White Gardenia (3 page)

‘How dare you!’ she screamed at him.

The smile died on his face but I could see that he couldn’t comprehend her reaction.

‘How dare you!’ she screamed again, hitting him across the cheek with the spade handle.

Olga gasped but the General didn’t seem worried about the neighbours witnessing my mother’s insurrection. He didn’t take his eyes from her face.

‘It’s one of the few things I have left to remember him by,’ my mother said, losing her breath.

The General’s face reddened. He stood up and retreated into the house without a word.

The following day the General dismantled the hot tub and offered us the wood for the fire. He took away the tatami mats and put back the Turkish carpets and sheepskin rugs for which my father had once traded his gold watch.

Later in the afternoon he asked if he could borrow my bicycle. My mother and I peered through the curtains to watch the General trundle down the road. My bike was too small for him. The pedals were short, so that with each rotation his knees passed his hips. But he handled the bicycle skilfully and in a few minutes disappeared through the trees.

By the time the General returned, my mother and I had adjusted the furniture and rugs back to almost the very inch where they had stood before.

The General glanced around the room. A shadow passed over his face. ‘I wanted to make it beautiful for you but I did not succeed,’ he said, using his foot to examine the magenta rug that had triumphed over his simple tatami. ‘Perhaps we are too different.’

My mother almost smiled but stopped herself. I thought the General was about to leave, but he turned one more time to glance back at her, not at all
like a regal military man but more like a shy boy who has been scolded by his mother. ‘Maybe I have found something on whose beauty we can agree?’ he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a glass box.

My mother hesitated before taking it from him, but in the end couldn’t resist her own curiosity. I leaned forward, compelled to see what the General had brought. My mother opened the lid and a delicate scent wafted into the air. I knew it at once, although it was something I had never experienced before. The perfume became stronger, floating around the room and enveloping us in its spell. It was a blend of magic and romance, the exotic East and the decadent West. It made my heart ache and my skin tingle.

My mother’s eyes were on me. They were glistening with tears. She held out the box and I stared at the creamy white flower inside. The sight of the perfect bloom set in a foliage of glossy green leaves conjured up a place where the light was dappled and birds sang day and night. I wanted to cry with the beauty of it, for instantly I knew the name of the flower, although until then I had only ever seen it in my imagination. The tree originated from China but was tropical and would not grow in Harbin where the frosts were brutal.

The white gardenia was a legend my father had spun for my mother and I many times. He had first seen the flower himself when he had accompanied his family to the Tsar’s summer ball at the Grand Palace. He would describe to us the women in their flowing gowns with jewels sparkling in their hair, the footmen and the carriages, and a supper of fresh caviar, smoked goose and
sterlet
soup served at round glass
tables. Later there was a fireworks display choreographed to the music of Tchaikovsky’s
Sleeping Beauty
. After meeting the Tsar and his family, my father walked into a room whose glass doors were thrown open to the garden. That was when he first saw them. The porcelain pots of gardenias had been imported from China for the occasion. In the summer air their delicate scent was intoxicating. The flowers seemed to nod and receive my father gracefully, as the Tsarina and her daughters had done just moments before. From that night on my father had been enamoured by the memory of northern white nights and a bewitching flower whose perfume conjured up paradise.

More than once my father had tried to purchase a bottle of the scent so that my mother and I could relive this memory too, but no one in Harbin had heard of the enchanting flower and his efforts were always in vain.

‘Where did you get this?’ my mother asked the General, running her fingertip over the dewy petals.

‘From a Chinaman called Huang,’ he answered. ‘He has a hothouse outside of the city.’

But my mother barely heard his answer, her mind was a million miles away on a St Petersburg night. The General turned to go. I followed him to the foot of the stairs.

‘Sir,’ I whispered to him. ‘How did you know?’

He raised his eyebrows and stared at me. His bruised cheek was the colour of a fresh plum.

‘About the flower,’ I said.

But the General only sighed, touched my shoulder and said, ‘Goodnight.’

By the time spring came and the snow started melting there were rumours everywhere that the Japanese were losing the war. In the night I could hear planes and gunfire, which Boris told us was the Soviets fighting the Japanese at the borders. ‘God help us,’ he said, ‘if the Soviets get here before the Americans.’

I decided to find out whether the Japanese were really losing the war and hatched a plan to follow the General to his headquarters. My first two attempts to get up before him failed when I slept past my own usual waking time, but on the third day I was woken by a dream of my father. He was standing before me, smiling, and saying, ‘Don’t worry. You will seem all alone, but you won’t be. I will send someone.’ His image faded and I blinked at the early morning light making its way through my curtains. I leaped out of bed into the chilly air, and only had to pull on my coat and hat, having prepared myself by sleeping fully clothed and with my boots on. I sneaked out the kitchen door and to the side of the garage where I had hidden my bicycle. I crouched on the slushy ground and waited. A few minutes later the black car pulled up at our gate. The front door opened and the General strode out. When the car moved off, I jumped on my bicycle and pedalled furiously to keep even a discreet distance. The sky was cloudy and the road dark and muddy. When it reached the junction, the car stopped and I hid behind a tree. The driver reversed a short distance and changed direction, no longer heading along the road to the next village where the General had told us he went each day, but taking the main one to the city. I mounted my bicycle again but when I reached the junction I hit a rock and toppled over,
slamming my shoulder into the ground. I winced in pain and looked at my bicycle. The front spokes had been bent by my boot. Tears leaked from my eyes and I limped back up the hill, walking the squealing bike next to me.

Just before I reached home I saw a Chinese man peek out from a grove of trees by the road. He looked as if he was waiting for me, so I crossed to the other side and began running with my wonky bicycle. But he soon caught up, greeting me in well-spoken Russian. There was something in his glassy-eyed gaze that made me afraid and I replied with silence. ‘Why,’ he asked, sighing as if he were talking to a naughty sister, ‘do you let the Japanese stay with you?’

‘We had nothing to do with it,’ I answered, my eyes still averted. ‘He just came and we couldn’t say no.’

He took the handlebars of the bicycle, pretending to help me with it, and I noticed his gloves. They were padded and shaped as if he had apples in them instead of hands.

‘They are very bad, the Japanese,’ he continued. ‘They have done terrible things. The Chinese people will not forget who helped us and who helped them.’ His tone was kind and intimate but his words sent a chill through me and I forgot the ache in my shoulder. He stopped pushing the bicycle and laid it on its side. I wanted to run but I was frozen with fear. Slowly and deliberately he lifted his glove to my face and then pulled the material away with the grace of a magician. He held before me a mangled mess of badly healed flesh, twisted into a club with no fingers. I cried out at the horror of it but knew he was not doing it for effect alone; it was a warning. I left my bicycle and ran through the gate to my
house. ‘My name is Tang!’ the man called out after me. ‘Remember it!’

I turned when I reached the door but he was gone. I clambered up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom, my heart beating like thunder in my chest. But when I pushed open the door I saw that she was still asleep, her dark hair spread over the pillow. I removed my coat, gently lifted the bedclothes and climbed in beside her. She sighed and brushed her hand against me before falling back into a sleep as still as death.

August was the month of my thirteenth birthday, and despite the war and my father’s death, my mother was determined to keep our family tradition of taking me to the old quarter to celebrate. Boris and Olga drove us into the city that day; Olga wanted to buy some spices and Boris was going to get his hair cut again. Harbin was the place of my birth, and although many Chinese said that we Russians never belonged nor had any right to it, I felt that it somehow belonged to me. When we entered the city, I saw all that was familiar and home to me in the onion-domed churches, the pastel-coloured buildings and the elaborate colonnades. Like me, my mother was born in Harbin. She was the daughter of an engineer who had lost his job on the railways after the Revolution. It was my noble father who had somehow connected us to Russia and made us see ourselves in the architecture of the Tsars.

Boris and Olga dropped us off in the old quarter. It was unusually hot and humid that day, so my mother suggested we try the city’s speciality, vanilla
bean ice-cream. Our favourite café was bustling with people and much livelier than we had seen it in years. Everyone was talking about the rumours that the Japanese were about to surrender. My mother and I took a table near the window. A woman at the next table was telling her older companion that she had heard the Americans bombing the previous night, and that a Japanese official had been murdered in her district. Her companion nodded solemnly, running his hand through his grey beard and commenting, ‘The Chinese would never dare do that if they didn’t feel that they were winning.’

After my ice-cream, my mother and I took a walk around the quarter, noticing which shops were new and remembering the shops that had disappeared. A peddler of porcelain dolls tried to entice me with her wares, but my mother smiled at me and said, ‘Don’t worry, I have something for you at home.’

I spotted the red and white pole of a barber’s shop with a sign in Chinese and Russian. ‘Look, Mama!’ I said. ‘That must be Boris’s barber.’ I rushed to the window to peek inside. Boris was in the chair, his face covered in shaving foam. A few other customers were waiting, smoking and laughing like men with nothing much to do. Boris saw me in the mirror and turned and waved. The bald-headed barber, in an embroidered jacket, also looked up. He had a Confucian moustache and goatee and wore glasses with thick frames, the kind popular among Chinese men. But when he saw my face pressed against the window, he quickly turned his back to me.

‘Come on, Anya,’ my mother laughed, pulling my arm. ‘Boris will get a bad haircut if you distract the barber. He might cut off his ear, and then Olga will be annoyed with you.’

I followed my mother obediently, but as we neared the corner I turned one more time towards the barber’s shop. I couldn’t see the barber through the shine on the glass, but I realised that I knew those eyes: they had been round and bulging and familiar to me.

When we returned home my mother sat me before her dressing table and reverently undid my girlish plaits and swept my hair into an elegant chignon like hers, with the hair parted at the side and bunched at the nape of the neck. She dabbed perfume behind my ears, then showed me a velvet box on her dresser. When she opened it I saw inside the gold and jade necklace my father had given her as a wedding present. She picked it up and kissed it, before placing it around my throat and fastening the clip.

‘Mama!’ I protested, knowing how much the necklace meant to her.

She pursed her lips. ‘I want to give it to you now, Anya, because you are becoming a young woman. Your father would have been pleased to see you wear it on special occasions.’

I touched the necklace with trembling fingers. Although I missed seeing my father and talking with him, I felt that he was never far away. The jade seemed warm against my skin, not cold.

‘He’s with us, Mama,’ I said. ‘I know it.’

She nodded and sniffed back a tear. ‘I have something else for you, Anya,’ she said, opening the drawer near my knee and taking out a package wrapped in cloth. ‘Something to remind you that you will always be my little girl.’

I took the package from her and untied the knot, excited to see what was inside. It was a matroshka doll with the smiling face of my late grandmother.
I turned to my mother, knowing that she had painted it. She laughed and urged me to open it and find the next doll. I unscrewed the doll’s torso and found that the second doll had dark hair and amber eyes. I smiled at my mother’s joke, and knew that the following doll would have strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes, but when I saw it also had a smatter of freckles across its funny face, I burst into giggles. I opened that doll to find a smaller one and looked up again at my mother. ‘Your daughter and my granddaughter,’ she said. ‘And with her smaller baby daughter inside her.’

I screwed all the dolls back together and lined them up on the dressing table, contemplating our matriarchal journey and wishing that my mother and I could always be just as we were at that moment.

Afterwards, in the kitchen, my mother placed an apple
pirog
before me. She was just about to cut the little pie when we heard the front door open. I glanced at the clock and knew it would be the General. He spent a long time in the entranceway before coming into the house. When he did finally enter the kitchen, he stumbled, his face a sickly colour. My mother asked if he was ill but he didn’t answer her and collapsed into a chair, resting his head in his folded arms. My mother stood up, horrified, and asked me to fetch some warm tea and bread. When I offered these to the General, he looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes.

He glanced at my birthday pie and reached over to me, patting my head clumsily. I could smell the alcohol on his breath when he said, ‘You are my daughter.’ The General turned to my mother and with tears falling down his cheeks said to her, ‘You are my wife.’ Sitting back in the chair, he composed
himself, wiping his face with the back of his hand. My mother offered him the tea and he took a sip and a slice of bread. His face was contorted with pain, but after a while it relaxed and he sighed as if he had reached a decision. He rose from the table and, turning to my mother, gave a charade performance of her hitting him with the spade handle after discovering his secret hot tub. He laughed then, and my mother looked at him, astonished for a moment, before laughing herself.