A series of English nannies followed one another through the household, so English joined French, Russian, and German as the languages of the crib, with no particular preference shown, save for Alexandra Ivanovna's conviction that certain languages were best for expressing certain classes of thought. One spoke of love and other trivia in French; one discussed tragedy and disaster in Russian; one did business in German; and one addressed servants in English.
Because the children of the servants were his only companions, Chinese was also a cradle language for Nicholai, and he developed the habit of thinking in that language because his greatest childhood dread was that his mother could read his thoughts—and she had no Chinese.
Alexandra Ivanovna considered schools appropriate only for merchants' children, so Nicholai's education was confided to a succession of tutors, all decorative young men, all devoted to the mother. When it developed that Nicholai displayed an interest in, and a considerable capacity for, pure mathematics, his mother was not at all pleased. But when she was assured by the tutor of the moment that pure mathematics was a study without practical or commercial application, she decided it was appropriate to his breeding.
The more practical aspects of Nicholai's social education—and all of his fun—came from his practice of sneaking away from the house and wandering with street urchins through the narrow alleys and hidden courtyards of the seething, noisome, noisy city. Dressed in the universal loose-fitting blue, his close-cropped hair under a round cap, he would roam alone or with friends of the hour and return home to admonitions or punishments, both of which he accepted with great calm and an infuriating elsewhere gaze in his bottle-green eyes.
In the streets, Nicholai learned the melody of this city the Westerners had confected for themselves. He saw supercilious young British "griffins" being pulled about by cadaverous rickshaw "boys" cachectic with tuberculosis, sweating with effort and malnutrition, wearing gauze masks to avoid offending the European masters. He saw the compradores, fat and buttery middlemen who profited from the Europeans' exploitation of their own people, and who aped Western ways and ethics. After making profit and gorging on exotic foods, the greatest pleasure of these compradores was to arrange to deflower twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls who had been bought in Hangchow or Soochow and who were ready to enter the brothels licensed by the French. Their tactics of defloration were... irregular. The only revenge the girl might have was, if she had a gift for theatrics, the profitable ploy of being deflowered rather often. Nicholai learned that all of the beggars who threatened passers-by with contact with their rotting limbs, or stuck pins into babies to make them cry pitifully, or mobbed and frightened tourists with their demands for kumshah—all of them, from the old men who prayed for you or cursed you, to the half-starved children who offered to perform unnatural acts with one another for your entertainment, were under the control of His Heinous Majesty, the King of Beggars, who ran a peculiar combination of guild and protection racket. Anything lost in the city, anyone hiding in the city, any service wanted in the city, could be found through a modest contribution to His Majesty's treasury.
Down at the docks, Nicholai watched sweating stevedores dog-trot up and down the gangplanks of metal ships and wooden junks with strabismic eyes painted on their prows. In the evening, after they had already worked eleven hours, chanting their constant, narcotizing hai-yo, hai-yo the stevedores would begin to weaken, and sometimes one would stumble under his load. Then the Gurkhas would wade in with their blackjacks and iron bars, and the lazy would find new strength... or lasting rest.
Nicholai watched the police openly accept "squeeze money" from withered amahs who pimped for teenaged prostitutes. He learned to recognize the secret signs of the "Greens" and the "Reds," who constituted the world's largest secret societies, and whose protection and assassination rackets extended from beggars to politicians. Chiang Kai-shek himself was a "Green," sworn to obedience to the gang. And it was the "Greens" who murdered and mutilated young university students who attempted to organize the Chinese proletariat. Nicholai could tell a "Red" from a "Green" by the way he held his cigarette, by the way he spat.
During the days, Nicholai learned from tutors: Mathematics, Classical Literature, and Philosophy. In the evenings, he learned from the streets: Commerce, Politics, Enlightened Imperialism, and the Humanities.
And at night he would sit beside his mother as she entertained the cleverest of the men who controlled Shanghai and wrung it dry from their clubs and commercial houses of the Bund. What the majority of these men thought was shyness in Nicholai, and what the brightest of them thought was aloofness, was in fact cold hatred for merchants and the merchant mentality.
Time passed; Alexandra Ivanovna's carefully placed and expertly guided investments flourished, while the rhythms of her social life slowed. She became more comfortable of body, more languid, more lush; but her vivacity and beauty ripened, rather than waned, for she had inherited that family trait that had kept her mother and aunts looking vaguely thirtyish long after they passed the half-century mark. Former lovers became old friends, and life on Avenue Joffre mellowed.
Alexandra Ivanovna began to have little fainting spells, but she did not concern herself over them, beyond accepting the well-timed swoon as essential to the amorous arsenal of any lady of blood. When a doctor of her circle who had for years been eager to examine her ascribed the spells to a weak heart, she made a nominal accommodation to what she conceived to be a physical nuisance by reducing her at-homes to one a week, but beyond that she gave her body no quarter.
"...and they tell me, young man, that I have a weak heart. It's an essentially romantic failing, and you must promise not to take advantage of it too frequently. You must also promise to seek out a responsible tailor. That suit, my boy!"
On the seventh of July, 1937, the North China Daily News reported that shots had been exchanged between Japanese and Chinese at the Marco Polo bridge near Peking. Down at number Three, the Bund, British taipans lounging about in the Shanghai Club agreed that this latest development in the pointless struggle between Orientals might get out of hand, if not dealt with briskly. They made it known to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek that they would prefer him to rush north and engage the Japanese along a front that would shield their commercial houses from the damned nuisance of war.
The Generalissimo decided, however, to await the Japanese at Shanghai in the nope that putting the International Settlement in jeopardy would attract foreign intervention on his behalf.
When that did not work, he began a systematic harassment of Japanese companies and civilians in the international community that culminated when, at six-thirty in the evening of August 9, Sub-Lieutenant Isao Oyama and his driver, first-class seaman Yozo Saito, who were driving to inspect Japanese cotton mills outside the city, were stopped by Chinese soldiers.
They were found beside Monument Road, riddled with bullets and sexually mutilated.
In response, Japanese warships moved up the Whangpoo. A thousand Japanese sailors were landed to protect their commercial colony at Chapei, across Soochow creek. They were faced by 10,000 elite Chinese soldiers dug in behind barricades.
The outcry of the comfortable British taipans was reinforced by messages sent by European and American ambassadors to Nanking and Tokyo demanding that Shanghai be excluded from the zone of hostilities. The Japanese agreed to this request, provided that Chinese forces also withdraw from the demilitarized zone.