The soldiers made the man kneel, taunting him and howling like wolves. The pack leader plunged his sword into the man’s other jacket panel and blood and rice flowed out together. Vomit trickled from the man’s lips. I heard glass smash and turned to see Doctor Chou standing behind me, his vials broken and leaking on the rocky path. Horror was etched in the grooves of his face. I stepped back, unnoticed by the soldiers, and into his outstretched arms.
The soldiers were grunting, excited by the smell of blood and fear. The leader pulled at the prisoner’s collar, exposing his neck. In a single swoop he dropped his sword and sliced the man’s head off at the shoulders. The bloody flesh rolled into the river, turning the water the colour of sorghum wine. The corpse remained upright, as if praying, and gushed blood in spurts. The soldiers stood back from it calmly and without guilt or disgust. Pools of blood and fluid collected around our feet and stained our shoes and the soldiers began to laugh. The killer lifted his sword to the sunlight and frowned at the muck that dripped from it. He looked around for something with which to clean it and laid eyes on my dress. He grabbed for me, but the outraged doctor pushed me further inside his coat, muttering curses at the soldiers. The leader grinned, mistaking Doctor Chou’s curses for protests, and wiped his glistening sword across the doctor’s shoulder. It must have disgusted Doctor Chou, who had just witnessed the murder of a fellow Chinese, but he remained silent in order to protect me.
My father was alive then, and that evening, after he had tucked me into bed and listened with restrained anger to my story, I heard him tell my mother on the landing: ‘It’s because their own leaders treat them so cruelly that they have lost all semblance of humanity. Their generals are to blame.’
At first the General brought little change to our lives and kept mainly to himself. He arrived with a futon, a gas cooker and a large trunk. We were only aware of his existence each morning, just after sunrise, when the black car would pull up outside our gate and the chickens in the yard would flutter as the General passed through them. And then in the evenings, when he would return late, weariness in his eyes, and give a nod to my mother and a smile to me before retiring to his room.
The General conducted himself with surprisingly good manners for a member of the occupying army. He paid rent and for anything he used, and after a while started bringing home rationed or banned items such as rice and sweet bean dumplings. He would place these luxuries, wrapped in cloth, on the dining table or kitchen bench before going to his room. My mother eyed the packages suspiciously and would not touch them, but she did not stop me from accepting the gifts. The General must have come to understand that my mother’s goodwill could not be bought with items that had been taken from the Chinese, as the gifts were soon supplemented with secret acts of mending. One day we would find that a previously jammed window had been fixed, on another that a squeaky door had been oiled or a draughty corner sealed.
But it wasn’t long before the General’s presence became more invasive, like a potted vine that finds its way into the soil and takes over the garden.
On the fortieth day after my father’s death, we visited the Pomerantsevs. The lunch was more lighthearted than usual, although it was only the four of us since the Lius would no longer come when we were invited.
Boris had managed to buy vodka, and even I was allowed some to ‘warm’ me. He amused us by suddenly whipping off his hat and revealing his closely cropped hair. My mother gingerly patted it and joked, ‘Boris, who did this cruel thing to you? You look like a Siamese cat.’
Olga poured some more vodka, teasing me by pretending to pass over my glass several times, then scowled. ‘He paid money for someone to do that to him! Some fancy new Chinese barber in the old quarter.’
Her husband grinned his yellow-toothed, happy grin and laughed. ‘She’s just upset because it looks better than when she does it.’
‘When I saw you looking like such a fool, my weak old heart nearly gave out,’ his wife retorted.
Boris took the vodka bottle and poured another round for everyone except his wife. When she frowned at him, he lifted his eyebrows and said: ‘Mind your weak old heart now, Olga.’
My mother and I walked home, holding hands and kicking at the freshly fallen snow. She sang a song about gathering mushrooms. Every time she laughed little puffs of steam floated from her mouth. She looked beautiful, despite the grief that was etched behind her eyes. I wanted to be like her but I had inherited my father’s strawberry blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles.
When we reached our gate, my mother’s gaze narrowed at the sight of the Japanese lantern hanging over it. She rushed me inside, peeling off her coat and boots before helping me with mine. She jumped to the sitting room doorway, urging me to hurry so that I didn’t catch cold from the tiled floor in the entranceway. When she turned to face the room she stiffened like a panicked cat. I stepped up behind her. Piled in one corner and covered with a red cloth was our furniture. Next to it a window alcove had been converted into a shrine complete with a scroll and ikebana flower arrangement. The rugs were gone and had been replaced by tatami mats.
My mother stormed through the house in search of the General, but he was not in his room or in the yard. We waited by the coal heater until nightfall, my mother rehearsing angry words for him. But the General did not come home that night and she lapsed into quiet despondency. We fell asleep, snuggled side by side near the dying fire.
The General did not return to the house until two days later, by which time exhaustion had drained the fight out of my mother. When he burst through the door with handfuls of tea, dress cloth and thread, he seemed to expect us to be grateful. In the delight and mischief in his eyes I saw my father again, the provider who found pleasure in securing treasures for his loved ones.
The General changed into a kimono of grey silk and set about cooking us vegetables and bean curd. My mother, whose elegant antique chairs had been packed away and who had no choice but to sit cross-legged on a cushion, stared out in front of her, purse-mouthed and indignant, while the house soaked in the aroma of sesame seed oil and soy sauce. I gaped at the lacquered plates the General set out on the low table, speechless but thankful for the small mercy that the General was cooking for us. I would have hated to see what would have happened had he ordered my mother to cook for him. He was obviously not like the Japanese men I had seen in our village, whose women had to wait on them hand and foot, and who made their wives walk several paces behind them, burdened by the weight of whatever goods they had bought at the markets, while they strutted on ahead, empty-handed, heads held high. Olga once said that the Japanese race had no women, just donkeys.
The General placed the noodles in front of us and, with nothing more than a grunt of ‘Itadakimasu’, began eating. He seemed not to notice that my mother did not touch her plate, or that I sat staring at the juicy noodles, my mouth salivating. I was torn between my hunger pangs and my loyalty to my mother. As soon as the General finished eating, I rushed to clear the plates so that he wouldn’t see that we had not eaten his meal. It was the best compromise I could make, for I did not want my mother’s annoyance to bring any harm to her.
When I returned from the kitchen, the General was straightening out a roll of Japanese paper. It wasn’t white and shiny like Western paper, nor was it completely matt. It was luminous. The General was on his hands and knees while my mother looked on, an exasperated expression on her face. The scene reminded me of a fable my father had once read to me about Marco Polo’s first appearance before Kublai Khan, the ruler of China. In a gesture contrived to demonstrate European superiority, Polo’s assistants unravelled a bolt of silk in front of the emperor and his courtiers. The material unfurled into a glistening stream that began with Polo and ended at the feet of Khan. After a moment’s silence the emperor and his entourage burst into laughter. Polo soon discovered that it was hard to impress people who had been producing fine silk centuries before the Europeans stopped wearing animal skins.
The General beckoned for m
e to sit next to him and laid out an ink pot and calligraphy brush. He dipped the brush and set it to the paper, pouring out the feminine swirls of Japanese hiragana. recognised the letters from the lessons we’d had when the Japanese had first taken over my school, before they decided it was better not to educate us at all and shut it down.
‘Anya-chan,’ the General said in his jumbled Russian, ‘I teach you Japanese characters. Important for you to learn.’
I watched him deftly make the syllables come to life. Ta, chi, tsu, te, to. His fingers moved as if he were painting rather than writing and his hands mesmerised me. The skin was smooth and hairless, the nails as clean as bleached pebbles.
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself and your people,’ cried my mother, snatching the paper from the General. She tried to tear it, but it was sinewy and pliant. So she scrunched it into a ball and threw it across the room. The paper dropped soundlessly to the floor.
I sucked in a breath. She glanced at me and stopped herself from saying anything more. She was trembling with anger but also with fear at what her outburst might cost us.
The General sat with his hands on his knees, not moving. The expression on his face was neutral. It was impossible to tell whether he was angry or just thinking. The tip of the brush dripped ink onto the tatami mat, where it spread out into a dark stain, like a wound. After a while the General reached into his kimono sleeve and took out a photograph and gave it to me. It was a picture of a woman in a black kimono and a young girl. The girl wore her hair in a topknot and had eyes as pretty as those of a deer. She looked almost the same age as me. The woman was glancing slightly out of the frame. Her hair was pulled away from her face. Her lips were powdered white and filled in with a narrow bow, but this couldn’t hide the fullness of her mouth. The expression on her handsome face was formal, but something about the turn of her head suggested she was smiling at someone off camera.
‘I have a little girl at home in Nagasaki with her mother and no father,’ the General said. ‘And you are a little girl without a father. I must take care of you.’
With that he stood up, bowed and left the room, leaving my mother and I standing with our mouths open, unable to think of anything to say.
Every second Tuesday the knife sharpener would come to our street. He was an old Russian with a lined face and mournful eyes. He had no hat and kept his head warm by wrapping it in rags. His sharpening wheel was strapped to a sled pulled by two Alsatians, and I would play with the dogs while my mother and our neighbours gathered to sharpen their knives and axes. One Tuesday Boris approached my mother and whispered that one of our neighbours, Nikolai Botkin, had disappeared. My mother’s face froze for a moment before she whispered back, ‘The Japanese or the Communists?’
Boris shrugged. ‘I saw him only the day before yesterday at the barber in the old quarter. He talked too much. Boasted too much about how the Japs are losing the war and that they are just concealing it from us. The next day,’ said Boris, clenching his hand and then springing it open to the air, ‘he is gone. Like dust. That man’s mouth was too big for his own good. You never know whose side the other customers are on. Some Russians want the Japs to win.’
At that moment there was a loud cry, ‘Kazaaa!’, and our garage doors flew open and a man ran out. He was naked, except for a knotted bandana pulled low on his brow. I didn’t realise that it was the General until I saw him throw himself into the snow and leap up for joy. Boris tried to cover my eyes but through the gaps in his fingers I was startled to see the General’s shrivelled appendage jiggling between his legs.
Olga slapped her knees and screeched with laughter, while the other neighbours stared, open-mouthed, in amazement. But my mother saw the hot tub that had been constructed in her sacred garage and screamed. This last insult was too much for her to bear. Boris dropped his hands and I turned to see my mother as she had been before my father’s death, her cheeks glowing and her eyes on fire. She raced into the yard, picking up a spade by the gate on her way. The General glanced from his hot tub to my mother, as if he were expecting her to marvel at his ingenuity.
‘How dare you!’ she screamed at him.
The smile died on his face but I could see that he couldn’t comprehend her reaction.
‘How dare you!’ she screamed again, hitting him across the cheek with the spade handle.
Olga gasped but the General didn’t seem worried about the neighbours witnessing my mother’s insurrection. He didn’t take his eyes from her face.
‘It’s one of the few things I have left to remember him by,’ my mother said, losing her breath.
The General’s face reddened. He stood up and retreated into the house without a word.
The following day the General dismantled the hot tub and offered us the wood for the fire. He took away the tatami mats and put back the Turkish carpets and sheepskin rugs for which my father had once traded his gold watch.
Later in the afternoon he asked if he could borrow my bicycle. My mother and I peered through the curtains to watch the General trundle down the road. My bike was too small for him. The pedals were short, so that with each rotation his knees passed his hips. But he handled the bicycle skilfully and in a few minutes disappeared through the trees.
By the time the General returned, my mother and I had adjusted the furniture and rugs back to almost the very inch where they had stood before.
The General glanced around the room. A shadow passed over his face. ‘I wanted to make it beautiful for you but I did not succeed,’ he said, using his foot to examine the magenta rug that had triumphed over his simple tatami. ‘Perhaps we are too different.’
My mother almost smiled but stopped herself. I thought the General was about to leave, but he turned one more time to glance back at her, not at all like a regal military man but more like a shy boy who has been scolded by his mother. ‘Maybe I have found something on whose beauty we can agree?’ he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a glass box.
My mother hesitated before taking it from him, but in the end couldn’t resist her own curiosity. I leaned forward, compelled to see what the General had brought. My mother opened the lid and a delicate scent wafted into the air. I knew it at once, although it was something I had never experienced before. The perfume became stronger, floating around the room and enveloping us in its spell. It was a blend of magic and romance, the exotic East and the decadent West. It made my heart ache and my skin tingle.
My mother’s eyes were on me. They were glistening with tears. She held out the box and I stared at the creamy white flower inside. The sight of the perfect bloom set in a foliage of glossy green leaves conjured up a place where the light was dappled and birds sang day and night. I wanted to cry with the beauty of it, for instantly I knew the name of the flower, although until then I had only ever seen it in my imagination. The tree originated from China but was tropical and would not grow in Harbin where the frosts were brutal.
The white gardenia was a legend my father had spun for my mother and I many times. He had first seen the flower himself when he had accompanied his family to the Tsar’s summer ball at the Grand Palace. He would describe to us the women in their flowing gowns with jewels sparkling in their hair, the footmen and the carriages, and a supper of fresh caviar, smoked goose and sterlet soup served at round glass tables. Later there was a fireworks display choreographed to the music of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. After meeting the Tsar and his family, my father walked into a room whose glass doors were thrown open to the garden. That was when he first saw them. The porcelain pots of gardenias had been imported from China for the occasion. In the summer air their delicate scent was intoxicating. The flowers seemed to nod and receive my father gracefully, as the Tsarina and her daughters had done just moments before. From that night on my father had been enamoured by the memory of northern white nights and a bewitching flower whose perfume conjured up paradise.
More than once my father had tried to purchase a bottle of the scent so tha
t my mother and I could relive this memory too, but no one in Harbin had heard of the enchanting flower and his efforts were always in vain.
‘Where did you get this?’ my mother asked the General, running her fingertip over the dewy petals.
‘From a Chinaman called Huang,’ he answered. ‘He has a hothouse outside of the city.’
But my mother barely heard his answer, her mind was a million miles away on a St Petersburg night. The General turned to go. I followed him to the foot of the stairs.
‘Sir,’ I whispered to him. ‘How did you know?’
He raised his eyebrows and stared at me. His bruised cheek was the colour of a fresh plum.
‘About the flower,’ I said.
But the General only sighed, touched my shoulder and said, ‘Goodnight.’
By the time spring came and the snow started melting there were rumours everywhere that the Japanese were losing the war. In the night I could hear planes and gunfire, which Boris told us was the Soviets fighting the Japanese at the borders. ‘God help us,’ he said, ‘if the Soviets get here before the Americans.’
I decided to find out whether the Japanese were really losing the war and hatched a plan to follow the General to his headquarters. My first two attempts to get up before him failed when I slept past my own usual waking time, but on the third day I was woken by a dream of my father. He was standing before me, smiling, and saying, ‘Don’t worry. You will seem all alone, but you won’t be. I will send someone.’ His image faded and I blinked at the early morning light making its way through my curtains. I leaped out of bed into the chilly air, and only had to pull on my coat and hat, having prepared myself by sleeping fully clothed and with my boots on. I sneaked out the kitchen door and to the side of the garage where I had hidden my bicycle. I crouched on the slushy ground and waited. A few minutes later the black car pulled up at our gate. The front door opened and the General strode out. When the car moved off, I jumped on my bicycle and pedalled furiously to keep even a discreet distance. The sky was cloudy and the road dark and muddy. When it reached the junction, the car stopped and I hid behind a tree. The driver reversed a short distance and changed direction, no longer heading along the road to the next village where the General had told us he went each day, but taking the main one to the city. I mounted my bicycle again but when I reached the junction I hit a rock and toppled over, slamming my shoulder into the ground. I winced in pain and looked at my bicycle. The front spokes had been bent by my boot. Tears leaked from my eyes and I limped back up the hill, walking the squealing bike next to me.
White Gardenia Page 2