For the next few days I suffered with Irina the awful choice that lay before her. I watched her twist her hair and cry herself to sleep. We walked around the island together for hours. I even took her to Ivan’s rock ledge but we couldn’t find any peace there either.
‘Captain Connor said America may take Grandmother if she gets an all-clear. But it’s not a guarantee. The Australian consulate, on the other hand, has agreed to take her when she’s better on the condition that I work there for two years,’ she said.
We held on to each other. Was I going to lose Irina and Ruselina too?
One night, while Irina tossed and turned in her bed, I took a walk on the beach. I couldn’t bear to think of Ruselina and Irina separated. If the French were humanitarian enough to take the sick and the old, I didn’t doubt that Ruselina would get the best care. But I couldn’t help seeing what was happening to them as something similar to what happened to my mother and me. Irina had lost her parents when she was eight years old, and now she was about to be cast off on her own again. I couldn’t help Ruselina being sick, but perhaps I could put her mind at rest. I sat down in the warm sand and looked up at the stars. The Southern Cross was shining brightly. Boris and Olga had given their lives for mine and Ruselina had said the best way to honour that was to live with courage. I pressed my face into my hands and hoped that I was a person worthy of their sacrifice. ‘Mother,’ I whispered, thinking about dazzling New York and the life I hoped to build there, ‘Mother, I hope I’m a person who can make a sacrifice for somebody else.’
The following afternoon I was hanging out the washing when Irina came to me. Her face had colour in it again and she seemed peaceful. She had resigned herself to something and I was anxious to find out what she had decided. I pursed my lips and steeled myself for her answer.
‘I will go to Australia,’ she said bravely. ‘I’m not taking any chances. As long as Grandmother gets better and we can be together, I don’t care. There are more important things than singing in ritzy nightclubs and visiting the Statue of Liberty.’
I nodded and returned to hanging out the washing, although I had barely enough strength to lift a slip.
Irina perched herself on an upturned bucket and watched me. ‘You must tell me all about America, Anya. You must write and not forget me or Grandmother,’ she said, entwining her fingers on her knee and swinging her foot. She was trying to hold back her tears but a single droplet fell from her eye and caught on the curl of her lip.
The blood rushed to my head and air surged into my lungs. I felt like a swimmer drawing a breath before launching herself from the diving board. I pegged a skirt to the line and strode up to Irina, grabbing her hand and pressing it into mine. Irina looked up at me. The tear slid from her lip onto my wrist. I had trouble saying the words at first, I couldn’t get them out in one sentence. ‘Ruselina said that we’re all she’s got.’
Irina didn’t take her eyes from my face. She opened her mouth to say something but stopped herself. She squeezed my hand tightly.
‘Irina, I…will not forget you…nor Ruselina,’ I said, ‘because I am coming with you.’
ELEVEN
Australia
I had been uprooted twice in my life but nothing could have prepared me for the shock of Australia. A few days after Ruselina was taken to France, Irina and I were flown from Manila to Sydney by army plane, so exhausted neither of us could remember much of the journey except for the furnace that blew over us when we changed planes in Darwin. We arrived at Sydney airport early in the morning. An immigration official by the name of Mr Kolros greeted us and helped us through customs. He had emigrated from Czechoslovakia a year earlier and spoke some Russian and English. Mr Kolros answered our questions about rents, food and employment politely, but when I asked him if he liked Sydney he ground his teeth and replied, ‘Sydney is good. It’s the Australians who take some getting used to.’
Irina clutched my arm, trembling with the influenza she had caught en route. We struggled to keep up with Mr Kolros, who strode through the arrivals area as if he had something more important to do at half past four in the morning than wait for us. There was a taxi waiting outside and he tossed our suitcases into the boot and paid the driver the fare to take us to the wharf, where we were to join a group of migrants from Europe.
Mr Kolros helped us into the taxi and wished us well before shutting the door. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said about the Australians.
‘Welcome to Sydney, girls,’ the driver greeted us, leaning over the front seat and speaking from the corner of his mouth. His English sounded unusual, it crackled like a log fire. ‘I’ll do the scenic route. It won’t take us much longer this time of the morning.’
Irina and I squinted through the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of our new city. But Sydney was cloaked in darkness. The sun hadn’t risen yet and there was a curfew on electricity usage because of the shortages after the war. All I could see were rows of terrace houses and grocers with their shutters rolled down. On one of the streets a dog with a black patch around his eye cocked his leg against a fence. A stray or a pet? I couldn’t tell. But he looked better fed than we did.
‘This is the city proper,’ the driver said, turning into a street lined with shops. Irina and I eyed the mannequins in the department store windows. While Shanghai would still have been bustling with life at this time of the morning, Sydney was quiet and empty. There wasn’t a cleaner, a policeman or a prostitute in sight. Not even a stray drunk staggering home. The Town Hall and its clock tower could have been shipped directly from Second Empire Paris, and the square between the hall and the church next to it created spaciousness that didn’t exist in Chinese cities. Shanghai wouldn’t have been Shanghai without its congestion and chaos.
The lower end of the street was bordered by Classical and Victorian style buildings, and one that looked like an Italianate palace, stamped with the initials ‘GPO’. Further along, the harbour loomed up ahead of us. I strained my neck to see the massive steel bridge that stretched across the black expanse of water. It seemed to be the tallest structure in the city. The headlights of the dozen or so cars passing over it winked at us like stars.
‘Is that the Harbour Bridge?’ I asked the driver.
‘Sure is,’ he said. ‘The one and only. My father worked as a painter on it.’
We passed under the bridge and soon found ourselves on a strip lined by warehouses. The driver stopped in front of a sign that read ‘Pier 2’. Although Mr Kolros had paid the driver already, I thought perhaps he would want a tip. When he took our suitcases from the boot, I searched my purse for the only American dollar I had left. I tried to pass it to the driver but he shook his head. ‘You might need it,’ he said.
Australians, I thought. So far so good.
Irina and I hesitated at the boom gate. A cold wind blew from the water, bringing with it the smell of brine and tar. The breeze bit through our cotton dresses. It was November and we had been expecting Australia to be warm. The IRO ship from Marseille was docked in the port. Hundreds of German, Czechoslovakian, Polish, Yugoslavian and Hungarian migrants were pouring down the gangways. The scene made me think of Noah and his ark, such was the variety of their accents and appearances. Men hobbled beneath the weight of wooden trunks. Women scuttled after them, bundles of bedding and cooking pots tucked under their arms. Children ran between their legs, calling out in their mother tongues, eager to see their new country.
We asked the guard where we should wait and he pointed to a train on the dock. Irina and I entered one of the carriages and found it empty. We struggled along the aisle, pinching our noses against the reek of fresh paint, and sat down in the first compartment we could find. The seats were hard leather and the air was thick with dust.
‘I think it’s a goods train,’ Irina said.
‘I think you are right.’ I opened my suitcase, pulled out one of the blankets I had brought from Tubabao and wrapped it around Irina’s shoulders.
Thro
ugh the grime on the window we watched the wharfies unload the ship’s cargo with a crane. Seagulls swooped overhead, squawking and screeching. The birds were the only things I had seen in the city that were familiar to me.
The ship’s passengers had to scramble over the piles of luggage to get their suitcases and trunks. A little girl in a pink coat and white stockings stood near the gangway, crying. She had lost her parents in the chaos. I saw a wharfie crouch down to talk to her, but she only shook her curly head and cried more. He glared around the crowd, then picked the girl up and put her on his shoulders, parading her around in the hope of finding her parents.
Once they had their luggage the passengers were directed to a building with the words ‘The Commonwealth of Australia Department of Immigration’ painted above the door. I realised then how lucky Irina and I had been to travel to Australia by plane. Although the trip had been rough between Manila and Darwin, our journey had been quick and we were the only two passengers. The people from the ship looked haggard and ill. Over an hour later they began to emerge from the building and make their way towards the train.
‘Are they all going to fit?’ Irina asked.
‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘Mr Kolros said that it will be a long trip to the camp.’
To our horror we watched the stationmaster round the passengers up like cattle and direct them to the doors. Elbows, arms and suitcases blocked our view as people pushed against each other to get inside. Unlike us, the Europeans were overdressed for the weather. They all seemed to be wearing two coats and several dresses or shirts each, as if they had saved on packing space by wearing everything they owned. A man in a pinstriped suit appeared at the compartment door. His face was smooth and young but his hair was white.
‘Czy jest wolne miejsce?’ he asked. ‘Czy pani rozumie po polsku?’
I knew a few basic phrases in Polish, which has some similarities to Russian, but I had to guess that he wanted a seat. I nodded my head and indicated for him to come inside. He was followed by a woman, and an old lady with two scarves tied over her head.
‘Przepraszam,’ the old lady said when she sat next to me. But I had exhausted all my Polish. She glanced at me. We didn’t speak the same language but we both had the same anxious look in our eyes.
Three Czechoslovakian men left their luggage in the aisle and took standing positions in the compartment. On one of the men’s sleeve was a dark patch in the shape of a star. I had heard what had happened to the Jews in Europe, and the tales were one of the few things that stopped me feeling sorry for my own situation.
With so many people in the compartment, the air quickly became stuffy, and Irina cracked the window open for air. Our fellow passengers’ clothes reeked of stale cigarette smoke, sweat and dust. Their faces were gaunt and pale, souvenirs of their long journey. My dress, and Irina’s too, smelled of scorched cotton, sea salt and airplane fuel. Our hair was streaked with blonde from the sun and greasy at the roots. We hadn’t been able to wash for three days.
Once the last group of passengers boarded we could see out the window again. The morning light was breaking across the sky, revealing the sandstone and granite details of the buildings we had not been able to see when it was dark. The modern and Art Deco buildings of downtown Sydney weren’t as tall as those in Shanghai but the sky above them was pristine blue. Past the helm of the ship the sun was sending golden rays shimmering across the water and I could see some red-roofed houses dotted along the foreshore. I pressed my palms together and brought my hands to my lips. Those beams of sunlight on the water were beautiful. There was no reference for the harbour in anything in my past. Its colour was the mythical hue of a mermaid’s eyes.
The stationmaster waved his flag and blew his whistle. The train shunted forward. The smell of coal was more oppressive than the air in the compartment and Irina shut the window. All of us crowded to the window to see the city when the train left the port. Through my square of the glass I saw prewar-style cars motoring along the streets in an orderly fashion; there were no traffic jams, tooting horns or rickshaws as in Shanghai. The train passed an apartment building. The lobby door opened and a woman in a white dress, hat and gloves stepped out. She looked like a model in a perfume advertisement. The image of the woman blended with the image of the harbour, and I felt excited about Australia for the first time.
But a few minutes later we were passing rows of fibrocement houses with tin roofs and untidy gardens, and my excitement turned to despair. I hoped what was true of other cities was also true of Sydney, that only the very poor lived near rail lines. The view from the window was a reminder that we were not in America. Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra would not dance merrily through this place. Even in the city there had been no great pillars to the gods. No Empire State Building. No Statue of Liberty. No Times Square. Only a street of elegant buildings and a bridge.
The younger Polish woman reached into her handbag and pulled out a package wrapped in cloth. The smell of bread and boiled eggs mixed in with the human scent in the air. She offered Irina and me a square of egg sandwich each. I accepted my piece gratefully. I was hungry because I hadn’t eaten breakfast. Even Irina, who had no appetite because of the influenza, accepted her piece with a smile.
‘Smacznego!’ Irina said. ‘Bon appétit.’
‘How many languages do you speak?’ I asked her.
‘None except Russian,’ she said, grinning. ‘But I can sing in German and French.’
I turned back to the window and saw that the view had changed again. We were passing market farms with lettuce, carrots and tomato vines planted in rows. Birds skittered through the fields. The houses seemed as solitary as the outhouses that stood in their yards. We passed through train stations that I would have thought deserted if not for their well-tended rosebushes and neatly painted signs.
‘Perhaps Ivan will be at the camp,’ Irina said.
‘Melbourne is south,’ I told her. ‘A long way from here.’
‘Then we must write to him soon. He will be surprised that we are in Australia.’
Irina’s mention of Ivan brought back the unhappy memory of those last weeks in Tubabao and I squirmed in my seat. I told her that I would write to Ivan, but I didn’t sound convincing, even to myself. Irina regarded me curiously for a moment, but said nothing more. She wrapped the blanket tighter around her shoulders and rested her head against the side of the seat. ‘What is this place we are going to?’ she yawned. ‘I want to stay in the city.’ A moment later she was asleep.
I played with the clasp of my handbag. It seemed strange that the elegant accessory in my lap had accompanied me all the way from Shanghai and was on its way with me to a refugee camp somewhere in the Australian countryside. The first time I had used the suede bag was to go to lunch with Luba at her ladies’ club. The lunch had been before Dmitri was unfaithful to me, and before I ever thought I would live anywhere else but China. The skin had faded in the Tubabao sun and there was a tear along the side. I fingered the scar on my face and wondered if the handbag and I were sharing a common destiny. I opened it and pressed my fingers against the matroshka doll inside. I thought about the day my mother was taken away and wondered what she had seen on her way to Russia. Had it been as alien to her as the scenery outside was to me?
I bit my lip and steeled myself, remembering my vow to be courageous. As soon as I could, I would contact the Red Cross. I told myself not to be worried about what kind of work I would be given or where I had to live; the only thing that mattered was finding my mother.
A while later the train started to climb, winding its way through a forest of white-barked trees so tall they almost blotted out the sun. They were unlike any trees I had seen before, ghostly and elegant, broad leaves quivering in the breeze. Later I would learn their names: blue gum, peppermint gum, stringy-bark, mottled gum, scribbly gum. But on that morning, they were yet another mystery to me.
The train jolted and came to a stop, sending passengers and luggage flying. I lifted my hand ju
st in time to stop a box falling on Irina’s head.
‘Meal stop!’ the conductor called out.
The Polish family looked to me to interpret the instruction. I gestured to them that we were getting off the train.
We stepped outside onto a little station surrounded by gullies of gum trees and sheer sandstone cliffs. The air was as fresh and sharp as menthol. Where the rock had been cut for the track there were crevices in the face of the stone. Water seeped through the cracks and mosses, liverworts and lichens clung there with tenacity. From all directions the atmosphere was alive with sounds: water trickling over rocks, the rustle of animals moving through the leaf litter, and birds. Never before had I heard such a chorus of birdsong. There were bell-like sounds, carollings and guttural cries. But one cry dominated them all, a whipped whistle that sounded like a falling drop of water amplified a million times.
A group of women were waiting for us on the platform, positioned like a small army behind trestle tables and soup urns. Their weather-beaten faces sized us up.
I turned around to find Irina and was shocked to see that she was bending over the side of the platform, holding a handkerchief to her mouth. I rushed towards her as a trickle of vomit fell from her lips and dripped onto the tracks.
‘It’s just the flu and the motion of the train. It’s nothing,’ she said.
‘Can you eat something?’ I rubbed my palm over her feverish forehead. It was not a good time to be sick.
‘Maybe some soup.’
‘Sit down,’ I told her. ‘I’ll bring you something.’
I stood in line with the others, glancing over my shoulder every so often to check on Irina. She was sitting on the edge of the platform, her blanket wrapped over her head so that she looked like a woman from the Middle East. I felt a tug on my sleeve and turned around to see a gnome-faced woman with a bowl of onion-smelling soup in her hands.
‘Is she very sick?’ the woman asked, handing me the bowl. ‘I brought it to you to save you standing in line.’ Like the taxi driver her voice was dry and crackled. The timbre of it warmed me.
White Gardenia Page 24