Brother Fish (80 page)

With her guiding us in what still seemed an outrageous idea to export cray to America, we might even have half a chance of succeeding, although I must say I harboured very serious doubts that it could be made to work. If I was being perfectly honest with myself, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was a clever and strong-willed woman, Jimmy Oldcorn was a natural and charismatic leader and Jack McKenzie was – well, what the hell was I? I guess a fisherman who read books and worried a lot.

The obsequious waiter, still rubbing his hands together, appeared and asked if we'd enjoyed what he referred to as ‘your second course', pointing out politely that we hadn't ordered an entrée. Perhaps next time we came we might like to try the excellent Tasmanian oysters served with cocktail sauce, or the prawn cocktail. He also sincerely hoped we would enjoy our dessert.

He appeared again shortly with our pudding orders – strawberries and cream for Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, pavlova for Jimmy and crème caramel for me. This gave the head waiter the chance to glide away from our table with a deferential bow, the words
‘Bon appétit'
left hovering in the air behind him.

I wondered momentarily if our individual choice of sweets was a good omen or a bad one – whether it meant that, as potential business partners, each of us would make an equal but different contribution to the venture or end up never being able to see eye to eye on any problem. Despite the enormously generous offer she was making, I felt Jimmy and I would have to think very carefully about a business partnership with the dreaded justice of the peace and formidable editor of the
Queen Island Weekly Gazette
.

Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan spooned a single strawberry snow-capped with cream, and held the spoon poised in the air at chin level. ‘It all seems so very long ago when, as a fifteen-year-old refugee fleeing from the Bolsheviks, I arrived in Shanghai in 1922,' she began.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Manchurian Piano Player

‘I was born on a modest country estate on the Volga River near the city of Astrakhan, only a few miles from the border of Kazakhstan, where my family had lived for several generations. My father, Count Nikolai Georgii Avksent'ievich Lenoir, was the eldest of four sons,' she said, smiling, realising his name must seem like a bit of a mouthful. ‘In Russia, when you first introduce a nobleman you use all his names. I should also emphasise that at the time, a count wasn't always a title that meant prestige and wealth. At best we were minor aristocracy, and in the salons of St Petersburg and Moscow we would have been dismissed as country bumpkins or, worse still, in trade – and, even more inappropriately, in fish. Unlike the true wealthy and titled our fortunes didn't depend on vast land holdings and the number of peasants we owned, but instead came from the Caspian Sea and, more particularly, from the export of beluga caviar.'

Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan dipped into her strawberries again, half-finishing the bowl before she resumed talking. ‘I imagine we were well-off and I dare say, compared to the peasants and the fishermen on the river, we were considered enormously wealthy. At the age of eighteen, as was the tradition in most families like ours, my father entered the Aleksandrovskoe Military School in Moscow, where he eventually graduated as an officer and as a military engineer.

‘It had never been his intention to make a career in the army – as the eldest son he was responsible for running our fishing enterprises and managing the estate. Military training was where young noblemen at the time were euphemistically taught how to be gentlemen, while being trained to be officers in the tsar's Imperial Army. While they may have been young officer cadets, they were almost certainly not, for the most part, gentlemen. The time spent at a military academy was seen as a time when a young man from a good family sowed his wild oats before returning to the family estate to marry and settle down.

‘My father's return home from military training coincided with a growing demand in America for beluga caviar. He used his newly acquired skill as an engineer to build a new fish-processing plant on the river near the city of Volgograd, which was said to look remarkably like a fort and was soon known locally as Fort Nikolai. Shortly after returning, he married Celeste Margaret Jourdan, a ballet dancer whom he'd met during his last months in the military academy, at a reception held on Bastille Day at the French Consulate in Moscow.

‘I was born in 1906 on the family estate, and despite hopes for a male heir I was to be the only child. I was eight when the Great War broke out and my father joined the Russian Imperial Army as a captain in the Engineers. He was wounded early in 1915 while blowing up a bridge on the Turkish border.' She looked up. ‘Curiously, like the two of you, in the leg. He was to walk with a pronounced limp, one leg slightly shorter than the other, for the remainder of his life.'

‘Dat too bad, Nicole ma'am,' Jimmy offered, shaking his head in sympathy.

‘Rather than be invalided out of the army, he volunteered to work as a military engineer on the Trans-Siberian Railway. With Turkey controlling the Black Sea outlet to the Mediterranean through the Dardenelles, Germany controlling the Baltic Sea, and with the port of Murmansk in the Arctic Ocean frozen for a large part of the year, the Trans-Siberian Railway became Russia's main artery to the outside world with Vladivostok, where my father was posted, its main port. My mother found herself separated from her husband by almost the entire length of Russia. As his was largely a desk job, she insisted, against his will, that we join him.

‘The army promoted my father to major, then colonel, and transferred him to become the head of the Port Authority in Vladivostok. Aristocrats, even of a minor kind, were soon to become ubiquitous, but when we first arrived they were few and far between in that part of Russia. We were accepted readily, even gratefully, into the local society. My early life was spent, like most well-bred Russian children, learning to play the piano and, of course, with my mother a ballet teacher, to dance. I was also taught to sing. My mother loved to dance, although my father's gammy leg left her without a partner and my fondest childhood memories are of her winding up the gramophone and dancing with me every morning from the age of seven. By the time I was ten I'd learned all the classic dances as well as the latest steps coming out of America. Naturally, I spoke French, and upon arriving in Vladivostok my mother engaged a Chinese
amah
named Ah Lai, who came from a village near Harbin in Manchuria, to take care of me. Children pick up languages effortlessly, and I soon learned to speak Cantonese fluently.

‘I loved Ah Lai dearly and she eventually became more a member of the family than a servant, which was not the way one was expected to treat the Chinese in those days. When I grew too old for an
amah
, she became my mother's
tai-tai amah
– that is to say, her personal maid. With England and France being Russia's major allies, my father was anxious that I learn English as well. A very prim and proper spinster lady, Miss Rosen, was engaged to tutor me for half a day three times a week.' Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan laughed. ‘As I recall, she was very pedantic about vowels. “My dear, correctly spoken English is a matter of sounding your vowels clearly,” she would say. We would spend the first fifteen minutes of every lesson sounding out a number of words and sentences, with clearly accentuated vowels, she'd prepared in advance. “The clown bounced on the trampoline and burst a boil on his bottom that caused him to become discombobulated” was one of her very favourite sentences. I confess I thought it very funny, and we'd both giggle no matter how many times it was repeated.

‘It was a pleasant, privileged and comfortable childhood until 1917, a date I remember less for the revolution that toppled the Romanoff Dynasty and the murder by the Reds of the tsar and his family, than as the year my own beloved mother died. She was an early victim of the flu epidemic that was eventually to spread throughout the world and cause the death of between forty and fifty million souls. I was only eleven at the time, and so Ah Lai virtually became my mother.

‘Russia was now divided by two forces – the White Russians, previously the Russian Imperial Army, and the Communists, or Red Army. The White cause finally collapsed on the 7th of February 1920 when the head of the White Army in Siberia, Admiral Kolchak, was killed in Irkutsk. Vladivostok immediately became the destination for the petty aristocracy and bourgeoisie fleeing from the terror of the Red Army. While still in charge of the port my father no longer received a salary, but he nevertheless felt compelled to continue to work. Shiploads of refugees began to arrive from all over Russia and it was important that someone avoid complete chaos. As it was, it was only a matter of time before the Red Army would arrive and, fearing for my life but feeling himself duty bound to remain at his post, my father asked Ah Lai to take me to stay in her village near Harbin. It took several weeks to travel the 250 miles to her village in an ox cart driven by an old Chinaman who'd once had his throat cut by bandits but somehow survived. He could no longer talk other than to make a series of rattling noises, which the ox seemed to understand. He slept with the beast at night while we cooked and camped at the side of the road, which, at the time, I thought was a grand adventure.'

I couldn't believe what I was hearing – on top of everything else, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had lived as a gypsy. We were spellbound.

‘I spent eighteen months in my
amah
's
zu ji
, which means the village where ancestors were born, before my father arrived to fetch me. It was immediately obvious that his health was failing and that he was physically exhausted. Moreover, he arrived virtually empty-handed with only a small suitcase that contained a precious icon and a few personal belongings. As he had received almost no salary since the collapse of the White Army, we found ourselves in a most impecunious situation.'

She looked up and saw Jimmy's bemused face. ‘We were stony-broke,' she explained. ‘My mother's jewellery was all we had – several rings, pearl earrings, a string of pearls and a diamond bracelet, which Ah Lai had placed in a small leather drawstring pouch and kept concealed during our journey from Vladivostok . . .' she hesitated momentarily, ‘. . . within her woman's private part, in case we were robbed by bandits. These few trinkets and, of course, the icon of Christ on a donkey entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday were all we possessed.'

I hated loose ends in a story and couldn't help myself. ‘What about the estate, you know, the fish factory?' I asked. ‘That must have been worth something.'

‘Two of my father's brothers died in the war and the third was killed when the local fishermen stormed the processing plant after the communists took over. It is now run as a commune, but curiously it wasn't the last time the family would have a direct connection with it – although that comes much later in my story.'

She pushed the remaining strawberries aside, leaving three uneaten in the bowl. ‘My father and I moved into a single room in Harbin, sharing washing and cooking facilities with twenty other families. Water was obtained from a hand pump in the filthy courtyard of the building. My father tried to gain work as an engineer, but with a bad leg and rapidly deteriorating health there was little he could find to do. Refugees are a desperate lot and not given to charity, and no one remembered or cared that he had kept the port open and running for almost two years allowing a great many of them to escape from Russia. Finally he experienced what later I would realise was a mental breakdown, and suffered from a deep depression that made it impossible for him to leave his bed. He talked almost daily of suicide, and I was beside myself with worry.

‘Selling my mother's jewellery, together with what possessions my father had managed to bring with him, brought very little. Harbin had become the major destination for the fleeing White Russians and it was awash with jewellery going for a song. Buyers from Europe were converging on the city to snap up pieces worth fifty times what they paid for them. No group of refugees was ever worse equipped to make a living, or could have chosen a more inappropriate place in which to make it. Most had never worked – certainly none of the women and very few of the men, other than in the military, and even this had not been taken too seriously, or the rabble that formed the communists could never have won. Work was what a peasant was born and ordained by God himself to do.'

‘Sound like dem Russians, dey don't have no niggers,' Jimmy said. ‘In America dat time it da same.'

‘Well, yes, I imagine that was true, certainly before the Civil War,' she said, putting Jimmy's somewhat sweeping statement into some sort of perspective. Then she looked at us. ‘You will tell me if I'm becoming tedious, won't you?'

‘Nicole ma'am, dis a great story,' Jimmy said, while I nodded my agreement. We were beginning to see a Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan emerging we could never have even remotely imagined.

‘At that time in Russia it was believed that peasants were not only a lower form of human being but also a different species. The theory was often postulated among the aristocracy that these creatures had developed alongside modern man but with a smaller brain and a much higher threshold for pain, so that they were natural beasts of burden somewhat like an ox in human form. It was commonly thought that when an infant was born with the Siberian winter approaching it was the practice for a peasant family to fatten it up then kill it and pickle it to avoid starvation in the harsh winter months that lay ahead. One such case was reported in a Moscow newspaper in 1906, the year I was born. It was immediately accepted by many of the petty bourgeoisie and the nobility as a universal practice among the Siberian peasants. So it was hardly surprising that after 300 years of being used and treated as one might an animal, the Russian peasants finally rose up against their oppressors. But then again there is a paradox – it was the working classes in the cities that were the first to embrace communism, followed by the miners and finally the long-suffering Russian peasants.