White Gardenia (2 page)

I slipped from the table unnoticed and ran outside to play with the cat who lived in the Pomerantsevs’ garden. He was a stray with torn ears and a blind eye but he had grown fat and contented under Olga’s attention. I pressed my face into his musky fur and wept. Stories like Ying-ying’s were whispered all over Harbin and even I had seen enough of Japanese cruelty to hate them too.

The Japanese had annexed Manchuria in 1937, although it had been effectively invaded six years earlier. As the war became more intense, the Japanese issued an edict that all rice was to go to their army. The Chinese were reduced to acorn meal as a staple food, and this couldn’t be digested by the very young or the sick. One day I was running along the twisted, leafy path by the river that flowed past our house. We had been let out from school early by our new Japanese principal, who had instructed us to go home and tell our parents of the recent Japanese victories in Manchuria. I was wearing my white convent uniform and enjoying the patterns the filtered sunlight made over me as I skipped along. I passed Doctor Chou, the local physician, on my way. Doctor Chou was trained in both Western and traditional medicine and was carrying a box of vials under his arm. He was famous for his sharp dress sense, and that day he was decked out in a well-cut Western suit and coat with a Panama hat. The mild weather seemed to please him too and we smiled at each other.

I passed him and reached the bend in the river where the forest was darkest and draped in vines. I was stunned by a loud shriek and stopped in my tracks when a Chinese farmer with a bruised and bleeding face lurched towards me. Japanese soldiers burst through the trees after him and surrounded us, waving their bayonets. The leader drew his sword and pressed it under the man’s chin, making an indent in the flesh of his neck. He lifted the man’s eyes to his, but I could see in their dimness and in the droop of his mouth that the light had already gone out of him. The farmer’s jacket was streaming water and one of the soldiers took a knife and ripped
open the left panel. Rice dropped in damp clumps to the ground.

The soldiers made the man kneel, taunting him and howling like wolves. The pack leader plunged his sword into the man’s other jacket panel and blood and rice flowed out together. Vomit trickled from the man’s lips. I heard glass smash and turned to see Doctor Chou standing behind me, his vials broken and leaking on the rocky path. Horror was etched in the grooves of his face. I stepped back, unnoticed by the soldiers, and into his outstretched arms.

The soldiers were grunting, excited by the smell of blood and fear. The leader pulled at the prisoner’s collar, exposing his neck. In a single swoop he dropped his sword and sliced the man’s head off at the shoulders. The bloody flesh rolled into the river, turning the water the colour of sorghum wine. The corpse remained upright, as if praying, and gushed blood in spurts. The soldiers stood back from it calmly and without guilt or disgust. Pools of blood and fluid collected around our feet and stained our shoes and the soldiers began to laugh. The killer lifted his sword to the sunlight and frowned at the muck that dripped from it. He looked around for something with which to clean it and laid eyes on my dress. He grabbed for me, but the outraged doctor pushed me further inside his coat, muttering curses at the soldiers. The leader grinned, mistaking Doctor Chou’s curses for protests, and wiped his glistening sword across the doctor’s shoulder. It must have disgusted Doctor Chou, who had just witnessed the murder of a fellow Chinese, but he remained silent in order to protect me.

My father was alive then, and that evening, after
he had tucked me into bed and listened with restrained anger to my story, I heard him tell my mother on the landing: ‘It’s because their own leaders treat them so cruelly that they have lost all semblance of humanity. Their generals are to blame.’

At first the General brought little change to our lives and kept mainly to himself. He arrived with a futon, a gas cooker and a large trunk. We were only aware of his existence each morning, just after sunrise, when the black car would pull up outside our gate and the chickens in the yard would flutter as the General passed through them. And then in the evenings, when he would return late, weariness in his eyes, and give a nod to my mother and a smile to me before retiring to his room.

The General conducted himself with surprisingly good manners for a member of the occupying army. He paid rent and for anything he used, and after a while started bringing home rationed or banned items such as rice and sweet bean dumplings. He would place these luxuries, wrapped in cloth, on the dining table or kitchen bench before going to his room. My mother eyed the packages suspiciously and would not touch them, but she did not stop me from accepting the gifts. The General must have come to understand that my mother’s goodwill could not be bought with items that had been taken from the Chinese, as the gifts were soon supplemented with secret acts of mending. One day we would find that a previously jammed window had been fixed, on another that a squeaky door had been oiled or a draughty corner sealed.

But it wasn’t long before the General’s presence became more invasive, like a potted vine that finds its way into the soil and takes over the garden.

On the fortieth day after my father’s death, we visited the Pomerantsevs. The lunch was more lighthearted than usual, although it was only the four of us since the Lius would no longer come when we were invited.

Boris had managed to buy vodka, and even I was allowed some to ‘warm’ me. He amused us by suddenly whipping off his hat and revealing his closely cropped hair. My mother gingerly patted it and joked, ‘Boris, who did this cruel thing to you? You look like a Siamese cat.’

Olga poured some more vodka, teasing me by pretending to pass over my glass several times, then scowled. ‘He paid money for someone to do that to him! Some fancy new Chinese barber in the old quarter.’

Her husband grinned his yellow-toothed, happy grin and laughed. ‘She’s just upset because it looks better than when she does it.’

‘When I saw you looking like such a fool, my weak old heart nearly gave out,’ his wife retorted.

Boris took the vodka bottle and poured another round for everyone except his wife. When she frowned at him, he lifted his eyebrows and said: ‘Mind your weak old heart now, Olga.’

My mother and I walked home, holding hands and kicking at the freshly fallen snow. She sang a song about gathering mushrooms. Every time she laughed little puffs of steam floated from her mouth. She looked beautiful, despite the grief that was etched behind her eyes. I wanted to be like her
but I had inherited my father’s strawberry blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles.

When we reached our gate, my mother’s gaze narrowed at the sight of the Japanese lantern hanging over it. She rushed me inside, peeling off her coat and boots before helping me with mine. She jumped to the sitting room doorway, urging me to hurry so that I didn’t catch cold from the tiled floor in the entranceway. When she turned to face the room she stiffened like a panicked cat. I stepped up behind her. Piled in one corner and covered with a red cloth was our furniture. Next to it a window alcove had been converted into a shrine complete with a scroll and ikebana flower arrangement. The rugs were gone and had been replaced by tatami mats.

My mother stormed through the house in search of the General, but he was not in his room or in the yard. We waited by the coal heater until nightfall, my mother rehearsing angry words for him. But the General did not come home that night and she lapsed into quiet despondency. We fell asleep, snuggled side by side near the dying fire.

The General did not return to the house until two days later, by which time exhaustion had drained the fight out of my mother. When he burst through the door with handfuls of tea, dress cloth and thread, he seemed to expect us to be grateful. In the delight and mischief in his eyes I saw my father again, the provider who found pleasure in securing treasures for his loved ones.

The General changed into a kimono of grey silk and set about cooking us vegetables and bean curd. My mother, whose elegant antique chairs had been packed away and who had no choice but to sit cross-legged on
a cushion, stared out in front of her, purse-mouthed and indignant, while the house soaked in the aroma of sesame seed oil and soy sauce. I gaped at the lacquered plates the General set out on the low table, speechless but thankful for the small mercy that the General was cooking for us. I would have hated to see what would have happened had he ordered my mother to cook for him. He was obviously not like the Japanese men I had seen in our village, whose women had to wait on them hand and foot, and who made their wives walk several paces behind them, burdened by the weight of whatever goods they had bought at the markets, while they strutted on ahead, empty-handed, heads held high. Olga once said that the Japanese race had no women, just donkeys.

The General placed the noodles in front of us and, with nothing more than a grunt of ‘
Itadakimasu
’, began eating. He seemed not to notice that my mother did not touch her plate, or that I sat staring at the juicy noodles, my mouth salivating. I was torn between my hunger pangs and my loyalty to my mother. As soon as the General finished eating, I rushed to clear the plates so that he wouldn’t see that we had not eaten his meal. It was the best compromise I could make, for I did not want my mother’s annoyance to bring any harm to her.

When I returned from the kitchen, the General was straightening out a roll of Japanese paper. It wasn’t white and shiny like Western paper, nor was it completely matt. It was luminous. The General was on his hands and knees while my mother looked on, an exasperated expression on her face. The scene reminded me of a fable my father had once read to me about Marco Polo’s first appearance before Kublai Khan, the ruler of China. In a gesture
contrived to demonstrate European superiority, Polo’s assistants unravelled a bolt of silk in front of the emperor and his courtiers. The material unfurled into a glistening stream that began with Polo and ended at the feet of Khan. After a moment’s silence the emperor and his entourage burst into laughter. Polo soon discovered that it was hard to impress people who had been producing fine silk centuries before the Europeans stopped wearing animal skins.

The General beckoned for me to sit next to him and laid out an ink pot and calligraphy brush. He dipped the brush and set it to the paper, pouring out the feminine swirls of Japanese
hiragana
. recognised the letters from the lessons we’d had when the Japanese had first taken over my school, before they decided it was better not to educate us at all and shut it down.

‘Anya-chan,’ the General said in his jumbled Russian, ‘I teach you Japanese characters. Important for you to learn.’

I watched him deftly make the syllables come to life.
Ta, chi, tsu, te, to
. His fingers moved as if he were painting rather than writing and his hands mesmerised me. The skin was smooth and hairless, the nails as clean as bleached pebbles.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself and your people,’ cried my mother, snatching the paper from the General. She tried to tear it, but it was sinewy and pliant. So she scrunched it into a ball and threw it across the room. The paper dropped soundlessly to the floor.

I sucked in a breath. She glanced at me and stopped herself from saying anything more. She was trembling with anger but also with fear at what her outburst might cost us.

The General sat with his hands on his knees, not moving. The expression on his face was neutral. It was impossible to tell whether he was angry or just thinking. The tip of the brush dripped ink onto the tatami mat, where it spread out into a dark stain, like a wound. After a while the General reached into his kimono sleeve and took out a photograph and gave it to me. It was a picture of a woman in a black kimono and a young girl. The girl wore her hair in a topknot and had eyes as pretty as those of a deer. She looked almost the same age as me. The woman was glancing slightly out of the frame. Her hair was pulled away from her face. Her lips were powdered white and filled in with a narrow bow, but this couldn’t hide the fullness of her mouth. The expression on her handsome face was formal, but something about the turn of her head suggested she was smiling at someone off camera.

‘I have a little girl at home in Nagasaki with her mother and no father,’ the General said. ‘And you are a little girl without a father. I must take care of you.’

With that he stood up, bowed and left the room, leaving my mother and I standing with our mouths open, unable to think of anything to say.

Every second Tuesday the knife sharpener would come to our street. He was an old Russian with a lined face and mournful eyes. He had no hat and kept his head warm by wrapping it in rags. His sharpening wheel was strapped to a sled pulled by two Alsatians, and I would play with the dogs while my mother and our neighbours gathered to sharpen their knives and
axes. One Tuesday Boris approached my mother and whispered that one of our neighbours, Nikolai Botkin, had disappeared. My mother’s face froze for a moment before she whispered back, ‘The Japanese or the Communists?’

Boris shrugged. ‘I saw him only the day before yesterday at the barber in the old quarter. He talked too much. Boasted too much about how the Japs are losing the war and that they are just concealing it from us. The next day,’ said Boris, clenching his hand and then springing it open to the air, ‘he is gone. Like dust. That man’s mouth was too big for his own good. You never know whose side the other customers are on. Some Russians want the Japs to win.’

At that moment there was a loud cry, ‘
Kazaaa!
’, and our garage doors flew open and a man ran out. He was naked, except for a knotted bandana pulled low on his brow. I didn’t realise that it was the General until I saw him throw himself into the snow and leap up for joy. Boris tried to cover my eyes but through the gaps in his fingers I was startled to see the General’s shrivelled appendage jiggling between his legs.

Olga slapped her knees and screeched with laughter, while the other neighbours stared, open-mouthed, in amazement. But my mother saw the hot tub that had been constructed in her sacred garage and screamed. This last insult was too much for her to bear. Boris dropped his hands and I turned to see my mother as she had been before my father’s death, her cheeks glowing and her eyes on fire. She raced into the yard, picking up a spade by the gate on her way. The General glanced from his hot tub to my mother, as if he were expecting her to marvel at his ingenuity.