White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘How did you find me?’ I asked.

  ‘When we reached the sea, we found that the Soviets were patrolling the coastline as well. There seemed to be no escape, but the situation worked in our favour. We were given jobs in a hotel where the party-privileged took their summer vacations. It was while we were working there that we befriended a man named Yuri Vishnevsky. Through him we found out that the Russians from Shanghai had been evacuated to America. After a while your mother approached Vishnevsky to help us move to Moscow. She told him that Moscow had been the city of her family and that she had always wanted to see it. But I knew her real reason. In Kazakhstan we were cut off from the rest of the world, but in Moscow we would not be. There were tourists and business people, government officials and foreign teachers. People with permission to cross borders. People who could be bribed or pleaded with.

  ‘Three years ago we moved to Moscow where, in between our jobs in a factory and a store, we devoted our lives to finding you. We spent our time around the Kremlin Palace, Red Square and the Pushkin Museum, pretending that we wanted to practise our English while we were really accosting tourists and foreign diplomats with details of you. Some of them agreed to help us but many turned away. We didn’t hear from anyone for a long time, until one American woman contacted the Russian Society in San Francisco for us. They contacted the IRO and found out that an Anya Kozlova had been sent to Australia.’

  The General stopped. Tears flowed out of his eyes and dripped down his cheeks. He made no attempt to wipe them away and blinked through them at me. ‘Can you imagine the joy when we received such news? The American woman was very kind and contacted the Red Cross in Australia to see if they could help any further. One of their retired volunteers remembered a young woman who had come to see her in 1950. The girl was beautiful and her story had made an impression on her. The volunteer had been heartbroken that she could not help the girl search for her mother, and had kept her details on file, although it was against the rules.’

  ‘Daisy Kent,’ I said to Ivan. ‘I always thought she wasn’t willing to help me at all!’ Perhaps her empathy had only appeared to me as reticence.

  ‘We were so close to finding you,’ the General said. ‘Your mother changed in the years she was without you. She lacked stamina and was chronically ill. But the moment she heard you were in Australia it was if she became a young, courageous woman again. She was determined that whatever it took we would find you.

  ‘We contacted Vishnevsky, who by that time had become a good enough friend to be trusted. He agreed to get papers for me, but said that your mother must stay behind as a guarantee of my return. I arrived in Australia two weeks ago and the Red Cross booked me a room in a hotel. I managed to trace you to a migrant camp and then to Sydney, but nothing after that. The Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages would not tell me if you had married or not. That was confidential information, even in a situation such as mine. But I was determined not to fail as I had in Shanghai. One day I was sitting in the hotel room, full of despair, when a newspaper was delivered under the door. Without thinking I picked it up and flipped through it. I came across a column signed off by ‘Anya’. I called the newspaper but the telephonist said the columnist’s name was not Anya Kozlova but Anya Nakhimovsky. “Is she married?” I asked. The woman said that she believed the writer was married. I looked up your address in the telephone book. Something told me that I had found the Anya I was looking for, but I couldn’t give away who I was or what I was doing to every Russian in Sydney. So I wrote you an anonymous note.’

  There the General sighed, exhausted, and said, ‘Anya, your mother and I have searched all these years for you. You have lived in our hearts every day. And now we have found you.’

  TWENTY

  Mother

  The Red Army Chorus bellowed out the ‘Volga Boat Song’ in a rumble that soun ded like thunder. From the cabin speakers, the beat was monotonous but the melody flooded my head. The chant blended with the hum of the plane and became a hymn. The exertion and valour in the singers’ voices reminded me of the men who had dug my father’s grave in Harbin. Such spirit seemed to belong much more to them than the Red Army. ‘Mother,’ I whispered to the clouds that skimmed underneath the plane like a carpet of sun-lit snow. ‘Mother.’ The tears stung my eyes. I grasped my fingers in my lap until they were purple. The clouds were celestial witnesses to the most significant event of my life. Twenty-three years earlier my mother and I had been parted and, in less than a day, we would see each other again.

  I turned to Ivan, who was cradling Lily in the crook of his arm while trying to keep the tea in the plastic cup from spilling onto his lap. It wasn’t an easy feat for a large man in a small space. He had barely touched the tray of garlic sausage, pirogi and dried fish. If we were in Australia, I would have teased him, asking him what kind of Russian he thought he was if he couldn’t stomach such typical Slavic fare. But jokes like that were for a country like Australia and could not be repeated in the Soviet Union. I studied the faces of our fellow passengers, surly-looking men in badly cut suits and a handful of mask-faced women. We didn’t know who they were but we knew to be careful.

  ‘Shall I take Lily?’ I asked Ivan. He nodded, lifting her through the gap between the tray and his leg, not letting go until he was sure I had her firmly in my grasp. Lily looked at me with her jewel-like eyes and pouted, as if she were blowing me a kiss. I stroked her cheek. It was something I did when I needed to replenish my faith in miracles.

  I thought of the washing basket on the lounge in the family room, spilling over with Lily’s summer clothes, bibs, towels and pillowcases. It was the only mess we had left behind and I found it comforting that we hadn’t left the house perfectly tidy. It made it seem that it was still our home, that there were things left undone that would need to be attended to when we returned. For I had understood the look that passed between Ivan and myself when we locked the front door before leaving for the airport: there was a risk that we wouldn’t be coming back.

  When the General told me that my mother was alive, the news had filled me with a joy equalled only by the rapture I had experienced when Lily was born. But four months had passed since we last saw the General and there had been no word since. He had warned us that this would be the case. ‘Don’t try to contact me. Just make sure you are in Moscow on February the second.’ There was no chance of speaking to my mother before leaving—there wasn’t a telephone in her building, and there was the problem of surveillance. We hadn’t been sure what to expect from the Soviet embassy, so the long application process and the eight-week wait for our visas had been agony, like pushing ourselves through a sieve. Even when the visas were issued without questions and I found myself at Heathrow Airport, boarding the plane bound for Moscow, I still wasn’t sure if my nerves had made it through to the other side all in one piece.

  The stewardess wiped her hands on her crumpled uniform and poured me another cup of lukewarm tea. Most of the attendants were older women, but this one made no attempt to straighten the strands of grey hair that were bulging from under her ill-fitting cap. She didn’t smile when I thanked her. She simply turned her back.

  They couldn’t afford to be friendly to foreigners, I reminded myself. Conversing too much with me could get her time in prison. I turned back to the clouds and thought about the General. In the three days he had spent with us, I had hoped that he would have started to seem more like a normal man and less of an enigma. After all, he ate, drank and slept like a mortal. He answered my questions about my mother—her health, her living conditions, her daily life—with frankness. I was horrified to hear that they didn’t have hot water in the apartment, even in winter, and that my mother was suffering pains in her legs. But I was overjoyed when the General told me that my mother had some good female friends in Moscow who would take her to the banya for a steam bath when she needed some relief from the pain. It reminded me that I’d had Irina, Ruselina and Betty to stand by me through the worst times of my life. B
ut I was too afraid to ask the General about his relationship with my mother and he never answered the question I asked him at Sydney Airport: ‘When we take my mother out of Russia, are you coming too?’ He kissed Ivan and me, and shook our hands, leaving us with the words: ‘You will see me one more time.’ I watched him disappear through the departure doors, an old man withered by time but with a proud march-like step, and realised that he had remained as much of a mystery to me as ever.

  Lily gurgled. Her brow was furrowed, as if she was reading my thoughts. I rocked her to reassure her. My worst moments in the months leading up to the trip were putting her to bed and kissing her soft cheek, knowing that I would soon be taking her from the safety of Australia and placing her in danger. I would give my life for Lily’s any time without hesitation, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to make the trip without her. ‘I want Lily to come with us,’ I told Ivan one night when we were getting into bed. I prayed for him to become angry with me and tell me that I was crazy. I hoped he would insist that Lily stay with Irina and Vitaly. Instead he leaned over and turned the light back on, studying my face in its glare. He nodded solemnly and said, ‘This family must never be separated.’

  There was a ‘clack’ and the Red Army Chorus was cut off mid-verse. The pilot’s voice echoed around the cabin. ‘Tavarishshi. Comrades, we are about to make our descent into Moscow. Please prepare yourselves by fastening your seat belts and returning your seats to the upright position.’

  I held my breath and watched the plane sink into the mass of clouds. The light changed from copper to grey and the sky disappeared, as if we had plunged into the ocean. The cabin rocked from side to side and flecks of snow lashed against the windows. I couldn’t see anything. There was a dipping sensation in my stomach and for a few weightless minutes it seemed as if the engines had stopped and the plane was falling. Lily, who had been good the whole way from London, started to cry from the change in pressure.

  The woman in the seat opposite leaned over and said to her in a cheery voice, ‘Why you cry, you pretty baby? All is well.’ Lily fell quiet and smiled. The woman intrigued me. Her French perfume was stronger than the fumes left by the Bulgarian cigarettes the men had been smoking, and her Slavic skin was beautifully madeup. But she couldn’t have been a typical Soviet woman as they weren’t able to leave the country. Was she a government official? A KGB agent? Or the mistress of someone important? I hated the feeling that we couldn’t trust anyone, that because of the Cold War no one’s kindness could be taken at face value.

  Gaps appeared in the clouds and through them I saw snow-covered fields and birch trees. The slipping sensation gave way to another, stronger feeling, that of being drawn into a magnet. My toes stretched downwards, as if I were being dragged to the ground by a force too big to imagine. I knew what that force was: Russia. Gogol’s words, read so long ago in the garden in Shanghai, came back to me: ‘What is there in it, in that song? What is it that calls and weeps, and grips our heart?…Russia! What do you want from me? What is that unattainable and mysterious bond between us?’

  Moscow was a fortress city, and I understood how apt that image was. It was the last wall standing between myself and my mother. I hoped that, armed with my husband and child and the determination born of years of pain, I had the courage to face it.

  The clouds disappeared like a curtain being whisked away and I could see the plains of snow and the murky sky. The airport was beneath us but I couldn’t see the terminal, only rows of snowploughs, and men in thick jackets and fur earmuffs standing by them. The runway was as black as slate. Despite Aeroflot’s reputation and the icy conditions, the pilot brought the plane to the ground with the gracefulness of a swan landing on a lake.

  When the plane came to a stop, the stewardess told us to head for the exit. There was a crush of people, and Ivan took Lily from me so he could hold her above the mass of travellers pushing against each other to get to the plane door. A gust of scouring wind burst through the cabin. When I approached the exit and saw the terminal building with its sooty windows and the barbed wire on its outer walls, I knew that the sun and warmth of my adopted country were far away. The air was so cold it was blue. It stung my face and made my nose run. Ivan pushed Lily further inside his coat to protect her from the bitter wind. I tucked my head down and kept my eyes on the stairs. My boots were fur-lined but as soon as I stepped onto the tarmac and headed towards the terminal bus, my feet began to freeze. I experienced another deeper sensation too. When I touched the ground in Russia, I knew that I was completing a journey begun long ago. I had returned to the land of my father.

  Inside Sheremetievo Airport’s dingy, fluorescent-lit arrivals area, the reality of what Ivan and I were about to do started to dawn on me with a lead-like sense of dread. I heard the General whisper in my ear: ‘You mustn’t make a slip. Everyone who comes into contact with you will be questioned about your behaviour. The maid at your hotel, the taxi drivers, the woman you pay roubles to for your cheap postcards. Take it as a matter of course that your room will be bugged.’

  In my naivety I had protested, ‘We are not spies. We are just a family trying to reunite.’

  ‘If you are from the West, you are a spy, or at least a bad influence, as far as the KGB is concerned. And what you are planning to do will be looked upon as the highest treason,’ the General warned me.

  I’d been practising for months to keep my face still, to answer questions without hesitation and in a succinct manner, but as soon as I saw the soldiers near the exit gate wearing their guns slung on their backs and the customs officer parading his German shepherd, my legs turned to jelly and my heart pounded so loudly in my chest that I was terrified I would give us away. When we left Sydney on Australia Day, the sun-bronzed customs officer had given us a miniature flag each and wished us a ‘happy holiday’.

  Ivan passed Lily to me and we took a place in line behind the handful of foreigners from the flight. He reached into his coat pocket for our passports and opened them to the pages with our new surname, Nickham. ‘Don’t deny your Russian heritage, if asked,’ the General had advised us, ‘but don’t draw attention to it either.’

  ‘Yeah, Nickham’s a lot easier to say than Nak-him-ov-sky,’ the moon-faced clerk at the Australian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages had laughed when we gave him the form for a request for a name change. ‘A lot of you New Australians are doing it. Makes it easier all round. Lilliana Nickham. She’ll be some sort of actress, I’m sure.’

  We didn’t tell the clerk that we were anglicising our name so we could get our visas passed through the Russian embassy without problems. ‘Anya, the days of Stalin’s purges of the descendants of nobility are over and you and Ivan are Australian citizens,’ the General had explained. ‘But drawing attention to yourselves could put your mother in danger. Even under Brezhnev, if we admit to having relatives abroad we can end up in a mental asylum, to cleanse us of any capitalist ideas we may have absorbed.’

  ‘Nyet! Nyet!’ The German man in front of us was having some sort of dispute with the customs officer in her glass booth. She pointed to his letter of invitation, but each time she gave it back to him he would push it through the slot of her window again. After a few minutes of this stalemate exchange, she waved her hand impatiently and let him through. Then it was our turn.

  The customs officer read our papers and examined every page of our passports. She frowned at our pictures and stared at the scar on Ivan’s face. I clutched Lily close to me, drawing comfort from her warmth. I tried not to lower my eyes—the General had said it would be taken as a sign of deception—and I pretended that I was studying the row of party flags which took up an entire wall. I prayed that he was right and we shouldn’t try to pass ourselves off as Soviets—even with Vishnevsky’s inside help the General told us he couldn’t get us the residency papers, and even if he could, if questioned it would be clear that we weren’t native Muscovites.

  The customs officer held up Ivan’s passport and stared from it
to him as if she were trying to unnerve him. We could hardly deny our Slavic eyes or our Russian cheekbones, but some of the British and American foreign correspondents in Moscow were children of Russian immigrants. What was so unusual about us? The officer frowned and called over her colleague, a young man with clean-cut features, who was sorting through some papers behind her. White spots began to dance before my eyes. Was it possible we weren’t even going to make it past the first point? The male officer asked Ivan if Nickham was his real name and what was his address in Moscow. But he asked the question in Russian. It was a trick and Ivan didn’t miss a beat.

  ‘Of course,’ he answered in Russian, and gave the address of our hotel. I saw that the General had been right. Compared to the sandpaper voice barking flight details over the loudspeaker, Ivan’s Russian was an elegant, pre-Soviet language that hadn’t been heard in Russia for fifty years. He sounded like an English person reading Shakespeare or a foreigner who had learned his Russian from second-hand textbooks.

  The male customs officer growled and grabbed the ink pad from his comrade. With a quick succession of loud bangs he stamped our papers and handed them back to Ivan, who calmly gathered them into his travel wallet and thanked the officers. But the woman officer had one final thing to say to me when I passed: ‘If you’re from a warm climate, why do you bring such a young baby to this country in winter? Do you want her to die of cold?’

  The window seal in the taxi had a leak in it and I pressed my arm over the hole to prevent the whistling draft from blowing on Lily. I hadn’t seen a car in worse condition since Vitaly bought his first Austin. The seats were as hard as wooden planks and the dashboard was a tangle of wires and jangling screws held together by cellulose tape. When he needed to indicate, the driver opened the window and thrust his hand into the freezing air. Most of the time he didn’t bother.