Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [154]
The Major was thinking of Vera Chiang as he worked, and of Harbin in 1937. ‘How hard life can be for refugees!’ he mused, squinting at a sparking-plug (his eyesight was no longer what it had been). ‘We don’t realize in our own comfortable, well-ordered lives what it must be like to lose everything in one of these political upheavals that bang and clatter senselessly round the world like thunderstorms uprooting people right and left.’ He sighed and the sparking-plug which lay in his palm grew blurred and changed into a picture of Harbin … what was it? … four, no, five years ago almost. Harbin had surely been one of the most depressing places on earth.
That had been on the Major’s first trip out East … when he had suddenly, on an impulse, decided to give up the settled, comfortable life he was leading in London and see the world, visit François in Indo-China, visit Japan, too, and see what all the fuss was about … see what life itself was all about before it was too late and old age descended on him. You might have thought that Harbin was a Russian city from the great Orthodox cathedral towering over Kitaiskaya and Novogorodnaya Street, and from the Russian shop-signs you saw, the vodka, the samovars, the Russian cafés and the agreeable sound of the Russian language being spoken everywhere. But it was a Russian city which had turned into a nightmare of poverty for the White Russians who had been washed eastwards on the tidal wave of the Revolution. How helpless they were! How few human beings, the Major thought with a sigh, can exert by hard work, thrift, intelligence or any other virtue the slightest influence on their own destiny! That was the grim truth about life on this planet.
Until Manchukuo had bought the Chinese Eastern Railway from the Soviet Government the year before the Major’s visit, there had at least been a large contingent of Soviet railway employees in Harbin to patronize the Russian shops and cafés, but by the time he had arrived even this flimsy economic support had been pulled from under the refugees. The railwaymen had returned to Russia, leaving the refugees to destitution. At one time there had been 80,000 of them; by the time the Major had arrived this number had dwindled by half. Those young and strong enough had gone south to look for some means of support in a China which was itself ravaged by famine and bandit armies. Those who stayed in Harbin very often starved. The Major himself had seen ragged white men pulling rickshaws in Harbin.
Vera Chiang had spent her childhood and adolescence in Harbin: that much was certainly true for when the Major had questioned her about it she had known every corner of the city. Her mother had died there, ‘of a broken heart’, she said sometimes; ‘of TB’ she said at others. She had only been a child then. Her father had gone south to try to establish another business to replace the one he had lost in the Revolution in Russia, leaving her in a school run by American missionaries. Thus she had learned to speak English. How sad and lonely she had been! she had told the Major with a tear sparkling in her eye, while the Major murmured comfortingly; he had never been able to resist a woman in distress. But how much worse her life had become when a message, long-delayed, had reached her from her father. He was lying ill, broken by poverty, in Canton. ‘Selling the last of my mother’s rings I set