A Choice of Evils

by Meira Chand

  ‘These people are foreigners no doubt. I don’t think you’ll find many Chinese of the same persuasion. I’m not a Communist, only a hack reporter. I’ll soon know more of the Generalissimo as I hope to interview him.’ Donald spoke to Nadya’s back as he followed her down the stone ramp. He felt forced to keep his gaze upon her, as if to photograph her in his mind. He observed her legs and the way she placed her feet to break her descent upon the steep cobbles. Beneath the thick fall of hair her neck was lightly freckled.

  They reached the bottom of the ramp. Nadya turned to nod goodbye and walked towards Martha’s hospital with the wrought-iron letters of its name arched above the gate, the William Clayton Nanking Hospital for Women and Children. She was glad Agnes Smedley had not been near to hear her exchange with this man. He was the type of person to whom words were ammunition. To defend oneself it was necessary to grab whatever thoughts flew by and fling them at him like a pile of stones. Agnes would have put him in his place with a few terse phrases and her knowledge of Yenan.

  The Yangtze was busy with war ships coming up to Nanking from Shanghai. The HMS Danae and the gunboats, USS Panay and the HMS Ladybird and the HMS Bee were often in port, along with many other vessels of different classes. So frequent was the arrival of these ships that the social life of the town improved. There were dances at the International Club and dinners on board the ships. Bands played and couples whirled on the roof of the International Club.

  At these times the town seemed alight to Nadya. After a day of documentation and the smell of paper, crammed in yellowing stacks onto miles of shelves, it was a relief to throw herself at the night. The gold-trimmed evening dress and the fashionable clothes she had brought from Shanghai at last had a place in her life. And there were the naval men, smart in their uniforms, thirsty for pleasure without involvement.

  Nanking was not without interesting men, some were even famous in scholarly ways, but there was no one she felt drawn towards. They passed her in the TECSAT Department, and talked of statistics for the husbandry of pigs, or an addition to the pantheon of Chinese gods. Some took her out to dinner or danced with her at the Club. As always they were eager for more, but she could summon no interest.

  At last Bradley Reed journeyed up to Nanking to assess the progress of his project. The few days of his visit were chaotic. Bradley stirred energy wherever he went, demanding the impossible, pushing people to extremes. He left the Department breathless, but on track for his autumn deadline.

  Before leaving he came to dinner with Martha. She was relaxed in Bradley’s company as she cut an almond cake for dessert. He entertained Flora and Lily with tales of their mother’s childhood.

  ‘We travelled on a boat up the Grand Canal. From the window of our cabin we had a great view of the feet of the peasants who sat up on the deck above us. Remember Martha how we complained of the smell of those feet?’ Bradley laughed. The girls giggled and looked at their mother, unable to imagine the child in her.

  Over coffee Bradley turned his attention to Nadya. ‘I have been talking today with Madame Chiang Kai-shek and W.H. Donald, their Australian advisor. They want regular reports on our project. I have suggested you keep them up-to-date. I want you to take in a progress report to them once a fortnight.’ The light above the table polished Bradley’s white hair. His face had the tough, soft look of old chamois leather.

  ‘Madame Chiang Kai-shek? What is she like?’ Nadya asked. She knew Bradley had easy access to the Chiangs, whom he had known many years.

  ‘Very persuasive,’ Bradley said. ‘But I was even more so; she is to write a foreword to our great work. I told them you would take our proofs in as soon as possible.’

  ‘To Madame Chiang Kai-shek?’ Nadya repeated.

  ‘Well, to W.H. Donald at least, I am not sure you will see Madame. I have already discussed all that is necessary with her. She is a busy woman.’ Bradley devoured his almond cake.

  ‘Who is this W.H. Donald?’ Nadya asked, taking the cup of coffee Martha passed her.

  ‘He is an advisor to the Chiangs,’ Martha explained. ‘He has been thirty-five years in China and never returned to Australia.’

  ‘He arrived first in Hong Kong and worked as a journalist for the China Mail,’ Bradley remembered. ‘He was one of the first ninety overseas war correspondents to reach Japan after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war. The scoops he scored were so numerous he was signed up as correspondent for the New York Herald in China.’ Bradley concentrated silently on another slice of cake and then continued.

  ‘So great is his intimacy with the Generalissimo and his wife that he calls them to their faces, Gissimo and Missimo. They call him in turn, Uncle Donald. There seems no historical event he had not been party to in his years in China. Before advising Chiang Kai-shek he worked for the Manchurian warlord, Chang Tso-lin and then his son, Chang Hsueh-liang. He helped Sun Yat-sen organise the Chinese Revolution, and worked also for the Viceroy of Canton, an imperious old Mandarin.’

  Martha smiled at the apprehension on Nadya’s face. ‘He’s not as frightening as he sounds,’ she laughed.

  Both she and Nadya had come to reassess their first opinions of each other. Martha knew more now of Nadya’s story. Behind the defensive exterior she saw a depth of character she could respect. She saw also in Nadya’s commitment to her work, a discipline that surprised her.

  ‘The Generalissimo, Madame and W.H.D. That, according to a standing joke, is China’s Foreign Office in a nutshell. No one can see the Chiangs without W.H.D.’s permission, even the Generalissimo’s bodyguard, who is a heel-clicking German who quarrelled with Hitler,’ Bradley informed them.

  ‘No one, except for you, I suspect,’ Martha smiled. She felt implicit support from Bradley. Their memories ran in parallel threads back to the mesh of childhood. No one understood her like Bradley. Once he had asked her to marry him. Her reaction had been one of shock; she thought of Bradley as a surrogate brother. Soon after his proposal she had met Bill, and then Bradley had met and married Claire.

  Bill Clayton had come out to China to be her father’s assistant the year before Martha returned from America. When Martha had left to study medicine in America, the mission hospital had been small and her mother still alive. When she returned to work with her father, it was a sprawling complex, but her mother was dead. Bill Clayton was full of religious zeal and a brilliant doctor. Within a year Martha and Bill got married, much to Dr Keswick’s delight.

  The thought of Bill filled Martha suddenly. He had always got on well with Bradley, although she had never told him of his proposal. At the end of their first year together she and Bill had moved to Soochow, to take over the hospital there. Their bedroom, she remembered, was painted cream and apple green. She could still see Bill in the doorway, tall and looseframed, his hair copper in a shaft of morning sun, freckled and sandy all over. She remembered watching him from the bed, pulling on his clothes to go off to an emergency. An old man had been caught in a factory press. They had been in the midst of making love, and Bill had left her quickly. He was brisk and tender in his embrace, and if she had not welcomed it, she also felt no great aversion. She found her pleasure in Bill’s own. Desire and passion, so idolised in literature, so tempting to the upright man, was still a mystery to Martha. It was as if a contagion had passed her by. She thanked God for freeing her from those struggles of the flesh. And yet in that room, on that morning of hurried lovemaking, she had conceived Flora. Remembering, she felt, as she had rarely felt while Bill lived, a sudden wave of lust for him. She turned quickly back to the conversation at the dinner table, shocked at this rogue response to memory. Bradley still spoke about W.H.D.

  ‘Even I have to approach the Chiangs through W.H.D.’ Bradley sighed. ‘I go back to Shanghai tomorrow.’ Turning to Nadya, his tone changed. ‘Phone W.H.D. for an appointment,’ he ordered.

  ‘What does W.H.D. stand for?’ Nadya asked.

  ‘I have never met anyone, even his group of intimates, who know what the ini
tials stand for. D is for Donald, that’s all anyone knows,’ Bradley said.

  ‘I have heard that name,’ Nadya replied. Almost at once she realised it was not W.H.D. she had heard of. Donald was the name of the man she had met on the walls of Nanking. She realised now she had thought of him often since that day.

  Nadya did not sleep well that night. The face of the man she had met on her walk atop Nanking’s walls came constantly before her, and would not be willed away. The fan whirled above in an uncertain manner. She feared it might crash down upon her. A faint edge of carbolic hung in the air. The impending meetings with W.H.D. and Madame Chiang filled her with apprehension. The past seemed to crowd up behind her. And thoughts of Sergei pushed again into her mind as fast as she thrust them out.

  She had known Sergei only three months before they escaped together to Harbin. A fire destroyed his accommodation and the Blagoveshchensk Committee assigned his family a room in Nadya’s home. The house had long ago been repossessed by the government, and divided up. Sergei was consumed by the convenience of the Amur River, that crossed the border between Russia and China, and could carry them to freedom. His father, a former court architect famous for his role in a political conspiracy, had been imprisoned, then released to Siberia. Prison affected his lungs and he died, but Sergei could not forget Imperial Russia. He longed for an end to penury, for holidays at German spas again, and for the dacha on a lake in Finland where he had hunted with his father. This residue lined his mind while he worked in a machine tool factory.

  It began as a game. They sat in the orchard on summer evenings. Laundry was strung between the trees and flapped and dripped upon them. They spoke in whispers, elaborating on Sergei’s plans of escape. They lay in the grass under the trees and the sun flamed above.

  ‘Take me with you,’ she demanded.

  ‘Escape is not for women,’ he argued.

  ‘You need money for a good escape. I still have my mother’s jewellery,’ Nadya reminded him.

  A breeze stirred the laundry and filled out shirts. A damp vest blew down upon them. Sergei had not yet kissed her. She leaned forward and shut her eyes, but as he made no move towards her she placed her lips upon his mouth. Although she trembled his body was passive, waiting for her to draw away. She had never been kissed before, and so found nothing extreme in his response.

  ‘If we delay the river will freeze,’ he told her as she opened her eyes.

  There had been no moon the night of the escape. The wind smelled of winter. Thin ice formed already about the edge of the river, where a boatman was waiting for them.

  ‘There are soldiers returning to duty on the borders of Manchuria. I didn’t know we were to carry them. I cannot take you on the main boat, it’s packed with those soldiers.’ He lifted the tarpaulin on one of a train of barges filled by sacks of potatoes. The craft sat low in the water. ‘You’ll have to make do with this.’

  Beneath the tarpaulin the odour of the river pressed upon them, as did the manure from the soil about the potatoes. They awoke at first light. With a sudden jerk the boats began to move. Lifting a corner of the canvas they watched the town drift away. Then, for the first time, Nadya realised not only the town but the country itself was slipping away from her. Panic overwhelmed her. She knew then she would never return. A skin was being ripped from her. Images of the past and of her father thrust up within her, filling her with desolation.

  Once her father had taken her with him on some business, to the boundary of Mongolia. It was not a land to press upon a child, and yet he had taken her there. She remembered still the smell of his heavy woollen coat as he held her against him. And she remembered the strange barren hills of that vacant land stretching into the distance. She was sure that, when she reached the horizon, she would be able to sit and dangle her legs into empty space. The land appeared on the edge of nothingness. The unknown place she travelled towards now with Sergei seemed suddenly an equal void.

  On the journey to Harbin Sergei made no move towards her. It was she who initiated their first coupling, its awkwardness compounded by the sacks of potatoes upon which they were forced to lie. It was as if he lent himself to her, allowed her to sit astride him. He offered no help and she, unskilled, had only a fire in her body to guide her. She was unprepared for the pain that skewered her upon him, or for his abrupt recoiling. He seemed suddenly to shrink within her. He pushed her off and turned away.

  ‘Next time it will be better,’ she whispered, afraid she had upset him, unable to tell without experience what her sensations should be. The heat had seared on in her belly for hours, as the barge rocked rhythmically over the water.

  At last, where the Amur River met the Sungari River, they were smuggled aboard another boat. As they stepped from the gangplank on to the deck, a blond man with green eyes, much older than Sergei, appeared and clasped him tightly to his breast. For the first time then she saw the emotion she had sought in Sergei’s face. He stood with his arm about the strange man, a light taking hold in his eyes.

  ‘This is Ivan Shepenov,’ Sergei introduced her. ‘I know him from Blagoveshchensk. He sails these boats between Russia and Manchuria. But for him we could not have got here.’ She knew then, instinctively, that they were lovers. He told her later, easily. He told her also that Shepenov was a spy.

  In Harbin they went to a friend of Nadya’s stepmother. The Primakovs were émigrés who had fled Russia ten years before, when exit visas were still easy to obtain. The house was warm and filled by the sweet smell of baking. Mrs Primakov poured tea from a samovar and served warm bread fresh from the oven. It was early morning but her husband had already left for his job on the Chinese Eastern Railway. She asked questions about Blagoveshchensk and Nadya’s stepmother. Sergei was silent, concentrating on his breakfast.

  ‘I need a job,’ he said when Mrs Primakov tried to draw him out.

  ‘Work on the Chinese Eastern Railway is difficult to get, but my husband will help,’ Mrs Primakov offered.

  ‘I do not want to work on the railway,’ Sergei argued.

  ‘This town overflows with refugees. Half the Russian men are unemployed. Women take any degrading task to keep their families together. Children have learned to beg in half a dozen languages, or sell themselves on the street.’ Mrs Primakov’s mouth grew tight. ‘From nowhere the Japanese suddenly came, when all the time we expected the Soviets to invade us. Blagoveshchensk was rough but Harbin is now worse. We have become a town of robbery, kidnappings and bandits. Russian deaths exceed births by two to one thanks to assaults, abortions and alcohol.’

  ‘I will find a job for myself,’ Sergei told Mrs Primakov. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and pulled on his coat. He had an address he wanted to trace, and showed Mrs Primakov a scrap of paper.

  ‘This is the Headquarters of the Russian Fascist Party,’ Mrs Primakov frowned. ‘These people are dangerous. They’ve been bought by the Japanese Army. Since the Japanese we’re flooded with drugs, prostitution and extortion. With the Russian Fascist Party as a front, the Japanese are behind all the kidnappings, for which they take a cut from the gangs. This is their way of exploiting Manchuria, of making money from our destruction. Harbin is awash with heroin and morphine. It can be bought anywhere, delivered at home or at the school gates.’ Mrs Primakov spoke in an impassioned way. Sergei turned his back upon her.

  At the front door she drew Nadya aside. ‘It is my duty as a friend of your stepmother to tell you I do not like this young man. I ask you to take care,’ Mrs Primakov urged. She presumed Sergei was Nadya’s husband and, in the interests of propriety, Nadya did not disillusion her.

  Soon Sergei found the Russian Fascist Party Headquarters, where Shepenov waited for him. From then on he went out alone, leaving Nadya with Mrs Primakov. He returned late each night smelling of vodka. Soon he did not return at all. Nadya knew he had finally gone when the diamond brooch and rings, and a thick gold chain with an emerald pendant that had belonged to her mother were missing from their velvet pouch. The las
t tangible link with her dead mother vanished. The loss cut her adrift, more than the humiliation of Sergei’s disappearance. She stood on a precipice with nothing beyond.

  ‘I must find work quickly,’ she said. She could not take the Primakovs’ hospitality indefinitely.

  ‘You have the right spirit,’ Mrs Primakov nodded in approval.

  Nadya discovered then another Harbin, apart from the town of solid stone edifices patrolled by Japanese soldiers, that resembled provincial cities upon the Volga. Harbin had first appeared to her as a fragment of pre-revolutionary Russia in the middle of the Manchurian plain. The cupolas of Orthodox churches rose against the sky. Tramcars and droshkies and horse-drawn sleds clattered along cobbled streets. Hotels, theatres, shops and banks proclaimed a bourgeois vitality. Now, she noticed hovels constructed of wooden scraps and discarded boxes, where the poorest Russians lived. Girls of eight or nine in cotton print dresses offered themselves to men. She learned that for an exiled Russian woman there was little work beyond what her body could earn. She went through advertisements in papers that listed typing as a requirement. On the way to interviews she observed Russian women walking the street, staring men boldly in the face, whispering a word. She passed the doors of cabarets and bars and sensed the diseased life within. It was as if this world drew her slowly to it. She had heard of the district of Putevaya, where Russian prostitutes laboured day and night. She thought of it as she journeyed back to the Primakovs after each unsuccessful interview.

  ‘It’s not your fault you cannot get work, unemployment is our affliction here. Everyone is leaving for Shanghai. All kinds of work are available there. We have a little spare money, it will buy you your passage. And you can live with Mr Primakov’s sister until you find your way.’ Mrs Primakov rolled dough, her hands white to the wrist with flour.

  From the first moment Shanghai filled Nadya with optimism. Within a few days she saw Bradley Reed’s advertisement for an assistant in a newspaper and applied for the job. She was lucky. In general, the work available for White Russian women in Shanghai differed little from that in Harbin.