White Gardenia (20 page)

‘You’re full of stories, Ivan,’ Irina laughed, standing up and brushing the sand off her legs. She wrapped her towel around her waist and, before I could say anything, hoisted herself into the jeep. ‘Come on, Anya,’ she said. ‘Join the tour. It’s free.’

‘Did you go to the doctor?’ Ivan asked me when I clambered on.

I was careful this time not to stare too closely at his face. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I’m surprised it was tropical worm. I got it just out of Shanghai.’

‘The ship you came on has done more than one journey. A lot of us have had the same thing. But you’re the first I’ve seen with it on the face. That’s the most dangerous place to have it. Too close to your eyes.’

The sandy beach track stretched for a mile, after which the coconut and nipa palms gave way to monstrous trees that crouched over us like demons. Their twisted trunks were draped in vines and parasitic plants. We passed a waterfall with an old
wooden sign nailed to the rock: ‘Beware of snakes near the water supply’.

A few minutes after the waterfall, Ivan brought the jeep to a stop. A mountain of blackened rocks blocked our path. Once the motor was off the unnatural quiet made me uneasy. There was no sound of birds singing, or the ocean or the wind. Something caught my attention, a pair of eyes on the rocks. I studied the mountain more closely and gradually came to see the relief of saints and papaya trees etched into it. A shiver pinched my spine. I had seen something like it before in Shanghai, but this Spanish church was ancient. A scatter of broken tiles was all that was left of the collapsed steeple, but the rest of the building was intact. Tiny ferns had taken root in every crack and I imagined the lepers, who had been on the island before the Americans arrived, milling around it and wondering if God had forsaken them the same way their fellow human beings had when they brought them here to die.

‘Stay in the jeep. Don’t get out for any reason,’ Ivan said, looking directly at me. ‘There are snakes everywhere…and old weapons. Doesn’t matter if I get blown to bits, but not pretty girls like you two.’

I understood why he had asked us to come then, why he had come looking for us on the beach. It was bravado. He had noticed my reaction to his face and he wanted to show me that he was not afraid for me to see it. I was glad that he had done it. It made me admire him because I was not like that. The mark on my cheek was not as bad as the scar on his face and yet it made me want to hide.

He threw aside a blanket and the hunter’s knife underneath it gleamed in the sunlight. He tucked
the knife into his belt and threw a coil of rope over his shoulder. I watched him disappear into the jungle.

‘He’s looking for more materials. They are going to build a movie screen,’ Irina explained.

‘He’s risking his life for a movie screen?’ I asked.

‘This island’s like Ivan’s home,’ said Irina. ‘A reason to go on living.’

‘I see,’ I said, and we lapsed into silence.

We waited over an hour, sucking in the still air and staring into the jungle for any sign of movement. The sea had dried on my skin and I could taste the salt on my lips.

Irina turned to me. ‘I heard that he was a baker in Tsingtao,’ she said. ‘During the war the Japanese discovered some Russians sending radio messages to a US ship. They took random revenge on the Russian population. They tied his wife and two baby daughters up in their shop and set it alight. He got that scar trying to save them.’

I sat down in the back of the jeep and rested my head on my knees. ‘How awful,’ I said. There was nothing more profound I could say. None of us had escaped the war unscarred. The agony I woke up to every morning was the same agony other people were experiencing too. The Tubabao sun bore down on my neck. I had only been there a day and already it was having an effect on me. It had magical powers. Powers to heal and to terrify, to drive you to madness or to relieve your pain. For the past month I had thought that I was alone. I was glad to have met Irina and Ivan. If they could find reasons to go on living, perhaps I would too.

A week later I was at my job in the IRO office, typing a letter on a manual machine with a missing Y key. I had learned to compensate for the typewriter’s shortcoming by substituting Y words for ones without the missing letter. ‘Yearly’ became ‘annual’, ‘young’ became ‘adolescent’ and ‘Yours truly’ changed to ‘With deepest regards’. My English vocabulary improved rapidly. However, I did strike a problem with Russian names, many of which contained Ys. For those I would type a V and painstakingly pencil in a stem.

The office was a Nissen hut with one open side, two desks and a filing cabinet. My chair scraped noisily on the cement floor every time I moved, and I had to peg the top of my papers so that they wouldn’t fly away in the sea breeze. I worked five hours a day and was paid one American dollar and a can of fruit a week. I was one of the few people paid for their work, most of the other refugees were expected to work for free.

On that afternoon Captain Connor was being annoyed by a persistent fly. He swatted at it, but the insect eluded him for over an hour. It landed on the report I had just typed and in exasperation Captain Connor squashed it with his fist, then looked guiltily at me.

‘Shall I type that page again?’ I asked.

Such accidents were common in our office but to retype a full page perfectly, when I had never used a typewriter before coming to the island, was a laborious task.

‘No, no,’ said Captain Connor, lifting the paper and flicking the fly’s remains off it with his fingers. ‘It’s almost the end of your day and the thing landed right at the end of a paragraph. It looks like an exclamation mark.’

I fitted the cloth cover over the keys and locked the typewriter away in its special box. I was picking up my bag to leave when Irina turned up.

‘Anya, guess what?’ she said. ‘I’m going to sing cabaret on the main stage this weekend. Will you come?’

‘Of course!’ I cried. ‘How exciting!’

‘Grandmother is excited too. She’s not well enough to play the piano, so I wondered if you could take her and keep her company?’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘And I will wear my best evening dress to mark the occasion.’

Irina’s eyes flashed. ‘Grandmother loves getting dressed up! She’s been racking her brains about your mother all week. I think she has found someone on the island who can help you.’

I had to bite my lip to stop it trembling. It was four years since I had seen my mother. I was a little girl when we were parted. After all that had happened to me, she had started to seem like a dream. If I could talk to someone about her, I knew she would become real again.

On the evening of Irina’s concert, Ruselina and I trampled through the ferns to the main square. We clutched our evening dresses at the hems, mindful that they shouldn’t get snagged on the thick grass. I was wearing a ruby evening gown and the damson shawl the Michailovs had given me for Christmas. Ruselina’s white hair was piled up on her crown. The style went well with her empire dress. She looked like a member of the Tsar’s court. Although she was frail and clung tightly to my arm, her cheeks were rosy and her eyes sparkled.

‘I’ve been talking to people from Harbin about your mother,’ she said. ‘One of my old friends from
the city thinks she knew an Alina Pavlovna Kozlova. She’s very old and her memory comes and goes, but I can take you to see her.’

We passed a tree full of flying foxes hanging like fruit from its branches. The foxes took flight when they heard us, transforming into black angels winging across the sapphire sky. We stopped to watch their silent journey.

I was thrilled with Ruselina’s news. Although I understood that the woman from Harbin probably couldn’t shed any more light on my mother’s fate, to find someone who knew her, to whom I could talk of her, was as close as I could get to her then.

Ivan met us outside his hut. When he saw our outfits he rushed back inside and returned with a stool in one hand, a wooden crate in the other, and a cushion pressed under each armpit. ‘I can’t have elegant women like you sitting on the grass,’ he said.

We reached the main square and found ushers with wetted-down hair and sun-bleached jackets directing people to seating areas. The whole camp seemed to have turned out for the concert. Ruselina, Ivan and I were sent to the VIP section near the stage. I saw doctors and nurses carrying people on stretchers. There had been a dengue fever outbreak a few weeks before I arrived on the island and the medical volunteers were carrying the patients from the convalescing tents to a special section marked ‘hospital’.

The show opened with a variety of acts including poetry readings, some comedy skits, a mini ballet and even an acrobat. When the evening light faded into darkness and the lights came on, Irina appeared on the stage in a red flamenco dress. The audience stood up and cheered. A young girl with braids and a short
skirt lifted herself up to the piano stool to accompany her. The girl waited for the audience to be still before placing her hands over the keys. She couldn’t have been more than nine but her fingers were magic. She conjured up a sad melody that pierced the night. Irina’s voice melded with it. The audience was mesmerised. Even the children were well behaved and quiet. It seemed we were all holding our breath, afraid to miss a single note. Irina sang about a woman who had lost her lover in the war, but who could be happy when she remembered him. The words brought tears to my eyes. ‘
They told me you would never return, but I didn’t believe them. Train after train returned without you, but in the end I was right. As long as I can see you in my heart, you are with me always.
’

I remembered my mother’s friend in Harbin, an opera singer I knew only as Katya. Her voice could make you feel that your heart was going to break. She said it was because when she sang a sad piece she thought about the fiancé she had lost in the Revolution. I looked at Irina standing on the stage, her dress glimmering against her gold skin. What was she thinking about? A mother and father who would never hold her again? She was an orphan. So was I. An orphan of sorts.

Afterwards, Irina sang cabaret songs in French as well as Russian, and the audience clapped along. But it was the first one that moved me most.

‘What a tremendous thing it is,’ I said, half to myself, ‘to give other people hope.’

‘You’ll find her,’ Ruselina said.

I turned to her, unsure of the meaning of her words.

‘You’ll find your mother, Anya,’ she said, pressing her fingers into my arm. ‘You’ll see, you’ll find her.’

A
week later Ruselina and I were walking along the sandy path to her friend’s tent in the Ninth District. After Irina’s concert Ruselina’s health had deteriorated and we proceeded slowly. She clung to my arm for support and helped herself along with a cane she had bought from a beach vendor for a dollar. Too much exertion shortened her breath and left her doubled over and wheezing. Yet, despite her feebleness, I felt it was me who was leaning against her that afternoon.

‘Tell me something about your friend,’ I asked her. ‘How did she know my mother?’

Ruselina stopped and used the back of her sleeve to dab the sweat from her forehead. ‘Her name is Raisa Eduardovna,’ she said. ‘She is ninety-five years old, lived in Harbin most of her married life, and was brought to Tubabao by her son and his wife. I think she met your mother only once, but the occasion seems to have left an impression on her.’

‘When did she leave Harbin?’

‘After the war. The same time you did.’

My heart prickled with yearning. Sergei’s imposed silence on my mother had wounded me, although he had meant well. I had read that some tribes in Africa dealt with their grief by never speaking of someone again if they left the tribe or died. I wondered how they could do that. To love someone was to always be thinking about them, whether they were with you or not. Not being able to speak freely about my mother in that period when I had first been separated from her had made her seem mythical and remote. At least a few times a day I tried to recall the texture of her skin, the timbre of her voice, our exact difference in height the last time I saw her. I was terrified that if I forgot any of those details, I would start to forget her.

We turned down a track choked with banana trees and headed towards a ten-man tent. When we reached the thatched fence that encircled it and opened the gate, I felt my mother’s presence. It was as though she were pulling me towards her. She wanted to be remembered.

Ruselina had visited her friend many times but this was the first time I had been inside the enclosure. The tent was the ‘mansion’ of Tubabao Island. The spacious marquee had been further enlarged by an annexe of woven palm leaves which served as a kitchen and dining room. A trimmed lawn of bull grass ran all the way up to the edges of the porch, which was bordered by a row of hibiscus trees. In the far corner of the yard a vegetable patch of tropical greens was thriving, while in front of it four chickens were pecking at a mound of food scraps. I helped Ruselina onto the porch and we smiled at each other when we saw the row of shoes on it, neatly arranged
in descending order of size. The largest was a pair of men’s hiking boots, the smallest a pair of baby shoes. Someone was banging something inside the tent. Ruselina called out and the chickens beat their wings and squabbled with surprise. Two of them took flight, landing on the roof of the annexe. I had heard that the chickens people bought from the Filipinos could fly quite high. I’d also heard that the eggs they laid tasted like fish.

The tent flap lifted and three small children tumbled out. They were all golden-haired girls. The youngest was a baby still in nappies and just learning to walk. The eldest was about four. When she smiled her dimples reminded me of Cupid. ‘Pink hair,’ she giggled, pointing at me. Her inquisitiveness made me laugh too.

Inside the tent, Raisa’s daughter-in-law and granddaughter were bent over planks of wood. They each held a hammer in their fist and gripped a line of nails between their teeth.

‘Hello,’ said Ruselina.

The women looked up, their faces red with exertion. They had tucked their skirts into their underwear, turning them into shorts. The older woman spat the nails out of her mouth and laughed.

‘Hello,’ she said, standing up to greet us. ‘You must excuse us. We’re building a floor.’ She was plump with an upturned nose and chestnut hair that fell in waves to her shoulders. She must have been fifty years old but her face was as smooth as a girl of nineteen’s. I held up the cans of salmon Ruselina and I had brought as a gift. ‘My goodness!’ she said, taking them from me. ‘I’ll have to make a salmon pie, and you’ll have to return to eat it.’

The woman introduced herself as Mariya and her
fair-haired daughter as Natasha. ‘My husband and son-in-law are out fishing for our dinner,’ she said. ‘Mother has been taking a rest. She’ll be pleased to see you.’

A voice called out from behind a curtain. Mariya pulled the screen aside and I saw an old woman lying on a bed. ‘Just as well you’re almost deaf, Mother,’ Mariya said, bending to kiss the woman’s head. ‘Otherwise how could you have slept through our racket?’

Mariya helped her mother-in-law to sit up and then arranged two chairs for Ruselina and myself on either side of the bed. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Sit down. She’s awake now and ready to talk.’ I took my place by Raisa’s side. She was older than Ruselina and her veins protruded through her parched skin like worms. Her legs were wasted and the toes so bent with arthritis they were curled over. I leaned over to kiss her cheek and she gripped my hand with a strength that belied her withered frame. I didn’t feel sorry for her the way I sometimes felt sorry for Ruselina. Raisa was infirm and not long for the world, but I envied her. An old woman surrounded by her happy, productive family. She could have little to regret in life.

‘Who is this beautiful girl?’ she asked, still clutching my hand and turning to Mariya. Her daughter-in-law leaned over and spoke into her ear. ‘She is a friend of Ruselina’s.’

Raisa peered at our faces, searching for Ruselina. She recognised her friend and grinned through toothless gums. ‘Ah, Ruselina. I’ve heard you’ve not been well.’

‘I’m good enough now, my dear friend,’ Ruselina replied. ‘This is Anna Victorovna Kozlova.’

‘Kozlova?’ Raisa glanced at me.

‘Yes, the daughter of Alina Pavlovna. The woman you think you met,’ said Ruselina.

Raisa fell silent, distracted by her thoughts. The air in the tent was hot, even though Mariya had rolled up the flaps on the rear and side windows. I edged forward on my chair so that my legs wouldn’t stick to the wood. A trickle of saliva gathered on Raisa’s chin. Natasha gently wiped it away with the corner of her apron. I thought the old woman had fallen asleep when she jolted upright and stared at me. ‘I met your mother once,’ she said. ‘I remember her well because she was so striking. Everyone was taken with her that day. She was slim with lovely eyes.’

My legs went weak. I thought I was going to swoon with the mention of my long-kept secret, my mother. I clutched the side of the bed, no longer aware of the others in the room. They disappeared from my mind as soon as Raisa spoke. I could only see the old woman lying in front of me and wait for each slurred word.

‘It was a long time ago,’ Raisa sighed. ‘It was at a summer party in the city. It must have been 1929. She arrived with her parents and was wearing an elegant lilac dress. I thought her very poised and liked her because she was interested in everything other people said. She was a very good listener.’

‘That was before she married my father,’ I said. ‘You’ve done well to remember that far back.’

Raisa smiled. ‘I thought I was already old back then. But I’m much older now. All I have to think about now is my past.’

‘Was that the only time you saw her?’

‘Yes. I didn’t see her after that. There were quite a few of us in Harbin and we didn’t all move in the
same circles. But I did hear that she married a cultured man and that they lived in a nice house on the outskirts of the city.’

Raisa’s chin dropped to her chest and she sank deeper into the bed, lying there like a deflated balloon. Her recollection seemed to have drained her. Mariya scooped water from a bowl and lifted the glass to her mother-in-law’s lips. Natasha excused herself to watch her children. I listened to the cries of the girls playing in the yard. I could hear the chickens cluck when Natasha passed by them. Suddenly Raisa’s face contorted. The water dribbled out of her mouth then gushed out like a fountain. She began to cry.

‘We were fools to have stayed for the war,’ she said. ‘The smart ones left for Shanghai long before the Soviets came.’ Her voice was raspy, constricted with pain.

Ruselina tried to make her more comfortable but she tugged away from her.

‘I heard the Soviets took your mother,’ Raisa said, lifting her age-spotted hand to her forehead. ‘But where she went, I don’t know. It may have been for the best. They did such terrible things to those who stayed behind.’

‘Take a rest, Mama,’ said Mariya, lifting the glass of water again to the old woman’s lips, but Raisa pushed her hand away. She was shivering despite the heat, and I wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. Her arms were so thin I was afraid they would splinter in my hands.

‘She’s tired, Anya,’ Ruselina said. ‘Maybe she can tell us more another day.’

She stood up to leave. My heart was torn with guilt. I didn’t want to make Raisa suffer, but I also
didn’t want to leave until she had told me everything she knew about my mother.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mariya. ‘Some days she’s clearer than others. I’ll tell you if she says anything more.’

I picked up Ruselina’s cane and was offering her my arm when Raisa called out. She struggled up on her elbows. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wild. ‘Your mother had neighbours, Boris and Olga Pomerantsev, didn’t she?’ she asked. ‘They chose to stay in Harbin even when the Soviets came.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Raisa sank back into the cushions and covered her face with her hands. A low wail rose in her throat. ‘The Soviets took all the young ones, the ones they could make work,’ she said, half to me, half to herself. ‘I heard they took Pomerantsev because he was still strong, even for an old man. But they shot his wife. She had a bad heart. Did you know that?’

I don’t remember walking back to Ruselina’s tent. Mariya and Natasha must have helped us at least some of the way, because I don’t see how Ruselina could have supported me on her own. I was in shock and my mind was blank except for one image: Tang. Boris and Olga’s fate reeked of him. I remember sinking onto Irina’s bed and pressing my face into the pillow. I yearned for sleep, for unconsciousness, for a respite from the agonising pain that gripped my insides. But it wouldn’t come. My swollen eyelids sprang open when I tried to close them. My heart pumped like a piston in my chest.

Ruselina sat beside me and rubbed my back. ‘It’s not what I expected,’ she said. ‘I wanted to make you happy.’

I looked up at her haggard face. There were hollows under her eyes and her lips were blue. I
hated the distress I was causing her. But the more I tried to be calm the worse the pain became.

‘I was stupid to believe nothing bad would happen to them,’ I said, remembering Olga’s frightened eyes and the tears on her husband’s cheeks. ‘They knew they were going to die for helping me.’

Ruselina sighed. ‘Anya, you were thirteen years old. Old people know they have choices to make. If it had been you or Irina, I would have done the same thing.’

I rested my head on her shoulder and was surprised to find that it was steadier than I had expected. My need seemed to give Ruselina strength. She stroked my hair and embraced me as if I were her own child.

‘In my life I have lost my parents and a brother, a baby, my son and my daughter-in-law. It’s one thing to die old, quite another to be cut down when you are young. Your friends wanted you to live,’ she said.

I hugged her tighter. I wanted to tell Ruselina that I loved her, but the words got lost somewhere in my throat.

‘Their sacrifice was their gift to you,’ she said, kissing my forehead. ‘Honour it by living with courage. They couldn’t ask for more than that.’

‘I want to thank them,’ I said.

‘Yes, you do that,’ said Ruselina. ‘I’ll be all right until Irina gets back. Go and do something to respect your friends.’

I stumbled down the path to the beach, almost blind with tears. But the trills of the crickets and the chirps of the birds in the bushes comforted me. In their music I heard Olga’s cheerful voice. She was telling me not to grieve, that she didn’t feel pain and wasn’t afraid any more. The day’s merciless sun had
softened and, filtered through the trees, it caressed me with a gentle touch. I longed to press my face into Olga’s dough-sprinkled bosom and tell her how much she had meant to me.

When I reached the beach the sea was grey and sombre. A circle of seagulls screamed overhead. The last of the sun’s rays burned into a shimmering line down the ocean’s centre and a mist floated in the air. I dropped to my knees in the sand and built a mound as high as my chest. When I had finished, I pressed a garland of shells around its point. My teeth clenched each time I imagined Olga dragged from her hearth and shot. Did she scream? I couldn’t think of her without thinking about Boris. They were swans. Mated for life. He wouldn’t have lasted a day without her. Did they make him watch? My tears dented the sand like raindrops. I built another mound and formed a bridge of sand between the two. I guarded my memorial, listening to the pounding and hissing of the waves, until the sun disappeared into the ocean. When the orange mirage faded and the sky dimmed, I said Boris and Olga’s names three times to the wind so that they would know I remembered them.

I found Ivan waiting for me under a light on the path back to my tent. He was holding a basket covered with a checked cloth. When I approached him, he lifted the cloth and uncovered a batch of fresh
pryaniki
. The honey and ginger smell of the cakes mingled with the sea air and the scent of the palm leaves. Such a cold climate tradition seemed out of place on the island. I had no idea how he had managed to get the ingredients, let alone bake them.

‘My very best, for you,’ he said, holding the basket towards me.

I tried to smile but I couldn’t. ‘I’m not good company now, Ivan,’ I said.

‘I know. I took my
pryaniki
to Ruselina and she told me what happened.’

I bit my lip. I had cried so much on the beach that I didn’t think I could cry any more. Still a heavy droplet slipped down my face and onto my wrist.