Nowhere Man

7. Nowhere Man

KIEV, SEPTEMBER 1900-

SHANGHAI, AUGUST 2000

On the horizon you could see black, bloated, heinous clouds leading a storm charge. And the sea kept licking the rusty ship — the Pamyat—loaded with destitute men, officers and soldiers alike, left with nothing but their honor, still wearing impeccable uniforms, exuding a faint scent of the Trans-Siberian railway. The officers’ wives, the finest ladies all, choked with swallowed tears, waving at their loyal servants on the shore, lined up like a choir in a great tragedy, hating the Bolsheviks even more than their mistresses. There was a young captain going around, politely imploring the ladies to get rid of excess baggage, and they obeyed — what difference did it make now? You could see millions of rubles in fur, bobbing in filthy water, like rat corpses. Amid the sinking fur and suitcases, there was a little lap dog barking shrilly, paddling feebly with its tiny paws, slowly losing its strength, until it drowned. Our hearts sank with it.

And the Pamyat sailed off, and no one on it could take their eyes off the beautiful shoreline, the lush forests and the curved mountains under the clouds: our Russian land, our mother’s breasts. We all wept, women and men, waves slamming the ship, as if they were waves of tears. And I stood at the prow, the Pacific wind ripping the skin off my face [he touches his scar], Vladivostok devoured by the mist behind me. You must believe me, I was deliberating whether to shoot myself, to empty my head and my heart, the devil take it all, for what is life, little sister, what is life without Russia. But then I heard my men singing with deep sonorous voices, coming straight from their Russian hearts, singing as no men had sung before: “Do not close your eyes, Mother Russia, for it is not time to sleep.” And it gave me strength. I did not kill myself, and here I am in Shanghai now, alive and swimming, although there are days, and this is one of them, when I regret that I did not blow my brains out, on the Pamyat, with my final gaze locked on Russia.

This is the story that Evgenij Pick—Captain Pick — told to Russian ex-princesses and ex-baronesses and ex-nobodies earning their paltry living in Shanghai as prostitutes and taxi dancers, even dressmakers. They would listen to him, swooning, warm tears in their Russian eyes, stroking their new, local lap dog until they hurt it with their hands shriveled from the work they had never done before, the dog slipping off their lap. They would not even notice Captain Pick’s nimble hand crawling up their thighs, then deeper, much deeper, and he never paid them for anything.

To drunken Russian ex-officers, surviving in Shanghai as bodyguards and extortionists (or not surviving at all), prone to scorching their nostalgia with poisonously cheap vodka, he would tell about the saber given to him by his father, a Cossack colonel, on his deathbed. His father made him swear on the saber that he would defend Mother Russia’s honor until his last breath. It was with that very saber (resting now in a pawnshop, he said, waiting for better days) that he decapitated a Jewish Bolshevik, in Smolensk, in 1919. Sometimes he would use a watermelon to demonstrate how the head flew in a perfect arc (“rainbow-like”) and fell on the ground with a thud that implied hollowness. His audience would always enjoy the joke, ordering more vodka for Captain Pick. He would cut open the watermelon with his rosewood-handle knife, and they would gorge on the crimson insides, using their fingers, kissing each other after every downed glass of vodka. And he would keep them enraptured, dizzy with common memories and alcohol, telling them how the Germans caught him in 1914, and how he escaped — he just walked out of the prison, ordering the guards in a thunderous voice to open the gate and they had to open it, saluting him, because even in large numbers and heavily armed they were afraid of a real Russian. The Germans caught him ten more times, and he escaped ten more times — he would slam his hand against his chest and holler: “They thought I was the devil himself!” and the crowd would proudly guffaw, delighted that the devil is Russian, one of our own. Pick would then start singing, “Do not close your eyes, Mother Russia, for it is not time to sleep,” and they would weep, as they wept leaving Vladivostok. Not infrequently, a mob of wobbling Russian patriots would carry Pick on their shoulders to their favorite brothel or an opium den, where they would pool money to treat him with a cure, admittedly temporary, for his wounded Russian heart.

At the beginning, a few of them would have trouble remembering his being on the Pamyat. Nor could the officers from the units he claimed to have served in remember him serving with them. Some of them even recalled a man with the same face, albeit scarless, working for the Soviets in Harbin and Shanghai under a different name. But after a while his stories, told in minute, plausible detail, absorbed along with a China Sea of vodka, displaced their memories, and they started generating their own, new memories featuring trench brotherhood with Captain Pick, his doughty feats, and legendary drinking binges, from which some of them never recovered. Eventually, Pick—Captain Pick — became the dearest brother of every true Russian in Shanghai.

The likely story, we have to say, is somewhat different. Evgenij Pick is born as Evgenij Mihailovich Kojevnikoff, in Kiev, in September 1900, son of a Cossack army colonel and a raped Jewish mother, who dies giving him birth. His father takes some care of him, paying an unmarried, crazy aunt to bring him up, until Papa gambles away all his money and kills himself, leaving Pick nothing but embarrassing debts and the unpaid aunt’s fury, conveyed through a beating with a broom handle. There is no record of the saber whatsoever. Apart from the broom-induced anguish following his father’s demise, little is remembered about Pick’s childhood, boyhood, or youth. After a few blank years, we find him serving in the Russian army in 1917, until he is captured by the Germans, but only once. We do not know when and indeed if he did escape, but in the fall of 1917, he is in Sankt Petersburg, caught up in the Revolution. It seems that the revolutionary fervor, not to mention numerous opportunities for pilfering and plundering, excited him enough to become a revolutionary. His duty becomes the duty of a political commissar, his job is to deliver speeches on a rich selection of injustices, and when he raises his arm and points in the general direction of bloodthirsty capitalist bloodsuckers, his audiences are always eager to go there, however distant and dangerous there may be.

His good revolutionary work allows him to study in Moscow, from 1919 to 1922, at the Military Academy and, simultaneously at the Academy for Music and Drama. After graduation he is said to have worked as an assistant military attaché in the Soviet embassies in Afghanistan and Turkey — jobs whose uneventfulness would be unbearable, were it not for the abundant availability of first-class opium.

In 1925, he arrives in Shanghai, via the Trans-Siberian railway, Vladivostok, and Harbin. His official duty is as an assistant to the Soviet military mission there — that is, a spy — working undercover as a businessman, selling advertising space in Russian papers. He really serves the Comintern, building networks, acquiring acquaintances who can provide fruitful information, some of which he fails to share with his comrades, but rather hoards it for the day he might need it.

And the day arrives in 1927, when, according to Wasserstein, he turns coat and furnishes the British intelligence in Shanghai with a carefully assembled collection of pertinent information, embellished with fantastic sub-narratives of ubiquitous Comintern conspiracies in China and — why stop there? — the world at large. All of it is delivered in a reasonable, measured, yet mesmerizing tone — all the accents are in the right places, and the ephemera (useless characters, pointless details, frequent digressions regarding his own unremarkable, woeful self) is effectively scattered throughout Pick’s narrative, providing the inevitable randomness of common existence, the sloppiness necessary for the illusion of a real, uncontrollable life. His briefers, all from good families and universally educated at elite British universities — evidently intellectually superior to an effusive Russian vagrant — cannot have enough of his stories. They promptly and passionately send Pick’s confession to the Foreign Office, followed by a note from the British ambassador, Sir William Senson, saying that “while [the accuracy of Pick’s information cannot be guaranteed, it has the ring of truth.”

The ring of truth is a golden one, it seems, for with the generous British reward and the profits from small but lucrative deals with his acquaintances Captain Pick is able to open his own theater in Shanghai. The theater has the ambitious name of the Far Eastern Grand Opera, and he is the impresario, stage manager, opera singer, ballet dancer, and its star actor. Let it be noted that his stage name, ever present on the glamorous marquee of his theater, is Eugene Hovans.

It is on the Grand Opera stage that Pick/Hovans performs his greatest role — the role of Chichikoff in Gogol’s Dead Souls. In Hovans’s rendition, Chichikoff becomes a Moses, leading the spiritless, soul-dead people of Russia to the promised land. The culmination of the performance was Chichikoff’s troika speech, inevitably resulting in women pulling their nicely combed and coiled hair off their heads in tufts, and men pulling out their guns and threatening to shoot themselves, right there, the devil take it all, enough of this misery. “Ah, you horses, horses — what horses!” vociferated Hovans, thumping his chest with his fist, as if intent on breaking it open and taking his heart out to exhibit its purity to the audience. “Your manes are whirlwinds! And are your veins not tingling like a quick ear? Descending from above you have caught the note of the familiar song; and at once, in unison, you strain your chests of bronze [chest thumping] and, with your hooves barely skimming the earth, you are transformed into arrows, into straight lines winging through the air, and on you rush under divine inspiration. . Russia, where are you flying? Answer me! [sobs, hair-pulling, revolvers cocked, etc.] There is no answer.”

Apart from being a Chichikoff, Hovans is a swan — as a matter of fact, the swan in Swan Lake; he is a man driven to suicidal madness in a single night, by a tenacious mouse pitter-pattering across the floor of the man’s mind; he is Raskolnikov, whose murder of the old lady is not justified philosophically, but by the fact that she is Jewish — an interpretation that goes over much better with his audience; and, finally, he is the Russian Hamlet. The Hamlet performances are crowned — as Fortinbras looms over Hamlet’s body — with the audience (whose wounds from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have not healed, and never will) sonorously singing: “Do not close your eyes, Mother Russia, for it is not time to sleep.”

But when he isn’t bringing his audiences to an orgasm of nostalgia, Captain Pick supplements his fame with the lucre reaped in the rich, filthy fields of Shanghai’s lawlessness. He blackmails an American judge who, he has discovered, is a homosexual. One day, the judge’s body washes off the shores of the Whangpoo, with his rectum cut out. In 1929, Captain Pick is sentenced to nine months in jail for having sold, under the name of Joseph Pronek, bonds of nonexistent foreign countries to a few seducible French mademoiselles and greedy English ladies. Then, Wasserstein says, he hawks worthless pamphlets and books stolen for him by the coolies from the Soviet consulate, wrapped nicely in the preposterous embroidery of Pick’s tales of their conspiratorial significance. He writes a column for a Shanghai-published Russian paper, in which he exposes the weaknesses in the pillars of the community, unless the pillars provide a recompense that would make him look at the frailties of other pillars instead. In 1931, under the name of Dr. Montaigne, he represents himself as a military adviser to the Chinese government and takes millions of dollars for arms that do not exist, which is what will ultimately prevent him from supplying them. His clients spend months imagining their future power, waiting for the arms to arrive and retelling Pick’s stories, until he is arrested and sentenced to a year in prison. In prison, he acquires a few Chinese friends, some of them loyal members of the Green Gang, hiding from the law in their comfortable prison cells (the Gang kindly providing everything from opium and girls to heroin and boys) until the memory of their crimes is erased by the newer crimes of their colleagues and acquaintances. Once out of jail, Pick shacks up with a Georgian woman who owns a brothel just behind the Astor House Hotel, and starts a modest white-slavery ring of his own. Both his fallen Russian lady friends and his Green Gang comrades come in handy in his new venture — which a sanctimonious Russian paper in Harbin unwisely makes public.

But no one cares about those self-righteous accusations (although a little nick is left on Pick’s heart) — Shanghai is a far different place from the priggish Harbin, people do what they have to and what they can to make a decent living. Furthermore, Captain Pick is a well-liked man, “the soul of every party he attends”—and he, God help him, attends many. He is the heart of the Russian community, always able to express the deep, true feelings of the Russian people. An acquaintance describes him as “a highly emotional individual,” someone who is “very trusting.” But, on the other hand, the acquaintance asserts, “he could be very suspicious. . He met many people, but quickly tired of them. Therefore, he had many enemies and no intimate friends. . He used to say: ‘Drama and music are my best friends and the stage my entire life.’” Another acquaintance describes him as having “a Mongolian cast of countenance. . no hair at all, wears a black skull cap, has burn scars on his head. . a heavy vodka drinker. . usually goes around with a rosewood-handle knife. . a friendly, decent fellow.”

The scars on his head are not the result of burning oil, as he claims, poured on him during a Bolshevik torture session, let alone the result of a Pacific wind strong enough to rip the skin off his face. Rather, it is a result of his opium stupor, in which he rolled off his opium-den divan and into a hearth.

Even a typically earnest American intelligence report has a hard time resisting Captain Pick’s charms, describing him as “well-educated, a good linguist, accomplished actor, fascinating story teller, but a facile writer. He is also a smuggler of arms, pimp, intelligence agent, and a competent murderer.”

Ever sensitive to the changing winds of history, Captain Pick has groomed his Japanese contacts with particular care from the beginning of his life in Shanghai, but in 1937, after the Japanese invasion of China, he begins working for the Japanese Naval intelligence Bureau in Shanghai. He assembles a ring of some forty European agents (not counting the gaggle of drugged-up Russian ladies), who are supposed to spy on other Europeans in Shanghai, believing themselves to be protected from the Japanese might in the International Settlement and the French Concession. His ring is the elite of Shanghai’s underworld: Baron N. N. Tipolt, a blackmailer, swindler, and informer for the Gestapo; Count Victor Plavchuk, handy with the blade, who would often entertain brothel staff by throwing knives at a terrified novice prostitute, occasionally pinning down her ears, just for a laugh; Admiral Marcus Templar, purportedly a member of the Greek Royal House, whose specialty is taking surreptitious photographs, used for blackmailing; Bernie and Ernie McDunn, Siamese Chicago twins, conjoined at the hip, who would do anything for a dose of heroin; Alex Hemmon, a former member of the Purple Gang in Detroit, a hit man who has to kill somebody every time he gets drunk (which he does habitually), and who moonlights as a professional trombonist in an orchestra regularly performing at the Far Eastern Grand Opera.

In the late thirties, under Japanese protection, Captain Pick’s is a cozy living. He’s providing plausible information to his employees, running his criminal (which in Shanghai is a term of endearment) enterprises and lovingly managing his Far Eastern Grand Opera. In 1940, Pick goes to Japan for a holiday, where he meets Commander Otani Inaho, the Japanese officer who will later head Naval Intelligence in Shanghai and become Pick’s chief Japanese patron. Commander Otani and Captain Pick become the closest friends, often publicly pronouncing their utmost respect and admiration for each other’s honor and manhood. Indeed, malicious rumor has it that besides sharing a deeply seated belief in the value of discipline and patriotism, they occasionally shared a messy bed. In 1941, a week or so after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese troops march leisurely into the International Settlement, encountering no resistance, and practically besiege the French Concession, run by a herd of confused, dim-witted Vichy loyalists. Pick becomes Commander Otani’s left hand and, thanks to his kind assiduousness, moves into room 741 at the luxurious Cathay Hotel.

The years spent in room 741 at the Cathay Hotel, dozing in the lap of the great power, are the best years of Pick’s life: comfortable, pleasant, not requiring a lot of work. A postwar American intelligence report, quoted by Wasserstein (prepared by one Captain Owen), describes Pick’s typical day: he gets up before dawn, watches the sun rise through the humid haze over the Whangpoo River, where robust Japanese ships are anchored in the harbor, junks sheepishly squeezing between them; he listens to the radio news from Moscow, London, Honolulu (enjoying the Glen Miller Band, humming along with Glen’s trombone); from six to seven A.M. he is on the phone, receiving and dispatching Shanghai intelligence, conveyed often as plain, candid gossip. He reads Russian newspapers and eats breakfast (two eggs, a mountain of bacon, a river of coffee), sometimes spurting a fleet of yolky spit all over the papers, infuriated by their dishonorable lies. Then he goes to the office at the Naval Intelligence, where he organizes files or masturbates in anticipation of lunch with his newest young-lady acquisition. Unless, that is, he goes to the Japanese Thought Police Headquarters to supervise the interrogation of a foreigner, occasionally adding a Russian touch: whipping the prisoner with a knotted whip, until chunks of flesh fall off. At one o’clock he eats lunch with a young lady whom he plans to bed after it. After dessert, he takes her to room 741, makes passionate love to her, and then has a comprehensive nap. The hotel staff risks being shot if they enter the room during his nap, which ends at exactly three o’clock. Between three and four he telephones his Japanese superiors, demanding benevolence toward one of his acquaintances and, sometimes, an iron-fist treatment of the Shanghai Jews. He then sets off for meetings regarding his theatrical, musical, or charity interests. Every Sunday he performs an important role in a play or a concert, aiming to uplift the Russian spirit in these daunting times, always ending the event with “Do Not Close Your Eyes, Mother Russia.” After the show he dines with friends and admirers, regaling them with tales of his peregrinations, loves, and suffering, never failing to bring his audience to cramps of laughter or a deluge of tears, sometimes both within moments. After that he goes for a lazy pipe or two of opium in a brothel, where he may or may not join in an elaborate orgy, frequently featuring midgets, animals, and children.

In the spring of 1944, Pick is awakened from his nap by the stirring of a mouse and emerges from his nightmare with a claustrophobic uneasiness and a tingling in his heart, which he recognizes as foreshadowing evil times. He screams at the cowering Cathay Hotel staff, storms down Nanking Road in his black pajamas, like a devil apparition, and charges into Commander Otani’s office, requesting, before even sitting down, to be sent off to another place, far from this stinking pit of hell. Commander Otani puts his hand on Pick’s shoulder, then strokes his cheek, until Pick calms down.

In the summer of 1944, Captain Pick goes to the Philippines. He arrives under the name of Koji, followed by his usual entourage, reinforced by the playboy boxer Mihalka; a Portuguese black marketeer Francisco Carneiro (Mihalka’s manager); and an Italian lawyer and chemist, Dr. Vincente, capable of concocting all kinds of joys. Pick’s orchestra does little, almost nothing, in Manila. They help catch and kill a Danish gunrunner. They set a trap for Father Kirkpatrick, an Irish priest, suspected of smuggling food and medicine to American internees — one source claims that it is Pick himself who oversees Father Kirkpatrick’s crucifixion. They intercept U.S. naval intelligence talking about imminent attacks all around the Pacific. The information is rejected by the Japanese as “dangerous thoughts,” whereupon Pick’s men use the equipment solely to record the American hit parade. American music is played at their parties, which instantly become all the rage among the idle Manila elite and prostitutes bored with the never-changing clientele.

But other than those few little jobs and parties, Captain Pick and his crew spend time racketeering, setting up a little, classy and expensive prostitution ring, and hanging out in nightclubs. Pick’s favorite haunt is the Gastronome, because the jukebox there has a record of him singing “Tea for Two” in English, though in the manner of a poignant Russian ballad, a rendition made all the more convincing by his atrocious Russian accent. The B-side of the record contains “Do Not Close Your Eyes, Mother Russia,” sung, as it well should be, heartbreakingly.

At the end of the summer, Pick gets uneasy again and returns to Shanghai, complaining of ill health, and taking the entire budget of the Manila operation with him. It was on the ship to Shanghai, with the Pacific winds in his face, that the uneasiness crystallizes into a sense of something coming to an end, into a painful, tormenting anticipation of a future loss.

Indeed, everybody can smell the end, and it has the smell of burning flesh — Tokyo has been leveled, Hiroshima annihilated. On August 9, between the bombs, Evgenij Pick has his last supper with Commander Otani at his home, room 741 at the Cathay. They eat a magnificently prepared yellow croaker, washed down by superbly aged sake, saved by Otani for a special occasion. Having kissed Otani on both cheeks, Pick goes to join the farewell orgy at the Yar restaurant, arranged by a posse of girls known as Mihalka’s Harem (Mihalka is still stuck in Manila). Pick complains to the girls, who could not care less in their opiatic daze, that he has reason to believe that the Japanese plan to kill him. Thus no one, apart from Otani, notices when he disappears from Shanghai the next day.

In the fall of 1945, Wasserstein notes, the American authorities in China fruitlessly search for Pick. He is seen in a barbershop in Shanghai; he is seen on a train to Beijing, telling the interested co-passengers how he cut off the head of a Japanese officer trying to rape a Chinese girl, and then had to spend a year behind the double wall of a magician’s trunk; he is seen praying in a Russian Orthodox Church in Beijing; he is seen performing a Hamlet monologue, delivering “To be or not to be. .” with a strange, untraceable accent, in front of an audience of American missionaries, who do not recognize the song he sings at the end.

Pick, in fact, takes a boat to Japan, which then hits a mine. Everyone on the boat dies, except Pick, who is miraculously found floating unconscious but alive, surrounded by a school of corpses and body parts. Pick goes to Tokyo, straight to the navy ministry, on crutches — his leg mauled — and finds Commander Otani, who transfers one million yen to Pick under the name of Koji, beseeching him to open a Russian theater in Tokyo and not to neglect his considerable thespian talents. Pick waits for the right moment to start the theater (for which he already has the name: the New World Theatre), but spends all his money waiting. And with the astute instinct of a veteran survivor he can sense that the American hounds are on his scent.

Hence in February 1946, he walks, limping dramatically into an American intelligence headquarters and offers to tell them the truth. He consequently delivers to his involved listeners (a Captain Aaron and a Major Maxwell) a cycle of interlocking stories, from the beginning of his life to this day: he tells them about escaping the Germans; about giving information to the British: about subverting Japanese intelligence operations in Shanghai: about his mother, who was an American, and who could be living in America today with her new husband. He tells them that he was the one who tipped off the Japanese about the Sorge spy ring, having remembered him as the Comintern colleague. He slaps his crippled leg, exhibiting it as a result of Japanese torture, and rolls a couple of nacreous tears down his sunken cheeks. He tells the Americans that his motive for going to Japan was to share with them all he knew, and to see the Japanese beasts suffering in defeat. He tells them everything he knows about every Japanese officer he ever met. He tells them everything he knows about Otani, the disgusting, opium-addicted sodomite, and about Otani’s liking for torturing prisoners.

The American intelligence officers are very happy with the quality of information coming from Pick. Everything makes a lot of sense, unverifiable though it may be, and they forgive and release Pick, in return for future cooperation. He goes back to Shanghai and attempts to restore his network to serve the Americans, but to no avail — Shanghai is not the same, and it never will be. Captain Pick swallows his loss with glass after glass of vodka; he eschews looking into the dark future by looking only as far as the next opium dose. Before the People’s Liberation Army enters Shanghai in 1949, he flees it. In the spring of 1950. he is in possession of an entry visa to Siam. In the summer of 1950, he is in a prison in Taiwan, where he entertains his fellow prisoners with stories told in broken Shanghai dialect about the wild thirties, singing the songs popular once upon a time, all in return for sexual favors and cigarettes. Then he disappears.

There are few photos of Pick. One of them is a police photo: a balding man, crowned by the remnants of his gray hair; a square, violent jaw; a triangular nose; a pointed Adam’s apple; glaring manic eyes. Another one is a publicity photograph from the Far Eastern Grand Opera days: he wears a top hat and a black cape, like a magician; there is an elegant white scarf casually thrown over his shoulder; in his gloved left hand he holds the other glove; in his right hand he holds a cigarette, with the ashes about to fall off. His face is heavily made up: thick, penciled eyebrows; glittering pomade; rouged lips. He glances at you sideways, as if about to turn to you full face and begin mesmerizing you. And you have to turn your gaze away, but you simply cannot.

In the summer of 2000, my wife and I went to Shanghai for our honeymoon, because that was where her grandparents met (her parents unromantically met in a Chicago bar called Jimmy’s). We’d saved enough money from our teaching and took a leave from Ort Institute. We’d promised all our students we would send them postcards and we’d let Marcus teach us a few phrases in the Shanghai dialect. We were in love and spent the flight holding hands and reading — she read The Idiot, and I read Wasserstein’s Secret War in Shanghai, occasionally kissing her lean neck. We stayed at the Peace Hotel, which used to be the Cathay, and we liked it — they changed our towels regularly, the staff who could speak English always asked us how we were, and we would tell them, for they seemed to care. Pretty soon, we started referring to our hotel room, room 741, as our home. We loved Shanghai, went walking everywhere, despite the incredible heat, wiping sweat off each other’s bodies upon returning to our room, and then making love. We bought cheap silk, authentic souvenirs, and Mao posters we knew our lefty, ironical friends would like. We walked the Bund and went to museums. We roamed the Old Chinese Town, fueled by the belief that we were getting the real China for very few dollars. In Sun Yat-sen’s former residence in the former French Concession, we looked at a saber on the wall, the map of China, and a silk painting of a cat (the guide said: “Please, look at the cat’s eyes — they follow you everywhere in the room”). We ate at restaurants in old Western buildings, including a French restaurant in an old Russian Orthodox church, the dome pressing down on us with all the might of an unfriendly Slavic God. We went to Suzhou for a day to look at the magnificent gardens. We rented jalopy bikes, and rode from garden to garden, taking a break only to succumb to a craving for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

And it was in Suzhou, in the Humble Administrator’s garden — reading Wasserstein in the shade of one of the pavilions, carps splashing the placid surface, lotus leaves spreading as far as the eye could see, gentle trees leaning over water, as if over a looking-glass — it was there that I found out that we had been staying in and were going back to Pick’s room, room 741 at the former Cathay Hotel. Need I say I was overwhelmed, with delight and unraveling fear at the same time? The coincidence — or better, the convergence — implied, glaringly, the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, but not necessarily benevolent being. When I told my wife about my discovery, she hugged me gently as if it were all my fault and she were forgiving me. I remembered the first time she hugged me, after I had stumbled down the stairs. “Are you good?” she had asked me, in Russian, for some reason.

And she told me something I had not known. She told me that her grandfather, a Jewish Shanghailander, had been detained after the Japanese took over the International Settlement, and she told me that it may have been Pick who tortured him. My wife’s grandfather never talked much about it, but they all knew what it had been like: he had tied him tightly in wet sheets, until his blood vessels were bursting into blotchy bruises (I saw them once, on his chest, shaped like unknown continents, when we went to visit him in Florida). Then the sheets slowly dried, almost squeezing him to death, until the body was so senseless that the only thing left was the part of your mind that could feel the pain. We immediately left the Humble Administrator’s tranquillity behind us, and boarded the train to Shanghai, where a devastating fever was awaiting us — we kept wiping the sweat off our bodies, but the perspiration would not stop.

That night someone tried to break into our room — I leapt out of my feverish dream, and charged to the door, yelling, “Who is it? Who is it?” but there was no response. As my heart was slamming against my chest walls, my wife’s screams fading, as our nightmares were merging, I imagined Pick’s painted face on the other side of the door. When I looked outside through the fish-eye peephole, there was, of course, no one outside, just the vacuously buzzing hall. I did not share my vision with my wife, but she must have known what I was thinking. In her eyes, I could see the somnolent terror twinkling as the ludicrous reflection of the exit sign.

But we, of course, knew that it must have been a drunken hotel guest trying to open our door, the wrong door, for that happens in every hotel, anywhere in the world.

The night of August 9—the anniversary of Pick’s last supper — I was woken up by my wife squeezing my hand (we held hands sleeping). I heard a body falling on the floor with a feeble thump, and then moving through the room: noises ebbing and flowing rhythmically, purposefully. We listened and received sounds coming from different corners, sometimes simultaneously. We sensed every whiff of air, vibrations of the space around us, frozen with fear, interrupting our breathing to hear better. We could not say anything, but we expected Pick to appear before us, in his magician’s cape, and begin to sing in his bass voice, replete with blood-curdling nostalgia: “Do not close your eyes, Mother Russia, for it is not time to sleep.” We heard Pick’s song in the rustle and bustle of the creature in the darkness, in the pitter-patter of little paws, in the pallid, oval field of the weak firelight, in the center of which there was a mouse, stopped to look at us, waiting for us to make an uncertain move before vanishing. I lay in the darkness, awake, paralyzed, biting the knuckle of my index finger, waiting for the evil to hatch out of the furry lump pulsating with life, and come right at me, and it did. It is right inside me now, clawing at the walls of my chest, trying to get out, and I can do nothing to stop it. So I get up.

‘Hemon paints a hilarious, parodic picture of city life, but it is his language that really sings: it has the unmistakable tenor of quality. . I should not be at all surprised if Hemon wins the Nobel Prize at some point’ GILES FODEN, Condé Nast Traveller

‘Hemon juggles narratives and voices and plays all sorts of literary games with great aplomb. . The novel’s sheer exuberance, its generosity and its engagement with life should win over all but the most curmudgeonly of readers’ Sunday Times

‘Downbeat but also hilarious, while the writing itself is astonishing’ Time Out

‘Ultimately this is a sad, beautiful book that reveals the inevitability of conflict, the redemptive force of friendship and the importance of understanding your origins even when presently lost’ Independent on Sunday

‘The entire book teems with a quivering, off-kilter strangeness’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Pronek is a memorable addition to the pantheon of outsiders looking in. . Hemon’s linguistic trickery, meanwhile, is the perfect medium for making the everyday seem strange’ Arena

‘Startles with the gift of making us see the mundane world anew. . Confirmed by this book as a master of economy and observation, Hemon gives the impression that. . delightful and accomplished as this novel is, those he has yet to write will be astonishing’ Guardian

‘One of the most interesting and powerful voices in contemporary literature’ Esquire

Hemon’s surrealism is a subtle presence. . The narrative is also carried by his wit, which is sharp and intelligent. . It is the warmth of Hemon’s writing, however, which lifts it above the level of cleverness and into something more interesting. . It is his characters which are likely to stay with readers the longest’ The Times

‘Writing as sharp as anything you’ll read all year’ GQ

‘This is a novelist fulfilling a poet’s obligation, to see and to speak the world afresh. . Bold, original, adventurous and humane’ Water stone’s Books Quarterly

‘Devastatingly simple: the merit of Nowhere Man rests on far more than literary stunts. It’s a study of the human condition’ Washington Post

‘Hemon can’t write a boring sentence, and the English language is the richer for it. . [Nowhere Man] will very likely serve as a springboard for even greater feats of the imagination from Aleksandar Hemon’ New York Times

‘Hemon, a virtuoso linguist, stylist and social observer, delivers a searing and mordantly funny novel about the dislocation of his protagonist, Jozef Pronek. . This angst-ridden, horny Balkan is deeply human, totally irresistible and often hilarious’ San Francisco Chronicle

‘Every sentence of this novel is infused with energy and wit’ Los Angeles Times