At last he arrived in Shanghai in 1927, the year the Communist uprising failed there, the same year Trotsky fell from power in Russia.
Father Lamereaux paused to pour himself another glass of whiskey.
As it happened, he whispered, a remark Adzhar made during his first days in Shanghai had an enormous influence on modern Chinese history.
When he arrived in the city his only interest was in learning the Kiangsi and Hakka dialects, to go with those he already knew, so that he could read the regional commentaries on the Chinese classics before continuing on to Japan. But at the same time, remembering his own experiences with the czarist police, he could not help but be sympathetic with the revolutionaries who were being hunted down in Shanghai and shot. Consequently he hid a number of them in his home until a way could be found for them to escape from the city.
One of these Chinese was an urbane scholarly man who had studied in Europe and had been one of the leaders of the uprising. He and Adzhar got into the habit of having long philosophical discussions to pass the hours. Not surprisingly, like Trotsky in the Bronx, the Chinese was depressed over the recent disaster to his cause.
Sometimes, he said one evening, despair paralyzes us. We become like an animal in the dark that can neither see nor hear nor smell.
I know that despair, said Adzhar. On one occasion I knew it particularly well. I was living with the Lapps and it seemed I would never escape those frozen regions where the darkness closes around you and closes in. But then the Lapps with their reindeer taught me what to do and taught me well, for remember no one knows such a night as they do above the Arctic Circle.
And what did they tell you?
What I’ve done all my life since then. Move. March.
Where?
What does it matter? All good roads are within. Mine has been a long one and perhaps your march must be long as well.
The scholarly Chinese smiled at Adzhar, for as they both knew, the Lapp proverb he had quoted was nothing more than the way of the Tao. He smiled at Adzhar, but he remembered the wisdom of the remark because it came from a man who had known many strange corners of the world.
A few days later the Chinese was able to escape from Shanghai. During the next few years he knew many more disasters, until finally a moment came when he and his comrades were completely surrounded by armies that far outnumbered them.
By then the scholarly revolutionary had risen high in the ranks of the party. Each night after a day of hopeless warfare the weary leaders sat down on the ground to discuss their desperate situation, and each night Adzhar’s friend argued with the others to accept the advice he had heard while hiding in Shanghai.
Almost all the other leaders disagreed with him. What he was proposing was failure and defeat. They still controlled this one area of the country, and the peasants there were loyal to them. If they left it they would have nothing. They would be nothing.
So they argued, but Adzhar’s friend was clever and eventually he won them over. The order was given to march and they did, six thousand miles in all, a march that saved them from extinction and became a mystical unifying force that brought them to power in the end.
A long voyage? Perhaps. Yet not as long as the voyage of a shoemaker’s son from Georgia.
Adzhar busied himself with Chinese dialects, but very soon he was experiencing a new kind of restlessness, the most profound he had ever known. He used to speculate that it had come to him because he had crossed the Gobi Desert on foot, although frankly I see no connection whatsoever between the two. Then at other times he claimed the original cause of the restlessness might have been more general and unspecified than one would expect, perhaps merely a routine result of having arrived in the East after so many decades of wandering. Lotmann favored the latter explanation and as proof quoted the story of Elijah and the ravens, which had saved his own life, but in the end who is to say? In any case the restlessness amounted to this.
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.