The Language of Bees

were his father, all women his mother.

Testimony, I:3

SO,” SAID HOLMES. “SHANGHAI.”

“Yes.” Damian took a breath, either summoning his thoughts, or rousing his determination. “As I said, you might think the city was the very worst place for a man vulnerable to temptation, but after my long sobriety aboard the Bella Acqua, it was as if my body came to value its natural state, and my mind found the tight-rope act of daily life in Shanghai exhilarating. It was a challenge simply to walk down the street for a newspaper, passing two gin-joints, an opium den, and the Sikh who sold bhang from a tray.

“And there was another reason Shanghai felt right. Do you know Andre Breton?”

“I have heard of him,” Holmes replied. “The self-appointed spokesman for the movement known as Surrealism.”

“Now, yes. During the War, Andre worked at the hospital in Nantes, where he came to adapt certain psychological theories of Sigmund Freud to treat victims of shell-shock. That was where I met him, after I… after I was injured.

“Andre's idea was that if one could break through the madness of shell-shock and regain access to the unconscious mind, the conscious and the unconscious might, as it were, join forces, and wholeness would be regained. He used what he calls automatism, a pure up-welling of dream-thought and dream-images, without the guidance of rational or even aesthetic concern, in various forms of art: writing, painting, sculpting, drama.

“Before long, it became clear that automatism was not merely a source of healing damaged minds, but a philosophy of life, a means of bringing together the separate realities of the human experience. Anyone who has spent time on the Front knows that, when one lifts his head from a barrage and finds dead people all around, there is a moment when life is immeasurably sweet and intensely real. In a similar way, the shock of the unexpected in a piece of art can forge a momentary link between light and dark, rationality and madness, matter-of-factness and absurdity, beauty and obscenity.

“As you see in that painting, I'd already been feeling my way in that direction before the War-the Dada movement, although Dadaism was intellectual and political compared to what Andre had in mind.

“Shanghai-and particularly, being a foreigner in Shanghai -might have been purposefully designed by Andre to illustrate and encourage the ‘surrealist’ impulse. Every moment there possesses an air of peculiarity, every corner brings a new gem of crystal-clear absurdity. My landlord, it turned out, was a policeman with a side business of child prostitutes. One of his girls used to sit in the courtyard playing the guitar and telling me of her dream to become a Catholic nun, once she had finished putting her older brother through university. The head of the missionary school where I taught for a while spent his every lunch-hour with an opium pipe. One discovered purity in the gutters and filth in the glittering shop-windows, every hour of every day.

“I found Shanghai to be the very essence of Surrealist doctrine: If the world is mad, then the maddest man is the most sane.

“So: I became sane by embracing madness. I became intoxicated by sobriety. I moved from one job to another, earning just enough to keep me fed, sheltered, and in paint. I walked and walked, I learned the language, I opened my eyes in wonder. And the images simply poured out of me.

“What I painted were intensely realistic renderings of impossibility. As one of the catalogues put it, I was their ‘Max Ernst of the East.’

“Yes, within two years, I was in a catalogue. Let me tell you how that came about.”

Holmes stirred in his chair, betraying a trace of tension. I saw the non-committal look on his face, and realised, as surely as if he had murmured it into my ear, that Damian wasn't here by accident. I don't know why it took so long to put it together-Damian's almost dutiful embrace; the lengthy formal narrative in place of conversation; even his presence the moment we arrived-but I finally saw that Damian had come here to Sussex, not to establish contact with his family, but because he wanted something.

Whatever he was after, Holmes' slight motion confirmed that we were circling in towards it now.

“I'd been there less than a year, painting furiously all the while, when a friend gathered up half a dozen paintings and took them into the International Settlement. She'd asked around, you know, to find which of the Western art galleries might be interested in my sort of thing. When she came back, she brought more money than I'd seen in years.

“Before I knew it, I was popular. More than popular, I was a Sensation, the darling of Shanghai 's international set, proof that one did not need to live in Paris or Berlin to be avante-garde. At the drop of a hat, I had money, I had a house, a studio, servants-and I had problems.

“I'd managed to balance myself against the temptations of the city while I was poor. But success proved a greater madness than I could manage. One night I was at a party and dope was going around, and I reached for it, the first time in three years.

“And again, Yolanda saved me. She physically slapped the stuff out of my hand and dragged me away from the party.

“However, I haven't told you about Yolanda. She's the reason… No, I should start at the beginning, so it all ties together.” He took a deep draught from his glass and crushed out the half-smoked cigarette, then fiddled with the case; in another minute, his fingertips would begin to pluck at his buttons.

“I'd met Yolanda my first week in Shanghai. She worked in a bar down the street from my Wong, but I met her in the courtyard outside of my room. She was visiting one of my neighbours-one of my landlord's girls, who was ill. Yolanda is Chinese, and although she worked in a bar and hadn't much education, she spoke good English because her family was Christian and sent her to the missionary school until she was eleven.

“Then her father died, and when she was sixteen, she found herself out on the streets. She went through a period of what she called ‘hating herself.’ She drank, did any kind of dope offered her, and-well, suffice to say she lived a pretty wild life.” He did not look at Holmes, who sat with his fingers steepled to his lips. Damian played with the catch of his enamelled case and pressed on.

“The self-hate period lasted for a year, until one day she woke up a little more sober than usual, and she knew that one morning she would not wake up at all, unless someone dragged her out of it. She didn't think she had the will to rescue herself, so she went to the missionaries, and told them they had to save her.”

He must have caught something of my reaction, because he gave me a crooked smile. “You like the image? Little painted bar-girl standing at the door to the local Christian do-gooders, throwing herself at them as you would a glove in a challenge.

“And give them credit, they tried their best. She stayed with them for three months until their rules became too much for her-but then, instead of giving up, she walked down the road to the Buddhist temple. She lasted a month there. And then it was a Shinto shrine, followed by some stray Hindus, then American Spiritualists. One after another, she worked her way through half the religions of the world, only at some point, it became more a hobby than a necessity. She went back to her bar, but only to serve drinks, and during her free hours she continued to sample the rich buffet of temples and churches and meeting places Shanghai has to offer.

“Until one day she encountered an odd French-American-English painter in the run-down house where one of her childhood friends was dying of syphilis. He saw a tiny little thing dressed in a tartan skirt, a Chinese silk blouse, a moulting rabbit-fur jacket, and a French beret, with cropped hair and painted eyes. She saw a tall, thin foreigner reeking of turpentine and blinking as if he'd just come from a cave.

“‘You need to eat,’ she said. ‘Take me to lunch.’

“What could I do? I took her to lunch, took her for a walk along the riverfront, and before I knew it, she was in my life. It was Yolanda who loaded up a rickshaw with my paintings and took them to the gallery. And Yolanda who haggled over the prices of the next batch. Yolanda who suggested that I become known, professionally, as ‘The Addler’-a sort of trademark. And as I said, Yolanda who kept me on something resembling the straight and narrow.

“In the end, it was Yolanda who suggested it was time to move closer to the centre of the art world, she who besieged the British Embassy until they told her how I might register as a citizen whose papers had been lost. I did not want to leave Shanghai, not really, but it was hard on her-there are many places where the Chinese are not welcome. I thought of Paris, which is as colour-blind as one can hope for, but she was afraid the pull of the old life