Edward Whittemore - Quin’s Shanghai Circus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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