A Cold Season In Shanghai. S.P. Hozy
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least not in her own mind. She was almost seventeen and ready for life to surprise her, like Annette. Lily was going to leave for finishing school in Switzerland soon and would be away for a whole year. Tatiana wasn't sure what she was going to do without her friend. Read books and listen to her father's lectures? Hang around with Olga and Jean Paul? The prospect was not appealing.
Tatiana and Lily cried the whole afternoon before Lily left for Switzerland. They gave each other diaries to write all their thoughts in and promised, promised, promised to write letters every day. Tatiana had begged her father to let her go to Switzerland with Lily, but he said it was impossible. It would cost more money than he made in a year. The truth was, he was afraid to let Tatiana spend a year away from home, even if she went with Lily. He saw that Tatiana was becoming restless, a dangerous thing in a young girl. Boys, he knew, could take care of themselves. Restlessness was a good quality in a young man. It made him curious and adventurous. Young men needed to take risks, find out what they were made of, especially before they settled down to marriage and a family. They needed to get that energy out of their system so they could take on the responsibility of work and family. But young women were a different thing altogether. No man wanted to marry a restless girl, and Sergei wanted his daughters to be married to fine and responsible men who would take care of them and their children, his grandchildren. Olga he was not worried about. Tatiana, he could see, was going to be a problem.
Tatiana did not believe her father when he told her they weren't rich. She knew they were rich, especially when she compared how they lived to the way most of the Shanghai Chinese lived. She had no concept of real wealth, however, and assumed that because they lived in a large stone house and were well-dressed and well-fed and had servants, they must be very rich. Her mother, who remembered how wealthy they had been in Russia, smiled sadly when Tatiana complained to her about her father's decision not to let her go to Switzerland and said, “My darling Tatiana, you have no idea.”
They had been in Shanghai for almost a decade, and with each passing year, Katarina missed Russia even more. They had made friends in Shanghai, of course, mostly through Sergei's business connections, and the few Russians who had left, like them, before the situation became critical and even dangerous for people of their class. But these were not people that Katarina ever felt close to. These were not the people who inhabited her soul the way her family did. She could never replace that feeling of profound connection that had nourished her every minute of her life. She loved her husband and daughters desperately, but they were a fragment of the broken bowl that had been her life, one that had once been filled to the brim with meaning and life, with people whose love and support went to the heart of who she was and where she had come from. Katarina needed this more than her husband and daughters did. They did not understand how bereft she was and why her world got smaller while theirs seemed to grow larger. Why can't I be like them? she often wondered. Why can't I let go of what I once had and can never have again?
As I grew taller, my mother seemed to get smaller and smaller. I could practically touch fingertips when I put my hands around her waist. She rarely left the house and lived for news from home. I didn't understand how she could just let her life float away on a cloud of sadness. It seemed like such a waste to me. Wasn't life to be lived? To be experienced? Why couldn't she pull herself together and just get on with it? Sometimes I was angry with her because her sadness and melancholia made me unhappy.
“It isn't fair,” Tatiana complained to her father.
Sergei once again summoned Tolstoy. “‘Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.’ Unfortunately your mother does not see joy in Shanghai. She left her happiness behind in Russia.”
“But, Papa,” she protested, “it's been nine years. I don't understand how someone can be sad for nine years.”
“Be patient, Tatushka. Someday you will understand. ‘The strongest of all warriors are these two—Time and Patience.’ Even though you are growing up in China, you were born with a Russian soul. This you cannot escape.”
Riddles, she thought. My father talks in riddles. “Tolstoy is dead!” she shouted and flung herself from the room.
Sergei couldn't decide what to do with his second daughter. He wanted her to have an education because he believed she had a good mind. He had thought briefly about sending her to Paris but had immediately rejected the idea. He could see the danger of letting his headstrong daughter go off on her own, so far from his influence. Besides, he was hearing too much about political instability and threats of war in Europe, and it made him uncomfortable with the idea of sending the impressionable Tatiana off into the middle of it. He was leaning toward designing a schedule of study for her, based on his own library and readings, and hiring a tutor to supervise it. He hadn't yet discussed it with Tatiana; he wanted a plan that was appealing enough that she would at least consider it before rejecting it outright.
In the summer of 1914, war broke out in Europe. Many of the young men began leaving Shanghai to take up arms for their home countries. The lives of a generation of young men and women would be disrupted for four years by a conflagration whose extent none of them could have anticipated. By the time the conflict ended, Shanghai would be a very different place.
Sergei could see his youngest daughter already beginning to drift away from him, and he initiated a campaign to draw her back into the world of books and ideas he had hoped she would embrace. He saw that the window of opportunity was very small, and if he did not capture her imagination now, she might be lost to him forever.
When I look back now, I understand how much I underestimated my father's wisdom. He had to work so much harder at raising me than he did Olga. He knew she would be all right. She was centred and uncomplicated, like a compass. True north was never a problem for her. She always knew where it was. I was different, however. I wasn't willing to settle for anything without exploring the possibilities, and I think, in this way I resembled him more than I realized. It was many years before I understood that taking on the responsibility of a family had anchored my father. He had accepted the yoke of family life because, quite simply, he loved us.
Sergei's family had been wealthy landowners in Russia. He was the third son, so he had fewer obligations than his older brothers. This had allowed him to indulge to his heart's content his love of reading. He was fascinated by history and what he thought it could teach the world. He was a philosopher at heart and lived in a world of ideas. Because everything had been given to him, Sergei could afford to be the optimist he was by nature. He saw something in Tatiana that he recognized, perhaps the legacy of his own insatiable curiosity, but he could not fathom her capacity for sadness—perhaps she had got that from her mother. He did his best to encourage the side of his daughter that was imaginative and perceptive, but he could not control the part of her that grew sullen and angry.
Chapter Six
The next year passed quickly for Tatiana. The program of study her father planned for her proved a welcome distraction. He engaged the services of Dimitri Lischenko, a well-known Russian scholar living in Shanghai who agreed to come to the house every afternoon to discuss with Tatiana the books she was reading and to test her progress with a series of written essays and examinations. Together, Sergei and Lischenko designed a course of study for Tatiana that included world history, ancient and modern philosophy, Russian, French and English literature, as well as readings in physics, since Sergei believed it was so closely tied to philosophy as to be relevant to the rest of her studies. Ever since Einstein's Theory of Relativity had been published a decade earlier, Sergei had intuited that a major shift in scientific thinking was taking place. He wasn't sure where it would lead the world, but he believed it could be as profound as Copernicus's claim that the earth revolved around the sun. Tatiana drew the line at mathematics, however. She said she had