White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘Anya.’

  The murky river transformed into the blue harbour again.

  ‘Anya.’

  It was Irina standing in the doorway holding out a plate of bacon and eggs.

  ‘What time is it?’ I glanced over my shoulder at her. Her smile disappeared.

  ‘Anya,’ Irina asked, her eyes darkening. ‘Why are you crying?’

  To my relief the American consulate in Sydney bore no resemblance to the one in Shanghai, save for the American flags in its reception area. Its decor was functional leather and wood. It was businesslike rather than chic and its uniformed guards looked purposeful and serious. It had none of the opulent atmosphere of its counterpart in Shanghai. Dan Richards was waiting for me. He was sitting in a wing-backed armchair with his leg crossed over his knee, reading the Daily Telegraph. The paper was folded out full in front of his face but I could tell it was him from the spray of red hair poking out over the edge of it, and his long, thin legs.

  I crept up to him and grabbed the top of the paper. ‘You should be reading my paper,’ I said, ‘not the competition’s.’

  Dan dropped the newspaper and stared up at me, his face breaking into a smile. ‘Anya!’ he cried, leaping out of his seat. He grabbed me around the shoulders and kissed me on the cheek. He hadn’t changed at all. He was still the same boyish Dan, despite being a father twice over. ‘Anya!’ he shouted again. ‘You’re beautiful!’

  The guards and the receptionist squinted at him, not impressed by the commotion he was causing. But Dan was oblivious to them and didn’t change his tone. ‘Come on!’ he said, taking my arm and wrapping it around his. ‘There’s a place a few blocks from here where we can have coffee and a bite to eat.’

  The restaurant Dan took me to was called the Hounds. It was exactly the kind of place one would expect diplomats to dine at. It was elegant but comfortable with a scrolled ceiling, solid chairs and dark wood tables. An old smell like leather and books pervaded it. There was an open fireplace in the dining area that of course was not in use at this time of year. The windows had been thrown open and Dan and I were seated at one overlooking a courtyard of clay pots of dwarfed lemon trees and planters full of overgrown herbs.

  The waiter pulled out my chair for me. He handed me the menu with a stiff smile.

  Dan watched him walk away and grinned at me. ‘Anya, you’ve stunned him. You are absolutely gorgeous. It makes me look good to be seen with you, and I’m an old married man.’

  I was about to ask him where Polly and the children were but the waiter returned too quickly with the coffee pot and I lost my chance.

  ‘Gosh, looking at this is making me hungry,’ said Dan, glancing at me over the top of his menu. ‘Would you like an early lunch? I heard the roast chicken is very good.’

  It was the first time I’d looked directly at him. He was the same jolly Dan but there was something in his expression, a flash in his eyes, that made him seem ill at ease.

  The waiter came with his notepad and left with Dan’s order for chicken and mine for mushroom soup. I saw it there again. The troubled expression on Dan’s face. The nervous constriction of his throat. For the first time that day I had a sense of foreboding. I became frightened that something had happened, some disaster had befallen Polly and his children. But surely he would have written to me of that before coming. Perhaps it was just tiredness. The trip from New York to Sydney was a long one.

  He took one of the rolls from the basket and began buttering it, glancing up at me now and again and smiling. ‘I can’t get over how well you look, Anya. I can see why the beauty business suits you. Tell me, what do you do on a typical day at the paper?’

  Yes, there was something there. He was Dan but not carefree Dan. Whatever it was that was troubling him would have to wait, I decided, until after the food arrived. There was something important he had to tell me but I did not want the waiter to interrupt us. So I let myself be lulled into friendly chatter and talked with him of day-to-day things. About Sydney and Australians, Diana, Betty’s café, the apartment in Potts Point, and my love for Australian fashion.

  It seemed ages before the food arrived. When it did, Dan tucked straight into his meal and appeared no closer to telling me what was on his mind.

  ‘So how is the soup?’ he asked. ‘Here we are in this hot country eating hot food, it doesn’t seem right, does it? Would you like some chicken?’

  ‘Dan.’

  He glanced up at me, still smiling.

  ‘Where is Polly?’

  ‘She’s in America. With the children. They’re all well,’ he said, carving a slice of chicken and putting it on my side plate. ‘Elizabeth is three, can you believe it?’

  ‘Are you here on business then?’ I asked. My voice broke.

  Dan stared at me. It was an honest, compassionate look. The expression of a man who does not wish to deceive his friend. He put down his fork. His eyes clouded over. The change in mood between us was so sudden that I was shocked. I could feel my face blanch. The blood hummed in my ears. Whatever it was he had to tell me, it was lying there covered between us, like a body in a mortuary waiting for identification. Dan drew a breath. I braced myself.

  ‘Anya,’ he began, ‘I didn’t come here for business. I came because I have something important to tell you.’

  There was no stopping what was coming now. I had unleashed it. Perhaps it needn’t have ever come out if I hadn’t asked. It was bad news. I could tell by the strange tone of Dan’s voice. It was a tone I had never heard him use before. We were going to talk of something distressing, something forbidden. But what on earth could it be?

  ‘Anya, I haven’t slept this past week,’ he said. ‘I have been tormented by what is the right thing to do by you. I know from every piece of correspondence you have sent me, and from seeing you now, that you are happy in your new life and your adopted country. I tried to write at least ten letters and ended up destroying them all. What I have to convey to you doesn’t belong in a letter. So I have come myself, believing in your fortitude and comforted by the fact that you are surrounded by true friends.’

  His speech was so wordy it almost made me laugh with nerves. ‘What is it?’ My voice was calm, but inside I was screaming with panic.

  Dan reached across the table and grabbed my wrist. ‘I have news of your husband. Dmitri Lubensky.’

  White spots danced before my eyes. I shrank back into my chair. A hot breeze from the courtyard washed over me. I smelled the sage and the mint. Dmitri. My husband. Dmitri Lubensky. I repeated his name to myself. He was connected to my past; I could not associate him with anything in the present. His name was the smell of brandy and the sound of trombones and drums from a brass band at the Moscow-Shanghai. He was tuxedos and velvets and oriental carpets. He was not part of the Sydney restaurant where I sat opposite Dan. He was not in the heat or the blueness of the Australian sky. Pictures flashed across my mind in fractured pieces: a bowl of shark’s fin soup, the rumba on a crowded dance floor, a room full of wedding roses. I took a sip of water, barely able to hold the glass steady in my trembling hand. ‘Dmitri?’ was all I could manage to get out.

  Dan pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his brow. ‘I have no idea how to tell you this…’

  Dan was speaking to me through a fog. I could barely hear him. Dmitri’s name had been like a blow. I had not been prepared for it. We were going to have coffee and cake. Dan had come on business. We were going to spend the morning laughing and talking about our lives. Everything seemed to be spinning around. Dan and I were not the same people we had been ten minutes ago. There was a taste like metal in the back of my throat.

  ‘Anya, a little over a week ago I was sitting at the breakfast table when Polly brought in my letters and my newspaper. It was going to be a normal day like any other day, except that I was running late and would have to read the paper at my office. After I dressed I picked the newspaper up from the table to put it in my briefcase. I stopped when I saw the picture on t
he front cover. I knew the man’s face in an instant. The article said the police were trying to identify him. He’d been shot in some sort of robbery that went wrong and was unconscious in hospital.’

  My hands were wet. They were soaking the tablecloth, making patterns like butterflies. Dmitri. Robbery. Hurt. Shot. I tried to picture it but could not.

  ‘When I saw the photograph my first thought was of you,’ Dan continued. ‘Should I tell you? Everything in my soul told me that I should not. That you had a new and happy life and the way the man had treated you had been nothing short of abominable. Deserting his young wife! How could he have been sure that you would have gotten that next boat? If you had waited just a few hours more you would have been left behind and executed by the Communists.’

  Dan sat back in his chair, his brow knotted. He picked up his napkin, refolded it and dropped it into his lap again. It occurred to me that this was the first time I had seen him look angry.

  ‘But I knew I had a moral duty to the police and the government to come forward and at least identify Dmitri,’ he said. ‘So I called the police sergeant listed in the article. He took down my statement and told me that the priest at the hospital was also keen to speak to anyone who knew the man. I didn’t know what that was about, but I felt obliged to call anyway. I telephoned the hospital and the priest told me that Dmitri was in bad shape, conscious at last but mostly delirious. He’d been shot trying to defend a seventeen-year-old girl. When I heard that it stopped me in my tracks. “And who is Anya?” the priest asked me. “He keeps calling out for Anya.” I told him I would be there on the next flight.’

  It was so hot in the room. The heat seemed to be coming in great waves. Why don’t they set up a fan, I thought. Do something about the air circulation. I fumbled with my hat. I took it off and laid it on the chair next to me. It seemed such a silly, frivolous thing now. How stupid I was to have been so delighted with it. Everything was shifting. I felt my chair lift. The ceiling seemed to come closer. It was as if I was riding the crest of a wave and at any moment I would be tugged underwater.

  ‘Anya, this is a terrible shock to you,’ said Dan. ‘Can I get you a brandy?’

  Dan seemed better. What he had been dreading was already underway. Suddenly he could be himself again, my strong friend helping me through another crisis. ‘No,’ I said, the room swaying before my eyes. ‘Just more water.’

  He signalled to the waiter to refill my glass. The waiter kept his eyes averted, trying to be discreet. But there was something morbid about him. His pale hands pouring the water seemed hardly human. His clothes smelled like an old church. He had the air of a funeral director rather than a waiter.

  ‘Please continue,’ I said to Dan. ‘What happened when you saw Dmitri? Is he all right?’

  Dan shifted in his seat. He didn’t answer my question. The sensation came over me that everything was about to change. That everything I had felt since Shanghai was about to be turned over. I had not understood Dmitri. The man I was hearing about was not the man I had imagined for so long. Where was his easy life? His nightclub? Where was Amelia?

  ‘I arrived in Los Angeles the day after I saw the newspaper article,’ Dan said. ‘I went straight to the hospital. The priest was waiting for me there. Since I’d given the police Dmitri’s name they had done a background check. It seems he had been working for a gangster called Ciatti, helping him run an illegal gambling den downtown.

  ‘On the night he was shot he was at some big gun’s house in the hills. The guy didn’t trust banks and it was rumoured that he had stashes of money and jewels all over the place. Ciatti somehow knew about that and figured he could pull a walk-in, walk-out job. Easy money when his gambling business was going down. He used a couple of his thugs to enter the place. Dmitri was just the driver. He was left with the car. But it went wrong when the big gun’s seventeen-year-old granddaughter turned up at the door. Her appearance hadn’t been figured into the plan. Dmitri watched her run up the steps to the house, knowing she was heading straight for a death trap. In fact, Ciatti was already pistol-whipping the girl when Dmitri burst inside. There was an argument. Dmitri struggled with Ciatti, copping a bullet in the lung and one through the top of his head. The screams and gunshots got the attention of the neighbours and Ciatti and his men fled the house.’

  ‘He saved someone?’ I asked. ‘Dmitri saved a girl he didn’t know?’

  Dan nodded. ‘Anya, when I saw him in the hospital he was incoherent most of the time. When I asked him about what happened that night he seemed convinced that the girl he had saved was you.’

  I felt a rip down my centre, as if something that had been buried for years was reawakening. I rubbed my hands over my face but couldn’t feel my fingers or my cheeks.

  Dan watched me. I had no idea what his taut expression meant. I had no idea what anything meant any more. ‘But Dmitri also had moments of lucidity,’ he said. ‘And in those moments he told me of a girl he once loved. A young woman who had danced the bolero with him. It was almost as if he understood who I was, and that I had come to represent you. “You’ll tell her, won’t you?” he begged me. “You’ll tell her that I always thought of her. I ran away because I was a coward, not because I didn’t love her.”

  ‘“How will she know?” I asked him. “How will I convince Anya of that when you left her to die?” Dmitri didn’t answer me for a long time. He fell back on his pillow, his eyes rolled back in his head. I thought he was lapsing into a coma again, but he suddenly looked at me and said: “As soon as I got to America, I knew I had been a fool. That woman? Do you think that she loved me? She left me overnight. When I asked her why, she said it was to defeat Anya. I can never explain to you the hold she had over me. How she could sing the worst in me to life. Not like sweet Anya, who could bring out the best. But between the two there must have been more blackness in me or how else could Amelia have won?”

  ‘The nurse came in to check on him then,’ Dan said, running his fingers through his hair. ‘She checked his pulse and his drip and said that I had asked enough questions and I should leave and let him be. I turned once again before I left the room and looked at Dmitri, but he was already asleep.

  ‘The priest was waiting for me outside. “Dmitri went to the IRO office the day he arrived in Los Angeles,” he told me. “There wasn’t any record of an Anya Lubenskya. So he asked them to check under Anya Kozlova. When he found out she had changed back to her maiden name, he said he knew that she would be all right. That she knew how to survive.” I asked the priest when Dmitri had told him this, and he said it had been that morning. During his confession.

  ‘I went to see Dmitri the following day. His condition had deteriorated again. He was very weak. I hadn’t slept all the previous night, so heavily was he weighing on my mind. “But you didn’t go back to her, did you?” I said to him. “You didn’t try to help her any further after that?” Dmitri looked at me with sadness on his face. “I loved her enough not to ever want to hurt her again,” he said.’

  Tears stung my eyes. All the time Dan had been talking my mind had been racing ahead. I would go to Dmitri. I would help him. By his very deed he had shown me that he was not a monster. He had saved a seventeen-year-old girl. And he had saved her because she had reminded him of me.

  ‘How soon can we get back to America?’ I asked Dan. ‘How long before I can see him?’

  Tears welled up in Dan’s eyes. He suddenly seemed old. It was a moment of agony. We stared at each other without saying anything. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a brown packet and handed it to me. My trembling fingers fumbled with the wrapping. Something fell out and tinkled onto the table. I picked it up. A wrought-iron key with a Parisian bow. Although I had not seen it for years, I recognised it immediately. The key to our apartment in Shanghai.

  For eternity.

  ‘He’s gone, isn’t he?’ I asked, tears streaming down my cheeks. I was barely able to speak.

  Dan reached over the table and grabbed my hands
, holding them tightly as if he were afraid that I would fall.

  The restaurant was filling up with people, the lunchtime crowd. All around us were happy faces. The patrons were chatting over their menus, pouring wine, clinking glasses, kissing each other’s cheeks. The waiter seemed lively all of a sudden, running backwards and forwards with the orders. Dan and I clung to each other. Dmitri was dead. I felt the knowledge of it spread across my chest and enter my heart. The irony of it seemed too much. Dmitri had fled to find riches and instead found pain and death. I had become a refugee and had never once gone hungry. All the past years I had been trying to hate Dmitri, he had never stopped thinking of me.

  I clutched the key in my palm.

  For eternity.

  Later, much later, when I moved into my apartment in Bondi and found the strength to take the key from the box where I had hidden it the day Dan gave it to me, I had a lock made to match it. It was the only way I could think of to share my life and good fortune with Dmitri.

  For eternity.

  Part Three

  SIXTEEN

  Bondi

  A few days after New Year’s Eve 1956, I was sitting in my flat on Campbell Parade, looking out to the beach and watching the crowd that spilled over it like mismatched clothes from a basket at a jumble sale. On the first day of January the seas had been high with waves over fifteen feet. The lifesavers were frantic, dragging people from the surf and rescuing two boys who had been washed onto the rocks. But today the sea was flat and flocks of seagulls bobbed lazily on its surface. It was hot and I had all the windows open. I could hear the sound of children playing on the sand and the whistle of the lifesavers urging people to swim between the flags. The ocean might have looked calm, but underneath it was riddled with dangerous rips.