It was not totally without relief that Nicholai saw Miss Goodbody off on her homeward-bound ship and returned to move out of her government-allotted quarters to a house he had rented in the Asakusa district of northwest Tokyo where, in this rather old-fashioned quarter, he could live with invisible elegance—nearly shibumi —and deal with Westerners only during the forty hours a week that produced his living, a luxurious level of living by Japanese standards because of his relatively high pay and, even more important, his access to goods at American post exchanges and commissaries. For Nicholai was now in possession of that most important of human endowments: identification papers. These had been obtained by means of a little winking collusion between Miss Goodbody and friends in the civil service. Nicholai had one ID card that identified him as an American civilian employee, and another that identified him as Russian. On the unlikely event that he might be questioned by American military police, he could produce his Russian identity; and for all other curious nationals, his American papers. Relations between the Russians and Americans were founded in mistrust and mutual fear, and they avoided interfering with one another’s nationals over petty events, much as a man crossing the street to rob a bank might avoid jaywalking.
During the next year, Nicholas’s life and work expanded. So far as work went, he was sometimes called upon to serve in the cryptography section of Sphinx/FE, before that intelligence organization was consumed by the insatiable new bureaucratic infragovernment of the CIA. Upon one occasion it was not possible to translate the decoded message into English because the Russian into which it had been reduced was almost gibberish. Nicholai asked to see the original cryptograph. Combining his childhood penchant for pure mathematics, his ability to conceive in abstract permutations as developed and displayed in his Gô training, and his native facility in six languages, he was able to locate the errors in decoding fairly easily. He discovered that the original message had been wrongly encoded by someone who wrote a stilted Russian that was organized, quaintly enough, in the Chinese word order, producing by chance a message that baffled the complicated decoding machines of Sphinx/FE. Nicholai had known Chinese who spoke their imperfectly learned Russian in this stilted way, so once he stumbled on the key, the content of the communication fell into place easily. But the clerk/accountant mentalities of the Cryptology Section were impressed, and Nicholai was heralded a “boy wonder”—for most of them assumed he was still a boy. One thoroughly “hep” young code clerk fanned his fingers at Nicholai, calling him a real “quiz kid” and describing the decoding job as “reet, neat, and com-plete!”
So Nicholai was transferred to Sphinx/FE on a permanent basis, given a raise in rank and salary, and allowed to pass his days in a small secluded office, amusing himself with the game of untangling and translating messages in which he had not the slightest interest.
In time, and somewhat to his surprise, Nicholai arrived at a kind of emotional truce with the Americans among whom he worked. This is not to say that he came to like them, or to trust them; but he came to realize that they were not the amoral, depraved people their political and military behavior suggested they were. True, they were culturally immature, brash and clumsy, materialistic and historically myopic, loud, bold, and endlessly tiresome in social encounters; but at bottom they were good-hearted and hospitable; willing to share—indeed insistent upon sharing—their wealth and ideology with all the world.
Above all, he came to recognize that all Americans were merchants, that the core of the American Genius, of the Yankee Spirit, was buying and selling. They vended their democratic ideology like hucksters, supported by the great protection racket of armaments deals and economic pressures. Their wars were monumental exercises in production and supply. Their government was a series of social contracts. Their education was sold as so much per unit hour. Their marriages were emotional deals, the contracts easily broken if one party failed in his debt-servicing. Honor for them consisted in fair trading. And they were not, as they thought, a classless society; they were a one-class society—the mercantile. Their elite were the rich; their workers and farmers were best viewed as flawed and failed scramblers up the middle-class monetary ladder. The peasants and proletariat of America had values identical to those of the insurance salesmen and business executives, the only difference being that these values were expressed in more modest fiscal terms: the motor boat rather than the yacht; the bowling league rather than the country club; Atlantic City rather than Monaco.
Training and inclination had combined to make Nicholai respect and feel affection for all members of the real classes: farmers, artisans, artists, warriors, scholars, priests. But he could feel nothing but disdain for the artificial class of the merchant, who sucks up his living through buying and selling things he does not create, who collects power and wealth out of proportion to his discrimination, and who is responsible for all that is kitsch, for all that is change without progress, for all that is consumption without use.
Following the advice of his mentors to maintain a diffident facade of distant shibumi, Nicholai was careful to mask his attitudes from his fellow workers. He avoided their envy by occasionally asking advice on some simple decoding problem, or phrasing his questions so as to guide them to the correct answers. For their parts, they treated him as a kind of freak, an intellectual phenomenon, a boy wonder who had dropped from another planet. To this degree, they were numbly aware of the genetic and cultural gulf separating him from them, but as they saw it, it was they who were within, and he who was without.
And that suited him perfectly, for his real life was centered on his house, built around a courtyard, off a narrow side street in the Asakusa district. Americanization was slow to penetrate this old-fashioned quarter in the northwest section of the city. To be sure, there were little shops engaged in producing imitations of Zippo lighters and cigarette cases bearing the image of the one-dollar bill, and from some bars came the music of Japanese orchestras imitating the “big band” sound, and peppy girl singers squeaking their way through “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me,” and one saw the occasional young man dressed like a movie gangster in the thought that he looked modern and American, and there were radio advertisements in English promising that Akadama wine would make you bery-bery happy. But the veneer was thin, and still in late May the district celebrated the Festival of Sanja Matsuri, the streets blocked by sweating young men staggering under the weight of black-lacquered, lavishly gilted palanquins, their eyes shining with saki-reinforced trance as they reeled under the weight of their burdens and chanted washoi, washoi, washoi, under the direction of magnificently tattooed men wearing only fundoshi breech-cloths that revealed the complicated “suits of ink” covering their shoulders, backs, arms, and thighs.
Nicholai was returning home through the rain, somewhat fogged with saki after participating in the Festival, when he met Mr. Watanabe, a retired printmaker who was selling matches on the street because his pride would not allow him to beg, although he was seventy-two and all his family was gone. Nicholai declared himself to be in desperate need of matches and offered to buy the entire stock. Mr. Watanabe was delighted to be of service, as the sale would forestall hunger for another day. But when he discovered that the rain had made the matches useless, his sense of honor would not allow him to sell them, despite the fact that Nicholai declared he was particularly seeking soggy matches for an experiment he had in mind.