Just before I reached home I saw a Chinese man peek out from a grove of trees by the road. He looked as if he was waiting for me, so I crossed to the other side and began running with my wonky bicycle. But he soon caught up, greeting me in well-spoken Russian. There was something in his glassy-eyed gaze that made me afraid and I replied with silence. ‘Why,’ he asked, sighing as if he were talking to a naughty sister, ‘do you let the Japanese stay with you?’
‘We had nothing to do with it,’ I answered, my eyes still averted. ‘He just came and we couldn’t say no.’
He took the handlebars of the bicycle, pretending to help me with it, and I noticed his gloves. They were padded and shaped as if he had apples in them instead of hands.
‘They are very bad, the Japanese,’ he continued. ‘They have done terrible things. The Chinese people will not forget who helped us and who helped them.’ His tone was kind and intimate but his words sent a chill through me and I forgot the ache in my shoulder. He stopped pushing the bicycle and laid it on its side. I wanted to run but I was frozen with fear. Slowly and deliberately he lifted his glove to my face and then pulled the material away with the grace of a magician. He held before me a mangled mess of badly healed flesh, twisted into a club with no fingers. I cried out at the horror of it but knew he was not doing it for effect alone; it was a warning. I left my bicycle and ran through the gate to my house. ‘My name is Tang!’ the man called out after me. ‘Remember it!’
I turned when I reached the door but he was gone. I clambered up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom, my heart beating like thunder in my chest. But when I pushed open the door I saw that she was still asleep, her dark hair spread over the pillow. I removed my coat, gently lifted the bedclothes and climbed in beside her. She sighed and brushed her hand against me before falling back into a sleep as still as death.
August was the month of my thirteenth birthday, and despite the war and my father’s death, my mother was determined to keep our family tradition of taking me to the old quarter to celebrate. Boris and Olga drove us into the city that day; Olga wanted to buy some spices and Boris was going to get his hair cut again. Harbin was the place of my birth, and although many Chinese said that we Russians never belonged nor had any right to it, I felt that it somehow belonged to me. When we entered the city, I saw all that was familiar and home to me in the onion-domed churches, the pastel-coloured buildings and the elaborate colonnades. Like me, my mother was born in Harbin. She was the daughter of an engineer who had lost his job on the railways after the Revolution. It was my noble father who had somehow connected us to Russia and made us see ourselves in the architecture of the Tsars.
Boris and Olga dropped us off in the old quarter. It was unusually hot and humid that day, so my mother suggested we try the city’s speciality, vanilla bean ice-cream. Our favourite café was bustling with people and much livelier than we had seen it in years. Everyone was talking about the rumours that the Japanese were about to surrender. My mother and I took a table near the window. A woman at the next table was telling her older companion that she had heard the Americans bombing the previous night, and that a Japanese official had been murdered in her district. Her companion nodded solemnly, running his hand through his grey beard and commenting, ‘The Chinese would never dare do that if they didn’t feel that they were winning.’
After my ice-cream, my mother and I took a walk around the quarter, noticing which shops were new and remembering the shops that had disappeared. A peddler of porcelain dolls tried to entice me with her wares, but my mother smiled at me and said, ‘Don’t worry, I have something for you at home.’
I spotted the red and white pole of a barber’s shop with a sign in Chinese and Russian. ‘Look, Mama!’ I said. ‘That must be Boris’s barber.’ I rushed to the window to peek inside. Boris was in the chair, his face covered in shaving foam. A few other customers were waiting, smoking and laughing like men with nothing much to do. Boris saw me in the mirror and turned and waved. The bald-headed barber, in an embroidered jacket, also looked up. He had a Confucian moustache and goatee and wore glasses with thick frames, the kind popular among Chinese men. But when he saw my face pressed against the window, he quickly turned his back to me.
‘Come on, Anya,’ my mother laughed, pulling my arm. ‘Boris will get a bad haircut if you distract the barber. He might cut off his ear, and then Olga will be annoyed with you.’
I followed my mother obediently, but as we neared the corner I turned one more time towards the barber’s shop. I couldn’t see the barber through the shine on the glass, but I realised that I knew those eyes: they had been round and bulging and familiar to me.
When we returned home my mother sat me before her dressing table and reverently undid my girlish plaits and swept my hair into an elegant chignon like hers, with the hair parted at the side and bunched at the nape of the neck. She dabbed perfume behind my ears, then showed me a velvet box on her dresser. When she opened it I saw inside the gold and jade necklace my father had given her as a wedding present. She picked it up and kissed it, before placing it around my throat and fastening the clip.
‘Mama!’ I protested, knowing how much the necklace meant to her.
She pursed her lips. ‘I want to give it to you now, Anya, because you are becoming a young woman. Your father would have been pleased to see you wear it on special occasions.’
I touched the necklace with trembling fingers. Although I missed seeing my father and talking with him, I felt that he was never far away. The jade seemed warm against my skin, not cold.
‘He’s with us, Mama,’ I said. ‘I know it.’
She nodded and sniffed back a tear. ‘I have something else for you, Anya,’ she said, opening the drawer near my knee and taking out a package wrapped in cloth. ‘Something to remind you that you will always be my little girl.’
I took the package from her and untied the knot, excited to see what was inside. It was a matroshka doll with the smiling face of my late grandmother. I turned to my mother, knowing that she had painted it. She laughed and urged me to open it and find the next doll. I unscrewed the doll’s torso and found that the second doll had dark hair and amber eyes. I smiled at my mother’s joke, and knew that the following doll would have strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes, but when I saw it also had a smatter of freckles across its funny face, I burst into giggles. I opened that doll to find a smaller one and looked up again at my mother. ‘Your daughter and my granddaughter,’ she said. ‘And with her smaller baby daughter inside her.’
I screwed all the dolls back together and lined them up on the dressing table, contemplating our matriarchal journey and wishing that my mother and I could always be just as we were at that moment.
Afterwards, in the kitchen, my mother placed an apple pirog before me. She was just about to cut the little pie when we heard the front door open. I glanced at the clock and knew it would be the General. He spent a long time in the entranceway before coming into the house. When he did finally enter the kitchen, he stumbled, his face a sickly colour. My mother asked if he was ill but he didn’t answer her and collapsed into a chair, resting his head in his folded arms. My mother stood up, horrified, and asked me to fetch some warm tea and bread. When I offered these to the General, he looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes.
He glanced at my birthday pie and reached over to me, patting my head clumsily. I could smell the alcohol on his breath when he said, ‘You are my daughter.’ The General turned to my mother and with tears falling down his cheeks said to her, ‘You are my wife.’ Sitting back in the chair, he composed himself, wiping his face with the back of his hand. My mother offered him the tea and he took a sip and a slice of bread. His face was contorted with pain, but after a while it relaxed and he sighed as if he had reached a decision. He rose from the table and, turning to my mother, gave a charade performance of her hitting him with the spade handle after discovering his secret hot tub. He laughed then, and my mother looked at him, astonished for a moment, before
laughing herself.
She asked him in slow Russian what he did before the war, had he always been a general. He looked confused for a moment, then pointed his finger to his nose and asked ‘Me?’ My mother nodded and repeated her question. He shook his head and closed the door behind him, muttering in Russian so well pronounced that he could have been one of us, ‘Before all this madness? I was an actor. In the theatre.’
The next morning the General was gone. There was a note pinned to the kitchen door, written in precise Russian. My mother read it first, her frightened eyes scanning the words twice, then handed it to me. The General had instructed us to burn everything he had left in the garage and to burn the note after reading it. He said that he had placed our lives in great danger when his only wish had been to protect us. He told us that we must destroy every trace of him for our own sake.
My mother and I ran to the Pomerantsevs’ house. Boris was chopping wood, but stopped when he saw us, wiping the sweat from his ruddy face and rushing us inside.
Olga was by the stove, twisting her knitting in her hands. She jumped out of her chair when she saw us. ‘Have you heard?’ she asked, white-faced and shaking. ‘The Soviets are coming. The Japanese have surrendered.’
Her words seemed to shatter my mother. ‘The Soviets or the Americans?’ she asked, her voice rising in agitation.
I could feel myself inwardly willing that it was the Americans who were coming to liberate us with their wide smiles and bright flags. But Olga shook her head. ‘The Soviets,’ she cried. ‘They are coming to help the Communists.’
My mother handed her the General’s note. ‘My God!’ said Olga after reading it. She collapsed into her chair and passed the note to her husband.
‘He spoke fluent Russian?’ Boris asked. ‘You didn’t know?’
Boris began talking about an old friend in Shanghai, someone who would help us. The Americans were on their way there, he said, and my mother and I should go immediately. My mother asked if Boris and Olga would come too, but Boris shook his head and joked, ‘Lina, what are they going to do to a couple of old reindeers like us? The daughter of a White Army colonel is a much better prize. You must get Anya out of here now.’
With the wood Boris had chopped for us we made a fire and burned the letter along with the General’s bedding and eating utensils. I watched my mother’s face as the flames rose and felt the same loneliness I saw written there. We were cremating a companion, someone we had never known or understood, but a companion just the same. My mother was relocking the garage when she noticed the trunk. It was jammed into a corner and hidden under some empty sacks. We lugged it out of its hiding place. The trunk was antique and beautifully carved with a picture of an old man with a long moustache holding a fan and gazing across a pond. My mother smashed the padlock with an axe and we lifted the lid together. The General’s uniform was folded there. She picked it up and I saw an embroidered jacket in the bottom of the trunk. Underneath the jacket we found a false moustache and beard, some makeup, thick-rimmed glasses and a copy of the New Pocket Atlas of China folded in a sheet of old newspaper. My mother stared at me, puzzled. I said nothing. I hoped that if only I knew the General’s secret we would be safe.
After we had burned everything, we turned over the soil and patted away the stain with the backs of our shovels.
My mother and I went to the district official’s office to get a permit to go to Dairen where we hoped to board a ship to Shanghai. There were dozens of other Russians waiting in the corridors and on the staircase, and some other foreigners and Chinese too. They were all talking about the Soviets and how some of them were already in Harbin, rounding up the White Russians. An old lady beside us told my mother that the Japanese family next door to her had committed suicide, terrified of the vengeance of the Chinese. My mother asked her what had made Japan surrender, and she shrugged, but a young man answered that he had heard rumours of a new kind of bomb dropped on Japanese cities. The official’s assistant came out and told us that no permits would be issued until all those seeking them had been interviewed by a member of the Communist party.
When we returned home our dogs were nowhere in sight and the door was unlocked and ajar. My mother paused before pushing it open, and just as her face on the day after my father’s mourning remains in my memory, so is that moment imprinted on my mind, like a scene from a film played over and over again: my mother’s hand on the door, the door swinging slowly open, the darkness and silence inside, and the incredible sense of knowing that someone was there, waiting for us.
My mother’s hand dropped to her side and felt for mine. It wasn’t trembling as it had since my father’s death. It was warm and strong and decisive. We moved together, not taking off our shoes in the entranceway as we had always done, but continuing on into the sitting room. When I saw him there at the table, his mutilated hands resting before him, I wasn’t surprised. It was as if I had been expecting him all along. My mother said nothing. She met his glassy eyes with a blank expression. He gave a bitter smile and motioned for us to sit down at the table with him. It was then that we noticed the other man, the one standing by the window. He was tall with piercing blue eyes and a moustache that hung from his lip like a winter fur.
Although it was summer, darkness fell quickly that evening. I remember the sensation of my mother’s firm grip on my hand, the fading afternoon light retreating across the floor, and then the whistling sound of a storm beating against the unshuttered windows. Tang interviewed us first, his tight-lipped smile appearing whenever my mother answered his questions. He told us that the General had not been a general at all, but a spy who also masqueraded as a barber. He was fluent in Chinese and Russian, a master of disguise who used his skills to gather information on the Resistance. Because the Russians thought he was Chinese, they felt quite comfortable gathering at his shop and discussing their plans, and revealing those of their Chinese counterparts. I was glad then that I had not told my mother that I had understood who the General was as soon as I saw the costume in the trunk. Tang’s face was fixed on my mother’s and she looked so shocked that I felt sure he would believe she had no part in the General’s work.
But even though it was obvious that my mother had not known who the General was, that we had not received any visitors while he lived with us, and that we were unaware that he could speak any language other than Japanese, it could not erase the hate Tang felt towards us. His whole person seemed to be inflamed with it. Such malice burned to only one goal: revenge.
‘Madame Kozlova, have you heard of Unit 731?’ he asked, restrained anger contorting his face. He seemed to be satisfied when my mother didn’t answer. ‘No, of course not. Nor would have your General Mizutani. Your cultured, well-spoken General Mizutani who bathed once a day and has never in his life killed a man with his own hands. But he seemed quite content to condemn people there, as you were to house a man whose countrymen have been slaughtering us. You and the General have as much blood on your hands as any army.’
Tang lifted his hand and waved the infected mess in front of my mother’s face. ‘You Russians, protected by your white skin and Western ways, don’t know about the live experiments that took place in the district next to this one. I am the only survivor. One of the many they tied to stakes in the snow, so that their nice clean educated doctors could observe the effects of frostbite and gangrene in order to prevent it happening to their own soldiers. But perhaps we were the lucky ones. They always intended to shoot us in the end. Not like the others, whom they infected with plague then cut open without anaesthetic to observe the effects. I wonder if you could imagine the feeling of having your head sawn open while still alive? Or being raped by a doctor so that he could impregnate you then cut you open and look at the foetus.’
Horror pinched my mother’s face but she never took her eyes off Tang. Seeing that he hadn’t broken her, he flashed his cruel smile again, and using his clubbed hand and elbow removed a photograph from a folder on the table. It appeared to be of
someone tied down on a table surrounded by doctors, but the overhead light was reflecting in the middle of it and I couldn’t make it out clearly. He told my mother to pick it up; she looked at it and turned away.
‘Perhaps I should show it to your daughter?’ he said. ‘They are about the same age.’
My mother’s eyes flamed and she met his hate with her anger. ‘My daughter is only a child. Hate me if you want, but what say has she had in anything?’ She glanced at the photograph again and tears came to her eyes, but she blinked them away. Tang smiled, triumphant. He was about to say something when the other man coughed. I had almost forgotten the Russian, he had sat so quietly, gazing out the window, perhaps not listening at all.
When the Soviet officer questioned my mother, it was if we had changed the script and were suddenly in a different play. He was unconcerned with Tang’s thirst for revenge or details about the General. He acted as if the Japanese had never been in China; he had really come to grab my father’s throat and, my father not being there, had settled on us. His questions to my mother were all about her family background and that of my father. He asked about the value of our house and my mother’s assets, giving a little snort to each reply as if he were ticking off a form. ‘Well,’ he said, appraising me with his yellow-speckled eyes, ‘you won’t have such things in the Soviet Union.’
White Gardenia Page 3