Two nights and three days from Wonsan to Harbin the train clattered on, the lush greenery interrupted by trucks and depots manned by soldiers in military khaki. Despite the inspections and unexplained transfers, this man I shall call S remained impassive, shadowed by a dusky light that had nothing to do with the time of day or the dimness of the car’s interior; he sat leaning against the windowpane, face set, impervious to the din around him. Later, I would come to recognize this posture of self-recrimination, but at the time I had barely recovered from our initial journey from Niigata to Wonsan across the Sea of Japan, and I was in a contemplative mood myself, in no condition to pause over the state of others, much less engage with my colleagues, who by now had begun drinking in earnest, liquor still being plentiful then, oiling even the most reticent of tongues. So I excused myself and must have promptly nodded off, for the next moment it was dawn, the day just beginning to break, the length of the train still shrouded in sleep. I was the only one awake, the only one woken by the sudden cessation of rhythm, which drew me to the window, still dark except for my reflection superimposed on it.
We had apparently stopped for cargo, the faint scuffling I could hear revealing a truck ringed by soldiers, their outlines camouflaged against the paling horizon. Later I would learn the significance of this stop, but for the moment the indistinct scene strained my eyes, and I pulled back, hoping to rest for another hour.
Forty years later, this scene returns to me with a crispness that seems almost specious when so much else has faded or disappeared. Perhaps it is simply the mind, which, in its inability to accept a fact, returns to it, sharpening the details, resolving the image, searching for an explanation that the mind, with its slippery grasp on causality, will never be able to find. Most days I am spared by the habits of routine. But when the air darkens like this, turning the windows inward and truncating the afternoon, the present recedes, its thin hold on consciousness no match for the eighty-two years that have already claimed it. If hindsight were less truculent, I might have long ago been granted the famed view of belated clarity that might have illuminated the exact steps that led me into the fog of my actions. But hindsight has not offered me this view, my options and choices as elusive now as they had been then. After all, it was war. An inexcusable logic, but also a fact. We adapted to the reality over which we felt we had no control.
For what could we have done? After seven years of embroilment and two years of open war, the conflict with China had begun to tax the everyday, small signs of oncoming shortages beginning to blight the streets, thinning shelves and darkening windows, so that even menus at the fanciest restaurants resembled the books and newspapers blatantly censored by the TokkÅ thought police. Then, when officials began making their rounds of sympathetic universities, seeking candidates disposed to patriotic service, our director submitted a list of our names, eliciting more visits from more officials, this time escorted by military men. Were we alarmed? Some of my colleagues were. But the prospect of a new world-class facility with promises of unlimited resources stoked our ambitions, we who had long assumed ourselves dormant, choked off by the nepotism that structured our schools and hospitals. If any of us resisted, I did not hear about it. Flattered and courted, we let ourselves be lured, the glitter of high pay and breakthrough advancements all the more seductive in the light of our flickering lives.
So the day we set sail from Niigata we were in high spirits, the early sky heavy with mist, the hull of the Nippon Maru chopping and cleaving as the sound of rushing water bore us away from our coastline, leaving us to wend our way through our doubts and worries to arrive in Wonsan, stiff and rumpled but clear in our convictions. After two turbulent days, we were grateful to be on steady ground, overwhelmed by new smells and sounds, the bustling travelers and hawkers broken up by the young, bright-eyed representative dispatched to meet us. This youth was energetic, if brash, and perhaps it was this, along with the sudden physical realization that we were no longer in Japan, that reminded me of my son, but it plunged me into a mood that would last the rest of the trip. Of S I have no recollection at this time, not until a few hours’ gap resolves into the memory of that cold window of the stilled train, my eyes pulling back from the soldiers and truck, their dark outlines replaced by the reflection of my face, above which I caught another face, its eyes watching me.
No doubt it was the hour, and the invasiveness of having been watched, but the shock colored all my subsequent encounters with S, so that even decades later I am left with an ominous impression of a man always watching as the rest of us adapted to our given roles and fulfilled them perfectly. Did we exchange words? I regret that we did not. For by the time I gathered myself, he was gone. Two hours later we pulled into Harbin, our Emperor’s celebrated new acquisition.
From Harbin we were to head twenty-two kilometers south to Pingfang. But we were granted a few introductory hours in the famed city, and we set about familiarizing ourselves with the cobblestone streets flanked by European shops and cafés still festive with wealthy Russians and a few well-placed Chinese, all of whom politely acknowledged our entourage. If people were wary, they did not show it, and we, for our part, acted the tourist, taking turns deciphering the familiar kanji strung together in unfamiliar ways on signs and advertisements as onion domes and minarets rose beside church steeples and pagoda roofs, obscuring the city’s second skyline: the “Chinese” sector of this once Russian concession city. Once or twice unmarked vans stole by, but overall our impression was of wonder and delight as we strolled through the crowd, the sun on our backs coaxing a healthy sweat despite the chill in the October air.
If not for a small incident, Harbin might have remained an oasis in my memory of China. But our young representative had irked me from the start, and the farther we walked the more he chatted, pointing out this or that landmark we must have heard of, and soon his loud, presumptuous voice began grating on me, and I snapped back with an energy that surprised even me.
My colleagues were quick to intervene, rallying around him like mother hens, clucking at my severity. But, you see, my son and I had been getting into it just like this, and I could not abide the youth’s hooded eyes; I lashed out, admonishing his temerity, his misguided courage and naïve ideals—the very things I believed had pushed my own son to run away, presumably to enlist. I would have lost my head then, save for the tether of my wife’s pleading face, which appeared before me, reminding me of how, despite her terror, she had refused to blame me each day I failed to find our son. I dropped my voice and let myself be pecked back, the sun-dappled street once again leading us on, this time to our first proper meal in days.
The day’s specialty was duck. Despite our meager group of thirty-one, the restaurant had been requisitioned, its large dining room conspicuously empty, its grand floors and walls echoing the stamps and scrapes of our shoes and chairs as we accepted the seats arranged around two tables set in the center of the room. S was observing us, his stolid face amplifying the garishness of our own as our tables began brimming with plates and bowls, flushing our cheeks and exciting our chopsticks. At last the duck was set before us, its dewy skin crisped and seasoned. For most of us, this was our first taste of the bird, and the pungent flesh, voluptuously tender, provoked our passions, prompting us to trade stories of our youthful lusts. But I for some reason found myself remembering the days I had spent toting my sister, who never tired of feeding the ducks that splashed in the pond behind our house. I earned my title as the group’s sentimentalist that day, but I believe it was at this moment that we fell in with each other, our shared pleasure piqued by our unspoken guilt at gorging on such an extravagance when our families back home had mere crumbs to support the patriotic frugality demanded of them. Perhaps this is why Harbin has stayed with me, nostalgic and laden, edged with a hysteria I would come to associate with this time.