White Gardenia (50 page)

Ivan helped me into my coat and then bent towards the seat, lifting Lily up out of the folds of his coat.

‘A baby?’ Vera turned to me, her smile fixed on her face. ‘No one told me that you were bringing a baby.’

‘She’s a good baby,’ said Ivan, bouncing Lily in his arms. Lily, suddenly wide awake, giggled and pulled his hat towards her mouth so that she could chew on it.

Vera’s eyes had a squint to them. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking when she touched Lily’s cheek. ‘A gorgeous baby. Such beautiful eyes. The colour of my pin,’ she said, pointing to the amber brooch in the shape of a butterfly that she wore on her collar. ‘But we might have to make some…modifications to our program.’

‘We don’t want to go anywhere we can’t take Lily,’ I said, slipping on my gloves. My remark seemed to unnerve Vera; her eyes grew wide and her face flushed. But she quickly recovered. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I quite understand. It was the ballet I was thinking about. They don’t allow children under five inside the auditorium.’

‘Perhaps I can stay behind with Lily,’ suggested Ivan. ‘You can take Anya. She would love to see a ballet.’

Vera bit her lip. I could see she was trying to work something out in her mind. ‘No, that would never do,’ she said. ‘You can’t come to Moscow and not see the Bolshoi.’ She fiddled with the wedding ring on her finger. ‘If you don’t mind, while we are at the Kremlin I’ll put you with a group tour and I’ll go see if I can arrange something.’

‘You let me know whatever you need to
arrange
things,’ Ivan said as we followed Vera towards the hotel doors.

Vera’s heels tapped on the floor tiles in a staccato rhythm. ‘Your travel agent said that you both speak excellent Russian but I don’t mind to speak in English,’ she said, her chin disappearing as she
wrapped her long scarf several times around her neck. ‘You tell me which language you prefer. You can practise your Russian if you like.’

Ivan touched Vera’s arm. ‘I say that when in Russia do as the Russians do.’

Vera smiled. But I couldn’t tell if it was because she was charmed by Ivan or because she had won some sort of victory.

‘You wait in here,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a taxi to come to the door.’

We watched Vera rush outside and say something to the doorman. A few moments later a taxi pulled up. The driver got out and opened the passenger doors. Vera signalled to us to come out and get inside the car.

‘What was that all about?’ I asked Ivan when we stepped into the revolving door. ‘All that stuff about “You let me know whatever you need to arrange things.”’

Ivan linked his arm with mine and whispered, ‘Roubles. I think what Madame Otova was talking about was a bribe.’

The entrance of the Tretyakov Gallery was as calm as a monastery. Vera passed a voucher to the woman in the booth and held up our tickets to us. ‘Let’s put our things away in the cloakroom,’ she said, waving for us to follow her down a flight of stairs.

The cloakroom attendants wore shabby blue coats over their dresses and scarves on their heads. They were bustling between the rows of hangers with armloads of bulky overcoats and hats. I was shocked at how old they were; I wasn’t used to seeing women
in their eighties still working. They turned and looked at us, and nodded when they saw Vera. We handed our coats and hats over to them. One of the women saw Lily’s face poking through the shawl and jokingly handed me a number for her. ‘Leave her,’ she said. ‘I’ll take care of her.’ I looked into the woman’s face. Although her mouth was turned down, like those of the other attendants, merriness shone in her eyes. ‘I can’t. She’s a “valuable”,’ I smiled. The woman reached out and tickled Lily’s chin, nodding.

Vera took her eyeglasses from her handbag and studied the special exhibitions program. She indicated the entrance to the gallery, and Ivan and I were about to head in that direction when one of the attendants called out.
‘Tapochki! Tapochki!
’ She was shaking her head and pointing to our boots. I looked down and saw that the snow on our boots had melted into puddles around our feet. The woman handed us each a pair of
tapochki
, felt overshoes. I slipped mine on over my boots, feeling like a naughty child. I looked down at Vera’s shoes. Her dry leather pumps looked as good as new.

In the main foyer a group of schoolchildren were lining up in front of a plaque, reading it while their teacher looked on with the kind of reverence a priest displays when he puts on his robes. A Russian family waited behind the children, curious about the plaque too, and were followed by a young couple. Vera asked us if we wanted to read the plaque. Ivan and I said yes. When it was our turn we stepped closer to the plaque and I saw that it was a dedication for the museum. As well as acknowledging the museum’s founder, Pavel Tretyakov, the plaque announced: ‘After the dark days of the Tsars and after the Great
Revolution, the museum was greatly able to expand its collection and make many masterpieces available “to the people”.’

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. What it meant was that after the Bolsheviks cut the throats of the noble and middle-class families or sent them to die in labour camps, they stole their paintings. The hypocrisy made my blood boil. Those families had paid the artists for their paintings. Could the Soviets say the same? There was no mention on the plaque that Tretyakov had been a wealthy merchant whose lifelong dream was
to make art available to the people
. I wondered if sometime in the future, the authorities would try to rewrite Tretyakov’s background and make him out to have been a working-class revolutionary. My father’s parents and sisters had been slaughtered by the Bolsheviks, and Tang’s partner in separating me from my mother had been a Soviet officer. Such things were not easy to forget.

I glanced at the Russian family and the faces of the young couple. They were expressionless. I wondered if they were thinking the same things I was, but, like Ivan and I, had to keep quiet in order to protect themselves. I’d thought I had returned to my father’s Russia, but I saw that wasn’t the case. My father’s Russia was only a remnant. A relic from a lost era.

Vera ushered us into a hall full of icons. ‘“The Virgin of Vladimir” is the oldest in the collection,’ she said, leading us towards a depiction of the Virgin holding her child. ‘It arrived in Kiev from Constantinople in the twelfth century.’ I read on the plaque underneath that the icon had been painted over many times, but had kept its original
despairing expression. Lily was quiet in my arms, fascinated by the colours around her, but I found it hard to feign interest in the artwork. I scanned the groups of elderly women in the museum’s guide uniform who were sitting along the walls. My eyes were wide and watchful, looking for my mother. She would be fifty-six years old. I wondered how much she would have changed since I last saw her.

Ivan asked Vera about the origins and themes of the icons, and slipped in questions about her personal life. Had she always lived in Moscow? Did she have any children?

‘What is he up to?’ I asked myself. I stopped in front of Rubliov’s icon of winged angels to listen to her answers. ‘I’ve only worked as a guide with Intourist since my sons went to university,’ Vera told him. ‘Until then I was a housewife.’ I noticed Vera gave away little of herself when she answered his questions and she didn’t ask Ivan anything about us or Australia in return. Was that because it wasn’t wise to have such conversations with Westerners? Or was it because she already knew what was important to know?

I walked impatiently on, and noticed through an arch that the guide a few rooms down was looking in my direction. She had dark hair and long, narrow hands, the kind you find on tall women. Her eyes glinted like glass in the light. My throat constricted. I edged my way towards her but as I got closer I saw that the dark hair on her head was just a scarf and that one of her eyes was clouded with a cataract. The other was pale blue. She couldn’t be my mother. The guide frowned at my stare and I quickly looked up at the portrait of Alexandra Struiskaya, whose gentle expression seemed too lifelike for comfort.
Flustered by my mistake, I stumbled on through the gallery, stopping to examine the portraits of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. All of them seemed to be regarding me with a kind of anxious foreboding. turned to the paintings of the noblemen and women for reassurance. They were dignified, elegant, dreamy. The colours floated up around them like magical clouds.

‘What happened to you after your portraits were completed? Did you know what the fate of your sons and daughters would be?’ I secretly asked them.

I waited by Valentin Serov’s ‘Girl with Peaches’ for Ivan and Vera to catch up with me. I’d seen the picture in a book but was amazed at the sincerity the painting projected when I stood before it in real life. ‘Look, Lily,’ I said, holding her so that she faced the painting. ‘You’ll be as beautiful as that girl when you grow up.’ The image of the girl’s radiant youth, her carefree eyes, the brightness of the room in which she sat, brought memories flooding back of the house in Harbin. I closed my eyes, frightened that I might begin to cry. Where was my mother?

‘I can see Mrs Nickham has a love of old art,’ I heard Vera say to Ivan. ‘But I think she will find that the best art in this museum belongs to the Soviet era.’

I opened my eyes and looked at her. Was she smiling or squinting at me? She led the way to the Soviet paintings and I followed dutifully, looking back at the ‘Girl with Peaches’ one more time. After all the ugliness I’d seen on my first day in Moscow, I could have stood in front of that painting for hours.

I did my best not to grimace while Vera spoke rapturously about the flat, lifeless art in the Soviet section. I thought if she used the terms ‘social
message’, ‘poetic simplicity’ or ‘the people of the revolutionary movement’ once more, I would walk out of the museum. But of course I couldn’t. Too much was riding on my good behaviour. Still, I found that the more I looked around the rooms, the more I found paintings that made me put aside my prejudices and acknowledge what I thought was good. There was a picture called ‘Students’ by Konstantin Istomin which caught my eye. Two delicate young women, caught in the dusk of a short winter’s day, gazing at the fading light from their apartment window.

Vera stepped up behind me. Was I mistaken or did she click her heels? ‘You like works that show femininity. And you seem to like dark-haired women,’ she said. ‘Come this way, Mrs Nickham, I think there is something in the next room which will be very much to your taste.’

I followed her, keeping my eyes to the floor, wondering if I had given myself away. I hoped that I would be able to express myself appropriately when she showed me another piece of Soviet propaganda.

‘Here we are,’ Vera said, positioning me in front of a canvas. I looked up and gasped. I found myself face to face with the close-up portrait of a mother holding her child. The first things I thought of were warmth and gold. The woman’s fine brow, the way she wore her hair in a low chignon, her chiselled features, were those of my mother. She looked gentle, but also strong and courageous. The child in her arms had gingery hair and pouting lips. The image of me as a baby.

I turned to Vera and stared into her eyes, my questions too obvious to voice. What is the meaning of all this? What is it you are trying to say to me?

If Vera was setting out some sort of puzzle for us, then the pieces weren’t coming together fast enough. I lay on the hotel bed, my back curved into the sag, and stared at the clock on the wall. Five o’clock. February the second was almost over and there was still no sign of my mother or the General. I watched the light fade into blackness through the grimy window. If I don’t see my mother at the ballet tonight, then it’s all over, I thought. My last hope is gone.

My throat tingled. I reached for the jug on the bedside table and poured myself a glass of the metallic-tasting water. Lily was curled up beside me, her fists bunched by the side of her head as if she were holding onto something. When Vera dropped us off at the hotel after the gallery, she asked me if I had anything ‘to keep Lily quiet’ during tonight’s performance. I told her that I would bring her dummy and give her a dose of baby Panadol to help her sleep, though I had no intention of doing either. I would feed her, and that was it. If Lily started crying, I would sit in the foyer with her. The way Vera was insisting on the ballet made me uneasy.

Ivan was sitting by the window, scribbling in his notebook. I opened the bedside drawer and pulled out the guest folder. A faded brochure for a resort on the Caspian Sea fell into my lap, along with a crinkled envelope with the hotel logo on it. I took the stub of pencil that was attached to the folder by a piece of twine and wrote on the envelope: ‘Vera’s waited too long to give me news of my mother. She doesn’t have a heart if she can’t understand what I’m going through. I don’t believe she’s on our side.’

I pushed my hair from my face, stood up on wobbly legs and handed my note to Ivan. He took it from me and, while he was reading it, I glanced down at what he had been writing in his notebook. ‘I thought I was Russian, but in this country I don’t know what I am. If you asked me a day ago what were the typical characteristics of the Russian people, I would have said their passion and their warm-heartedness. But there is no backslapping gregariousness in this place. Only cowering, stooping people with eyes full of fear. Who are these ghosts around me…?’

Ivan wrote under my words on the envelope: ‘I’ve been trying to figure her out all day. I think the painting was her way of trying to tell you. She probably can’t talk because we are under surveillance. I don’t think she’s with the KGB.’

‘Why?’ I mouthed to him.

He pointed to his heart.

‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘You’re a good judge of character.’

‘I married you,’ he smiled. Ivan tore the page he had been writing on from his notebook and, together with the envelope, ripped them into tiny pieces which he carried to the toilet and flushed away.

‘This is an impossible way to live,’ he said, half to me and half to the hissing cistern. ‘No wonder they look so unhappy.’