When the Americans Came

Dr. Rokoff had not expected anyone that afternoon--his few remaining patients came at fixed intervals--and the prolonged ringing at the door of his one-room office and home seeped into his dream as part of the clamor that had come over Shanghai in the month or so since the end of the war. He saw himself, in this dream, at a soiree at the czarist officers' club, perusing one of the local English-language newspapers with the help of his pocket dictionary. The newspaper referred to the war tidily as World War Two. He contemplated the others, standing silently with bowed heads. "Gentlemen, put this down in your field dispatches: September 27, 1945. We are outflanked. Our World War, the World War, is now only World War One." From the wall a painting of Nicholas II in an admiral's uniform gazed vacuously into the middle distance, as though the Autocrat of All the Russias were secretly passing wind. Dr. Rokoff downed a vodka, killed the taste with some herring--vile stuff both, the buffet was better in World War One--and drifted out into the night.

Along Avenue Joffre the American soldiers lurched, singly and in groups, as hands plucked at them and faces, white and yellow, male and female, beckoned and leered. In the slashing neon light outside the Renaissance Café the downy face of a young American sailor rose before him. "Uh ... is this where they've got that White Russian colony you hear about?" Dr. Rokoff could understand that much. "Yes. Shanghai has several sectors, you see. We are in the French Concession, where most of us Russian émigres are living, although some of us are living also in the International Settlement. There are also the Chinese sectors: Nantao and--" "Uh ... is this where you get them White Russian girls?" Dr. Rokoff turned angrily on his heel; he was suddenly back in his room, sitting at his desk, and an American Army officer in a meticulously pressed uniform filled the doorway. "Dr. Constantine Rokoff?" Dr. Rokoff stood up. "Yes." "We have discovered what you have been doing. We are confiscating your license. Have you anything to say in your defense?" The officer took off his gold-braided cap to wipe his forehead in the steamy noonday heat; he had meticulously parted steel-gray hair like General Zubronoff's during the retreat before the Bolshevik offensive in eastern Siberia. Dr. Rokoff was ashamed of the room's peeling walls and his own seedy appearance. The ringing in his head grew louder; he woke up.

"Horoshó, odnú minúku," he called out. "All right, one minute." The ringing ceased. He lifted himself heavily off the couch and straightened the bedspread to hide the sheets underneath. How faded it was, the embroidered flowers smudged and torn. He folded the material partly under, partly over the pillow, as his wife used to. Dousing his face in a basin of cold water behind a folding screen--running water was not yet fully restored--he put on his white coat and went to the door.

"Doktor Rokoff?"

"Da."

It was a young woman, smiling uncertainly. A tall, elderly man stood behind her. "Ya nadyéus," she said. "I hope--"

"Yes?"

"I didn't know if you received patients in the afternoons. I couldn't find your name in the telephone book."

"Please come in."

He studied them warily across his desk when all three were seated--the girl with her narrow shoulders and pinched, unpainted face, the gaunt man sitting ramrod straight beside her. The girl placed her hand on the man's arm and the man took off his pincenez. "My wife," he said, with a ceremonious nod toward the girl, whom Dr. Rokoff had taken to be his daughter, "my wife wishes to work in the Arizona Bar."

"I beg your pardon?"

"That is why we are here." His grave voice and manner would have befitted a government minister reporting to the cabinet.

"I see."

"We have discussed it."

"Oh--Well...."

"Exhaustively."

"Then what is there left to say? Please keep me in touch with further developments." Dr. Rokoff's head ached and he felt put upon. Derelicts he could contend with; feeble-mindedness was too much.

"Now, if you'll excuse me--"

"Doctor," the girl intervened, "this is my husband, Ilya Stepanych Gorin. He is a night watchman at the Jardine Matheson Company warehouse."

"I shall bear it in mind. Also that you wish to work in the Alhambra Bar."

"Arizona Bar."

"Ah, yes. Now--"

"If you can fix my leg."

"Oh?"

"If you can straighten it."

Even in the dimness of the stairway, Dr. Rokoff had been aware of some troubling quality in her. Looking more closely--high cheekbones, eyes somewhat aslant, a mixture of delicacy and Russian peasant in her face--he realized that she reminded him of Maria, though his wife had never been this pretty. Perhaps their daughter would have been. The past clung to him these days like a bad conscience. What he had felt, seeing his doorway unexpectedly alight with this young woman with eyes brimming with--what?--something he couldn't find a word for--life?--was, he realized now, a tremor very like joy. It was part of his unhinged state since the end of the war, no doubt.

"What is the matter with your leg?"

"I broke it ice skating."

"When?"

"Three and a half years ago. A doctor put it in a cast. But afterward, it was crooked."

The husband, as though hearing his cue, leaned forward, placing an envelope before Dr. Rokoff, and sat back triumphantly. "Sixty dollars, American currency." In faded violet ink, in curlicued, old-fashioned Russian handwriting, the envelope bore the words Nina's Leg.

Dr. Rokoff was aware that the long silence was lending itself to misinterpretation.

"Nnn-da," the husband said. "Mmmyes," as though prepared for this outcome. "All right. I'll sell my stamps. That should bring another fifty American dollars, I am sure."

The girl touched his arm again. "Ilyusha, I told you, we're not selling your stamp collection. Doctor, will you let me pay you the rest in installments? You see, now that the Americans have arrived--well, we hear that the Americans pay well for dancing with them."

"Just dancing?" The words escaped him; he wished he could unsay them.

She regarded him coolly. "And talking a little."

"My wife speaks excellent English," the husband offered. With his long, clouded face and shabby suit, he did remind Dr. Rokoff of those cabinet meetings in Vladivostok. The Provisional Government of the Maritime Territory, no less. When was that--1921? Dr. Rokoff, just turned 30, was assistant minister of public health. They met interminably, plying one another with judicious observations on the demoralized state of the Bolshevik government in Moscow, avoiding the obvious: their own imminent military collapse. Then the last railroad station. The last border town. White sheets over Chinese padded coats in the glistening Manchurian snow. Maria pulling the tiny white-painted sled with their infant in it.

"We had hoped," the husband continued, "to have one hundred American dollars saved up by the time the war ended. A colleague at the warehouse was able to change Occupation tender into American currency for us. Akh, what you cannot change on the Shanghai black market! However, the war ended too soon."

Too soon, yes. Poor fellow. Whenever the war ended would have been too soon for you. For me, too. The Japanese Occupation--wonderful, wasn't it? Like being immured. At last. You with your Nina and your stamps. Me with my--Now the doors have been blasted out of their frames. What are we to do, we damaged ones who prefer the dark?

He went around the desk. The girl wore flat shoes. The right shoe was only partly laced; a strap sewn onto the heel buttoned around the leg. "Please lift your skirt," he said. "Higher." It was a shapely leg, finely boned, and bent perceptibly to the right below the knee. She tensed when he took off the shoe and removed the cloth wound around the instep. She did not cry out when he pressed the sole of the foot, but he saw her eyes singed with pain.

The Russian colony was full of incompetents. There were people practicing as doctors who would not have been male nurses in Russia. One of them had turned the journalist Filipoff into a morphine (continued on page 208) When the Americans Came (continued from page 92) addict after a minor operation; the operation had not even been necessary. By the time Dr. Rokoff got him, he had sunk to the heroin dens in Nantao. Dr. Rokoff was stabilizing his intake, trying at the same time to uncover the psychological roots of the addiction in the hope of enabling him to overcome it, when the officers' club cut off his morphine supply. "I'm sorry, Kostya," the head of the club's hospital had said, "the Japanese have reduced our ration." Dr. Rokoff had had to go to the black market. Even so, Filipoff had broken off treatment. Where was he now? Dead?

He found a measuring tape in one of the drawers where Maria's things still lay untouched. "Hold both legs out. Straight." The right leg was an inch shorter than the left.

He went back to his chair. "That piece of cloth doesn't do much good."

"It hurts less to walk."

"What you need is a special shoe." He wrote on his prescription pad. "Here. This man, I know him. It's all explained here. Wear the shoes he makes for you for a few days, then come back to see me." He held out the piece of paper and the envelope with the 60 American dollars.

The girl shook her head vehemently.

"Doctor, doctor, it's not for a shoe we came."

"A shoe may be all you need."

"What American will dance with me with this leg?"

The stridency of her cry released a flood of resentment within him. This fever, this feverish wind blowing under the skirt of every virgin and matron and whore, young and old, rich and poor, in this famished Babylon of the China Coast, was it now searching out the last forlorn crannies of the Russian colony and blowing the halt, lame and blind into his office? He could hang out a sign--everybody was hanging out signs--Dr. Constantine Rokoff, Late of the city Hospital of kiev, Straightens legs, grafts on arms and screws in Eyeballs for dancing with the Americans.

"Why do you need the money?" (What business was it of his? He was losing control of himself. But she answered.)

"To buy a gas stove."

"Come, now!"

"For three and a half years, we've had to make do with a kerosene cooker. It breaks. I hate it."

"Then buy a new kerosene cooker."

"We want a gas stove."

"Mr.--ah--"

"Gorin." The husband sat up even straighter.

"Kindly take this, and this." He held out his prescription blank and the envelope.

Gorin looked like a child pulled two ways in a grownups' argument.

"Dr. Rokoff!" the girl blazed at him.

"The war is over! The Americans have arrived!"

Dr. Rokoff bridled. "For us to grovel at their feet and scramble for their dollars and smile when they kick us aside?"

"The Americans are not like that!"

"What do you want?"

"I don't want to rot."

"We all rot. In Shanghai, Paris, San Francisco, New York, all Russian émigrés rot. We are people without a country. People without a country rot."

"People who have lost courage rot! I want an operation before it is too late."

"Courage? Akh, there is no such thing as people with courage and people without courage. Courage is a commodity, a talisman, a magic verse--it passes from hand to hand. You borrow a little courage from others of your kind to get you through the day. Our kind has spewed us out. What good could the English do me, or the French, with their precious little settlements and concessions--garden parties at which we 'White Russians' were the footmen, one step, we consoled ourselves, above the Chinese, the 'Chinks'?"

"Dr. Rokoff, I came to you about my leg and you're telling me about garden parties and footmen and--"

"Listen to the doctor, Ninachka," Gorin said respectfully. "He's right."

"You see, your husband knows what I mean!" Exhilarated by the rush of words to his head, he yielded to the pleasure of talking seriously to someone again, even though he knew he was rambling. "And now that it's the Americans who are in Charge, do you want me to go to them and say, 'Kind sirs, though only a stateless person, I am a doctor and I want to practice my profession splendidly again'? And after the Americans, we will doubtless see--oh, unthinkable!--the Chinese take over in China? So what would you have me do--establish an expensive practice in abortions and fake nostrums and buy a passport on the black market for some banana republic of South America and have my ears assailed by Spanish as well? Before it's too late, you said? For twenty-five years, it has been too late. Nothing can please us, there is no reason for anything, there is no future. Russia has spewed us out and our only function is to become extinct."

"Doctor! I am talking about my life and you quote me the words of a song to make fashionable tears with at émigré night clubs!"

He laughed, delighted at being found out. "You know that song? Alexandre Vertinsky sings it at that night club on Yu Yuen Road. 'Someone else's cities. And above them, someone else's star.' Very beautiful." He realized he had been pacing between the desk and the window. His headache was gone. Nina was smiling up at him impishly. The unwelcome moil outside had invaded his room with an impish, kindred face.

"Doctor."

"Yes."

"Can the operation be done?"

"Yes."

"And can you do it?"

He sat down. "This is how it is." They craned forward as he sketched the operation on his pad, showing where the bone, set incorrectly, had grown together at a slight angle, affecting the position of the foot during stance and gait. Operative treatment would call for breaking the bone again at the same place and realigning the bone fragments. A bone plate might be necessary. The leg would be kept in a plaster cast while the bone knit together again.

"The same thing happened with the colonel's horse," Gorin informed them.

"Were you in the cavalry?" Dr. Rokoff asked.

"Yes. Third Cavalry Regiment. I was the bookkeeper. In the beginning. In the end, I was taking care of the horses. There were no books to keep anymore."

"Whose army? What was the general's name?"

Gorin pondered, then shook his head. "The colonel's horse broke its leg and the bone was badly set. The colonel had to shoot it."

Nina frowned. "How long would the leg be in a cast?"

"Two months, at least."

"And then? Would it be straight again?"

"Yes, if the fragments are realigned correctly."

"And the same length as the other leg?"

"Yes."

"And the foot will stop hurting?"

"The tenderness should disappear."

"And will you do it?"

Can you do it? Will you do it? It kept coming back to that. Hell, it had been that all along. Admit it: It wasn't disgust with the chase after the Americans and their dollars that had stiffened him against her appeal, it was fear. He looked at them in wonderment. "Why, why did you come to me?"

"Ah," Gorin said, "we wanted the best."

"The best?"

"My colleague at the warehouse, the one who was able to get American dollars for us on the black market, he told us you were the best doctor in Shanghai. He told us how you saved his life."

"I saved his life?"

"During the Revolution, doctor," Nina said. "You took a bullet out of his chest, near the heart. His name is Ivanoff, Boris Vasilievich Ivanoff."

Ivanoff ... such a common name. He was disappointed at not being able to remember the man. "Where did this ... exploit take place?"

"In the province of Kazan, I think he said."

Ah, yes, he could remember the field hospitals in Kazan. But that would have been 25 years ago. What kind of doctor had he been since, unable to preserve his own infant daughter from the cholera epidemic, unable to save his own wife, failing to question the diagnosis of stomach ulcers by that specialist in Harbin until--so swiftly--it was too late, when a simple hysterectomy could have saved her? And what kind of doctor had he become in the past three years, since the Filipoff affair? He wanted to tell them: "Dear good people, don't you know what they say about Constantine Rokoff on that black market where your friend got you those American dollars? Didn't he hear anything over the glasses of tea and saucers of jam at the Renaissance Café?"

What could he have done? Filipoff had blabbed. Soon other addicts were coming to see him. Should he have turned them away, abandoned them to Nantao? Another evasion! Surely some providence in which he no longer believed had sent this strangely matched couple into his room to wake him up! The stoicism with which he had watched the loss of his reputation, as his regular practice shrank and he descended to what he was, a shady dispenser of injections that could not be had in any other doctor's office in the colony; the comfort he took in working among the most wretched of his fellow exiles, giving them some hope at least of slugging their way back to health; the point of honor he made of not charging anyone more than he could pay or not charging anything at all if he was penniless; his own slide into virtual penury--was not all this a pretense, a way of avoiding the truth: that he had wanted to escape from the demands of his work as general practitioner, that he wanted to have his license revoked?

"Mrs. Gorin."

"Yes, doctor."

"I will perform the operation."

He had never seen such radiance in anyone's eyes.

• • •

Ilya Stepanych Gorin climbed the broad curving stairway to the Arizona Bar. He was carrying on a conversation in his mind with Dr. Rokoff. "Dr. Rokoff, you appear to assume"--the words were falling very satisfyingly into place--"you appear to assume that to be a professional dancer in a respectable business like the Arizona Bar is synonymous with ... that is, my wife assures me that it is respectable, and I don't mind admitting that I am here to take a look for myself--" The prickly silver light in his eyes and the crazy music tearing at his eardrums interrupted his train of thought and he found himself in a dim, crowded dance hall with high balconies and huge distorted faces carved out of shiny rosy glass beaming down on the dance band at the back. A white-gowned Chinese waiter came through the crush. "Wanchee table? Wanchee dancing girl?"

Gorin gaped. Here were the American soldiers and sailors who paid so well for being danced with. They made up perhaps half the men on the dance floor. The others, both whites and Chinese, danced in the normal fashion: the fokstrót, as it was called in Russian (the word, he believed, was borrowed from the English). But the Americans held their partners at arm's length, twirling them around in a strange, offhand manner. It must be, he thought, the dance of the cowboys. "Wanchee Chinese girl?" the waiter asked. "Loshian girl? Portuguee?"

A few feet away, an American soldier flung his partner away from him and turned his back on her in sudden violence. Gorin started forward to catch her before she fell, thinking at the same instant that Nina could not work here, after all: Americans were dangerous. The soldier reached behind him without looking and, as the room drowned in a screaming beat from the bandstand and the grotesque masks overhead turned from rose to pulsating red, his hand and the girl's made a perfect fit and miraculously they were some distance away, the Chinese girl arched in another spin, smirking up at the placid face of the soldier. "Want Flench girl?" the waiter asked; then, losing his patience: "Wei!"

Gorin took off his pince-nez. "Arizona Bar?" he inquired, in English.

"Upstairs," the waiter said, and he left him.

Gorin was spellbound by the gyrations on the dance floor. Ekh, Ilya Stepanych, it's just a dance, and you imagined goodness knows what. No wonder Dr. Rokoff thought you were a little ... nnn-da. "Dr. Rokoff: You also evidently assume that Nina married me only because of her leg. Permit me to inform you that when Nina arrived in Shanghai from Harbin, before the skating accident--before the accident, mark you!--she brought a letter to me--yes, to me!--from her mother, asking me to look out for her. Her mother, you may not have heard, is an actress of great talent." He recalled the orderly world backstage at the Russian Dramatic Theater in Harbin, where he was in charge of the pulleys. His colleagues, the actors and actresses, all treated him with respect.

"Wanchee table?" It was another waiter.

Gorin was irritated at the interruption. "I ... looking ... Arizona Bar." The waiter led him to the bottom of a staircase and pointed up. As he climbed the stairs, he wished he had not come. On the landing above, there was another door, another waiter. Summoning his best English, he said, "I ... want talk ... manager."

With the door closed behind him, the insensate music snapped off. The room seemed dark and empty, until his eyes adjusted themselves to the pink glow of the small table lamps (right before him, a woman's bare shoulder!) and his ears caught a murmur of voices and the slithery notes of a piano. The waiter led him to an alcove where there was more light. A man, a white man, said. "Yes, I am the manager. What is the trouble?"

"Huh? Someone making trouble?" An American officer sitting next to him lifted a flushed, handsome, no-longer-young face.

"Usual thing. Squeeze."

"Huh?"

"Bribes. Payoff. For the police. Look," the man said to Gorin, "I am not giving any more. I have with Chief Inspector Wong the matter arranged."

"Out," said the American. "We don't need any cops in this place. This goddamn corruption in this goddamn country has got to stop. And I'll tell you who's gonna stop it. Uncle Sam."

Gorin suddenly understood. They thought he was a policeman. Because of his watchman's uniform. He had to wear it because he had stopped off on the way to work. He bowed to the American officer. "Sir. How do you do? I watchman. Night watchman. Jardine Matheson Company."

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" the manager asked. Gorin didn't understand. "Russe? Russian?"

"Ah--yes. Roshian."

"Hey," the American gripped his glass, "I said beat it."

"No, no, major," the manager said.

"He is not from the police. He is a ... nobody."

Gorin chuckled with pleasure at having been mistaken for a policeman, and he looked around him. From behind the bar, a row of Russian bar girls waiting for customers stared at him expressionlessly. He turned back to the American. "Sir. My wife want work Arizona Bar. Dance." He brought out Nina's picture.

"What's he saying?" the American asked.

"He is asking if his wife can work here," the manager said.

"He's asking what?"

"If his wife can work behind the bar here. Or dancing. Or perhaps with you, major?"

"Hey, you a Kraut?"

"I am Cherman, major, but anti-Hitler since 1934."

"You mean this joker here is asking if his wife can work here?"

Gorin nodded. "Wife. Picture. My wife." He leaned over the table and handed him the picture.

The American looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at him and said slowly, "Why, you poor bastard. You poor bastard."

A dancing couple brushed by. A sprinkle of notes came from the piano. Gorin was transfixed by the look of profound compassion on the American's face. His chest tightened. He wanted to grab the American's hands and say, "Thank you, brother, for understanding." But what there was to understand began forcing its way up again and he could not speak. He smiled weakly at a Chinese waiter with a tray of drinks. After the waiter was gone, he turned his congealed smile on the Russian bar girls.

He heard the American shout, "Hey, Russki, have a drink." That terrible look was gone from the American's face. Gorin accepted a glass. "Siddown!" He sat down.

The manager seemed displeased. "This picture is not satisfactory. It is only showing the face. It is not showing the figure. The legs."

"Right," the American said. "How about it, Ivan? Her legs any good?"

"Ah, yes." The drink burned, burning away the tightness in his chest. Gorin seldom drank. "Yes. Leg good. Dr. Rokoff fix."

He turned to the bar girls and said in Russian, "One leg was bent, you see. Dr. Rokoff has straightened it. Dr. Rokoff is a remarkable manipulator of fragments, though in other matters he tends toward exaggeration."

Everything seemed to be getting noisier, and there were more people dancing. The American and the manager were deep in conversation. They were arguing, he was sure, about whether to employ Nina. There was a full glass in his hand. He got up and went to the bar. "Where is the need for this exaggeration?" he demanded of the bar girls. "If a good and decent woman wishes to improve her financial situation by dancing, is there any need to assume that.... That is what I should have put to Dr. Rokoff! Yes, I should have!" The faces were a row of painted, powdered stone. He swallowed the remains of the drink. The warmth was spreading. It calmed him down. The girls were smiling and he smiled in response. There were some American officers at the bar now and the girls were smiling and drinking with them. Then the American who had been at the table was standing next to him. Nina's picture was in front of him on the bar. Gorin gripped the American's hands in his, saying, "Spasibo, bratyets. Thanks you, brother, thank you." The American was saying something he could not understand and, in his bad English, Gorin tried to explain to him his real plan about Nina and the Arizona Bar, not the plan of the gas stove but the other plan, his private plan, which he would tell her about after she got the job here and they saved a little money.

They would use the money to go back to Harbin--yes!--where Nina was born and her mother was still living, and they would make a new life there, because there were stables there and he knew horses from the time of the White Armies. The American looked sober and unfriendly. He had placed an American bank note next to Nina's picture on the bar and was saying something. Gorin could make out "Five dollars, huh?" but he would not listen. He told him how his friend lvanoff had promised to write to Harbin and arrange for a job for him and he would earn plenty of money himself--himself, yes!--he pushed the bank note away--because he knew how to take care of horses and Nina would not have to dance with anyone. The American placed a second bank note on the bar and said something sharply, demanding an answer, but Gorin did not understand, he frantically would not listen, as he told the American in his bad English how the gas stove was only the excuse and they would go back to Harbin and there they would be happy again.

• • •

Nina lay in the women's ward of the Club of the Officers of the Imperial Russian Army and Navy. It had been the whist room at one time; the men's ward was contained with difficulty in the former ballroom and billiard room. The hospital had begun as a clinic in a corner of the building, but as the officers and their wives and other relatives began to fail, the white iron beds marched slowly across the building, driving the card and billiard tables and the ballroom furniture into the basement.

Afternoon sunlight buttered the scabbiness of the walls. Some of the other women sat on the edge of their beds in their gray sweaty nightshirts, staring. Their conversation, a hypnotic singsong on the theme of those of their circle who had died or gave promising signs of dying ("Da, mátushka, da, and our turn is coming, and our turn is near"), would not resume until closer toward evening. Nina turned back a page of her notebook and reread what she had just written:

My dear Friend!

I am writing you from a funny little hospital in Shanghai. Really, I must tell N. about it the next time I visit Florence; he must put it into one of his novels. The hospital is attached to (you would never guess) a club of czarist officers. Sometimes in the evenings you can hear a shout from the billiard room. "Yellow ball in corner pocket--bouf!" Just like Chekhov's Cherry Orchard. Other evenings the generals and their wives and daughters arrive in their uniforms and their finery, and the strains of the waltz and the mazurka keep me pleasantly awake late into the night. Some of the women in my room were ladies in waiting at the court is St. Petersburg, and the talk is all of the balls and flirtations and gossip of those days.

The only trip Nina had ever made in the 22 years of her life was from Harbin to Shanghai, and the letter, like the other letters in the notebook, and in all the other notebooks locked away in a drawer at home, was not addressed to anyone she knew. In the novels, novellas and short stories that filled the Russian-émigré library in Harbin, the heroines of some of her favorite books wrote to kindred spirits, favoring the salutation "My dear Friend"; so haut monde, it seemed to her, its very tactfulness bespeaking worlds of intimacy. She liked to write late in the evening, in bed. "Write, Ninachka, write," Gorin would say reverently, looking up from his stamp albums. "Give your mother my regards." She had told him they were letters to her mother in Harbin.

Just two days ago, a famous doctor repaired my stupid leg. It lies there in front of me in its plaster cast, like a great big cocoon, hurting a little, but that's fine--the doctor says a little pain is normal after an operation. It means my leg is knitting together, healing, getting ready for my new life.

(The Alps. She, Nina, flying on skis, Rolf in pursuit. The French Riviera. A spray of foam. René's enamored face. New York. Fifth Avenue! Hobbling down the sameness of some Shanghai street, she would stop sometimes and close her eyes and let the sunlight pry them ever so slightly apart. Seen through the golden haze of her eyelashes, the street would lose its familiar look. Wall and pavement would tremble and dissolve and the shimmer would be her longed-for Fifth Avenue. She imagined stairs of glass, a jauntiness in her step, a crystalline feeling. Up ahead, Bob stood waiting impatiently by a fountain.)

"Okh, hot." The woman next to her worked her bare, purple-veined feet over the wooden floor. "Hot. Even the floor."

Nina looked away. The sight of those feet under that tent of a nightshirt always brought out the room's sour smell.

The woman was starting on her. "Your husband is late today, isn't he?"--craftily.

Ilyusha. Poor Ilyusha.

"Comes every day, eh? But late today, isn't he?"

How was she to tell him she was leaving him?

"Never learned to talk, eh?"

"Leave her be, leave her be, mátushka"--the dirgelike voice from the far corner. "She'll lie here a few months, she'll learn to talk, she'll learn."

"I am the widow of an officer! I am not to be insulted in this fashion! Who do you imagine you are?" the woman bellowed. "Is your husband an officer?" The young (continued on page 216) When the Americans came (continued from page 212) intern came in with the tea: Nina heard the clinking of spoons in glasses. "Is he an officer? What regiment is he in? Where is my butter?"

"Eat your bread," the intern said. "The butter is on the bread. There are no regiments anymore."

Nina heard him place a glass and plate on her night table. "How is the pain?" he asked.

She faced him. "Oh, it's fine!"

"You mean there's less pain than yesterday?"

"Oh. Well ... a little more, perhaps."

"Then we'll have a little more medication."

"Where, I am asking." the woman in the next bed demanded, "is the butter? Where is the butter on this bread?" She chewed loudly.

Nina turned her face back to the wall. Dear God, how was she to tell him?

("I had to," she said.

"I know," Bob said.

"I had to leave him. But I do love him. Not the way I love you."

"I understand. Don't cry."

Bob and she stood against the railing on board the President Coolidge. The paper ribbon wound around her index finger snapped; it quivered across the yellow water, entwined in all the other ribbons, back to the wharf, where, indistinguishable now in the receding crowd, Ilyusha held the other end.

Later, Bob and she were in the bridal suite. In the velvet darkness, the ocean whispered: a gleam of moonlight sculpted his smooth young back as his dress shirt fell to the floor. She turned her head away on the pillow, her heart beating fearfully.)

The scene was blotted out. Nina opened her eyes. She still felt her heart beating. She felt flushed and moist. She closed her eyes again.

(The glow of their cigarettes in the dark. Happiness like a deep quiet pool in her heart. "Dear," Bob said, deeply moved, "why didn't you tell me?"

"I was ashamed.")

And yet she had not set. out to withhold herself from Gorin. "Sleep, Ninachka, sleep," he had said the night she moved into his room after the private ceremony in Father Nikodim's vestry, as he spread an army blanket for himself on the floor. She had taken it for an older man's delicacy of feeling toward an 18-year-old virgin. But a month passed and they were like father and daughter, or like mother and child. She thought it her wifely duty to talk to him about it. but that seemed only to frighten him. She embraced him, and he held onto her and presently was asleep, and they did not talk of it again, to her own relief. He had never been married, though he was already past 50.

(She told Bob all of this now. There had been boys in Harbin, but she had never dreamed of giving herself to any of them. Her true life was not to begin until she escaped. Her mother had placed her in an American missionary boarding school, where she acquired English and a mute yearning for America. Her father? Oh, he was a musician. And a Don Juan, her mother said. He had disappeared before she was five. She remembered him in his black sable coat, standing with her one evening outside the Harbin opera house, smoking a long, perfumed cigarette. She remembered the laughter of the men and women coming out of the banquet room of the Hotel Moderne; one of the men gave her a gold ruble. Harbin, the Paris of the Orient, they called it; a refuge for all the wealth and privilege that had been thrown across the Chinese border by the Red Army; her birthplace; who remembered it now? And where was the laughter and the glamor by the time she grew up? The Japanese invasion of Manchuria had killed it. Time had killed it. Everyone who could leave had left. And she?

"They said to me: There is Shanghai. You must go to Shanghai. There are ships in Shanghai for every corner of the world. So that is what I dreamed of and that is where I went, and three weeks after I got there, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Shanghai was cut off. And I broke my leg. I thought: The war will go on and on, you are a cripple, now you will never catch up. Give up, give up, give up!"

Bob held her tenderly.

"IIyusha saved me. I agreed to marry him. I had nowhere to turn. He said, 'I know I am too old for you. But if you would let me take care of you....'"

The scene shifted back to when she and Bob were standing at the ship's railing. On the pier, a Filipino band was playing Aloha. Bob was reading her the ship's itinerary. Hong Kong. Manila. Guam. Honolulu. And 21 unbelievable days later, San Francisco. Ilyusha came toward them through the crush. He was wearing his old raincoat, which belted at the waist, and he looked tall and distinguished and military. He and Bob shook hands and he embraced her.

She began to cry. "Ilyusha, dear Ilyusha, tell me I'm selfish, tell me it was heartless of me to divorce you. Tell me it's wrong of me and I'll stay!"

Ilyusha said, "Nina. Ninachka. Listen. If, for a kindness, you miss your life, you will never forgive yourself, or me."

"And you, Ilyusha? What will you do?"

He told her, smiling pinkly, rather pleased with the cleverness of it, but she could not make him out. She could see his face over the heads of the people jostling between them, his lips carefully framing the words "Understand? Understand?" but she could not hear him above the noise of the crowd drawing him away.)

"Oh!" she exclaimed.

Ilyusha was standing by her bed. He smiled apologetically. "Hello, Ninachka. I didn't mean to wake you up."

"Oh.... No, no, I wasn't asleep." Still, far away, the hubbub of the crowd. But gone now the brave swagger of the raincoat, in its place the washed-out watchman's blue, so tame on the shoulders, so tight, so pathetically tight about the neck. It probably hurts him. It hadn't occurred to her before. "Did you have something to eat?"

"Oh, yes. The cooker works very well."

He sat down. She could see he was flustered. "What is it, Ilyusha?"

"I--ah--I have arranged matters with the people at the Arizona Bar."

"You went there?"

"I stopped by. They have agreed to employ you. It seems a pleasant enough place."

She hoped he had not complicated things for her. It didn't matter. There were plenty of other bars. (She closed her eyes again, to see the time Bob and she first met. She was sitting behind the bar when he came up, the wings of the American Air Corps shining on his chest. He said. "Hello. You don't look like the others."

"Hello. You don't, either."

"Will you dance with me?"

She felt guilty, with Ilyusha beside her, and opened her eyes. Ilyusha looked away. "I--ah--was not entirely honest with you."

"What is it. my dear?"

"The cooker, as always, is a misery."

"I knew that." The room was very still. They were all listening.

"After this is over, there is something--" He wroung his hands in the effort he was making to tell her something. Then he subsided. "I have a surprise for you."

He was putting money aside to buy her a pair of dancing shoes, if she knew him. Lying back and looking at his dear, kind face, she grew sad, with the kind of sadness she had known as a child, waiting to be discovered in some wrongdoing. The time she had snipped off the dog's whiskers came back to her. Mama, she thought, close to tears, I am so unhappy.

• • •

Dr. Rokoff's telephone, reinstalled through the good offices of his former associate, Dr. Vladimir Steinberg, now a success in the International Settlement, with influential English and American friends, awakened him at two in the morning. The caller sounded spiteful: the doctor took him at first for one of the jeerers in the street below. Dr. Rokoff, having resumed advertising in the medical directory in the White Russian daily Nóvaya Zaryá (The New Dawn), had given up sleeping in the afternoons, and his glutinous dreams, after leaving him for a while, were returning at night. He had been dreaming that he had painted his shabby walls a clean beige and enriched the room with the East Indian tapestry that used to hang in his office in Kiev. Yet the walls were bloated with water and the beige was running leprous to the floor. He searched about for a bucket when half the ceiling and the wall fronting the street collapsed, leaving him in full view of the people in the street. It was then that the telephone rang, and it took, him a moment to realize that it was the young intern calling from the hospital.

Dr. Rokoff went back to his couch and lay down. He gave himself five minutes of not doing anything, not thinking anything.

He had to walk to the hospital. In the deserted streets, the Chinese shop fronts, boarded up for the night, looked like a traveling carnival crated for departure. Could he have been off in the realignment? No, he would have spotted it in the postoperative X ray. An infection, after all? There was always a small chance of that in the best of operating rooms, and in that converted clubroom.... No, he had operated in peasant huts and he had never been more careful. He kicked a stone; if it reached the opposite curb, everything would be all right. It had to be all right. There was nothing wrong in the way he had broken and reset the bone, nothing! The jeep was almost on him before he saw it. Too late to jump back. He thought: There it is; it isn't a question of realignment or infection, it is in general too late. But instead of smashness and oblivion, the screech ended in nothing: the street still there, the close-up face of an American solidier at the wheel of a jeep skidded askew and touching him with a fender. From under a visored cloth cap, tranquil eyes in a strong, broad face regarded him quizzically. Dr. Rokoff felt foolish.

"I am sorry," he said.

"That's all right," the American said.

"This is China. You walk in the middle of the street and drive on the sidewalk--naturally."

"I am looking for--how you say?--pebble."

"Oh, sure, a pebble. Shoot, ain't no law against huntin' down a pebble in the shank of the night."

A magnanimous giant in a children's book. What was he saying? The Americans were a new breed of men, a young people uncorrupted by defeat. If he shook this American's hand, some of their new strength would flow into him and it would not be too late. He stepped around the front of the jeep. "Please. Permit me--" But with a grating of gears, the jeep shot away.

The intern was waiting for him beside Nina's bed. Dr. Rokoff cut open the plaster cast. "Mama!" Nina said in a high, clear voice. "I didn't mean to do it!" The smell hit him.

The operation was performed very successfully by Dr. Rokoff, with Dr. Steinberg, driving halfway across the city, assisting. Gorin stood waiting outside the operating room, where the two doctors' jackets hung from the clamps of an empty billiard-cue rack. This must be the former billiard room, he kept telling himself. But how could it be, when Nina told him the billiard room was now the men's ward? Maybe they moved the billiard room here first. Then, after a few years, they had to move it down into the basement. That was probably it--yes. He started in panic when Dr. Rokoff and another man in white passed by, but they did not notice him.

"Kostya," the other man said, "can I give you a lift?"

Dr. Rokoff stood by the window, staring into the gray morning.

"Kostya," Dr. Steinberg said, "how long has it been since we worked together? Ten years?" Dr. Steinberg persisted.

"Twelve?"

"Steinberg. Please. Not now. Goodbye."

"You never performed a better operation, Kostya."

"Volodya, I beg of you...."

"Listen to me. Nobody could have foreseen it."

Gorin found his voice. "Dr. Rokoff...."

Dr. Rokoff turned around. His face was unrecognizable.

"Wait!" Dr. Steinberg commanded. "Are You--" He took Gorin by the elbow. "You must try to understand. The very best of doctors cannot always--The fact is, your daughter's leg was so delicate that the pressure of the plaster cast was enough to cause a deep gangrenous wound. There was no choice--"

"Volodya, go!"

"But to amputate."

Gorin sank to the floor, proped against the cue rack. He could see Dr. Rokoff's white stubbly face before him and he could hear him saying, "Gorin, my brother, before God I am guilty. Something was bound to have gone wrong. For me, the Americans arrived too late. What brought you to me?" But the voice was a dry rustling in his ears and the morning light was unreal, and it was lamplight again before he stood bewildered beside Nina's bed, afraid to look any lower than her bright, cheated eyes.