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energy required for violence.
    “Certainly! They thought the train was a beast! An apparition! They attacked it. And the workers, some of them, were not much better. Being convicts.” He stopped, remembering the gaunt, expressionless men chained to their wheelbarrows by day and to their bunks at night. It was misery that had made those men dangerous. One had to assume that having lost everything, they were capable of anything.
    He’d had to use convict labor on the battlefileds of Mukden as well, to supplement his forces, an infantry corps so battle-fatigued that the only bullets the men were deemed responsible to handle were those that had already been fired. An insulting appointment—punitive—the judgment against him still pending. Soldiers and convicts worked side by side, ragged, silent, the former distinguished only by their uniforms, their unfettered ankles. Under his command, the men began at one end of a scorched plain and made their way slowly across it, using hoes to harvest the abandoned lumps of lead, some of which were twisted into fantastically sinister shapes.
    Sometimes at night, when Captain Litovsky closed his eyes, the brown plain of Mukden stretched out before him forever; and if he slept, he dreamed of having to rake through the hard earth with his bare fingers. In one such dream, which he could not dismiss even when awake, he suffered an enchantment by the czar, who severed his hands from his wrists and his feet from his ankles and switched them around. Hands sewn to the ends of his legs with black wires, he was compelled by the czar to go on digging.
    “How many wives do you have?” Alice asked, interrupting his thoughts.
    “Well! What a question! One, to be sure!” Captain Litovsky touched his mustache and collar.
    “Are you not a Mohammedan?”
    “Most certainly not! Here, look.” And he pulled a little round circle of gold metal from his pocket, a coin bearing an image of the Virgin, and held the icon out to Alice. The Virgin’s face was worn as smooth and as flat as one of the savage’s, so often did the captain, his hand hidden in his pocket, rub his thumb over her features.
    “I am an understanding man,” he said. “Particularly with young persons. But you mustn’t ask such questions. I am as Orthodox as the day is long!”
    “I’m sorry,” Alice said. “Your wife—is she named Olga?”
    “No,” he said. “My wife is named Tamara. After her mother.”
    “But then who is Olga?” Alice asked.
    “Why don’t you tell me about living in China?”
    “What do you want to know?”
    “Whatever you would like to tell me.”
    Alice looked assessingly at the captain as she sorted through her Westerner’s repertoire of the alien and picturesque. Walking with her amah past a Chinese dentist’s stall? Extracted teeth were arranged in tidy rows on a piece of black cloth, as if the rotten brown lumps were jewels. Amah had pointed proudly to one of the lumps. “That one belong mine,” she’d said, and she opened her mouth to indicate a red gap where the tooth had been just a week before.
    Men smaller than her father carrying whole tea shops on their backs, bamboo frames bearing braziers, pots, cups. Native children with slits in their trousers squatting to defecate in the gutters. Streets boiling with life. The only thing Alice could compare to the sight of a Shanghai street was what she’d seen once when she’d turned over the body of a dead raccoon with a stick; seeing the maggots, the packed, churning crowd of them, she’d thought: Shanghai .
    Every morning Alice held up her arms for her amah to dress her. She watched the woman’s back bend as she got down on her knees to button all twelve buttons on each of Alice’s white kid shoes. When David died, Amah had wept, she’d struck her fists into her eyes, she’d beat her head against the wall and the floor. But apart from that day, how quiet she was, and how silently Chinese servants moved, wearing felt slippers. They