‘Why you get involved with that woman?’ Mrs Woo whispered to me. ‘She no good. Her husband not as bad. But he stupid. His wife die of typhoid and he let that woman into his house because he lonely. No American want her…’
She stopped speaking when Amelia appeared with a handful of pictures she had torn from the catalogue. ‘These, Mrs Woo,’ she said, thrusting the ruined pages at the seamstress. ‘We are a nightclub, you know,’ she added, a catty smile on her face. ‘And you are no Elsa Schiaparelli to tell us what or what not to wear.’
We left Mrs Woo with an order for three evening and four day dresses, which I assumed was the only reason the woman put up with Amelia’s bad manners. From a department store on Nanking Road we bought underwear, shoes and gloves. On the pavement outside a beggar boy was scribbling the story of his plight with a piece of chalk. He was wearing a rough cotton loincloth, the skin on his shoulders and back burned painfully red by the sun.
‘What does it say?’ Amelia asked. I looked at the fine hand. My Chinese was not fluent but I could tell that the words had been written by someone educated and literate. The boy’s story was that he had seen his mother and three sisters killed when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. One of his sisters had been tortured. He found her body by the roadside. Her nose, breasts and hands had been cut off by the soldiers. Only he and his father survived and they fled to Shanghai. They bought a rickshaw with all the money they had left. But one day the man’s father was hit by a drunk foreigner driving too fast in his car. The father was still alive after the accident, with his legs broken and a large gash that exposed his skull on his forehead. He was bleeding profusely but the foreigner refused to take him to hospital in his car. Another rickshaw driver helped the boy cart his father to a doctor but it was too late. The man was dead. I read the last words out loud: ‘I beg you, brothers and sisters, to hear my plight and help me. May the gods in heaven send you great riches for doing so.’ The beggar boy looked up, amazed to see a Western girl reading Chinese. I slipped some coins into his hand.
‘So that’s how you will spend your money,’ said Amelia, entwining her cold arm with mine. ‘To help people who sit on pavements and do nothing to help themselves. I’d rather give it to the monkey. At least he strove to entertain me.’
For lunch we ate won-ton soup in a café filled with foreigners and rich Chinese. I had never seen such people, not even in Harbin before the worst of the war. The women were dressed in violet, sapphire or red silk dresses, their nails polished and their hair coiffured. The men were equally as stylish, in double-breasted suits and with pencil-thin moustaches. Afterwards Amelia took my purse to pay the bill at the counter and bought herself a packet of cigarettes and some chocolate for me. We strolled out onto the street, past the shops selling mah-jong sets, wicker furniture and love charms. I stopped to look at a store with dozens of canaries in bamboo cages hanging up outside it. The birds were all chirping and I was mesmerised by their pretty songs. I heard a cry and turned around to see two small boys looking at me. Their faces were creased and elfin and their eyes were full of menace. They seemed not quite human, holding up clawed hands. A pungent smell hit me and I realised their fingers were smeared with excreta. ‘Give money or wipe on dress,’ one of them said. At first I couldn’t believe what was happening, but the boys crept closer and I felt in my pocket for my purse. Then I remembered I had given it to Amelia. I looked around for her but she was nowhere to be seen. ‘I don’t have money,’ I pleaded with the boys. They responded by laughing and cursing me in Chinese. It was then that I noticed Amelia in the doorway of a hat shop across the road. My purse was in her hands.
‘Please, help me. They want money,’ I called out to her. She picked up a hat and studied it. At first I thought she hadn’t heard me, but then she looked up, her mouth twisting into a smile. She shrugged and I realised that she had seen the whole thing. I stared at her hard face, her black eyes, but that only made her laugh more. One of the boys grabbed for my skirt, but before he could reach it the bird-keeper burst out from his store and swatted at the boy with a broom. The child ducked and scurried away with his companion through the rows of street stalls and between pedestrians, eventually disappearing from sight.
‘Shanghai always like this,’ the shopkeeper muttered, shaking his head. ‘Now just get worse. Nothing but thieves and beggars. Cut off your fingers to get your rings.’
I glanced back to the doorway where Amelia had been standing a minute before. But it was empty.
Later I found Amelia in a pharmacy down the road. She was buying Dior perfume and an embroidered compact. ‘Why wouldn’t you help me?’ I screamed at her, hot tears spilling down my face and dripping from my chin. ‘Why do you treat me like you do?’
Amelia glared at me with disgust. She picked up her parcel and pushed me out the door. On the pavement she thrust her face into mine. Her eyes were bloodshot and furious.
‘You’re a foolish child,’ she shouted at me, ‘to rely on the kindness of others. Nothing is free in this city. Do you understand? Nothing! All kindness has a price! If you think people are going to help you for nothing, then you will end up like that beggar boy on the pavement!’
Amelia dug her fingers into my arm and dragged me to the kerb. She called out for a rickshaw. ‘Now I’m going to the racing club to be with adults,’ she said. ‘You go home and find Sergei. He’s always at home in the afternoon. Go and tell him what an evil woman I am. Go and cry to him about how badly I treat you.’
The rickshaw ride home was bumpy. The streets and the people became one blur of colour through my tears. I held my handkerchief to my mouth, terrified that I was going to be sick. I wanted to go home and I would tell Sergei Nikolaievich that I did not care about Tang, I wanted to be with the Pomerantsevs in Harbin again.
When I reached the gate I rang the bell until the Old Maid opened it. Despite my distress, she greeted me with the same expressionless face of the day before. I rushed past her and into the house. The hall was dark and silent, the windows and curtains had been closed to keep out the stifling afternoon heat. I stood in the parlour for a moment, unsure of what to do next. I passed the dining room and found Mei Lin asleep there, her tiny feet sticking out from under the table, the thumb of one hand in her mouth, the other clenching a cleaning cloth.
I hurried through the halls and corridors, terror rising in my blood. I ran up the stairs to the third floor and looked in every room until I came to the last one, the room at the end of the hall. The door was ajar and I knocked softly but there was no answer. I pushed it and it swung open. Inside, as with the rest of the house, the curtains were closed and the room was dark. The air was thick with the smell of human sweat. And something else: a cloying sweetness. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see Sergei Nikolaievich slumped in his chair, his head on his chest. Behind him the shadowy figure of the manservant kept a ghoul-like watch.
‘Sergei Nikolaievich,’ I called out, my voice cracking. I was terrified that he was dead. But after a while Sergei Nikolaievich lifted his eyes. A blue haze rose up around him like a halo and with it came the reek of putrid air. He was sucking smoke from a long-stemmed pipe. I was startled by his face, sunken and grey, with eyes so hollow they looked like cavities in his skull. I edged away, not prepared for this new nightmare.
‘I’m so sorry, my Anya,’ he wheezed. ‘So very, very sorry. But I’m lost, my little one. Lost.’ He collapsed back into his seat, his head thrown back and his mouth open and gaping, struggling for breath like a dying man. The opium in the pipe gurgled and cooled into black ash.
I fled from the room, perspiration dripping from my face and neck. I made it to my bathroom just in time to throw up the soup I had eaten with Amelia. When I had finished I wiped my mouth with a towel and lay on the cool tiles, trying to steady my breathing. I heard Amelia’s words in my head: You’re a foolish child to rely on the kindness of others. Nothing is free in this city. Do you understand? Nothing! All kindness has a price!
; In the mirror’s reflection I could see the dresser with the matroshka dolls lined up on it. I closed my eyes and imagined a gold line stretching from Shanghai to Moscow. ‘Mama, Mama,’ I said to myself, ‘keep safe. You survive, and I will survive, until we can find each other again.’
THREE
The Tango
The packages from Mrs Woo arrived a few days later, while Sergei Nikolaievich, Amelia and I were eating breakfast in the courtyard. I was drinking tea Russian-style, plain with a scoop of blackcurrant jam on the side for sweetness. Tea was all I ever had for breakfast, although every morning the table was laid with pancakes dripping with butter and honey, bananas, mandarins, pears, bowls of strawberries and grapes, scrambled eggs with melted cheese, sausages and triangles of toast. I was too nervous to have an appetite. My legs trembled under the glass tabletop. I spoke only when I was spoken to, and even then uttered not a syllable more than necessary. I was terrified of doing something that might bring on Amelia’s ill humour. But neither Sergei Nikolaievich—who had given me permission to use his first name, Sergei—nor Amelia seemed to notice my timid behaviour. Sergei spoke cheerfully to me about the sparrows that visited the garden, and Amelia, for the most part, ignored me.
The bell on the gate rang and the maid brought up two brown-paper parcels with our address scribbled down the sides in English and Chinese. ‘Open them,’ Amelia said, clasping her talon-like fingers and smiling. She was pretending to be my ally for her husband, but I was not deceived. I turned to Sergei and held up the garments for him one by one. All the day dresses received his nods and ‘ahs’ of approval. ‘Oh yes, that one is the prettiest,’ he said, pointing to a cotton dress with a butterfly collar and a row of sunflowers embroidered on the neckline and belt. ‘You should wear that tomorrow for our stroll in the park.’ But when I opened the package of evening dresses and showed him the green cheongsam, Sergei’s brow knotted and his eyes turned dark. He glared at Amelia and said to me, ‘Anya, please go to your room.’
Sergei hadn’t addressed me angrily, but being sent away from the table made me feel dejected. I shuffled through the hall and moped up the stairs, wondering what he was upset about and what he was going to say to Amelia. I hoped whatever it was wouldn’t make her even more contemptuous of me.
‘I told you that Anya is not coming with us to the club until she is older,’ I heard him tell his wife. ‘She has to go to school.’
I stopped on the landing, straining to listen. Amelia scoffed, ‘Oh yes, we are going to hide the truth from her about who we are, aren’t we? Make her spend some time with the nuns before we introduce her to the real world. I think she’s already caught on to your habit. I can tell by the pitying way she looks at you.’
‘She’s not like girls from Shanghai. She is…’ The rest of Sergei’s sentence was drowned out by Mei Lin clumping up the stairs in wooden clogs, a pile of fresh linen stacked in her arms. I lifted my finger to my lips. ‘Shhhh!’ I said to her. Her birdlike face peered at me over the sheets. When she realised that I was eavesdropping, she put her finger over her own lips and burst into giggles. Sergei stood up and closed the front door, so I never got to hear the rest of the conversation that morning.
Later Sergei came to see me in my room. ‘Next time I will get Luba to take you shopping,’ he said, kissing the top of my head. ‘Don’t be disappointed, Anya. There is plenty of time for you to be the belle of the ball.’
My first month in Shanghai passed slowly and with no further news of my mother. I wrote two letters to the Pomerantsevs, describing Shanghai and my guardian in favourable terms so that they wouldn’t worry. I signed my name Anya Kirillova, in case the letters were read by the Communists.
Sergei sent me to the Santa Sophia School for Girls in the French Concession. The school was run by Irish nuns and the students were a mix of Catholics, Orthodox Russians and some Chinese and Indian girls from wealthy families. The nuns were kind-hearted women from whose faces smiles shone more often than frowns. They were great believers in physical education and played baseball with the senior girls on Friday afternoons while the junior girls watched. The first time I saw my geography teacher, Sister Mary, sprinting from base to base with her habit hitched to her knees and being tagged by my history teacher, Sister Catherine, it took all my willpower not to laugh. The women were like giant cranes struggling for flight. But I didn’t laugh. Nobody did. For while the sisters were usually sweet, they could also be exacting in their punishments. When Luba took me to enrol at the school, we witnessed the Mother Superior making her way along a line of girls propped up against the school wall. She was sniffing the girls’ necks and hair. After each inhalation she twitched her nose and lifted her eyes to heaven as if she were tasting a cask of fine wine. Later I learned that she had been inspecting the girls for perfumed talc, scented hair tonics and other cosmetic enhancements that drew attention to themselves. The Mother Superior saw a direct connection between vanity and moral corruption. The one offending student she found that morning had been put on bathroom duty for a week.
Mathematics was taught by Sister Bernadette, a plump woman whose chin went straight to her neck. Her northern accent was as thick as butter, and it took me two days to work out that a certain word she kept repeating was ‘parentheses’.
‘Why are you frowning at me, Miss Anya?’ she asked. ‘Is there a problem regarding the ahrentheses?’
I shook my head and caught sight of two girls smiling at me from across the aisle. After the lesson they made their way over to my seat and introduced themselves as Kira and Regina. Regina was a petite dark-haired girl with violet eyes. Kira was as blonde as the sun.
‘You’re from Harbin, aren’t you?’ Kira said.
‘Yes.’
‘You can tell. We are from Harbin too but we came with our families to Shanghai before the war.’
‘How can you tell I’m from Harbin?’ I asked.
They laughed. Kira winked and whispered in my ear, ‘You don’t need Russian writing lessons.’
Kira’s father was a doctor, Regina’s a surgeon. We found out that we had elected almost the same classes for the coming term: French, English grammar, history, mathematics and geography. But while I took the afterhours art classes at the gymnasium, they rushed back to their homes at the posh end of Avenue Joffre for their piano and violin lessons.
Although we sat together in nearly every class, I sensed without asking that Regina’s and Kira’s parents would not have approved of their daughters coming to see me at Sergei’s house nor would they have been comfortable with me in their own homes. So I never invited the girls and they never invited me. I was relieved in a way because I secretly feared that if I did invite them over, Amelia would have another drunken fit, and I would have been embarrassed to have such well brought up girls witness her behaviour. So while I often longed for their company, Regina, Kira and I had to make do with a friendship that began with prayers in the morning and ended with the school bell in the afternoon.
When I wasn’t at school I was tiptoeing to Sergei’s library and sneaking out to the garden with armfuls of books and my sketchpad. Two days after I had arrived at the house I discovered a gardenia tree in a sheltered part of the garden. It became my sacred spot and I spent almost every afternoon there, drowning myself in volumes of Proust and Gorky or sketching the blooms and plants around me. I would do anything I could to avoid crossing paths with Amelia.
Sometimes when Sergei returned home in the afternoon he would join me in the garden and we would talk for a while. I soon realised he was better read than I had assumed, and once he brought me the works of a Russian poet, Nikolai Gumilev. He read to me a poem about a giraffe in Africa which the poet had written to cheer his wife when she was depressed. Sergei’s resonant voice made the words flow so eloquently that I could imagine the proud animal roaming the African plains. The picture carried me so far away from my sadness that I hoped the poem would never end. But always after an hour or so of talking, Sergei’s fingers would star
t to tremble and his body begin to twitch, and I knew that I would lose his pleasant company to his habit. I would see then how much weariness lived in his eyes, and I understood that in his own way he too was avoiding Amelia.
One afternoon when I came home from school I was surprised to hear voices in the garden. I peered through the trees and saw Dmitri and Amelia sitting in wicker chairs near the lion-head fountain. There were two women with them. I caught glimpses of their bright dresses and hats through the tree ferns. The clinking of teacups and the sound of the women’s laughter rippled through the garden like the whispers of ghosts. And for some reason Dmitri’s voice, louder and deeper than the others, made my heart thump in my chest. He had offered to take me to Yuyuan and I was so bored and lonely I hoped that if he saw me he would remember his promise.
‘Hello!’ I said, bursting in on the little group.
Amelia raised her eyebrows and glanced scornfully over me. But I was so eager to see Dmitri I didn’t care if she scolded me for intruding.
‘Hello. How are you?’ said Dmitri, standing up and dragging over an extra chair for me.
‘It’s a long time since I saw you,’ I said.
Dmitri didn’t answer me. He sank back into his own chair and lit a cigarette, humming a tune to himself. I cringed. It was not the enthusiastic welcome I’d imagined.
The two other women were about Dmitri’s age and were dressed in mango and rose-coloured dresses with ruffles about the sleeves and necklines. The lines of their silk petticoats were visible beneath the sheer fabric. The girl closest to me smiled with lips rouged as dark as grapes. The severe line of kohl around her blue eyes made me think of an Egyptian goddess.
‘I am Marie,’ she said, stretching out a pale hand, the long nails sharpened to points. She nodded to the golden-haired beauty next to her. ‘And this is my sister, Francine.’
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