White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘Don’t blame yourselves,’ Luba tried to comfort us. ‘I don’t believe he was afraid to disturb you on your wedding night. I think he knew he was going to die and wanted to be near you. You reminded him so much of himself and Marina.’

  We never told Amelia that we buried Sergei with his wedding ring on his finger and that the grave next to his, with the Russian inscription and the two engraved doves, one living, one dead, was Marina’s. The day after the funeral, Alexei called us to his office for the reading of the will. It should have been a straightforward affair. Dmitri owned the apartment, Amelia would get the house, and the Moscow-Shanghai would be divided between them. But the way Luba hovered nervously, twisting the tie of her scarf and trembling when she served the tea, made me think something was wrong. Dmitri and I huddled together on the sofa while Amelia sank into a leather armchair by the window, her sharp features bathed in the frosty morning light. Her eyes were narrowed and once again she reminded me of a coiled snake about to strike. I understood the ferocity of her hate for me. It stemmed from her sense of self-preservation. Sergei had been much closer to me than anyone else for the past year.

  Alexei kept us in suspense, shuffling papers around on his desk and taking his time to light his pipe. His movements were clumsy and slow, weighted down by the grief he felt for the man who had been his friend for over thirty years.

  ‘I’m not going to draw this out,’ he said at last. ‘Sergei’s final will, revoking all other previous wills and made the twenty-first day of August, 1947, is simple and plain.’ He rubbed his eyes and put on his glasses before addressing Dmitri and Amelia. ‘Although he loved you all equally and dearly, and you may be perplexed by his choice, his wishes are clear and exact: “I Sergei Nikolaievich Kirillov bequeath all my worldly belongings, including my house and all its possessions, and my business, the Moscow-Shanghai, to Anna Victorovna Kozlova.”’

  Alexei’s words were met with stunned silence. Nobody moved. I think we were waiting for him to say something more, to make some qualifications. Instead he removed his glasses and said, ‘That’s it.’ My mouth turned so dry I couldn’t close it. Dmitri stood up and walked to the window. Amelia sank down into her chair. What had just taken place seemed unreal to me. How could Sergei, whom I loved and trusted, do such a thing to me? He had betrayed Dmitri for all his years of loyalty and made me his accomplice. My mind raced to think of a reason, but it made no sense.

  ‘He made this will when Anya and I got engaged?’ Dmitri asked.

  ‘The date would indicate so,’ said Alexei.

  ‘The date would indicate so,’ repeated Amelia, her face full of scorn. ‘Are you not his lawyer? Did you not advise him on his will?’

  ‘As you know, Amelia, Sergei has not been well for some time. I witnessed his will but I did not advise it,’ Alexei replied.

  ‘Do lawyers take wills from people they suspect to be not of sound mind and body? I think not!’ Amelia spat, leaning across his desk. Her fangs were drawn and she was ready to strike.

  Alexei shrugged. It gave the impression he was enjoying the sight of Amelia being undone.

  ‘I believe Anya to be a young woman of impeccable character,’ he said. ‘As a wife she will share everything she has with Dmitri, and, as you have been so charitable to her, I’m sure she will show the same kindness towards you.’

  Amelia sprang from her chair. ‘She came here as a pauper,’ she said, not looking at me. ‘She was never meant to stay. We gave her charity. Do you understand? Charity. And he turns his back on Dmitri and me and gives her everything!’

  Dmitri crossed the room and stood above me. He took my chin in his hand and looked into my eyes. ‘Did you know anything about this?’ he asked. I paled at the question. ‘No!’ I cried. He grasped my hand to help me off the sofa. It was the gesture of a loving husband, but as soon as our skin touched I felt his blood turn cold.

  I did not miss the hate in Amelia’s eyes as she watched us leave. Her expression was a knife in my back.

  Dmitri did not utter one word to me on the way home. Nor did he say anything once we were in the privacy of our apartment. He spent the afternoon slouched on the window ledge, smoking and gazing at the street below. The burden of conversation fell to me and I was too weary to carry it. I cried, and my tears dripped into the carrot soup I prepared for supper. I cut myself when I sliced the bread and I let the blood drip into the dough. I thought that maybe if Dmitri tasted my grief he would believe in my innocence.

  In the evening Dmitri sat rigid-backed, staring into the fire. He turned away from me, while I faced him full on, vulnerable and longing to be forgiven for something that wasn’t my fault.

  It wasn’t until I rose to go to bed that he finally spoke to me. ‘He didn’t trust me in the end, did he?’ he said. ‘After all that talk about me being like a son, he still saw me as scum underneath. Not good enough to be trusted.’

  The muscles in my back tensed. My mind was moving in two different directions at once. I was both relieved and terrified that Dmitri was finally talking to me. ‘Don’t think that way,’ I said. ‘Sergei adored you. It’s as Alexei said: he wasn’t of a right mind.’

  Dmitri rubbed his hands over his haggard face. It hurt me to see the bitterness in his eyes. I longed to hold him, to make love with him again. I would have given anything to see desire instead of misery on his face. We had had only one night of real love and happiness. Since then everything had been a descent into decay and rot. Bitterness made our home reek the way Sergei’s perishing corpse had pervaded the house with its smell.

  ‘And what’s mine is yours anyway,’ I continued. ‘You haven’t lost the club.’

  ‘Then why not have the decency to give it to the husband in the first place?’

  We lapsed into hostile silence again, Dmitri moving back to the window and me retreating to the kitchen door. I wanted to shout out at the injustice of my situation. Sergei had lovingly prepared the apartment for us and then, with one sweep of his will, had turned it into a battlefield.

  ‘I never understood his relationship with Amelia,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it seemed like they hated each other. Perhaps he was afraid of her influence on you?’

  Dmitri turned to me with such spite in his eyes that it sent a chill through me. His hands clenched into fists. ‘The worst of it is not what he has done to me, but what he has done to Amelia,’ he said. ‘She built that club up while he was busy soaking his brain with opium, lost in illusions of his glorious past. Without her he’d be just another rotting Russian lying in the gutter. It’s easy to pick on her because she was born in the street, because she doesn’t have fine aristocratic manners. But what do those manners really mean? Tell me who is more honest?’

  ‘Dmitri,’ I cried. ‘What are you talking about? Who do you mean?’

  Dmitri slid off the window ledge and strode to the door. I followed him. He had taken his coat from the closet and was slipping it on.

  ‘Dmitri, don’t go!’ I begged, and realised what I meant was: ‘Don’t go to her.’

  He fastened the buttons of the coat and tied the belt, oblivious to me.

  ‘What has been done can be undone,’ I said. ‘We can divide the Moscow-Shanghai between the two of you. I’ll legally give it to you and you can decide what you want to give to Amelia. Then both of you can run it as you always have, independent of me.’

  Dmitri stopped buttoning his coat and glanced at me. The tautness in his face softened and my heart leaped with hope.

  ‘That would be the decent thing to do,’ he said. ‘And to let her stay in the house, even if it is yours now.’

  ‘Of course, I had no intention of doing otherwise.’

  Dmitri stretched out his arms. I ran into them, burying my face into the folds of his coat. I felt him press his lips to my hair and I inhaled his familiar scent. It will be all right between us, I told myself. This will pass and he will love me again.

  But the coldness was still there in his body. It was impenetrable, like armou
r between us.

  The following week I was shopping on Nanking Road. There had been a reprieve in the weather after the bitter cold of the previous week and the street was packed with people enjoying the fragile rays of the midday sun. Businessmen poured out of their offices and banks for lunch; women with shopping carts greeted each other on street corners, and everywhere I turned there were street vendors. The smell of the vendors’ spicy meats and roasting walnuts made me hungry. I was reading the menu in the window of an Italian café, deciding between zuppa di cozze and spaghetti marinara when suddenly there was a scream so shrill and dreadful it made my heart stop. People began to scurry in all directions, terror on their faces. I was jostled along with them. But the crowd was hedged in by two army trucks at each end of the block and I found myself jammed against a shop window, a heavy-set man pressing so hard against me that I thought my ribs would break. I slipped past him and into the writhing crowd. Everyone was struggling against each other, trying to stay away from whatever was happening on the street.

  I was propelled to the front of the crowd and I found myself face to face with a group of Nationalist army soldiers. The soldiers were pointing their rifles at a line of young Chinese men and women kneeling in the gutter with their hands linked behind their heads. The students didn’t seem frightened, only disorientated. One of the girls was squinting at the crowd and I noticed her glasses were caught in the collar of her jacket. They were cracked, as if they had been knocked from her face. Two army captains were standing off to the side, arguing with each other in hushed tones. Suddenly one broke away from the other. He strode up behind the first boy in the line, pulled a pistol from his belt and fired at the boy’s head. The boy’s face contorted with the impact of the bullet. A spurt of blood like a fountain shot up from the wound. He collapsed on the pavement, blood oozing around him. I was struck dumb with horror, but others in the crowd screamed or cried out in protest.

  The captain moved rapidly along the line, executing each of the students as casually as a gardener picking off dead blooms. They dropped one by one, their faces twisting and twitching in death. When the captain reached the near-sighted girl, I ran forward without thinking, as if to protect her. He glared at me with savage eyes, and an English woman grabbed my arm and pulled me back into the crowd. She tucked my head against her shoulder. ‘Don’t look!’ she said. The pistol fired and I wrenched away from the woman. The girl didn’t die instantly like the others. It hadn’t been a clean shot. Half the side of her head was blown away. A loose flap of skin was dangling by her ear. She fell forwards and dragged herself along the pavement. The soldiers followed alongside, kicking her and poking at her with their rifles. She whimpered, ‘Mama, Mama,’ before becoming still. I stared at her lifeless form, the gaping wound on her head, and imagined a mother somewhere, waiting for a daughter who would never come home.

  A Sikh policeman pushed through the crowd. He yelled at the soldiers and pointed to the bodies strewn on the pavement. ‘You have no right to be here!’ he shouted. ‘This is not your territory.’

  The soldiers ignored him and climbed back into their trucks. The captain who had done the killing turned to the crowd and said, ‘Those who have sympathy for the Communists will die with the Communists. This is my warning: what I did to them, they will surely do to you if you let them into Shanghai.’

  I hurried along Nanking Road, barely aware of where I was going. My mind was a jumble of images and sounds. I bumped into people and shopping carts, bruising my arms and hips and not noticing. I thought mostly of Tang. His twisted smile, his mangled hands, his need for revenge. I hadn’t seen the ugliness of his hate in the eyes of those freshfaced students.

  I found myself in front of the Moscow-Shanghai and rushed inside. Dmitri and Amelia were in the office, examining the account books with their new lawyer, an American called Bridges. The air was heavy with their collective cigarette smoke and they were frowning in concentration. Although the tension between Dmitri and myself had faded, and even Amelia had been civil after she had realised I wasn’t going to oust her from the house, it was only because of my desperation that I interrupted them so boldly.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Dmitri, getting out of his chair. His eyes were full of concern and I wondered what I looked like.

  He helped me to sit down and brushed my hair away from my face. I was touched by his tenderness and blurted out what I had seen, stopping every so often to swallow the tears that choked me. They listened to my story intently and when I had finished were silent for a long time. Amelia tapped her long red nails on the desk, and Dmitri wandered to the window, jacking it open for air.

  ‘These are not good times,’ said Bridges, rubbing his sideburns.

  ‘I believe Sergei,’ said Dmitri. ‘We survived the war and we will survive this.’

  ‘The only wise words he had to offer,’ Amelia scoffed, taking a fresh cigarette and lighting it.

  ‘What about the rumours?’ asked Bridges. ‘We are hearing them more and more. And one day there is no bread, another day there is no rice.’

  ‘What rumours?’ I asked.

  Bridges glanced at me, the hairy fist of one hand pressed against the palm of the other. ‘They say that the Communist army has regrouped and is approaching the Yangtze, that all over the country Nationalist generals are deserting and joining forces with the Communists. That they plan to take Shanghai.’

  I drew in a breath. A tremble travelled from my legs to my arms. I thought I was going to be sick.

  ‘What are you frightening Anya for?’ said Dmitri. ‘Is this the time to be telling her such things? After what she has just seen?’

  ‘It’s nonsense,’ said Amelia. ‘The club is doing better than ever. It is full of British, French and Italians. It’s only the lily-livered Americans who are getting nervous. So what if the Communists come? They want the Chinese, not us.’

  ‘What about the curfew?’ said Bridges.

  ‘What curfew?’ I asked.

  Dmitri frowned at Bridges. ‘It’s only for the winter. To preserve fuel and other supplies. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘What curfew?’ I repeated, looking from Bridges to Dmitri.

  ‘We can only open four nights a week. And only until eleven-thirty,’ said Bridges.

  ‘A mere rationing precaution,’ said Dmitri. ‘It was more severe during the war.’

  ‘Another American lily-livered act,’ added Amelia.

  ‘It’s only for the winter,’ said Dmitri. ‘Nothing to worry about at all.’

  The next day Luba came to see me. She was dressed in a cobalt blue suit with a corsage of posies pinned to the lapel. At first I felt awkward because Dmitri and Amelia had fired her husband as the club’s lawyer, but Luba did not behave any differently towards me. ‘Anya, look how pale and skinny you’ve become,’ she said. ‘We shall get you a proper meal. At my club.’

  I invited her in and she brushed past me, glancing around the apartment as if she were looking for someone. She rushed over to the display cabinet and examined the dolls, then picked up a jade Buddha on the bookshelf and studied it, and ran her hands over the exposed stone walls. Then I understood what she was looking for in the things she touched.

  ‘I miss him like I miss my own father,’ I said.

  Her face twitched. ‘I miss him too.’

  Her eyes met mine and she turned away to look at a painting of the Chinese Gardens. The midmorning sun was shining through the curtainless windows. It bounced off Luba’s wavy hair, turning it into a halo. It reminded me of the way the light had flooded over Sergei’s shoulders when he danced at the Moscow-Shanghai the night of our engagement party. Although Luba was part of our clique, I had never got to know her very well. She was one of those women who took so well to the role of being someone’s wife that it was impossible to think of her as any more than an extension of her husband. She had always appeared a robust, fleshy doll on her husband’s arm, smiling through gleaming gold teeth but never revealing her thoughts. Suddenly
, in a moment, we had become allies, both of us daring to remember Sergei with affection.

  ‘I’ll get dressed,’ I said. Then on impulse I asked her, ‘Were you in love with him?’

  She laughed. ‘No, but I did love him,’ she said. ‘He was my cousin.’

  Luba’s club was off the Bubbling Well Road. It was stylish in a shabby kind of way. The curtains were elegant but faded and the oriental carpets were grand but worn. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a rockery garden with a fountain and magnolia trees. The club attracted the well-to-do wives who couldn’t get into the British clubs. It was full of German, Dutch and French women mostly about Luba’s age. The dining hall was noisy with the babble of their conversations and the clanking of plates and glasses being whisked around on silver trolleys by Chinese waiters.

  Luba and I shared a bottle of champagne and ordered chicken Kiev and Vienna schnitzel, with white chocolate cheesecake for dessert. I felt as if I were seeing her for the first time. Looking at her was like looking at Sergei. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed the similarities before. The same bear-like roundness. Her plump hands on her knife and fork were age-spotted but perfectly manicured; her shoulders were hunched but she held her chin high. Her skin looked pliant and well fed. She opened a compact and powdered her nose. There was a little splatter of pockmarks on her left cheek but her face was so neatly madeup that they were hardly noticeable. Although she wasn’t anything like my real mother, there was something maternal about Luba that made me feel warmly towards her. Or perhaps it was because I saw Sergei living on in her.