White Gardenia (4 page)

She asked him in slow Russian what he did before the war, had he always been a general. He looked confused for a moment, then pointed his finger to his nose and asked ‘Me?’ My mother nodded and repeated her question. He shook his head and closed the door behind him, muttering in Russian so well pronounced that he could have been one of us, ‘Before all this madness? I was an actor. In the theatre.’

The next morning the General was gone. There was a note pinned to the kitchen door, written in precise Russian. My mother read it first, her frightened eyes scanning the words twice, then handed it to me. The General had instructed us to burn everything he had left in the garage and to burn the note after reading it. He said that he had placed our lives in great danger when his only wish had been to protect us. He told us that we must destroy every trace of him for our own sake.

My mother and I ran to the Pomerantsevs’ house. Boris was chopping wood, but stopped when he saw us, wiping the sweat from his ruddy face and rushing us inside.

Olga was by the stove, twisting her knitting in her hands. She jumped out of her chair when she saw us.
‘Have you heard?’ she asked, white-faced and shaking. ‘The Soviets are coming. The Japanese have surrendered.’

Her words seemed to shatter my mother. ‘The Soviets or the Americans?’ she asked, her voice rising in agitation.

I could feel myself inwardly willing that it was the Americans who were coming to liberate us with their wide smiles and bright flags. But Olga shook her head. ‘The Soviets,’ she cried. ‘They are coming to help the Communists.’

My mother handed her the General’s note. ‘My God!’ said Olga after reading it. She collapsed into her chair and passed the note to her husband.

‘He spoke fluent Russian?’ Boris asked. ‘You didn’t know?’

Boris began talking about an old friend in Shanghai, someone who would help us. The Americans were on their way there, he said, and my mother and I should go immediately. My mother asked if Boris and Olga would come too, but Boris shook his head and joked, ‘Lina, what are they going to do to a couple of old reindeers like us? The daughter of a White Army colonel is a much better prize. You must get Anya out of here now.’

With the wood Boris had chopped for us we made a fire and burned the letter along with the General’s bedding and eating utensils. I watched my mother’s face as the flames rose and felt the same loneliness I saw written there. We were cremating a companion, someone we had never known or understood, but a companion just the same. My mother was relocking the garage when she noticed the trunk. It was jammed into a corner and hidden under some empty sacks. We lugged it out of its hiding place. The trunk
was antique and beautifully carved with a picture of an old man with a long moustache holding a fan and gazing across a pond. My mother smashed the padlock with an axe and we lifted the lid together. The General’s uniform was folded there. She picked it up and I saw an embroidered jacket in the bottom of the trunk. Underneath the jacket we found a false moustache and beard, some makeup, thick-rimmed glasses and a copy of the
New Pocket Atlas of China
folded in a sheet of old newspaper. My mother stared at me, puzzled. I said nothing. I hoped that if only I knew the General’s secret we would be safe.

After we had burned everything, we turned over the soil and patted away the stain with the backs of our shovels.

My mother and I went to the district official’s office to get a permit to go to Dairen where we hoped to board a ship to Shanghai. There were dozens of other Russians waiting in the corridors and on the staircase, and some other foreigners and Chinese too. They were all talking about the Soviets and how some of them were already in Harbin, rounding up the White Russians. An old lady beside us told my mother that the Japanese family next door to her had committed suicide, terrified of the vengeance of the Chinese. My mother asked her what had made Japan surrender, and she shrugged, but a young man answered that he had heard rumours of a new kind of bomb dropped on Japanese cities. The official’s assistant came out and told us that no permits would be issued until all those seeking them had been interviewed by a member of the Communist party.

When we returned home our dogs were nowhere in sight and the door was unlocked and ajar. My mother paused before pushing it open, and just as her face on the day after my father’s mourning remains in my memory, so is that moment imprinted on my mind, like a scene from a film played over and over again: my mother’s hand on the door, the door swinging slowly open, the darkness and silence inside, and the incredible sense of knowing that someone was there, waiting for us.

My mother’s hand dropped to her side and felt for mine. It wasn’t trembling as it had since my father’s death. It was warm and strong and decisive. We moved together, not taking off our shoes in the entranceway as we had always done, but continuing on into the sitting room. When I saw him there at the table, his mutilated hands resting before him, I wasn’t surprised. It was as if I had been expecting him all along. My mother said nothing. She met his glassy eyes with a blank expression. He gave a bitter smile and motioned for us to sit down at the table with him. It was then that we noticed the other man, the one standing by the window. He was tall with piercing blue eyes and a moustache that hung from his lip like a winter fur.

Although it was summer, darkness fell quickly that evening. I remember the sensation of my mother’s firm grip on my hand, the fading afternoon light retreating across the floor, and then the whistling sound of a storm beating against the unshuttered windows. Tang interviewed us first, his tight-lipped smile appearing whenever my mother answered his questions. He told us that the General had not been a general at all, but a spy who also masqueraded as a barber. He was fluent in Chinese
and Russian, a master of disguise who used his skills to gather information on the Resistance. Because the Russians thought he was Chinese, they felt quite comfortable gathering at his shop and discussing their plans, and revealing those of their Chinese counterparts. I was glad then that I had not told my mother that I had understood who the General was as soon as I saw the costume in the trunk. Tang’s face was fixed on my mother’s and she looked so shocked that I felt sure he would believe she had no part in the General’s work.

But even though it was obvious that my mother had not known who the General was, that we had not received any visitors while he lived with us, and that we were unaware that he could speak any language other than Japanese, it could not erase the hate Tang felt towards us. His whole person seemed to be inflamed with it. Such malice burned to only one goal: revenge.

‘Madame Kozlova, have you heard of Unit 731?’ he asked, restrained anger contorting his face. He seemed to be satisfied when my mother didn’t answer. ‘No, of course not. Nor would have your General Mizutani. Your cultured, well-spoken General Mizutani who bathed once a day and has never in his life killed a man with his own hands. But he seemed quite content to condemn people there, as you were to house a man whose countrymen have been slaughtering us. You and the General have as much blood on your hands as any army.’

Tang lifted his hand and waved the infected mess in front of my mother’s face. ‘You Russians, protected by your white skin and Western ways, don’t know about the live experiments that took place in the district next to this one. I am the only survivor. One of the many
they tied to stakes in the snow, so that their nice clean educated doctors could observe the effects of frostbite and gangrene in order to prevent it happening to their own soldiers. But perhaps we were the lucky ones. They always intended to shoot us in the end. Not like the others, whom they infected with plague then cut open without anaesthetic to observe the effects. I wonder if you could imagine the feeling of having your head sawn open while still alive? Or being raped by a doctor so that he could impregnate you then cut you open and look at the foetus.’

Horror pinched my mother’s face but she never took her eyes off Tang. Seeing that he hadn’t broken her, he flashed his cruel smile again, and using his clubbed hand and elbow removed a photograph from a folder on the table. It appeared to be of someone tied down on a table surrounded by doctors, but the overhead light was reflecting in the middle of it and I couldn’t make it out clearly. He told my mother to pick it up; she looked at it and turned away.

‘Perhaps I should show it to your daughter?’ he said. ‘They are about the same age.’

My mother’s eyes flamed and she met his hate with her anger. ‘My daughter is only a child. Hate me if you want, but what say has she had in anything?’ She glanced at the photograph again and tears came to her eyes, but she blinked them away. Tang smiled, triumphant. He was about to say something when the other man coughed. I had almost forgotten the Russian, he had sat so quietly, gazing out the window, perhaps not listening at all.

When the Soviet officer questioned my mother, it was if we had changed the script and were suddenly in a different play. He was unconcerned with Tang’s thirst for revenge or details about the General. He
acted as if the Japanese had never been in China; he had really come to grab my father’s throat and, my father not being there, had settled on us. His questions to my mother were all about her family background and that of my father. He asked about the value of our house and my mother’s assets, giving a little snort to each reply as if he were ticking off a form. ‘Well,’ he said, appraising me with his yellow-speckled eyes, ‘you won’t have such things in the Soviet Union.’

My mother asked him what he meant, and he replied with distaste, ‘She is the daughter of a colonel of the Russian Imperialist Army. A supporter of the Tsar who turned his guns on his own people. She has his blood. And you,’ he sneered at my mother, ‘are of little interest to us but of great interest to the Chinese, it seems. They need examples of what is done to traitors. The Soviet Union just needs to call home its workers. Its
young
, able-bodied workers.’

My mother’s face didn’t change expression, but she gripped my hand tighter, squeezing the blood out of it and bruising the bones. But I didn’t wince or cry out from the pain. I wanted her to hold me like that forever, to never let me go.

With the room spinning and me nearly passing out from the pain of my mother’s grip, Tang and the Soviet officer made their devil’s bargain: my mother in exchange for me. The Russian got his able-bodied worker and the Chinese man got his revenge.

I stood on the tips of my toes, reaching upwards to the train window so that I could touch the fingertips of my mother’s outstretched hand. She had pressed herself against the window frame so that she could be near to
me. From the corner of my eye I could see Tang standing with the Soviet officer by the car. He was pacing like a hungry tiger, waiting to take me. There was much confusion on the station. An elderly couple were clinging to their son. A Soviet soldier shoved them away, forcing the young man onto a carriage, pushing him in the back as if he were a sack of potatoes not a person. In the cramped carriage he tried to turn to look at his mother one last time, but more men were pushed in behind him and he lost his chance.

My mother gripped the window bars and hoisted herself higher so I could see her face more clearly. She was very drawn with shadows under her eyes, but she was still beautiful. She told me my favourite stories over again and sang the song about the mushrooms to calm my tears. Other people were reaching their hands out of the train windows to say goodbye to their families and neighbours, but the soldiers beat them back. The guard near us was young, almost a boy, with porcelain skin and eyes like crystals. He must have taken pity on us for he turned his back to us and shielded our last moment from the view of others.

The train began to pull away. I held onto my mother’s fingers as long as I could, side-stepping the people and boxes on the platform. I tried to keep up but the train gathered speed and I lost my grip. My mother was tugged away from me. She turned back, covering her mouth with her fist because she was no longer able to contain her own grief. My tears stung my eyes but I wouldn’t blink. I watched the train until it disappeared from view. I fell against a lamppost, weakened by the hole that was opening up inside me. But an unseen hand held me upright. I heard my father say to me: ‘You will seem all alone, but you won’t be. I will send someone.’

A
fter the train had gone there was a pause, like the interlude between a flash of lightning and the sound of thunder. I was afraid to turn and look at Tang. I imagined that he was creeping towards me, crawling as a spider does towards the moth it has caught in its web. There was no need to hurry, his prey was trapped. He could linger and savour the pleasure of his cleverness before devouring me. The Soviet officer would already be gone, my mother forgotten and his mind on other business. I was the daughter of a White Army colonel, but my mother would make a more useful labourer. Ideology was a catchcry to him. Practicality was more important. But Tang was not like that. He wanted his twisted justice done and would see this thing through until the end. I didn’t know what he had planned for me, but I was sure it would be something lingering and unspeakable. He wouldn’t just have me shot or thrown from a roof. He had said, `I want you to live daily with the consequences of what you and your
mother have done.’ Perhaps my fate would be that of the Japanese girls in my district, the ones who had not been able to escape. The Communists shaved their heads then sold them to the Chinese brothels that served the lowest of the low: lepers without noses and men with such terrible venereal diseases that half their flesh was rotted away.

I swallowed. Another train was pulling in on the opposite platform. It would be easy…so much easier, I thought, staring at the heavy wheels, the metal tracks. My legs trembled, I inched a step forward, but my father’s face flashed before me and I couldn’t move any further. I caught sight of Tang out of the corner of my eye. He was indeed lurking towards me, taking his time. There was hunger, not relief, on his face now that my mother was gone. He was coming for more. It’s over, I told myself. It’s all over.

A firecracker exploded into the sky and I jumped back, startled by the sound. A crowd of people in Communist uniform swamped the station. I stared at them, not able to take in their sudden appearance. They were shouting ‘
Oora! Oora!
’ and waving bright flags and beating drums and cymbals. They had come to welcome the arrival of more Russian Communists. They marched directly between Tang and myself. I saw him trying to fight his way through them, but he became trapped in their parade. The people were circling him. He was screaming at them but they couldn’t hear him above their cheers and music.

‘Go!’

I looked up. It was the young Soviet soldier, the one with eyes like crystals. ‘Go! Run!’ he shouted, pushing me with the butt of his rifle. A hand grabbed mine and I was pulled through the crowd. I couldn’t see who it was ahead of me. They dragged me
through the wriggling onslaught. Everything was human sweat and the smell of gunpowder from the firecrackers. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Tang was pushing through the crowd. He was gaining ground but the stumps of his hands hampered him. It was impossible for him to grab people to get them out of his way. He shouted orders to the young Soviet, who made as if to chase after me but purposely got himself tangled in the crowd. I was bumped and jostled, my shoulders and arms bashed and bruised. Up ahead through the sea of legs a car door opened up and I was thrust towards it. I recognised the hand then. I felt the calluses and knew the largeness of it. Boris.

I leaped into the car and Boris stepped on the pedal. Olga was in the passenger seat. ‘Oh my darling Anya. My little Anya!’ she cried. The road rolled away behind us. I looked through the back window. The crowd on the station was swelling, the disembarking Soviet soldiers adding to its number. I couldn’t see Tang.

‘Anya, get down under the blanket,’ Boris said to me. I did as I was told, and I felt Olga piling things on top of me. ‘Did you expect those people?’ she asked her husband.

‘No, I intended to grab Anya no matter what,’ he said. ‘But it seems that even the mad enthusiasm for the Communists can come in useful sometimes.’

A while later the car stopped and there were voices. The door opened and slammed. I heard Boris talking quietly outside. Olga was still in the front seat, wheezing under her breath. I felt sorry for her and her weak old heart. My own heart was beating wildly, and I clamped my mouth shut, as if that would somehow prevent anyone from hearing it.

Boris jumped back into the driver’s seat and we moved on. ‘A road block. I told them we have things to prepare for the Russians, and we are in a hurry,’ he said.

Two or three hours passed before Boris said I could come out from under the blanket. Olga lifted the bags off me, which turned out to be sacks of grain and vegetables. We were driving along a dirt road surrounded by mountain ridges. There was no one in sight. The fields were deserted. Up ahead I could see a burned-out farmhouse. Boris drove into the storage shed. The whole place smelled of hay and smoke and I wondered who had lived there. I knew from the shrine-like shape of the gates that they had been Japanese.

‘We will wait until dark before going to Dairen,’ said Boris.

We got out of the car and he spread out a blanket on the floor and told me to sit on it. His wife opened a small basket and pulled out some dishes and cups. She scraped some
kasha
onto a plate for me, but I felt so sick I could hardly eat it.

‘Take some, my darling,’ she said. ‘You need strength for the journey.’

I stared at Boris, who looked away.

‘But we are staying together,’ I said, feeling the fear constrict my throat. I knew that they were talking about sending me to Shanghai. ‘You must come with me.’

Olga bit her lip and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. ‘No, Anya. We must stay here or we will lead Tang straight to you. He is a vile creature who has not yet had his fill.’

Boris put his arm around my shoulders. I buried my face into his chest. I knew I would miss his smell,
the smell of oats and wood. ‘My friend, Sergei Nikolaievich, is a good man. He will take care of you,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘Shanghai will be much safer for you.’

‘And such fine things in Shanghai too,’ said Olga, trying to make me smile. ‘Sergei Nikolaievich is wealthy and will take you to shows and restaurants. It will be much more fun than staying here with us.’

At nightfall, by back roads and across farms, the Pomerantsevs drove me to the port of Dairen where a ship was leaving for Shanghai at sunrise.

When we arrived at the dock, Olga cleaned my face with the sleeve of her dress and slipped the matroshka doll and jade necklace my mother had given me into my coat pocket. I wondered how she had saved them or understood their importance but I had no time to ask her before the ship’s whistle sounded and the passengers were called on board.

‘We have already sent word to Sergei Nikolaievich to expect you,’ she said.

Boris helped me onto the gangway and handed me a small bag packed with a dress, a blanket and some food. ‘Make your way in this world, little one,’ he whispered to me, tears dripping down his face. ‘Make your mother proud. All our dreams now rest with you.’

Later, on the Huangpu River approaching Shanghai, I remembered those words and wondered if I could live up to them.

How many days passed before the towering skyline of Shanghai loomed up in the distance, I do not remember. Perhaps two, perhaps more. I was not
conscious of anything except a dark hole that seemed to have opened itself up in my heart, and the stench of opium smoke which choked the air day and night. The steamer was crammed with people fleeing the north, and several of the passengers lay about on their mats like emaciated cadavers, the stubs of their laced cigarettes clenched between their dirty fingers, their mouths like caverns in their faces. Before the war the foreigners had attempted to moderate the damage they had caused by imposing opium on China, but the Japanese invaders had used addiction to subdue the population. They had forced peasants in Manchuria to grow poppies and built factories in Harbin and Dairen to process it. The very poor injected it, the wealthy brewed it in pipes, and just about everyone else smoked it like tobacco. After eight years of occupation, it seemed that every Chinese male on the ship was addicted.

The afternoon we approached Shanghai, the steamer dipped and rose on the muddy river, sending bottles and children rolling. I gripped the railing, my gaze fastened on the makeshift houses that littered either side of the riverbank. They were windowless shacks propped one against the other like stacks of cards. Jammed next to them were rows of factories whose great furnaces exhaled gusts of smoke. The smoke wafted across the narrow, garbage-strewn streets and turned the air into one foul concoction of human waste and sulphur.

The other passengers displayed little interest in the metropolis we were approaching. They remained huddled in small groups, smoking or playing cards. The Russian man next to me was asleep on his blanket, an overturned bottle of vodka by his side and a stream of vomit running down his chest.
A Chinese woman squatted next to him, cracking nuts with her teeth and feeding them to her two small children. I wondered how they could be so impassive when I felt that we were being slowly drawn into the world of the damned.

I saw that my knuckles were raw from the breeze and I shoved them into my pockets. My fingers nudged the matroshka doll and I began to cry.

Further on, the slums gave way to a stretch of ports and villages. Men and women lifted their straw hats and looked up at us from their fishing baskets and rice sacks. Dozens of sampans converged on the steamer like carp to a piece of bread. The occupants offered us chopsticks, incense, lumps of coal, and one even held up his daughter. The little girl’s eyes were turned backwards with terror but she didn’t struggle against him. The sight of her made the bruise on my hand twinge, the one my mother had pressed there on our last night in Harbin. It was still swollen and blue. The ache reminded me of the tightness with which she had held it, and the belief her grip had given me that we could never be separated, that she would never let me go.

It was only when we reached the Bund that I could grasp any sense of Shanghai’s legendary wealth or beauty. The air was fresher there and the port full of cruise ships and a white ocean liner whose funnel was letting off steam in preparation for the journey ahead. Next to it a Japanese patrol boat with a gaping hole in the side and its bow half underwater listed against the dock. From the top deck of the steamer I could see the five-star hotel that had made the Bund famous: the Hotel Cathay with its arched windows and penthouse suites, and the line of rickshaws that curved around it like a long piece of string.

We disembarked into a waiting area at street level and were besieged by another wave of hawkers. But the wares the city peddlers offered us were much more exotic than those of the boat people: gold charms, ivory figurines, duck eggs. An old man pulled out a tiny crystal horse from a velvet bag and placed it in my palm. It had been diamond-cut and its planes sparkled in the sunlight. It made me think of the ice sculptures the Russians carved in Harbin, but I had no money in my pocket to spend and I had to hand it back to him.

Most of the passengers were greeted by relatives or whisked away in taxis or rickshaws. I stood alone in the subsiding babble of voices, nauseous with the panic that was rushing through my veins, my eyes flitting to every Western man, hoping that he would be Boris’s friend. The Americans had rigged up open-air screens to play newsreels from around the world of the closure of the war. I watched the scenes of joyous people dancing in the streets, smiling soldiers returning home to their peaches-and-cream wives, the speeches by smug-looking presidents and prime ministers, all subtitled with Chinese characters. It was as if America was trying to convince us that everything would be all right again. The broadcast ended with an honour roll of those countries, organisations and individuals who had helped liberate China from the Japanese. There was one group conspicuously absent from it: the Communists.

A neatly dressed Chinese man appeared before me. He handed me a gold-edged card with my name written on it in a cramped, hurried hand. I nodded and he picked up my bag, gesturing for me to follow him. When he saw that I was hesitant, he said: ‘It’s okay. Mr Sergei sent me. He will meet you at his house.’

On the street, away from the river breeze, the sun produced a sweltering, semitropical heat. Hundreds of Chinese were crouched in the gutters cooking spicy broths or displaying trinkets on blankets. Between them, peddlers pushed wheelbarrows of rice and wood. The manservant helped me into a rickshaw and soon we were being pulled along a road filled with bicycles, rattling tramcars and shiny American Buicks and Packards. I turned my head to look up at the grand colonial buildings, never having seen a city like Shanghai in my life.

The streets off the Bund were a maze of narrow laneways with washing strung from window to window like flags. Baldheaded children with weepy eyes peered curiously from dark doorways. On every corner there seemed to be a food vendor frying something that smelled like rubber, and I was relieved when the rancid air gave way to the aroma of freshly baked bread. The rickshaw ran under an arch and came out into an oasis of cobblestoned streets, Art Deco lamps and shops displaying pastries and antiques in their windows. We turned into a street lined with maple trees and came to a stop outside a high concrete wall. The wall was lime-washed an elegant blue but my eyes fixed on the fragments of broken glass cemented to its top edge and the barbed wire wrapped around the branches of the trees that overhung it.

The manservant helped me down from the rickshaw and rang a bell next to the gate. A few seconds later the gate swung open and an elderly Chinese maid greeted us, her face colourless like a corpse against her black cheongsam. She didn’t answer me when I introduced myself in Mandarin. She only lowered her eyes and guided me inside the compound.

The courtyard was dominated by a three-storey house with blue doors and lattice shutters. Another single-storey building was connected to the main house by a covered walkway and I assumed from the bedding slung over the windowsills that it was the servants’ quarters. The manservant handed my bag to the maid and disappeared into the smaller building. I followed the woman across the neat lawn and past flowerbeds bursting with roses the colour of blood.