White Shanghai

by Elvira Baryakina

  “Let me have a look at you.” She stretched her hand to undo Ada’s coat.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  Martha started to laugh. “She’s going to teach French—to whom,may I ask?”

  “Give her a job as a taxi-girl in the Havana,” suggested Klim. “She can dance.”

  Color drained from Ada’s face. “What’s a taxi-girl?”

  “A paid dance partner,” Klim explained. “There are a lot more men in Shanghai than women, and all the bachelors hang around the restaurants. They don’t have their own girlfriends, so they dance with taxi-girls. It’s a decent job, nothing to do with prostitution.” Klim undid his jacket. “Take off your coat. Let’s show off your talents.”

  Martha spluttered with laughter when she saw Ada’s dress, all washed-out and too small for a girl of her age. Ada hated her already.

  “Come here,” ordered Klim. He pushed away the chairs and the table and stood in the middle of the room. Trembling, Ada moved close to him. Martha started the gramophone.

  “Let’s do the tango.”

  Klim took Ada’s hand and pulled her by the waist, close to him. The sudden intimacy of an adult male felt strange. His breath was hot, his eyes shining, as if he’d fallen in love with her in a split second.

  Martha applauded, “Oh my girl! Bravo, bravo!”

  “Do something with her dress,” said Klim, releasing Ada from his embrace. “She grew out of this one three years ago.”

  Martha disappeared into another room.

  “So, Ada, want to be a dancer?” Klim asked in an even voice, his eyes already blank.

  She caught her breath. “I don’t know.”

  “If I were a woman, I would. When you dance, you can be anyone you want to be. But when the music stops, everything is back to normal. It’s all worth it just for those few minutes.”

  Martha returned with two dresses on hangers. “I won’t let you try them on: you haven’t had a bath for ages. Just hold the dress in front of you. So, this one will be okay and this one will do, too. Do you have shoes?”

  Ada shook her head.

  “Show me your foot.”

  Martha brought in a pair of expensive, lightly worn shoes.

  “If you perform well, you will be paid. If you hide in the corner, I’ll throw you out in the blink of an eye. You’ll get a dollar and a half a day, and I will deduct the cost of the dresses and the shoes from your salary. Deal?”

  Ada nodded.

  “If you want, you can move in here, to the rooms upstairs,” Martha said and turned to Klim. “If she runs away with the dresses, I will skin you alive.”

  “Where would she run—to the Bolsheviks?”

  “You brought her here; you’re responsible for her. Where’re you staying?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Ask Chen—he rents rooms and speaks English.” Martha scribbled on a piece of paper how to find Chen. “That’s it. Now go. I need to get a good sleep. Make sure the girl is at the Havana tonight at seven.”

  Klim kissed her cheek and went downstairs.

  No oranges today, Ada thought.

  As a farewell, Martha whispered to her, “If you’re a virgin, I beg you, do not sleep with anyone without telling me. I can get you a client you can only dream of!”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE HOUSE OF HOPE AND A EMERGING CAREER

  1.

  The two-story building was a U-shaped hodgepodge of European architecture and Chinese poverty. Its entrance from the street was barred with iron gates. Above them, a plaque read in Chinese and in English, The House of Hope and a Burgeoning Career.

  “I can only imagine what success we’ll achieve here,” Klim chuckled.

  Ada followed him into the inner yard, a grim enclosure of gray walls and windows with caged birds. A rectangle of sky overhead was cross- stitched with endless washing lines and, as everywhere, pants, pants and more pants flapping in the wind.

  Klim left Ada to watch the samovar and his backpack and went to talk to Chen.

  There were six doors, all facing one another. A small dark-skinned woman appeared on the porch, mumbled something to Ada and started taking the washing in.

  Please God, help us find a room! Ada prayed. To get a job and a place to live in one day—incredible luck! I would have to live with Klim and feed him, too. He doesn’t have money and probably won’t have any soon, but it’s okay, as long as I’m not alone.

  I wonder where Klim met Martha? Surely, he wasn’t using her services when he lived here before?

  Sudden memories of their tango sent shivers down Ada’s back. I hope he will behave himself.

  Klim emerged from Chen’s apartment. “Let’s go. It seems we have agreed on a price: we pay eight dollars a month and get a room. Plus, we can use boiling water in the dorm kitchen. Maybe later you will get a promotion or I’ll get a job. We have quiet neighbours from the Philippines: at night, they play at the Havana in the orchestra then sleep through the day. So, it’s all pretty lucky. Also, I’ve told the owner that you are my concubine; otherwise they wouldn’t let us stay together. Chinese are very strict with their moral standards.”

  Ada nodded slowly.

  Klim laughed. “Don’t worry, no one’s going to check. Here, everyone is far from what they seem.”

  Chen—a stooping Chinese man in a blue dressing gown and a little black hat—led them upstairs on squeaking wooden steps.

  “We’re in the loft,” Klim explained.

  Chen placed a ladder up to a ceiling hatch.

  “Welcome,” he motioned up.

  Klim helped Ada drag her luggage up to a tiny, unheated cubbyhole only a tad bigger than a train compartment. There was a smell of damp wood. In one corner, there was a stove made of a metal barrel labelled Kerosene; in the other, a curtain with a flowery pattern hung down from a piece of telephone cord.

  “What is it?” Ada asked, peeping behind the curtain where she saw a little tub with a lid on it.

  “It’s a toilet,” Klim explained. “Chinese houses have no sewage systems, so people use these pots.”

  Ada pulled herself together. It’s okay, she thought. I can handle this.

  “Is there a bathroom?”

  “Well…you can lug water up here, heat it up and wash yourself. Or you can go to the river. But I wouldn’t recommend it: it’s full of cholera.”

  “Are you going to bring water up here?”

  “I’ll go to a bathhouse.”

  Klim took more money from Ada and went to get food. He came back with a packet of boiled rice and six little sticks beaded with something brown.

  “Here you go. This is frogs’ brains, a local delicacy.” He wolfed one down as he was talking. “Just kidding. I’ve got no idea what it is.”

  Ada didn’t like Chinese food: it was too greasy and not salted.

  Klim watched her struggling with her dinner.

  “We’ll get settled. Buy some coal—make this place warm. When I arrived here the first time, I stayed over in a fanza, a Chinese country house. It was a bedbug hole, so I left to sleep in a shed and spent the whole night in a chest. In the morning, the owner was screaming his head off, ‘You dirty blasphemer! This is my granny’s coffin!’”

  Ada smiled. All in one day: she’d gotten a job in a restaurant at a brothel, was introduced as someone’s concubine and ate a frog’s brain. If only her friends in Izhevsk could hear about it!

  2.

  Klim left Ada trembling in the dressing room and returned to the restaurant. It was already full of people—noise, smoke and laughter. The Havana was just as he remembered it: same frescoed walls, same waiters hovering in white aprons, same Philippine orchestra playing in the background. It was the perfect accompaniment to the endless boozing and carousing.

  On the way there, Klim told Ada the rules. Taxi-girls usually sat at special tables; men bought tickets at the counter—fifty cents each—and chose a girl. But no one was allowed to approach a lady straight away. First, one needed to let the supe
rvisor know, then the supervisor told the taxi-girl and she decided if she was keen to dance or not. But she shouldn’t be too picky if she wanted to earn money.

  “After the dance, you sit at the client’s table and get him to buy you wine and snacks,” Klim instructed Ada. “Let him spend as much money as you can, you’ll get a commission from that. Then call him to dance with you again.”

  “What if I’m offered a drink?” Ada asked.

  “Sip a little. Just try not to get drunk. If it’s all too much, and you can’t handle it any more, take your shoes off. It’s a sign you’re tired.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I used to have a friend who worked as a taxi-girl.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Went up in the world: got married.”

  The friend was Chinese; her name was Jie Jie. Klim was hopelessly in love with her. His employer, a chronic racist, found out Klim wanted to marry an Asian woman, so to protect “the honor of the white race,” this man incited his fellow gentlemen to band together and send Klim out of China.

  Klim was tied and thrown on a ship sailing to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, he worked like a dog just to save enough money for a return ticket. One day, he received a telegram from Martha saying that Jie Jie had left Shanghai with some merchant.

  Klim thought he would never forget her, but then he met Nina and, goodness gracious, it started all over again: his eyes full of fire and head full of sweet confusion. He didn’t care about wars or revolutions. Just one thing mattered: to see his love, every day, excited and longing for him, so he could kiss her lips and think in exaltation, My darling girl, my precious.

  But love is fickle: everything passes.

  Taxi-girls emerged from the back rooms and ceremoniously strode to the tables. The audience whistled and applauded. Ada was last. The other girls had blackened her eyebrows and dolled up her hair with a rose. Silly chicken, Klim thought.

  A fat man in striped trousers rushed to her with a ticket. Short-sighted, Ada squinted, searching for Klim. He purposely looked away.

  “What a girl!” Martha laughed sitting next to Klim. “Flirts with her eyes, but misses the target.”

  “Please, be kind to her,” Klim said. “It’s tough for her; she’s all alone in this world.”

  “What about you, my dear? Ada said you live together.”

  Klim didn’t answer.

  3.

  Dawn was close. Smoke rose from the chimneys and roosters crowed. Ada held onto Klim, shuffling along. Her feet bled from Martha’s new shoes. She was drunk. How do you say no when a client offers you a bottle?

  “There are establishments of high class where one has to come with one’s own lady,” Ada slurred. “There are establishments of low class where one can rent a lady. And there are classless establishments where all the women are communal. So, I guess I haven’t fallen too low.”

  Her eyelids were heavy, pleading for sleep. Why did she think she would feel the same magic in the Havana as she felt dancing with Klim? No, there was no magic there. And there never would be.

  A big stinking barrel on red wheels appeared on the road. A Chinese man dragged it calling out in a sing-song voice.

  “Why does he wake everyone up so early?” Ada asked.

  “It’s a night-man. People pay him to clean their night pots,” Klim explained.

  Ada’s teeth chattered from the cold and exhaustion.

  “I hate your Shanghai,” she muttered.

  4.

  She fell asleep in her clothes: just spread a blanket on the floor and collapsed face down. Klim stood by the window. Their little room had a view of roofs and sky.

  He believed he’d seen Nina in a passing car, a fleeting glimpse of her silhouette in a lambskin hat. Of course, it was a trick of the mind. From now on, he’d be haunted by an image of a woman with shiny dark-brown locks and a pointed chin.

  Klim remembered dancing with Ada and imagining another woman in his hands.

  A kite rocketed up above the roofs, soaring for a second and plummeted down.

  Shanghai had changed beyond recognition: new houses, government flags and wondrous types of cars. Even the people seemed different to how they used to be. Before the revolution of 1911, all Chinese men used to wear their hair in plaits as a symbol of faith to the Manchu Dynasty. Today, everyone had their hair cut short. The rich young folk dressed stylishly, with canes in their hands, tipping their fedoras to ladies.

  Martha told Klim that the Americans and Japanese had built a lot of factories here, and people from all over China had rushed to Shanghai to better their lot.

  Life in the other provinces was even more desperate then in Shanghai. After the emperor’s abdication, the country had been split into fiefdoms. The government in Peking had no money or power, and each city had its own warlord, ensuring endless riots and civil discord.

  The Chinese despised the whites, calling them huge, hairy barbarians, physically strong, but ignorant. However, they didn’t dare wage war as foreign ships were docked in the ports of China to protect the rights of the whites and the Japanese, the only Asian nation the West was ready to talk to on equal terms.

  Foreign devils were taking over the Middle Kingdom. A Chinese cobbler could not compete with a shoe factory. A usurer in a dusty shop could not beat international banks. White people lived like royalty, enjoying very low taxes and well-trained servants ready to work merely for food. One could rent a palace for only two hundred dollars.

  Klim thought of the time when he first arrived in Shanghai. He was just nineteen with plans to get rich. His first entrepreneurial venture was to breed crows. Ladies were annoyed with the glut of birds soiling their hats with droppings, so city authorities issued a prize for every dead bird. But Klim couldn’t bring himself to kill the little chicks and set them free. Then he found work with a tea company owned by that bastard, Marc Donell, the one who sent him to Buenos Aires later on.

  The building where Donnell’s office used to be didn’t exist anymore, demolished. Now, there was a big department store with huge, shiny shop windows. The little red-tiled house where Klim used to rent a room was also long gone.

  The old Shanghai had disappeared, and Klim had to start all over again.

  Ada’s books were stacked along the wall. They were askew, and if Klim looked from the side, he read: NINΛ.

  Klim knew in advance he wouldn’t find her here. If they met by chance, what would he say? I love you? Old news. Then why was he back in Shanghai?

  My darling girl, my precious...will you let me go?

  CHAPTER 4

  ARMS SMUGGLERS

  1.

  Nina dreamed about the belligerent rooster from her childhood— fiery, treacherous, with yellow feet, a green tail and wild eyes. Scary as a cockatrice.

  Her granddad asked her, “Sweetheart, could you chase that rooster out of the kitchen garden? He will ruin all the veggies.”

  Granddad was very brave. He received the St. George’s Cross during the Crimean War. Hard to tell him this bird was worse than a wolf, worse than the Gypsies who kidnap children. It fed on little kids.

  Nina pulled a whip out of the broom and apprehensively opened the gates to the kitchen garden. The rooster was sitting on an upturned iron barrel, clawing the metal, all bristled up.

  “Go away,” hissed Nina, hardly hearing her own voice.

  The feisty creature stretched its wings and flew up with a frightening noise. With its beak—bang!—it hit Nina between her eyes. Blood spurted from the wound.

  “Momm-y-y-y!”

  Mother bandaged her forehead. “Oh Lord! Oh Lord! Stop shaking for God’s sake!”

  Granddad took an axe and went to punish the bird. Nina peeped into the shed. He had pressed the enemy hard to the log—yellow claws beating the air. The axe flashed. Cluck! A headless rooster slipped out and started to run—straight at Nina.

  This nightmare—a bloodstained headless bird chasing her in revenge—haunted Nina all her life
, even on intricately embroidered pillows in the warm house on Grebeshok Hill.

  The ominous rooster left when she met Klim. New love blocked out everything with questions and exclamation marks. Nina would wither when Klim was late or away. She would get nervous and angry—jealous that someone else had his attention and his time.

  She was so glad when he proposed to her! It happened not long before they left Nizhny Novgorod. They received their marriage certificate in a dusty Soviet registry office lodged in the basement of the confiscated merchant house. To celebrate, they went to a canteen and ate soup with dried salty fish. They were poor and powerless. Not a single soul in the whole world cared about them. But they were happy: they had each other.

  Klim looked at Nina with boyish delight. “I am bursting with pride when we bite from the same apple.”

  He wrote articles for her—about her—lively ones, teasing and lyrical, sad and glitzy. He would then read them aloud to make her laugh.

  He was trustworthy, bringing all he had to her feet. And there was the problem: he didn’t have anything. Klim laughed when he was robbed and didn’t give a damn about the future. He watched his life go by as a film: the scarier—the better. A good attitude for the war; otherwise, one might go mad.

  But Vladivostok was a different matter; it was almost peaceful and nearly functioned as a trading center. It did not tolerate such a mind- set. Nina prayed Klim would pull up his socks, get his act together and start looking for a well-paid job. Okay, he wasn’t a businessman, but he could still find better employment than writing local articles for peanuts. He hardly ever earned a decent sum of money. Only when he received commissions from foreign news agencies did they eat well. He was blissfully wasting his talent interviewing weary soldiers and wild schoolgirls. His jokes made people laugh, and he was happy—as simple as that.

  Nina realized Klim would never change. If she wanted pressed tablecloths and shrimps in white wine sauce, she’d have to get them herself.

  She tried to do business, but went bust: no one took her seriously. While she was still fresh and young, men were eager to help her. It was amusing to see such a sweet thing trying to do serious stuff. But after she turned twenty-six, no one was interested in guarding her anymore.