White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, clasping his fingers. ‘I am sure you are used to dealing with a lot of haughty Shanghailanders.’

  ‘Yes. But you’re not a true Shanghailander,’ he said. ‘You were born in Harbin and I heard you worked hard on the ship.’

  After I had completed the registration and employment forms, Ivan walked me to the door. ‘If you need anything,’ he said, shaking my hand again, ‘please come and see me.’

  I stepped into the sunshine and he tugged me back by the arm, pointing with his rough finger to my cheek. ‘You have tropical worm there. Go to the hospital immediately. They should have treated you for it on the ship.’

  But it was Ivan’s own face that caught me by surprise. He was young, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six. He had classic Russian features. A wide jaw, strong cheekbones, deep-set blue eyes. But running from his forehead down the corner of his right eye to his nose was a scar like a scorch mark. Where the injury had clipped his eye the flesh had healed badly and the lid was partly closed.

  He caught sight of my expression and stepped back into the shadow, turning away from me. I was sorry for my reaction because I liked him.

  ‘Go. Hurry,’ he said, ‘before the doctor goes to the beach for the day.’

  The hospital was near the market and the main road. It was a long wooden building with an overhanging roof and no glass in the windows. A young Filipino girl led me through the ward to a doctor. The beds were all empty except for a woman resting with a small baby asleep on her chest. The doctor was a Russian and, as I later learned, a volunteer from among the refugees. He and the other volunteer medical staff had built the hospital from scratch, begging the IRO and Filipino government for medicine or buying it on the black market. I sat on a rough bench while the doctor examined my cheek, stretching the skin with his fingers. ‘Just as well you came to me now,’ he said, rinsing his hands in a bowl of water held up by the girl. ‘Parasites like that can live on for ages, destroying the tissue.’

  The doctor gave me two injections, one into my jaw and another stinging one near my eye. My face prickled as if someone had slapped it. He handed me a tube of cream that read ‘Sample only’ on the label. I slipped off the bench and almost fainted. ‘Sit for a while before you go,’ the doctor told me. I did as he said, but as soon as I was out of the hospital I became nauseous again. There was a courtyard beside the hospital with palm trees and canvas chairs. It had been set up for day patients. I stumbled over to one of the chairs and collapsed into it, the blood singing in my ears.

  ‘Is that girl all right? Go check,’ I heard an old woman’s voice say.

  The sun was hot through the leaves of the trees. I could hear the ocean rumble in the background. There was a rustle of material and then a woman’s voice. ‘Can I get you some water?’ she asked. ‘It’s very hot.’

  I blinked my watering eyes, trying to focus on the shadowed figure against the cloudless sky.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘I just had some injections and they’ve made me weak.’

  The woman crouched next to me. Her curly brown hair was tied high on her head with a scarf. ‘She’s fine, Grandmother,’ she called out to the other woman.

  ‘I’m Irina,’ the young woman said, her smile full of white teeth. Her mouth was out of proportion to her face, but she emanated light. It shone on her lips, in her eyes, through her olive skin. When she smiled she was beautiful.

  I introduced myself to her and her grandmother. The old lady was stretched out on a banana chair under a tree, her feet barely reaching the end. The grandmother told me her name was Ruselina Leonidovna Levitskya.

  ‘Grandmother hasn’t been well,’ said Irina. ‘The heat doesn’t agree with her.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Ruselina asked me. Her hair was white but she had the same brown eyes as her granddaughter.

  I pushed back my hair and showed them my cheek.

  ‘You poor thing,’ said Irina. ‘I had something like that on my leg. But it’s all gone now.’ She lifted her skirt to show me her dimpled but stainless knee.

  ‘Have you seen the beach?’ Ruselina asked.

  ‘No, I only arrived yesterday.’

  She clasped her hands to her face. ‘It’s beautiful. Can you swim?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I’ve only ever swum in a pool. Not the ocean.’

  ‘Then come,’ Irina said, stretching out her hand. ‘And be anointed.’

  On the way to the beach we stopped by Irina and Ruselina’s tent. Two rows of conch shells marked the path to the door. Inside, a crimson sheet draped from corner to corner across the ceiling gave everything a warm pink hue. I was amazed at how many clothes the women had managed to pack inside a plywood wardrobe. There were feather boas, hats and a skirt made from bits of chipped mirror. Irina flung me a white swimming costume.

  ‘It’s Grandmother’s,’ she said. ‘She’s stylish and slim like you.’

  My sundress was sticky against my hot skin. It felt good to peel it off. The air rushed over my body and my skin tingled with relief. The costume fitted around my hips but was tight over my bust. It made the flesh of my breasts swell upwards, like a French corset. At first I was embarrassed by it, but then I shrugged and decided not to care. I hadn’t worn so little in the open since I was a child. It made me feel free again. Irina slipped on a suit that was magenta and silver-green. She looked like an exotic parrot.

  ‘What did you do in Shanghai?’ she asked me.

  I told her my governess story and asked her what she did. ‘I was a cabaret singer. My grandmother played the piano.’

  She saw my surprise and blushed a little. ‘Nothing fancy,’ she said. ‘Not the Moscow-Shanghai or anything as classy as that. Smaller places. Grandmother and I made dresses between jobs to support ourselves. She made all my costumes.’

  Irina didn’t notice me flinch at the mention of the Moscow-Shanghai. The recollection of it was a shock. Had I really believed that I would never have to think of it again? There must be hundreds of people on the island who had heard of it. It had been a Shanghai icon. I just hoped none of them would recognise me. Sergei, Dmitri, the Michailovs and I had not been typical Russians. Not the way my father, mother and I had been when we lived in Harbin. It felt strange to be amongst my people again.

  The path to the beach passed a steep ravine. A jeep was parked on the side of the road and four Filipino military policemen crouched around it, smoking and sharing jokes. They straightened up as we walked by.

  ‘They keep watch for pirates,’ Irina said. ‘You’d better be careful on your side of the camp.’

  I wrapped my towel over my thighs and used the ends to cover my breasts. But Irina strode by the men with her towel over her shoulder, aware but unashamed of the electric effect her voluptuous body and swinging hips had on them.

  The beach was a dreamscape. The sand was as white as foam and dotted with coconuts and millions of tiny shells. It was deserted except for a couple of brown retrievers sleeping under a palm tree. The dogs lifted their heads as we passed. The water was flat and clear under the midday sun. I had never swum in the ocean before but I ran towards it without fear or hesitation. Goosebumps of pleasure pinched my skin when I broke the surface. Schools of silver fish flickered past. I threw my head back and floated on the crystal mirror of the ocean’s skin. Irina dived and resurfaced, blinking away drops of water from her lashes. Anointed. That was the word she had used. It was how I felt. I could feel the worm on my cheek shrinking, the sun and the salt acting like antiseptic on the wound. Shanghai was washing off me. I was basking in nature, a girl from Harbin again.

  ‘Do you know anyone from Harbin here?’ I asked Irina.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My grandmother was born there. Why?’

  ‘I want to find someone who knew my mother,’ I said.

  Irina and I lay on our towels under a palm tree, sleepy like the two dogs.

  ‘My parents were killed in the bombing of Shanghai, when I was eight,’ she said. ‘My gr
andmother came to take care of me then. It’s possible she knew your mother in Harbin. Although she lived in a different district.’

  A motor rumbled behind us, disturbing our peace. I thought of the Filipino police and jumped up. But it was Ivan, waving at us from the driver’s seat of a jeep. At first I thought the jeep had been painted in camouflage, but when I looked at it more closely I saw that it was moss and corrosion that gave the panels their mottled appearance.

  ‘Do you want to see the top of the island?’ he asked. ‘I’m not supposed to take anyone there. But I’ve heard it’s haunted and I think I might need two virgins to protect me.’

  ‘You’re full of stories, Ivan,’ Irina laughed, standing up and brushing the sand off her legs. She wrapped her towel around her waist and, before I could say anything, hoisted herself into the jeep. ‘Come on, Anya,’ she said. ‘Join the tour. It’s free.’

  ‘Did you go to the doctor?’ Ivan asked me when I clambered on.

  I was careful this time not to stare too closely at his face. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I’m surprised it was tropical worm. I got it just out of Shanghai.’

  ‘The ship you came on has done more than one journey. A lot of us have had the same thing. But you’re the first I’ve seen with it on the face. That’s the most dangerous place to have it. Too close to your eyes.’

  The sandy beach track stretched for a mile, after which the coconut and nipa palms gave way to monstrous trees that crouched over us like demons. Their twisted trunks were draped in vines and parasitic plants. We passed a waterfall with an old wooden sign nailed to the rock: ‘Beware of snakes near the water supply’.

  A few minutes after the waterfall, Ivan brought the jeep to a stop. A mountain of blackened rocks blocked our path. Once the motor was off the unnatural quiet made me uneasy. There was no sound of birds singing, or the ocean or the wind. Something caught my attention, a pair of eyes on the rocks. I studied the mountain more closely and gradually came to see the relief of saints and papaya trees etched into it. A shiver pinched my spine. I had seen something like it before in Shanghai, but this Spanish church was ancient. A scatter of broken tiles was all that was left of the collapsed steeple, but the rest of the building was intact. Tiny ferns had taken root in every crack and I imagined the lepers, who had been on the island before the Americans arrived, milling around it and wondering if God had forsaken them the same way their fellow human beings had when they brought them here to die.

  ‘Stay in the jeep. Don’t get out for any reason,’ Ivan said, looking directly at me. ‘There are snakes everywhere…and old weapons. Doesn’t matter if I get blown to bits, but not pretty girls like you two.’

  I understood why he had asked us to come then, why he had come looking for us on the beach. It was bravado. He had noticed my reaction to his face and he wanted to show me that he was not afraid for me to see it. I was glad that he had done it. It made me admire him because I was not like that. The mark on my cheek was not as bad as the scar on his face and yet it made me want to hide.

  He threw aside a blanket and the hunter’s knife underneath it gleamed in the sunlight. He tucked the knife into his belt and threw a coil of rope over his shoulder. I watched him disappear into the jungle.

  ‘He’s looking for more materials. They are going to build a movie screen,’ Irina explained.

  ‘He’s risking his life for a movie screen?’ I asked.

  ‘This island’s like Ivan’s home,’ said Irina. ‘A reason to go on living.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, and we lapsed into silence.

  We waited over an hour, sucking in the still air and staring into the jungle for any sign of movement. The sea had dried on my skin and I could taste the salt on my lips.

  Irina turned to me. ‘I heard that he was a baker in Tsingtao,’ she said. ‘During the war the Japanese discovered some Russians sending radio messages to a US ship. They took random revenge on the Russian population. They tied his wife and two baby daughters up in their shop and set it alight. He got that scar trying to save them.’

  I sat down in the back of the jeep and rested my head on my knees. ‘How awful,’ I said. There was nothing more profound I could say. None of us had escaped the war unscarred. The agony I woke up to every morning was the same agony other people were experiencing too. The Tubabao sun bore down on my neck. I had only been there a day and already it was having an effect on me. It had magical powers. Powers to heal and to terrify, to drive you to madness or to relieve your pain. For the past month I had thought that I was alone. I was glad to have met Irina and Ivan. If they could find reasons to go on living, perhaps I would too.

  A week later I was at my job in the IRO office, typing a letter on a manual machine with a missing Y key. I had learned to compensate for the typewriter’s shortcoming by substituting Y words for ones without the missing letter. ‘Yearly’ became ‘annual’, ‘young’ became ‘adolescent’ and ‘Yours truly’ changed to ‘With deepest regards’. My English vocabulary improved rapidly. However, I did strike a problem with Russian names, many of which contained Ys. For those I would type a V and painstakingly pencil in a stem.

  The office was a Nissen hut with one open side, two desks and a filing cabinet. My chair scraped noisily on the cement floor every time I moved, and I had to peg the top of my papers so that they wouldn’t fly away in the sea breeze. I worked five hours a day and was paid one American dollar and a can of fruit a week. I was one of the few people paid for their work, most of the other refugees were expected to work for free.

  On that afternoon Captain Connor was being annoyed by a persistent fly. He swatted at it, but the insect eluded him for over an hour. It landed on the report I had just typed and in exasperation Captain Connor squashed it with his fist, then looked guiltily at me.

  ‘Shall I type that page again?’ I asked.

  Such accidents were common in our office but to retype a full page perfectly, when I had never used a typewriter before coming to the island, was a laborious task.

  ‘No, no,’ said Captain Connor, lifting the paper and flicking the fly’s remains off it with his fingers. ‘It’s almost the end of your day and the thing landed right at the end of a paragraph. It looks like an exclamation mark.’

  I fitted the cloth cover over the keys and locked the typewriter away in its special box. I was picking up my bag to leave when Irina turned up.

  ‘Anya, guess what?’ she said. ‘I’m going to sing cabaret on the main stage this weekend. Will you come?’

  ‘Of course!’ I cried. ‘How exciting!’

  ‘Grandmother is excited too. She’s not well enough to play the piano, so I wondered if you could take her and keep her company?’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘And I will wear my best evening dress to mark the occasion.’

  Irina’s eyes flashed. ‘Grandmother loves getting dressed up! She’s been racking her brains about your mother all week. I think she has found someone on the island who can help you.’

  I had to bite my lip to stop it trembling. It was four years since I had seen my mother. I was a little girl when we were parted. After all that had happened to me, she had started to seem like a dream. If I could talk to someone about her, I knew she would become real again.

  On the evening of Irina’s concert, Ruselina and I trampled through the ferns to the main square. We clutched our evening dresses at the hems, mindful that they shouldn’t get snagged on the thick grass. I was wearing a ruby evening gown and the damson shawl the Michailovs had given me for Christmas. Ruselina’s white hair was piled up on her crown. The style went well with her empire dress. She looked like a member of the Tsar’s court. Although she was frail and clung tightly to my arm, her cheeks were rosy and her eyes sparkled.

  ‘I’ve been talking to people from Harbin about your mother,’ she said. ‘One of my old friends from the city thinks she knew an Alina Pavlovna Kozlova. She’s very old and her memory comes and goes, but I can take you to see her.’

  We passed a tree
full of flying foxes hanging like fruit from its branches. The foxes took flight when they heard us, transforming into black angels winging across the sapphire sky. We stopped to watch their silent journey.

  I was thrilled with Ruselina’s news. Although I understood that the woman from Harbin probably couldn’t shed any more light on my mother’s fate, to find someone who knew her, to whom I could talk of her, was as close as I could get to her then.

  Ivan met us outside his hut. When he saw our outfits he rushed back inside and returned with a stool in one hand, a wooden crate in the other, and a cushion pressed under each armpit. ‘I can’t have elegant women like you sitting on the grass,’ he said.

  We reached the main square and found ushers with wetted-down hair and sun-bleached jackets directing people to seating areas. The whole camp seemed to have turned out for the concert. Ruselina, Ivan and I were sent to the VIP section near the stage. I saw doctors and nurses carrying people on stretchers. There had been a dengue fever outbreak a few weeks before I arrived on the island and the medical volunteers were carrying the patients from the convalescing tents to a special section marked ‘hospital’.

  The show opened with a variety of acts including poetry readings, some comedy skits, a mini ballet and even an acrobat. When the evening light faded into darkness and the lights came on, Irina appeared on the stage in a red flamenco dress. The audience stood up and cheered. A young girl with braids and a short skirt lifted herself up to the piano stool to accompany her. The girl waited for the audience to be still before placing her hands over the keys. She couldn’t have been more than nine but her fingers were magic. She conjured up a sad melody that pierced the night. Irina’s voice melded with it. The audience was mesmerised. Even the children were well behaved and quiet. It seemed we were all holding our breath, afraid to miss a single note. Irina sang about a woman who had lost her lover in the war, but who could be happy when she remembered him. The words brought tears to my eyes. ‘They told me you would never return, but I didn’t believe them. Train after train returned without you, but in the end I was right. As long as I can see you in my heart, you are with me always.’