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through Leningrad in those days. It was partly the desire for physical activity: an order I could bring to my body. It was partly the grace of those fighters, their limbs that moved in deliberate lines. I wanted order, I wanted grace. I wanted to pass like a wind through any tempest.
    So I began coming to the kwoon five or six times a week. I learned how to stand; I learned how to exhale. Sifu taught me the first form, “Little Idea,” a sequence of gestures that seem like magic, summoning motions, not like any kind of combat. I stood with Lughur and Yu Wei and repeated the movements,repeated and repeated them, becoming taller, becoming clearer, ten thousand tiny refinements. Sometimes sifu called up a student, his birthmark glowing in the lantern light; five seconds of contest and then the simplest shift of weight, sifu pivoting his hips, a figure sent sprawling.
    I improved. My body became lighter and stronger. I did pushups beside the radiating stove. I squatted with Yu Wei, drinking tea, hearing tales of Peking. I laughed with Moritz, who had begun studying kung-fu during the war, when he was stationed in Tsingtao. “Even the Chinese monks know how to fight,” he said. I couldn’t visit the kwoon as often when I began travelling, but still I went. Sifu taught me the second form, “Sinking the Bridge,” with its pivots and kicks. He taught me the third form, “Darting Fingers.” He taught me as though I was the most fitting student, a natural son, and I left coins behind, in the box by the door.
    Aboard the
Majestic
, travelling to America, I tried to maintain my practice. If Pash was out late or up early, I could use our cabin to run through the first and second forms. But usually I skipped down the ladders and across the catwalks to practise in a corner of the aft hydraulics chamber, an area the engine men nicknamed the “gym.” Several of them were enthusiastic bodybuilders (admittedly, all bodybuilders are enthusiastic). They planted themselves beside the hydraulics chamber’s heaving silos, feet flat on the grille, and lifted things: boxes, metal struts, barrels of lard. I worked beside them. It was easy to be self-conscious: I was a paid passenger, smaller than the strongmen, greaseless. I was also the only martial artist. And yet as soon as I slipped into horse pose, my insecurities fizzed away like vapour. There we were, shoulder to shoulder: sailors with sacks of coal raised over their heads, the scientist from Leningrad punching his wing-chun one-inch punch. It was hot. We sweated.I stripped to my underpants before the third form, darting
biu
jee. Sometimes the space was too crowded to make many movements, but this was all right, this I embraced; the student needs new challenges. In the bowels of the
Majestic
I tried to breathe like a child.
    Nevertheless, I had to come out sometimes, for messages, for meals, and, alas, most frequently, to be sick. At regular intervals I climbed up from the engine rooms, scurried down the aft corridor, flung open a door, and vomited into a toilet. Szigeti always seemed to be standing watch. As soon as my head poked up from the stairwell he would be over me: briny, excited, eager to talk. I’d trundle past him, breathing sideways, feeling every swaying slow motion of the ship. I kneeled by the porcelain. MADE IN TORONTO, it said. Szigeti stood quietly outside, leaning his head against the closed door, speaking in the tone of a lover. “Are you all right, Lyova?”
    “Yes,” I murmured.
    Sometimes I would come out and he would be gone, and the only sign he had been there was the glass of seltzer water he’d left for me, gurgling, sad and alive.

    NOW IT IS ELEVEN YEARS later and I am on a different ship, the
Stary Bolshevik
, and here too the waves fall and lift. I once proposed a device that would ameliorate a great boat’s sway, balancing the bobbing seas, a sort of unbobber, but I could not find anybody to finance the prototype.
    I am being taken back to Russia.