White Gardenia (17 page)

The apartment was gloomy. Mei Lin wasn’t there and I assumed she must have gone shopping or be taking a nap in the maid’s room. I closed the door behind me and started taking off my coat. A chill prickled my neck. The spicy smell of tobacco stung my nose. I squinted at the shadow on the sofa until it took form. Dmitri. The red tip of his cigarette glowed like a coal in the blackness. I stared at his faint outline, trying to decide if he was real or an apparition. I switched on the light. He glanced at me but said nothing, drawing in and out on the cigarette as if he couldn’t breathe without it. I walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove. The steam hissed from the spout and I made myself a cup of tea without offering him anything.

‘I put the rest of your things in a trunk in the hall closet,’ I told him. ‘In case you were wondering why you couldn’t find them. Lock the door when you go.’

I shut the bedroom door behind me. I was too tired for words and in no mood to be hurt any more by Dmitri. I kicked off my shoes and tugged my dress over my head. The room was cold. I slipped under the bedcovers and listened to the rain. My heart was thumping in my chest. But I wasn’t sure if it was Dmitri or Dan who had caused that. I stared at the clock on the bedside table, the gold miniature that the Michailovs had given us on our engagement. An hour passed and I assumed Dmitri must have left. But just as my eyes began to droop, I heard the bedroom door open and Dmitri’s step on the floorboards. I rolled on my side, feigning sleep. I held my breath when I felt the weight of his body sink into the mattress. His skin was like frost. He rested his hand on my hip and I turned to stone.

‘Go away,’ I said.

His hand gripped tighter.

‘You can’t do what you did and then come back.’

Dmitri didn’t say anything. His breathing was the sound of a man spent. I pinched my arm until the skin bled.

‘I don’t love you any more,’ I said.

His hand moved across my back. The skin was no longer soft like suede. It was sandpaper. I slapped him away but he clasped my cheeks in his hands, forcing me to face him. Even in the darkness I could see his gauntness. She had taken him whole and returned him empty.

‘I don’t love you any more,’ I said.

Hot tears dripped onto my face. They burned into my skin like sulphur.

‘Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you,’ he sobbed.

I pushed him away from me and struggled out of the bed. ‘I don’t want you,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you any more.’

Dmitri and I ate breakfast the next morning at the Brazilian café on Avenue Joffre. He sat with his legs stretched out in the streak of sunshine gleaming through the window. His eyes were closed and his mind seemed far away. I picked out the mushrooms from my omelette with a fork, saving them for last.
Mushrooms in the woods lie hidden like secret treasures, waiting for eager hands to pluck them.
I remembered my mother singing to me. The café was empty except for the moustached waiter who hovered at the counter, pretending to clean it. The air smelled of wood, oil and onions. Even now, whenever I come across that combination of aromas, I remember the morning after Dmitri came back to me.

I wanted to know if he had come back to me because he loved me or because things had gone wrong with Amelia. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask him. The words lay on my tongue like a foul taste. The uncertainty was a barrier between us. To talk of her was to conjure her up, and I was too afraid to do that.

After a while he sat up and rolled his shoulders. ‘You have to move back to the house,’ he said.

The thought of even seeing the house made my stomach turn. I didn’t want to live in the place where Dmitri had been with Amelia. I did not want to see
betrayal in every piece of furniture. I baulked at the idea of sleeping in my old bed after it had been defiled.

‘No, I don’t want to,’ I said, pushing my plate aside.

‘It’s safer at the house. And for now that’s what we have to think about.’

‘I don’t want to go to the house. I don’t even want to see it.’

Dmitri rubbed his face. ‘If the Communists storm the city, they will come to the Concession via your street first. The apartment has no protection. At least the house has the wall.’

He was right, but I still didn’t want to go. ‘What do you think they will do if they come?’ I asked. ‘Will they send us to the Soviet Union like they did to my mother?’

Dmitri shrugged. ‘No. Who will make money for them? They will take over the government and seize Chinese businesses. It’s the looting and rioting I’m concerned about.’

Dmitri stood up to go. When he saw that I was hesitant he reached out his hand. ‘Anya, I want you to be with me,’ he said.

My heart dropped when I saw the house. The garden was muddy from the rain. No one had bothered to prune the rosebushes. They had turned into menacing vines snaking up the walls, digging their tentacles into the window frames and leaving brown scars on the paint. The gardenia tree had lost all its leaves and was nothing more than a stick poking up through the ground. Even the soil in the beds looked clumped and dejected: no one had planted bulbs for spring. I heard Mei Lin singing in the laundry and realised that Dmitri must have moved her to the house yesterday.

The Old Maid opened the door and smiled when she saw me. The expression transformed her sunken eyes. For a moment she looked radiant. In all the years I had known her she had not smiled at me once. Suddenly, as we were balanced on the brink of disaster, she had decided to like me. Dmitri helped her drag my suitcases into the entrance and I wondered when the other servants had left.

The walls of the drawing room were bare, all the paintings were gone. There were holes where the light fittings had been removed.

‘I stored them away. To be safe,’ Dmitri said.

The Old Maid opened the trunks and started carrying my clothes up the stairs. I waited until she was out of earshot before I turned to Dmitri and said, ‘Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie any more.’

He flinched as if I had struck him.

‘You sold them to keep the club. I’m not stupid. I’m not a little girl, despite what you think. I’m old, Dmitri. Look at me. I’m old.’

Dmitri slipped his hand over my mouth and held me against his chest. He was exhausted. Old too. I could feel it through his skin. His heart was barely beating. He clutched me, pressing his cheek against mine. ‘She took them when she left.’

The words stung like a slap. My heart bore down on my rib cage. I thought it might burst into the pit of my stomach. So
she
had left
him
. He hadn’t chosen me over her at all. I pulled away from him and sank back against the sideboard. ‘Is she gone?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, watching me.

I sucked in a breath, teetering between two worlds. One where I took my suitcases and headed back to the apartment, and the other where I stayed
with Dmitri. I pressed my palms against my forehead. ‘Then we will put her behind us,’ I said. ‘She is out of our lives.’

Dmitri fell against me and wept into my neck.

‘“She”, “Her”, “Gone”. That’s how we will talk of her now,’ I said.

The Nationalist army tanks roared through the city day and night and the street-corner execution of Communist supporters became a daily occurrence. Once, on my way to the markets, I passed four severed heads spiked on street signs and didn’t even notice until a girl and her mother behind me screamed. In those last days the streets always smelled of blood.

The new curfew limited us to opening the club only three nights a week, which was a blessing in a way because we were short-staffed. All our top chefs had left for Taiwan or Hong Kong and it was hard to find any musicians who were not Russian. But on the nights we did open, the old patrons were there in their finery.

‘I’m not going to let a bunch of disgruntled peasants spoil my fun,’ Madame Degas told me one evening, taking a long drag through her cigarette holder. ‘They’ll spoil everything if we let them.’ Her poodle had been run over by a car, but she had stoically replaced it with a parrot named Phi-Phi.

Her sentiment was reflected in the faces of the other patrons who stayed on in Shanghai. The British and American businessmen, the Dutch shipping merchants, the nervous Chinese entrepreneurs. An obsessive kind of joie de vivre kept us going.

Despite the mayhem in the streets outside, we drank cheap wine as if it were vintage stock and nibbled at cubes of ham the way we once ate caviar. When there were blackouts, we lit candles. Dmitri and I waltzed on the dance floor every night like newlyweds. The war, Sergei’s death and Amelia had all come to seem a strange dream.

On the evenings the club was closed, Dmitri and I stayed at home. We read to each other or listened to records. In the midst of the disintegration of the city we had become a normal married couple. Amelia was nothing more than a ghost in the house. Sometimes I caught a whiff of her scent on a cushion or found a sleek dark hair on a brush or tile. But I never saw her or heard from her, until one evening, several weeks after I had moved back into the house, when the telephone rang and the Old Maid answered it. In the absence of the manservant the old woman had taken to speaking English and answering the telephone like a butler. I could tell who the caller was by the way the Old Maid shuffled into the room, nervously avoiding my glance. She whispered something to Dmitri. ‘Tell her I am not at home,’ he said. The Old Maid returned to the hall and was about to deliver the message when Dmitri called out loud enough so that Amelia would have heard him: ‘Tell her not to call here again.’

The next day Luba sent me an urgent message to meet her at the club. We hadn’t seen each other for a month and when I found her sitting in the foyer in a smart hat but with a face as drawn as a dead woman’s, I almost cried with the shock of it.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked her.

‘We are leaving the house,’ she said. ‘We depart
for Hong Kong tonight. This is the last day for exit visas. Anya, you must come with us.’

‘I can’t,’ I told her.

‘It will be impossible for you to get an exit visa otherwise. Alexei has a brother in Hong Kong. You can pose as our daughter.’

I had never seen Luba in such an overwrought state. She had been my voice of calm through my marriage crisis. But when I looked at the other women in the room, the few regulars who were left, all of them had the same panic-stricken eyes.

‘Dmitri came back to me,’ I said. ‘I know he won’t leave the club and I must stay with my husband.’ I bit my lip and stared at my hands. Another person was slipping away from me. If Luba left Shanghai, we weren’t likely to meet again.

She opened her handbag and pulled out a handkerchief. ‘I told you he would come back,’ she said, dabbing at her eyes. ‘I’d help you both to get out, but you’re right about Dmitri. He won’t leave the club. I wish he was still friends with my husband. Alexei might have been able to convince him to leave.’

The maître d’hôtel called us to say our usual table was ready. After he seated us, Luba ordered a bottle of the best champagne, and the cheesecake for dessert.

When the champagne arrived, she almost gulped down her first glass. ‘I’ll send you our address in Hong Kong,’ she said. ‘If you need our help in any way, you let me know. Though I would be a lot happier if I knew you were intending to leave.’

‘There’s still quite a crowd going to the club,’ I told her. ‘But if they start leaving, I promise I will talk to Dmitri about going too.’

Luba nodded. ‘I have news about what happened to Amelia,’ she said.

I dug my nails into the seat of my chair. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

‘I heard she started chasing after a Texan with money. But that man was smarter than her usual prey. He took what he wanted and then left her. She’s been outdone this time.’

I told her what had happened the previous night and how Dmitri had told Amelia never to call again.

The champagne seemed to have helped Luba’s nerves. A smile came to her face. ‘So the bitch had to have one more try,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, Anya. He’s out from under her spell now. Forgive him, and love him with all your heart.’

‘I will,’ I said. But I wished we hadn’t spoken about Amelia. She was a virus that lay dormant in the system until you mentioned her.

Luba took another swig of champagne. ‘The woman’s a fool,’ she said. ‘She’s been telling people about some rich connections she has in Los Angeles. She’s talking about her own nightclub, the Moscow-LA. What a joke.’

It was raining when we came out of the club. I kissed Luba goodbye and was grateful for the numbing properties of champagne. I watched her push her way through the crowds to get to a rickshaw. What has happened to us all? I wondered. Those of us who had once waltzed on the dance floor of the Moscow-Shanghai and tried to sing like Josephine Baker.

The night was full of the wail of sirens and in the distance there was gunfire. The next morning I found Dmitri standing ankle-deep in the muddy garden.

‘They closed the club,’ he said.

His face was ashen. In his despairing eyes I saw the young Dmitri. A boy who had lost his mother.

He shook his head in disbelief. ‘We are ruined,’ he said.

‘It’s only until everything settles down,’ I told him. ‘I’m prepared. We have enough of everything to last us a few months.’

‘Didn’t you hear the news?’ he said. ‘The Communists have taken over. They want all foreigners out. All of us. The American consulate and the International Refugee Organisation have arranged a ship.’

‘Then let’s get out,’ I said. ‘We’ll start again.’

Dmitri sank to his knees in the mud. ‘Did you hear what I said, Anya?
Refugees
. We can’t take anything with us.’

‘Let’s just go, Dmitri. We are lucky somebody wants to help us.’

He brought his muddy hands to his face and covered his eyes. ‘We’re going to be poor.’

The word ‘poor’ seemed to break him but I felt strangely relieved. We weren’t going to be poor. We were going to be free. I hadn’t wanted to leave China because it had seemed the only connection to my mother. But the China we had known didn’t exist any more. It had slipped through our hands in a second. None of us should have tried taking it in the first place. Even my mother would have seen the open door before me, a chance for Dmitri and I to start again.