White Gardenia (18 page)

The Old Maid’s face dropped when I told her that she and Mei Lin should leave because it wasn’t safe to be in our house. I packed whatever food I could for them into trunks, and sewed a pouch full of money and told the Old Maid to hide it in her dress. Mei Lin
clung to me. Dmitri had to help me lift her into the rickshaw. ‘You must go with your old friend,’ I told her. She was still crying when the rickshaw moved off, and for a moment I thought of keeping her with me. But I knew they would never let her out.

Dmitri and I made love to the sound of bomber planes and the thunder of distant explosions. ‘Can you forgive me, Anya? Can you really forgive me?’ he asked afterwards. I told him that I already had.

In the morning a torrential rain was falling. It beat like gunfire against the roof. I slid out of Dmitri’s embrace and moved to the window. The rain was washing down the street in great floods. I turned to Dmitri’s naked form on the bed and wished that the rain could wash away the past too. He stirred and blinked at me.

‘Never mind the rain,’ he mumbled. ‘I will go by foot to the consulate. You pack our suitcases. I will come back and get you tonight.’

‘It’s going to be all right,’ I told him, helping him with his shirt and coat. ‘They aren’t going to kill us. They are just telling us to get out.’

He touched my cheek. ‘Do you really think we can start again?’

Together we walked through the house, knowing that by the end of the day we would never again recline on its elegant furniture or gaze out its grand windows. I wondered what would become of it, to what use the Communists would put it. I was grateful Sergei wouldn’t have to witness the destruction of Marina’s beloved home. I kissed Dmitri and watched him run up the garden path, hunched against the rain. I felt the urge to go with him, but there was little time and I had to prepare for our journey.

I spent the day breaking up my jewellery and sewing the stones and pearls into the toes of our socks and the seams of our underwear. I hid the remaining pieces of my mother’s jade necklace in the base of my matroshka doll. I had no practical clothes that I could pack, so I stuffed my most expensive dresses into my suitcase in the hope that at least I would be able to sell them. I was terrified and excited at the same time. We couldn’t be sure that the Communists would let us out. Not if they were like Tang. They might execute us in their thirst for revenge. But I sang as I worked. I was happy and in love again. When darkness fell I shut all the curtains and cooked by candlelight, using every ingredient in the kitchen to prepare a feast. I spread out a white tablecloth on the floor and set it with our wedding dishes and glasses, the last time we would use them.

When Dmitri did not return in the evening I convinced myself not to think the worst. I speculated that the rain would keep the Communists at bay for at least another day and that Dmitri was streetwise enough to stay out of trouble. ‘The worst is over,’ I muttered to myself like a mantra and curled up on the floor. ‘The worst is over.’

When Dmitri hadn’t returned by morning, I tried to call the consulate but the lines were down. I waited another two hours, nervous sweat pooling under my arms and slipping down my back. The rain eased and I threw on my coat and boots and ran to the consulate. The halls and waiting areas were crammed with people. I was given a ticket and told to wait my turn. I scanned the crowds desperately for Dmitri.

I spotted Dan Richards coming out of his office and called out to him. He recognised me and waved me over.

‘Awful business, Anya,’ he said, taking my coat and shutting the door to his office behind us. ‘Can I get you some tea?’

‘I’m looking for my husband,’ I told him, trying to quell the panic that was churning inside me. ‘He came here yesterday to get us passage on the refugee ship. But he hasn’t returned.’

Concern washed over Dan’s kind face. He helped me into a seat and patted my arm. ‘Please don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Everything has been chaotic here. I’ll find out what has happened.’

He disappeared down the hall. I sat, numb like a stone, eyeing the Chinese antiques and books that were half packed into boxes.

Dan returned an hour later, his face gaunt. I rose out of the chair, terrified that Dmitri was dead. Dan had a paper in his hands and lifted it up to me. I saw the photograph of Dmitri. The eyes that I loved so much.

‘Anya, is this your husband? Dmitri Lubensky?’

I nodded, fear screaming in my ears.

‘Good God, Anya!’ he cried, sinking into his chair and running his hand through his unkempt hair. ‘Dmitri Lubensky married Amelia Millman last night and left for America this morning.’

I stood in front of the Moscow-Shanghai, staring at its boarded-up doors and windows. The rain had stopped. Guns were sounding nearby. My eyes drank in the portico, the stone steps, the white lions that guarded the entrance. Was I trying to remember or forget it all? Sergei, Dmitri and I dancing to the Cuban band, the wedding, the funeral, the last days.
A family scurried by on the street behind me. The mother shooed her crying children like a hen. The father was bent over, pulling a cart of trunks and suitcases which I knew would be seized before they even got to the dock.

Dan had given me one hour to return to the consulate. From there he had secured for me passage on a United Nations ship headed for the Philippines. I was going to be a refugee, but I was going to be one alone. The pearls and stones in my stocking toes jabbed me. All my other jewellery would be looted when the hordes broke into the house. All of it except my wedding ring. I lifted my hand and stared at its bands in the glary light. I climbed the steps towards the growling marble lion closest to the door and placed the ring on its tongue. My offering to Mao Zedong.

T
he ship that took us from Shanghai groaned and listed to one side. It lurched forward at full speed, smoke billowing from its funnels. I watched the city slip further and further into the distance, waves splashing over my feet. The buildings of the Bund were devoid of light and activity, like grieving relatives at a funeral. The streets were quiet, waiting for what would come next. Once we reached the mouth of the river the refugees on board wept and laughed. One held up the white, blue and red royal flag. We had been saved. Other rescue ships had been shot at or sunk before they reached that point. The passengers sprang from railing to railing, hugging each other, buoyant with relief. Only I seemed to be sinking, weighed down by a loss wrapped around me like an anchor. I was being dragged down into the river, the murky water rushing over my head.

Dmitri’s second betrayal had unleashed a longing for my mother stronger than I had experienced in all
the years we had been separated. I called her up from the past. I saw her face in the overcast sky and in the white wake that spread like a sheet between me and the country where I had been born. Her image was the only thing that could bring comfort. Only she could help name the wretchedness that tormented me.

I was in exile and without love for the second time.

I didn’t recognise the other people on the ship, though many of them seemed to know each other. All the Russians I knew had escaped China by other means. But there were quite a few wealthy people mixed in with the middle-class families, the shopkeepers, the opera singers, the pickpockets, poets and prostitutes. We privileged ones were the most ridiculous. The first night in the mess hall we arrived for dinner in our furs and evening attire. We dipped bent spoons into chipped soup bowls and failed to notice the metal cups and frayed napkins that were our tableware. We were so lost in our illusions of who we had once been that we could have been dining at the Imperial for all we knew. After the meal we were handed the cleaning roster for the next twenty days at sea. The woman next to me accepted it in her diamond-ringed fingers as if it were a dessert menu and then squinted at the piece of paper in puzzlement. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, looking around for whoever was responsible. ‘Surely they can’t mean me?’

The next day one of the ship’s orderlies handed me a plain blue dress from a pile of clothes he was pushing around on a trolley. It was a size too big and was worn around the waistband and the sleeves. The cream lining was stained and it smelled musty. I
slipped it on under the garish bathroom light and stared in the mirror.
Is this what you were afraid of, Dmitri? That we would be wearing other people’s clothes?

I gripped the sides of the sink. The room seemed to spin around me. Did Dmitri want a club called the Moscow-LA so badly that he had been prepared to sacrifice me? I had not seen treachery in his eyes the morning he left for the consulate. When I helped him to button his coat, I had no reason to believe that he would not return for me. So what had happened after that? How had Amelia intercepted him? I closed my eyes and imagined her red mouth whispering spells of persuasion: ‘It will be so easy for you to start again…the Nationalist government destroyed thousands of documents before they fled. There’s probably nothing formal to say you’re married. Nothing the United States would know about anyway.’ I heard Dmitri affirming ‘I do’ at their hurried wedding. Did he flinch, I asked myself
,
at the moment he murdered me?

It was the thought of how much I loved him and how little he loved me that was driving me to madness. Dmitri’s love was like Shanghai. It had only existed on the surface of things. Underneath it was corrupt and rotten. His love was not like my mother’s love, although both had left their mark on me.

Most of the refugees on the ship were cheerful. The women gathered at the railings to talk and stare at the sea, the men sang as they mopped decks, the children skipped rope together and shared toys. But every night they would gaze out of their cabin
windows to search for the moon and stars and check the ship’s position. They had learned not to trust anyone. It was only when they saw the celestial markers that they could sleep, reassured that they were still en route to the Philippines and were not being transported to the Soviet Union.

If they had sent me to a labour camp, I wouldn’t have cared. I was dead already.

They, on the other hand, behaved as though they were grateful. They scrubbed the decks and peeled potatoes with little complaint and talked of the countries that might accept them after the Philippines. France, Australia, the United States, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay. The places rolled off their tongues like poetry. I had no plan, no idea what the future held. The pain in my heart was so deep that I thought I was going to die of it before we ever reached shore. I scrubbed the decks along with the other refugees, but while they took breaks, I went on rubbing fittings and railings until my hands were bleeding from windburn and blisters. I only stopped whenever the supervisor tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Anya, your energy is remarkable but you must go get something to eat.’ I was in purgatory, trying to buy my way out. As long as I felt pain, I would live. As long as there was punishment, there was hope of redemption.

Six days into the journey I awoke with a burning pain on my left cheek. The skin had turned red and raw and was full of hard cysts that looked like insect bites. The ship’s doctor examined it and shook his head. ‘It’s caused by anxiety. It will go when you get some rest.’

But the disfiguration didn’t go. It stayed with me the whole journey, marking me out like a leper.

On the fifteenth day the steamy heat of the tropics passed over us like a cloud. The steel blue water transformed into an azure ocean and the smell of tropical pines perfumed the air. We passed islands with steep cliffs and sandbanks of white coral. Each sunset was a fiery rainbow sizzling on the horizon. Tropical birds fluttered on and off the decks, some so tame that they would jump onto our hands and shoulders without fear. But such natural beauty made some of the Shanghai Russians uneasy. Rumours of voodoo and sacrifices spread throughout the ship. Someone asked the captain if it was true that Tubabao Island was a leper colony and he assured us that the island had been sprayed with DDT and any lepers moved long ago.

‘Don’t forget you’re the last ship,’ he told us. ‘Your fellow countrymen and women are already there, ready to welcome you.’

On the twenty-second day there was a shout from one of the crew and we rushed out onto the decks for our first view of the island. I shielded my eyes from the sun and squinted into the distance. Tubabao protruded from the sea, mute, mysterious and shrouded in a fragile mist. Two giant mountains, covered in jungle, mimicked the curves of a woman resting on her side. Snuggled in the arch of her stomach and thighs was a cove of alabaster sand and coconut palms. The only sign of civilisation was a jetty reaching out from the tip of the beach.

We anchored and our luggage was unloaded. Later in the afternoon we were sorted into groups and taken to the beach in a creaky barge that reeked of oil and seaweed. The barge moved slowly and the Filipino
captain pointed to the clear sea beneath us. Schools of rainbow-coloured fish skittered under the boat and something that looked like a stingray lifted itself from the sandy bottom. I was sitting next to a middle-aged woman in high heels and a hat with a silk flower in the brim. Her hands were neatly tucked into her lap and she was perched on the splintery wooden bench as though she were on her way to a health spa for the day, when in reality none of us knew what even the next hour would bring. It struck me then how absurd our situation had become. Those of us who had known the bustle and stink, the noise and frenzy of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities were about to make our home on a remote island in the Pacific.

Four buses waited for us at the end of the jetty. They were rundown, the glass was missing from the windows and the panels were warped with rust. An American navy man with hair like steel wool and a sunburned forehead stepped out of one and told us to get onboard. There weren’t enough seats so most of us had to stand. A young boy offered me his seat and I sunk gratefully into it. My thighs stuck to the burning leather and, when I was sure no one was looking, I slipped my stockings down to my ankles and hid them in my pocket. The air on my stinging legs and feet was a relief.

The bus bumped and rattled over the furrows in the dirt road. The air steamed with the aroma of the banana trees that lined our path. Every so often we passed a nipa hut and a Filipino hawker would hold up a pineapple or soda drink for us to see. The American shouted above the roaring motor that he was Captain Richard Connor, one of the IRO officials based on the island.

The camp itself was only a short distance from the
beach, but the primitiveness of the road made the journey seem longer. The buses parked next to an open-air café, empty of patrons. The bar was made of thatched palm leaves. Card tables and fold-up chairs were half buried in the sandy soil. I looked at the chalkboard menu: cuttlefish in coconut milk, sugar pancakes and lemonade. Connor led us by foot down a paved path between rows of army tents. Some of the flaps were rolled up to let in the afternoon breeze. The insides were crammed with camp beds and overturned crates that served as tables and chairs. Many had a single light bulb strapped to the centre pole and a primus stove near the entrance. In one tent the crates had been covered with matching cloths and set with a dinner service made from coconut shells. I was amazed at what some people had managed to get out of China. I saw sewing machines, rocking chairs and even a statue. Those belonged to the people who had left first, those who had not waited for the Communists to land on their doorsteps before evacuating.

‘Where is everyone?’ the woman with the flower in her hat asked Connor.

He grinned. ‘Down at the beach, I suspect. When you’re off duty, that’s where you will want to be too.’

We passed a large tent with open sides. Inside four stout women were bent over a vat of boiling water. They turned their sweaty faces towards us and shouted, ‘
Oora!
’ Their smiles were genuine but their welcome filled me with homesickness. Where was I?

Captain Connor led us to a square in the middle of the city of tents. He stood on a wooden stage, while we sat in the scorching sun and listened to his instructions. He told us that the camp was divided
into districts, each with its own supervisor, communal kitchen and shower block. Our area backed onto a jungle ravine, a ‘disadvantageous position in terms of wildlife and safety’. Therefore our first task would be to clear it. I could barely hear the captain through the pulse in my head when he talked about the deadly ‘one minute snakes’ and about the pirates who crept out of the jungle at night armed with bolo knives and who had mugged three people already.

Single women were usually put two to a tent, but due to our proximity to the uncleared jungle all the women in our district were put in tents of four or six. I was assigned a tent with three young women from the countryside around Tsingtao who had come to the island earlier on the
Cristobal
. Their names were Nina, Galina and Ludmila. They were not like Shanghai girls. They were robust with rosy looks and hearty laughs. They helped me collect my trunk and showed me where the bedding was issued.

‘You’re very young to be here on your own. How old are you?’ Ludmila asked.

‘Twenty-one,’ I lied.

They were surprised but not suspicious. I made up my mind in that moment that I would never talk of my past. It hurt too much. I could speak about my mother because I was not ashamed of her. But I would never mention Dmitri again. I thought of how Dan Richards had signed my papers to get me out of Shanghai. He had struck out ‘Lubenskya’ and written my maiden name, ‘Kozlova’. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘There will be a day when you’ll be glad that man’s name doesn’t belong to you.’

Already I was longing to be free of it.

‘What did you do in Shanghai?’ Nina asked.

I hesitated a moment. ‘I was a governess,’ I said. ‘To the children of an American diplomat.’

‘You have nice clothes for a governess,’ said Galina, sitting cross-legged on the baked-mud floor and watching me unpack. She swept her fingers over the green cheongsam poking out of the corner of my trunk. I tucked the corners of the sheets under my mattress. ‘I was expected to help entertain,’ I said. But when I looked up I saw that her expression was innocent. There had been nothing behind her remark. And the two other girls seemed more fascinated than sceptical.

I reached into the suitcase and pulled out the dress. I flinched when I saw that Mei Lin had repaired the shoulder. ‘Have it,’ I said to Galina. ‘I’m too tall for it these days anyway.’

Galina jumped up, pressing the dress against her chest and laughing. I cringed at the side splits. It was too sexy for any governess, even those exceptional ones who ‘entertained’.

‘No, I’m too fat,’ she said, handing it back to me. ‘But thank you for your kindness.’

I held the dress out for the other girls but they giggled. ‘It’s too fancy for us,’ said Nina.

Later, on our way to the dining tent, Ludmila squeezed my arm. ‘Don’t look so sad,’ she said. ‘It all seems a bit much at first, but when you see the beach and the boys you’ll forget your troubles.’

Her kindness made me despise myself more. She thought I was one of them. A young, carefree woman. How could I tell them I had lost my youth long ago? That Shanghai had ravished it?

The district dining tent was illuminated by three twenty-five-watt bulbs. In the dim light I could make out about a dozen long tables. We were served boiled
macaroni and meat hash on tin plates. The people from my ship picked at their food while the seasoned Tubabao hands wiped their plates clean with slices of bread. An old man spat plum pits straight onto the sand floor.

When she saw that I wasn’t eating, Galina pressed a can of sardines into my hand. ‘Add them to the macaroni,’ she said. ‘For a bit of taste.’