‘Enchanté,’ Francine said, pushing her curls out of her eyes and leaning towards me. ‘Comment allezvous? I heard you are studying French at school.’
‘Si vous parlez lentement je peux vous comprendre,’ I said, wondering who had been talking to her about me. Amelia wouldn’t care if I spoke French or Swahili.
‘Vous parlez français très bien,’ exclaimed Francine. She wore a small diamond on her left hand. An engagement ring.
‘Merci beaucoup. J’ai plaisir à l’étudier.’
Francine turned to Dmitri and whispered, ‘She is charming. I want to adopt her. I think Philippe won’t mind.’
Dmitri was staring at me. His gaze made me so self-conscious that I almost spilled the tea Francine handed to me.
‘I can’t believe you are the same girl I saw a few months ago,’ he said. ‘You look so different in your school uniform.’
A blush burned from my neck to my hair. Amelia sniggered and whispered something to Marie. I slumped back into my chair, barely able to breathe. I remembered how Dmitri had sat close to me that first night in Shanghai, his face near to mine as if we were confidants. Equals. Perhaps in the blue velvet dress he hadn’t realised I was thirteen. What a contrast I must appear this afternoon: a child in a puffy blouse and pinafore, two tightly woven braids sticking out from under her straw hat. Not someone he would take to Yuyuan. Not when he could take Marie and Francine. I tucked my feet under the chair, suddenly ashamed of my school shoes and knee-high socks.
‘You are very cute,’ Francine said. ‘I would like to take a photograph of you eating an ice-cream. And I’ve heard you are quite an artist too.’
‘Yes, she copies the clothes from my fashion magazines,’ sniggered Amelia.
I cringed in shame, too mortified to even look at Dmitri.
‘What I hate about schoolgirls,’ said Amelia, drumming her fingernails on her teacup and taking her time before plunging her dagger into me, ‘is no matter how clean and tidy you send them off in the morning, they always return smelling like sweat and oranges.’
Marie roared with laughter, showing rows of little teeth like a piranha. ‘How vulgar,’ she said. ‘I imagine it’s all the running around and skipping rope they do.’
‘And all the squashed fruit they sneak into their school bags,’ Amelia added.
‘Anya hardly smells like that,’ said Dmitri. ‘I was just taken aback by how young she is.’
‘She’s not that young, Dmitri,’ said Amelia. ‘She’s just underdeveloped. When I was her age I already had breasts.’
‘How mean they are being,’ said Francine, brushing my braids off my shoulders. ‘She has an elegance beyond her years. Je l’aime bien. Anya, quelle est la date aujourd’hui?’
But I did not want to practise French any more. Amelia had hit her target and I was humiliated. I fumbled in my pocket for my handkerchief and pretended to sneeze. I did not want to add to my humiliation by letting them see the unhappiness in my eyes. It was as if they had held up a mirror for me and I had seen myself as never before. A scruffy schoolgirl with bruises on her knees.
‘Come on then,’ said Amelia, standing up. ‘If you can’t take a joke and are going to pull faces, then come inside with me. Let Dmitri enjoy the garden with his friends.’
I hoped Dmitri would protest and insist that I stay but he didn’t, and I knew that I had sunk in his esteem and that he was no longer interested in me. I trailed after Amelia like an unwanted dog. I wished that I had never heard his voice in the garden that day. That I had gone straight into the house and to the library without saying a word to anyone. Once we were out of earshot, Amelia turned to me, her eyes flashing with pleasure at my pain. ‘Well, you made a fool of yourself, didn’t you? I thought you would have been taught better manners than to intrude where you have not been invited.’ I didn’t answer her. I hung my head and allowed myself to be corrected. Amelia strolled to the window and peered through the curtains. ‘My friend Marie is such an attractive young woman,’ she sighed. ‘I do hope that she and Dmitri get on. He’s at an age when a man looks for a companion.’
I spent the afternoon in my room, miserable. I kicked my French books under the bed and tried to drown myself in a volume on the history of Ancient Rome. From the garden I could hear laughter and the sound of music. I had never heard music like it before: carnal, enticing, creeping up to my window like the delicious scent of an exotic lily. I covered my ears against it and tried to concentrate on my book, but after a while the temptation to see what was going on became too much. I crept to the window and peeped out. Dmitri was dancing with Marie in the courtyard. Francine was bent over a record player, readjusting the needle each time the music stopped. One of Dmitri’s hands rested between Marie’s shoulderblades while the other clasped her fingers in his own. Cheeks pressed together, they were parading around in a kind of staccato walk. Marie was flushed, giggling stupidly with each step. Dmitri’s expression was mock serious. ‘Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow,’ sang Francine, tapping out a rhythm for them with her hands. Marie was stiff and awkward, and tripped on the hem of her dress when Dmitri dipped her.
‘I’m tired,’ she complained. ‘This is far too difficult. I would rather do the foxtrot.’
Francine swapped places with her sister. I wanted to shut my eyes, I was so sick with envy. She was by far the more graceful of the two sisters and in Dmitri’s arms she brought elegance to the dance. Francine was like a ballet dancer, conveying everything from passion to anger and love in her eyes. Dmitri stopped pulling a face with her. He stood erect and appeared even more dashing. Together they looked like two Siamese cats locked in a mating ritual. I leaned further out the window, caught up by the dreamy tempo of the tango. I closed my eyes and imagined it was me down there in the courtyard, dancing with Dmitri.
A drop of water fell on my nose. I opened my eyes and saw that the sky had turned dark and an afternoon shower was splattering down. The dancers quickly gathered their things and rushed inside. I pulled shut my window and, as I did so, caught sight of myself in the dresser mirror.
‘She’s not young, she’s just underdeveloped,’ Amelia had said.
I glared at my reflection with loathing. I was slight for my age, having only grown an inch since my eleventh birthday. A few months before coming to Shanghai I had noticed the first sprouts of honeycoloured hair between my legs and under my arms. But I had remained painfully skinny with a flat chest and bottom. It had never bothered me until that afternoon; I had been indifferent to my physical growth. But an impression had been made on me. I had come to see that Dmitri was a man, and suddenly I wanted to be a woman.
By the end of summer the tenuous truce between the Nationalist and Communist armies slid into civil war. There was no mail going in or out of Manchuria and I received no reply to my letters to the Pomerantsevs. I became driven by a desperate need to keep some sort of connection with my mother and began devouring every detail about Russia that I could find. I pored over the books in Sergei’s library, searching out tales of steamers sailing on the Astrakhan, stories of the tundra and the taiga, the Ural and the Caucaus Mountains, the Arctic and the Black Sea. I pestered Sergei’s friends for their memories of summer dachas, great cities of gold, grand statues reaching towards pale blue skies, and parades of soldiers. I tried to piece together a picture of Russia as my mother might see it, but instead found myself becoming lost in a landmass too big to imagine.
One day Amelia sent me on an errand to pick up monogrammed table napkins for the club. Although I had been the one to drop off the material to the embroidery shop the week before, my mind was occupied by the news that the Soviets were battling for Berlin, and I shuffled along the avenues of the Concession without paying attention to where I was going. A man’s shout snapped me out of my thoughts. Two people were bickering behind a fence. Their Chinese was too fast for me to understand, but when I glanced around at my surroundings I realised that I was lost. I was standing in a lane at the back of a row of derelict Europe
an-style houses. The shutters were barely holding on by their hinges and the peeling stucco walls were stained by rusty watermarks. Barbed wire curled over the fences and windowsills like ivy, and the yards were full of brackish puddles although it hadn’t rained for weeks. I tried to retrace my steps but only became more confused in the maze of alleys that turned left and right with no logical pattern. The stench of urine was thick in the hot air and my path was blocked by scrawny chickens and geese. I clenched my fists in panic.
I turned a corner piled with rusty bed frames and an old icebox, and stumbled across a Russian café. White lace curtains were draped across the dirty windows. The Café Moskva was crammed between a grocer whose carrots and spinach stalks swooned limply in their buckets and a patisserie whose iced tea slices were speckled with dust. I was relieved to find something Russian and entered the café with the intention of asking directions. When I pushed open the screen door a bell rang. The smell of spiced sausage and vodka hit me as soon as I stepped into the dim interior. Chinese music was blaring from a radio balanced precariously on the counter, but it couldn’t drown out the sound of flies circling the tin ceiling. An old woman, so shrivelled that she appeared to be on the verge of decay, squinted at me over the edge of her stained menu. She wore a crumpled velvet dress with lace at the throat and wrists, and in her grey hair a tiara with all the stones missing. Her lips moved and her eyes were dark and troubled. ‘Dusha-dushi. Dusha-dushi,’ she muttered to me. Speak soul to soul. Speak soul to soul. At the table next to her an old man in a beret was scanning the menu, turning the yellowing pages frantically as if he were reading a detective novel. His companion had fierce blue eyes and black hair stretched back into a bun. She was biting her nails and scribbling words on a paper doily. The owner approached me with a menu, his cheeks rosy like borscht and his hairy stomach straining the buttons of his shirt. Two women in black dresses and shawls eyed my expensive shoes when I sat down.
‘What can I bring you?’ the owner asked.
‘I want you to tell me about Russia,’ I said on impulse.
The café owner rubbed his freckled hand over his cheeks and chin and sank into the chair opposite me like a man condemned. It was as if he had been waiting for me, for this day, this hour. He took a moment to gather his strength before describing to me the summer fields brimming with buttercups, birch trees, woods rich with the scent of pine needles and moss crushed underfoot. His eyes glistened when he recalled chasing squirrels, foxes and weasels as a child and the taste of his mother’s dumplings served steaming on frozen winter nights.
The whole room stopped to pay attention, and when the owner was exhausted, the others joined in to fill in the spaces. The old woman howled like the lone wolf in the forest; the man in the beret sang out the tones of the massive church bells ringing on festive days; and the poet described peasant men and women harvesting fields bursting with wheat and barley. All the while the women in mourning kept wailing, punctuating every story with: ‘And only in death will we return home.’
Hours passed like minutes, and it wasn’t until the sun went down and the light in the windows changed from yellow to ash that I realised I had been in the café all afternoon. Sergei would probably be worried about where I was and Amelia would be angry when I told her that I hadn’t picked up the napkins. Still I could not leave or interrupt these strange people. I sat listening until my legs and back ached from lack of movement, taking in every joyful shriek or downcast glance. I was captivated by the stories of a place that was opening up like a traveller’s tale before me.
The following week, as the café owner had promised, a Soviet soldier was waiting for me. The man’s face was sunken like a piece of pottery that had collapsed in the kiln. His nose and ears had been eaten away by frostbite and he’d wrapped gauze over the holes to keep the dust out. The air rattled in his throat, and I curled my toes to stop myself flinching from the reek of bile that blew across the table whenever he spoke.
‘Don’t be alarmed by my looks,’ he told me. ‘Mine is a lucky fate compared to the others. I made it to China.’
The soldier told me that he had been taken prisoner by the Germans. After the war, instead of welcoming them home, Stalin ordered all former prisoners of war to be transported to labour camps. The men were packed onto trains and ships riddled with rats and lice and sent to Siberia. It was punishment for having seen what Stalin was terrified they would tell others: that even when Germany was ravaged by war, its people lived better than the Russians. The soldier had escaped when his prison ship ran aground.
‘When that happened,’ he said, ‘I felt the world open up before me and I fled across the ice. I could smell the fire and hear shouts behind me. The guards started shooting. Men fell dead around me, their mouths gaping and their eyes wide open. I expected to feel the hot metal rip of a bullet in my back too. But I kept running into the white nothingness. Soon all I could hear was the howling wind and I understood my fate was to survive.’
I did not turn away from the soldier or stop him talking when, for the price of hot tea and black bread, he described to me the burned villages, the famines and the crime, the rigged trials and mass deportations to Siberia where people dropped dead in the subzero air. His stories terrified me so much that my heart began to palpitate and I broke out in a sweat. But I continued to listen because I knew that he had come from the recent Russia. My mother’s Russia.
‘There are two possibilities,’ he told me, softening the bread in the tea and gripping the edge of the table with the pain swallowing caused him. ‘By the time your mother got to Russia they may not have cared that she was the widow of a White Army colonel and just stuck her in a factory as cheap labour and used her as an example of a reformed mind. Or they may have sent her to a gulag. If that was the case, unless she is a very strong woman, she is dead already.’
After the soldier had eaten, his eyes began to droop and he fell asleep, nestling his damaged head in his arms like a dying bird. I walked out into the midday light. Although it was still summer a sharp wind had risen and it stung my face and legs, making me shiver. I ran through the laneways, my eyes smarting and my teeth chattering. The soldier’s words hung like chains on me. I saw my mother, gaunt and starving in a prison cell, or lying face down in the snow. I heard the sound of the train wheels and remembered her stricken face as she was carried far away from me. I could not fathom such a gruesome fate for the woman who was part of me, and yet I had no clue, not the slightest idea of what had happened to her. At least I had kissed my father’s cold cheek and said goodbye. But with my mother there had been no final goodbye, no ending. Just a lonely longing from which there was no relief.
I wanted everything to stop, to have an end to the fears that prickled me, to find some peace. I tried to think of pleasant thoughts but I could only hear the soldier’s words and see his brutalised face. Unless she is a very strong woman, she is dead already.
‘Mama!’ I cried out, covering my face with my hands.
Suddenly an old woman in a beaded scarf appeared next to me. I stumbled backwards, startled.
‘Who are you looking for?’ she asked, clutching my sleeve with her splintered nails.
I edged away but the woman shuffled towards me, peering at me with raven eyes. Her red lipstick was a slash of garish colour over her thin lips and the creases on her forehead were jammed with caked powder. ‘You are searching for someone, aren’t you?’ she asked in a voice that sounded Russian, though I couldn’t be quite sure. ‘Bring me something of hers and I will tell you her fate.’
I tugged away from the woman and hurried down the street. Shanghai was full of cheats and tricksters preying on the desperation of others. But the words she shouted after me stilled my breath. ‘If she left something behind, she will come back for you.’
By the time I reached the house, my neck and arms were aching and a chill had set like ice in my bones. Zhun-ying, who everybody called the Old Maid, and Mei Lin were in the laundry near the servants’ quarters. The
laundry was a raised stone platform with a roof and temporary walls that were removed in summer. The Old Maid was wringing out towels and Mei Lin was helping her, water splashing in pools around their feet and dripping down the single step onto the grass. Mei Lin was singing something, and the normally grouchy Old Maid was laughing. The little girl’s grin scrunched into a concerned frown when I lurched unsteadily up the step towards her and gripped onto the boiler handle for support. ‘Please tell Sergei I won’t be down for dinner tonight,’ I told her. ‘I’ve caught a cold and am going to bed.’ Mei Lin nodded but the Old Maid scrutinised me with her inflamed gaze.
I collapsed onto my bed and the room’s golden walls enveloped me like a shield. Outside, Mei Lin’s laughter floated up into the summer air. Further in the distance I could hear the babble of traffic on the main road. I covered my eyes with the back of my arm, tormented by my aloneness. I couldn’t talk to Sergei about my mother. He skipped around the subject, cutting conversations short by suddenly remembering an urgent errand or paying attention to a distraction he normally would have ignored. His averted eyes and half-turned body always discouraged me from talking about her. I knew it was because of what grieving for his first wife had done to him. He once said that my pining might keep my mother alive in my imagination but in the end it would drive me mad.
I glanced at the matroshka dolls on my dresser and thought about the fortune teller. If she left something behind, she will come back for you. I slipped off the bed and opened the dresser drawer, lifting out the velvet box Sergei had given me for the jade necklace. I had not worn it since my thirteenth birthday. It was a sacred object which I laid out on the bed and wept over whenever I felt alone. The green stones reminded me of how much it meant to my mother to give it to me. I would close my eyes, trying to picture my father as a young man. I imagined how his heart must have been racing the day he walked with it hidden in his jacket on his way to give it to my mother. I opened the box and picked up the necklace. The stones seemed to vibrate with love. The matroshka dolls were mine, but somehow the necklace remained my mother’s even though she had given it to me.
White Gardenia Page 7