubland. Only at rare intervals was there any sign of human presence -- an isolated farmhouse, a little black line of telegraph poles strung along an immense tawny hillside, a battered roadsign on an ill-defined dirt track. At evening he glimpsed, in impossibly remote valleys, villages shimmering like a few strewn pearls. The next day there were only mountains, enormous and cold; and beyond them were featureless plains of windblown snow. Nick felt as though he'd come not to a new world but to an uninhabited one.

***

They were all dismayed by Rockford. They had been expecting one of America's fabulous cosmopolitan cities, gleaming with wealth and excitement; the train left them in an industrial town deep in a wintry countryside. Their sponsors were nice people but appeared to think that everybody in China lived in mud huts: on the first day, they took their guests on a proud tour, plainly expecting them to be dazzled by Rockford's meager attractions -- the corner drugstore and soda fountain, the little downtown movie theater, the car dealership near the main highway, the glass and steel roadside diner where the truckers ate ... for once Maria spoke for the whole family: she kept saying in Russian, "Well, it's just like some little peasant village, isn't it?" No one could figure out a way of translating this so as not to cause offense.

Within a few weeks, Nick's parents made plans to move on. They'd gotten in touch with the White Russians already in America -- here and there were city neighborhoods of White Russians dating back to the first wave of emigration, comfortingly familiar places with Russian bakeries and teahouses and bookstores, where a distant relative or a friend of a friend could always be counted on to come through with a job or an apartment. Most of the people they knew from the refugee camp were already getting settled in these places; some of Maria's family had gone east to New York, and some west to Sacramento, California. Irina and Nikolai decided to return to San Francisco, where there was a big Russian enclave in the Richmond district. Nick and Maria stayed behind.

Nick had always believed America meant a fresh start -- which for him meant a fresh start without his parents around. He decided to make a go of it in Rockford. He didn't like it any better than the rest of his family did, but it had the advantage of being as far away as possible from anybody he knew. So, as his relatives found their way into jobs and friendships and supportive communities around the country, Nick spent his first winter in America selling encyclopedias door to door.

He must have been a strange apparition to his potential customers -- tall and scrawny, fumbling calamitously with his sample case, and speaking in a Russian accent so thick he came off like a comic book spy. He was a hopeless salesman: simultaneously pushy, whiny, deferential, self-righteous, and incomprehensible. There was also the unexpected problem that, uniquely among the company's employees, he genuinely admired the product he was selling and was astonished to the point of despair that anybody would refuse to buy it. He had no idea it was nothing more than a bad knockoff of Encyclopedia Britannica; he'd never seen anything to compare with it before, and would sometimes spend whole evenings enchantedly reading to Maria from random pages of the sample volume.

His boss took a liking to him, and tried to get him to adopt a more successful style, like the one he himself practiced. Here's how Nick remembered it (this is from an unpublished article about his life in America): "He browbeat working-class people. He said that obviously they didn't care if their children grew up to be stupid, illiterate bums like their parents. He would rage and cuss and he almost always made a sale." Nick was just too polite for anything like that: he couldn't imagine raising his voice with a stranger. So he went on lugging his briefcase in hapless defeat from door to door through the snow-buried streets; sometimes whole days went by without anybody letting him in.

He moved on to other jobs. He worked briefly for a company that repaired furnaces. But they turned out to be crooks; they were sabotaging the furnaces so they could inflate the repair bill. Nick quit two days before the sheriff arrested the whole crew. Then he got a job at a foundry: "a noisy, dirty, smoky place -- I hated it with a passion." He worked at a farm supply house, which he liked better, but it was six days a week, ten hours a day for a weekly take-home of 45 dollars. He couldn't keep himself and Maria alive on that -- especially since she had become pregnant soon after their arrival in Rockford.

Then he turned the corner: he got a job with a company called Woodward Governor. They manufactured prime mover control equipment -- that is, machines that regulate the operation of large mechanical systems like power plants and hydroelectric dams. Nick worked in the deburring department, and spent all day grinding off tiny imperfections in newly-made metal parts. It was exhausting work, but that didn't matter to him. All he cared about was the utopian atmosphere of the place.

Woodward Governor was an anomaly in Rockford -- in fact, it was an anomaly in Fifties America -- because of its progressive approach to employee relations. The owners were fiercely hostile to organized labor, and they believed they could keep the shop from unionizing if they offered their workers benefits no labor negotiator would dream of demanding. So while the pay was comparable to that in most factories, the perks were astonishing. The physical plant was maintained with fanatical care: the grounds were dotted by manicured flowerbeds; the windows and the factory floors were scrubbed down every night; everyone arrived at work each day to find all the machinery gleaming and polished. The cafeteria employed qualified chefs rather than industrial-style cooks (on Thanksgiving, the CEO in a big puffy chef's hat ladled out the turkey). Medical and dental checkups were provided free. There were even free monthly haircuts given on company time: Nick never tired of hearing the announcement over the loudspeaker, "Nick Cherniavsky, you have an appointment with the barber."

He always said afterwards that it was the best company he ever worked for, or even heard about. He grew to idolize the CEO, a man named Irl Martin -- ultimately Martin took on some of the same nobility and dignity in Nick's mind as the commandant at the cadet school had. (One of Nick's unpublished articles, written almost thirty years later, is called "Irl Martin -- American Patriot, Industrial Genius.") During Nick's first week in the deburring plant, Martin gave him the company's regular "welcome aboard" present: a heavy brass nameplate cut on one of the factory drillpresses; and Nick took it with him from job to job for the rest of his working life.

Nick's only problem with the place was his fellow workers. (They were called "members;" the company had forbidden the word "employees.") They never seemed to be as enthusiastic about the place as Nick was, and he was continually pained to hear them grumble about company policies that he viewed as eminently fair and reasonable. But that was of a piece with their general air of sullen ignorance. He often had moments at Woodward when he thought that his old boss at the encyclopedia company had been right -- Americans really were stupid, illiterate bums. The other members never talked about history or politics, or anything else that mattered to Nick; the only subject that seemed to spark their passion was sports. Nick found this inscrutable. Then and later, he thought it was self-evident that anybody who cared about sports was an idiot.

I once asked his daughter Nina about that: "What kind of conversations did he expect to be having? Did he think that people would sitting around in the company cafeteria arguing about the Founding Fathers and the Bill of Rights?"

"That's exactly what he thought," she said. "It's what he'd always believed America was supposed to be about."

***

During their early years in Rockford, Nick and Maria were very happy together. They were profoundly grateful to America for welcoming them in; they always spoke of the day they became American citizens as one of the proudest of their lives. They even came to like Rockford, in a way. Nick felt a lot of affection for the cramped and dingy apartments they stayed in when they first arrived; he always enjoyed telling the story of a Murphy bed in one apartment that was on so tight a spring that Maria was sometimes folded up inside it. Maria meanwhile grew to be genuinely impressed by all the cheap modern products available at the dime store. A photo taken at their first Christmas in Rockford shows her exuberantly displaying a new set of cookware: she's seized two of the pots and has posed with them in the middle of the living room, her arms spread and crooked like a flamenco dancer.

After she became pregnant, they started looking for a more permanent home. But they dawdled, and nitpicked, and quibbled over every house they looked at; when their daughter Nina was born in the spring of 1952, they still were living in a two-room furnished apartment. They didn't find the perfect place until Nina had turned three. It was a little summer cottage, built of cinderblocks and panelled throughout with knotty pine, that stood on a couple of acres of uncultivated land along the banks of the Rock River.

Nick never liked that house much. But he was determined to be happy there. He was reading a lot of Thoreau in those days, and he was fired up with the idea of self-reliance; he liked to walk around the house declaiming his favorite passage from Walden: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation..." (His other favorite recital piece was from Shakespeare: "Now is the winter of our discontent.") Even though he disliked how isolated the house was, and hated gardening, and was cast into despair every spring when the Rock River rose and flooded them out, he still felt satisfied that he was roughing it so well.

Maria was the one who really loved the place. All her life, she had treasured her own version of the American dream: it was one derived from her childhood reading, in Russian translation, of Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Zane Gray, and -- her favorite -- Captain Mayne Reid (unknown in America since his heyday in the mid-19th century, but beloved by generations of Russian children for Wild West romances like The Headless Horseman and The Death Shot). From all of these, she'd built up a paradisial image: a small cabin hidden away from the world in the depths of the trackless American wilderness, where she could live forever unmolested by society. The house on the Rock River was as close as she ever came to it. While Nick went off to work each day, she was blissfully alone, with no company except her infant daughter and the endlessly fascinating animals who lived along the riverbank. She had pet names for the local racoons, skunks, deer, snakes, and moles; she sometimes glimpsed a marauding fox padding through the depths of a wooded grove; she once raised a litter of newborn rabbits that her dog had found abandoned in a tree-hollow.

The only regular contact the family had with the outside world came in the form of long-distance phone calls from Nick's parents in San Francisco. Everybody found these a trial. One of Nina's earliest memories is of Nick standing stock-still in the middle of the living room, speechless with rage, gripping the phone receiver so tightly his fingers were glowing white. Maria would usually have to take over the conversation and swallow her own dislike long enough to act as peacemaker. The purpose of these calls was unvarying: Nikolai and Irina wanted to nag Nick. They told him what car he should buy and what classes he should take at night school and what friends he should cultivate and what kind of property he should be on the lookout for; they were particularly obsessed with how their granddaughter was being raised, and would call to find out what clothes she was wearing and whether she was eating enough bread and whether her hair was properly long and braided.

They returned to Rockford for a visit during the summer of 1956, when Nina was four years old. A tremendous fight broke out when they learned Nick and Maria were planning to send Nina to kindergarten. Nikolai thought he had made the family position perfectly clear. If the schools in Shanghai had been unsuitable for Nick, the ones in America were out of the question for Nina. When he saw that Nick and Maria wouldn't budge, he began bellowing that they must not love their daughter if they wanted to get rid of her so badly. That was too much for Maria; she became hysterical with rage and stormed around the yard behind the cabin, seizing fallen branches and swinging them furiously against the treetrunks. Nina remembers her shrieking over and over in Russian, "Nobody tells me I don't love my daughter!"

When Nikolai and Irina weren't available to provide a common enemy, though, Nick and Maria more and more turned their frustrations on each other. The isolation of their lives brought out their worst qualities -- or, at least, made some of those qualities intensely irritating to the other person. Maria, for instance, put her energies into fussing and customizing the household, and inexorably turned everything they owned into a one-of-a-kind handmade. Nina remembers: "My mother was excellent at altering cheap clothes -- and we always had really cheap clothes -- so that they would hang gracefully. She would take these cheap, garish white curtains and dye them in instant coffee and tea to give them a faded aristocratic elegance. She had a really uncanny gift with dime-store materials; she would use hobby-kit paint to blend the color palette of mismatched ashtrays and lamps and vases." Nick watched all this with increasing exasperation. It infuriated him that nothing he brought home seemed good enough for her as it was. Sometimes when they were arguing he would pick up a freshly-ornamented trivet or illuminated placemat and brandish it at her, yelling "Look! This was fine! People use it just the way they made it! There was nothing wrong with it, okay!" Once at the dinner table he seized a newly-painted bowl filled with whipped cream and flung it out the kitchen door; it broke and the cream spattered all over the porch shades. Maria was so incensed that she refused to clean it up. This was the middle of winter, and it was bitterly cold: the white dripping globules and stalagtites froze in place, and remained there until the first thaw of spring.

"In a lot of ways," Nina says, "my parents were terrible for each other." Nick had absorbed from his father the idea that it was a man's duty to be the patriarch, the decision-maker, the final authority; for Nick this meant he had to be the bulwark of rationality against what he saw as Maria's increasing strangeness. Maria regarded this pose with amused scorn -- less amused and more scornful as time with on. For all her eccentricity, she could be shrewd about people, and she saw Nick's air of forthrightness as absurd: she knew that deep down he was even more impractical and dreamy than she was.

Their biggest fight began one Christmas when they tried to decide how to spend his annual bonus from Woodward Governor. Maria wanted a clothes drier; she said there was nowhere to string the clotheslines in the winter. (The truth was, she was growing frail with arthritis and was finding household tasks like the laundry exhausting.) Nick thought this was preposterous. He told her that lots of people ran a household with