The house was a traditional Chinese residence in Fuchiatien, the district occupied by Chinese. The innermost room in the house was the Baron’s old-fashioned scholar’s study, simply furnished with a plain square table, chairs of blackwood, pigskin trunks, and a felt-covered k’ang bed. The room was heated by small iron stoves in the corners that held burning balls of compacted coal dust and clay. A pair of carved wooden screens were set at an angle to the door. If evil spirits entered the room, they’d strike the screens and be stopped. All the furniture was aligned to face south to ensure feng shui. Even blindfolded, the Baron could have found his way through every room, as the furniture was all identically oriented. This arrangement was common in Chinese households.
The rare visitors were startled by the severity of the house, the spare furniture, the lack of bric-a-brac, the brick floor. But there’s no comfort here, they said. This was true. How well he’d learned from the Chinese. His family would have considered the house cold, bare, suited only for the poor who could not afford furnishings.
A large painted metal box in the study contained his family’s voluminous correspondence, his most precious possession. The letters dated back to the eighteenth century, when the czar had elevated the family to the aristocracy. The letters had been written in gilded rooms in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Krakow, Copenhagen, and Helsinki, where his grandfather and father had had diplomatic postings. He’d memorized each word, stroke, ornate ink flourish, watermark, wrinkle, and fold of the letters. The distinct styles of handwriting on the envelopes were as familiar as his own hand. For years, he’d corresponded with his brother and cousins in St. Petersburg, adding their letters to the stacks of ribbon-tied envelopes and papers in the metal box. Posting a letter from Kharbin and receiving a reply was a process that spanned three or four months. Although it was not a conscious decision, he had gradually stopped writing and lost all contact with his family. In Manchuria, the family and personal history could be erased like a sentence in a diary. He was untethered. With the detachment of an observer, he realized that he’d pass the rest of his life here and would be buried in Manchuria.
The Baron thought his wife would understand him better if she knew his background, the many places he’d lived in St. Petersburg and diplomatic postings across Europe. He described the family house in St. Petersburg and their dacha, surrounded by birch trees and gardens, on the Île des Apothecaires on the Neva near St. Petersburg. His family homes were filled with things of value and valueless things: stationery with the family crest, engraved silver picture frames, mother-of-pearl caviar spoons, buttonhooks, niello bibelots, his father’s gold-tipped fountain pens, a collapsible rubber washtub for bathing, gold-painted porcelain dishes. A life weighed and given value by possessions and then the renunciation of the possessions. He had stepped away from this torrent of objects, assigned everything to his brother, when he left St. Petersburg. But it seemed the objects followed him, as they were replicated in the residences of the wealthy in Kharbin.
He tried to describe the details of the family homes for Li Ju as if they were photographs or postcards. But there was a space where their languages didn’t overlap. What was the Chinese word for mantelpiece? For attic? For eaves? He struggled to translate the nuances of Russian into equivalent words in Chinese or English.
“We’ll visit St. Petersburg someday,” he had half-promised Li Ju, and she smiled. But he couldn’t imagine returning to Russia. Manchuria had so thoroughly transformed him that he would marvel along with her at the city’s tramcars, the gilded spire atop the Admiralty building, the view from the Strelka, the life-size jeweled icons and pillars of lapis lazuli in St. Isaac’s Cathedral.
Chinese calligraphy was the Baron’s solace in the evening. On the narrow stage of his desk, under lamplight, a rectangle of white paper was the shape of discipline. He could barely fathom the perimeters of its difficulty, the years of practice, but this elusiveness and uncertainty was part of calligraphy’s seduction. When he was lost, nervous about executing a brushstroke, he had learned to wait calmly until the character was visualized and wavered into shape, opening like a novelty flower of folded paper in water. He sometimes dreamed about written Chinese characters, angular brushstrokes, thick and thin, scattered like dark hay over a field of white paper or his wife’s hair loose against a pale cushion, black as sticks. Paper was a surface with the impermanence of snow.
Unlike the majority of Chinese women, his wife, Li Ju, could read and write. She had also learned English and a little Russian at the Scottish Presbyterian orphanage, memorizing text from the standard prayer book so that her speech was fractured, curiously old-fashioned, laced with thees and thous. Li Ju solemnly recited passages from hymnals, gesturing at the proper places as she’d been instructed. “‘My heart swells, O Lord / I am a river beside you.’” Her hand flickered in the direction of her heart. He didn’t always correct her or offer an explanation of text that was unclear, but this allowed him to keep something back from her just as she hid within her own language. At times, he believed that he wasn’t subtle enough for his extraordinary young wife.
Once, she had playfully given him a calligraphy lesson, blackening the tip of her finger on a cake of ink. She sat in front of a dark screen, and her upraised finger with its black spot slowly stroked Chinese characters in the air so he could follow the long lines and dots as she described each one. Finished with the lesson, he cupped her hands in his and inhaled the scent of her skin, identifying the incense she’d handled earlier that day. “I know you microscopically” was his joke, but it was an unfamiliar word to her. He couldn’t properly explain it so one day he brought Li Ju to his office. She squinted into the microscope at the bright piece of transparent glass securely balanced inside, the light sharp as a cut.
Another time, she gently shaped his lips into the correct speaking position with her fingertips. His mouth could not find the Chinese pronunciation of hs from the Russian ch. He stuttered. “It is because of your mustache,” she had teased. But it wasn’t only his lips. His ears couldn’t distinguish the tones, the emphasis on words with their complicated inflections. One syllable could have four different tones of voice and four different interpretations, simply by the way it was pronounced.
Li Ju was young, a kernel, perfect as a bud. The underside of her lip was as pale as melon, her fingernails the beige of almonds. He was convinced that nothing was finer than her skin, opaque as milk at the roots of her black hair. He was ashamed of his own skin, slack, sun-mottled with age, and his hands, huge and rough, aching at night. He was almost fifty years old and the time spent at army camps and prisons working in freezing temperatures had permanently marked him.
He knew nothing about her family. She was silent about her life before the orphanage. Did she remember a home, her mother, father, sisters or brothers? Or had she been too young for memory? Or was memory too painful? Li Ju was her original name, the sisters at the Scottish Presbyterian orphanage claimed, but the identity of the person who had delivered her was unknown. He could have requested the immense registration book be taken from the shelf at the orphanage and opened to the page where information about her was recorded. Each child was documented in case a relative or family member wished to reclaim him or her in the future. Some parents who gave up their child left a small memento for identification, an item as simple as a button, a toy, coin, a scrap of paper with a verse. But an investigation into his wife’s past seemed like a betrayal. He left her history in the book at the orphanage. It was hers alone.
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