“I cannot take her,” Nina whispered, when the girl finally fell asleep. “It’s insulting to the memory of my daughter: no one can replace her.” She placed the baby on Klim’s bed. “I need to go home.”
Klim stood up—the decision was made. “I’ll keep the girl.”
“You?”
“It’s a Chinese baby!” Ada objected. “Who’s going to look after it? It should be taken to a convent or an orphanage!”
Klim shook his head. “It’ll be mine.”
“Up to you,” said Nina slowly and closed the hatch, climbing downstairs.
Ada knocked her forehead with her fist. “Listen, Klim, what are you going to feed her with? If you think that I’ll put up with a screaming child in my room, you’re very much mistaken. I’m—”
The hatch flew open and Nina staggered back into the room. “My breasts might be in pain again. … I don’t know what to do with all this milk. Let the girl stay with me…for a while.”
CHAPTER 34
DEATH, GRIEF AND LOSS
1.
Ada realized she was a heartless person. When she saw Nina Kupina in her room after the funeral, she didn’t think about the woman’s tragedy, but about her own passport. Klim had said Nina dealt with documents and Ada wondered whether Nina had connections with the American Consulate.
Of course, she felt sorry for everyone: for Klim, his wife, Lissie and Brittany left to the mercy of her aunt. But most of all, Ada felt sorry for herself. What bad luck! If not for Brittany’s flu, she would be on her way to California. The Wayers most likely would have taken her with them: their daughter loved her poor governess too much to leave behind.
Instead, Ada now worked in Mr. Bernard’s house, the man who knew all about her dark past.
Edna had put Brittany on the second floor in a tiny bedroom. Until the little girl recovered, Ada fed her from a spoon, read books to her and every day waited for the front door to bang and for a servant to announce the arrival of Mr. Bernard.
Would he tell his wife everything?
Ada didn’t like Mrs. Bernard. Edna thought she was smarter than everyone else and she was indifferent to children.
She had told Ada that Lissie had put a dried sausage into her bag before the Wayers’ departure. “What a rascal,” Edna laughed, showing slightly crooked teeth.
Lissie should have put a dead rat in the bag, not a sausage, Ada thought.
Brittany, Hobu and Ada often spent time in the kitchen. The kitchen was ruled by Yun, a cook with a copper face and a thin gray beard, which he tucked behind the collar of his jacket.
Yun didn’t serve the Bernards; he served the house and made his own rules there. Straight after the wedding, Edna ordered the most modern cupboards, dishes and stove for the kitchen—it all arrived in ten huge boxes from Europe. She invited some guests to see the new furniture. Then somebody asked Yun how he managed to cook for twenty people and keep the kitchen as clean as a museum.
“Missy doesn’t like it when I put my old pots and spices in the kitchen,” said Yun. “That’s why I cook in my room.”
Whatever he was told he would ignore: he still squeezed cream for tortes out of an old Chinese newspaper and made little roses with a turkey-cock feather. If the neighbors were planning to have a special dinner, he would give them the silverware from the mansion to use. Edna would get angry and Yun would listen to her with his eyes closed and an impassive expression on his face. Then he would bow and tell her: “Close neighbors are more important than distant relatives.” And that would be the end of their talk.
“Unfortunately, I can’t kick him out,” Edna often sighed. “Daniel loves his cooking.”
Brittany fell in love with Yun at first sight. She could have forever watched him deftly chop onions or skin a chicken in a single, swift movement. Hobu would join her with her knitting and Ada with a book. But, in Yun’s kingdom, reading was not allowed: the cook was constantly talking and demanded everyone’s attention. When he was in good spirits, he would tell them about the god Zao Jun, a large portrait of whom hung in a niche on the wall.
“He’s the master of the stove: he remembers the good and bad doings of the family. On New Years, he’ll go to the Sky and will report everything to the Jade Emperor.”
When he was in a bad mood, Yun would chastise white people. “They hire a crowd of servants for any little job and then go ride horses or chase balls in the heat of the day—they call it golf. It doesn’t make sense! And how barbaric it is to pour milk in tea! They don’t let their women sit at home; they drag them to all kinds of places, not appropriate for women’s brains.”
Filled with new wisdom from Yun’s rants, Brittany would sit her dolls in a semi-circle and explain to them: “Gals have to know their place.”
Once she announced to her governess that she had twelve new friends.
“Where from?” asked Ada, surprised. “From the back yard. Yun has his school for young cooks there, but it’s a secret! Don’t ever tell anybody, or Auntie Edna will throw them out.”
Each day, around ten to fifteen boys would climb through a hole in the fence to learn Yun’s cooking mastery.
“Look, look! They’re slipping him money,” Brittany whispered in excitement. From their hiding place, she and Ada watched the pupils bow and hand little envelopes to the old man.
Ada smiled to herself: Edna thought she was the smartest cookie of all and had no idea what was going on in her own house.
2.
Nina walked into Tamara’s room with the end of her shawl dragging along the carpet.
“Hugh Wayer offered to close Jiří’s case if I pretend I never had a daughter,” she said.
Her calmness confused Tamara. “What did you say?”
Nina looked at her sternly. “I said I belong to the Chinese jurisdiction as I don’t have citizenship. And the police of the International Settlement don’t have the right to process Labuda’s case—no crime was committed on its territory.”
“What if Wayer hands you over to the Chinese?”
“They won’t touch me, or else very interesting facts will become apparent in biographies of some Chinese officials. Lemoine isn’t acting as a witness and without him they can’t prove anything. All the papers have Jiří’s signature, so he’s the one to answer for that, and I don’t know anything. That’s what I told Wayer: if he presses me, I’ll write in all newspapers how he protected his son from jail. But I’ve lost my money: they’ve frozen all my bank accounts.”
Tamara could only marvel at Nina’s spirit. What would she do if she lost her child, went bankrupt and was left to face a snake like Wayer?
“Bring your husband here,” Tamara asked. “I would like to talk to him.”
“No.”
“And you won’t show me your Chinese girl?”
“No. I’ve put on weight and I need to lose it—that’s why I nurse her: it’s the best method. And after that Klim can do with her what he likes.”
Tamara knew Nina hated both her husband and that child. Klim had bartered away his own daughter for a darkey foundling; he even had baptized her and named her Katya. For Nina, he was a traitor.
Tamara thought about how to help her friend. “You should come back to society. We’ll create a legend: you suffered from—”
“No,” interrupted Nina. “I don’t want anyone’s sympathy.” She turned and walked out.
For a while, Tamara sat in her little nest, surrounded by pillows, silks and aromatic candles.
All of us are a reflection of each other’s fears, she pondered. I look at Nina, terrified: I would have died if someone crushed my child. And Nina, in turn, looks at me and thinks: I would die if I were a cripple. We both look at Hugh Wayer, at his son Robert, at everyone passing in front of us—I would have died if I were you. If I had your temper, your family, your work, your mistakes, your past… And everyone proves that it’s unnecessary to die, whoever you are and whatever happens to you.
Tony came home with an orchid in a gloss
y pot. “It’s for you! Hurry up and kiss your victorious husband. I won in court, in polo and on the stock exchange!”
His head had a special smell, but it was so delicate that Tamara could feel it only on her first breath.
“Nina visited today,” she said. “What do you think of her?”
Tony raised his smiling eyes. “She’s lovely. Let’s have a chess match after dinner? If you win today I’ll be in amazement till the end of the week. Today, I’ve been lucky and shrewd like Odysseus.”
Love. Tenderness, thought Tamara. After all, it’s very flattering that he, the best of husbands, is totally uninterested in the most fascinating of women.
3.
Nina was drowning in grief. It was impossible to live like this—with no light at the end of the tunnel. She chased her thoughts about her baby and Labuda in a vicious circle: How had the police found out about the consulate? Who reported them? Silly Jiří must have spilled the beans? Or was it mean old Lemoine?
Several times, Nina vainly tried to reach him on the phone, but he didn’t answer. She went to his house, but One-Eyed didn’t let her inside: Monsieur Lemoine wasn’t interested in the defeated.
What could she do about her grief? It tormented her like an inflamed splinter, like a piece of shrapnel, stuck in her body.
Nina went to a church and scribbled her name in the book at the entrance. “Please, pray for me,” she asked a junior deacon.
She took a candle. In her childhood, after liturgy she always felt as if washed clean. Her troubles were taken from her shoulders like odd threads clinging to a dress. It was all different now: the thought Why me? would not let her go neither after praying, nor confession.
However, Nina knew why and what for. For too long she had lived her life unpunished. Now, she had received a bill for Klim, for Jiří Labuda and Edna Bernard.
Talking to Tamara wasn’t helping: she felt sorry for Nina, and that was unbearable. Her former acquaintances either felt shy of her situation or pestered her with endless questions.
Klim didn’t understand why Nina couldn’t accept the Chinese baby. Men don’t have the mystical blood connection a woman has with her child. The one Nina shared with her mother and then with her daughter. The new Katya seemed to her an ugly nutcracker, a sneer at her motherhood.
Moreover, Nina was jealous. She needed Klim’s support, his passion, his care, but he spent it all on some screaming creature that was not their own. Sometimes it seemed to Nina that her husband had ceased to love her altogether. Well, she could understand him: anyone would get tired of this constantly grumpy, confused woman.
I’m lost. I don’t love anyone. I don’t know what I want, she thought in despair.
CHAPTER 35
CHINESE CALENDARS
1.
It took many battles, but in the end Tony Aulman managed to have Nina’s accounts unfrozen: the bank admitted they didn’t have any proof of her money being obtained through crime.
Aulman called Nina, “I recovered the rest of your money—one thousand two hundred dollars. Come and take it. Your account is closed.”
When Nina arrived at his office, she saw about twenty Chinese girls sitting in the waiting room; the rest were standing in a row all the way downstairs to the first floor.
“Who are they?” Nina asked.
“Actresses,” Aulman sighed.
He explained that his client, a film company called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had asked him to find two buffalos for their new motion picture. It turned out it was prohibited to export buffalos out of China, so they decided to do all the shooting in Shanghai. A film director arrived and demanded to source a couple of indigenous people a young man and a young woman for the main roles. Aulman was very reluctant to take up the job. “I’m not a talent agency,” Tony explained to the film producer. But he promised to give him rights for showing the films in China and Aulman relented. After all, outside of America, Shanghai was the biggest market for films.
“I’ve had enough of these actresses,” Tony complained, laying out packs of money in front of Nina. “We placed an ad in the Chinese newspapers, Healthy twenty-year-old ladies, fluent in English and pleasant in appearance required for casting. And what do you think? They came: old, pimple-faced, with bound feet, not understanding a word in English. What were they hoping for?”
The phone rang and Tony grabbed the receiver, “Hello! I don’t care that you don’t want your buffalos anymore. They were purchased for you and now they’re in my garden eating the grass on my lawn. I’m asking you to take them away!”
Nina put the banknotes into her purse, waved goodbye to Tony and went out. Thank God, she had cash—lots of debts had accumulated over the previous months and she still didn’t know where to get money from. She couldn’t count on Klim—he’d lost his job and was eating through his savings.
On her way out of the building, she ran into a street seller with the usual knickknacks: cigarettes, pencils and wall calendars with languishing blondes. The seller was a Russian, of course: who else out of the white women would sell on the streets?
“Give me a packet of Ruby Queen, please,” Nina asked. She had recently started to smoke: it was a sort of a self-immolation ritual where she slowly killed herself and watched the audience, wondering if they would try to stop her.
“Would you like to take a calendar?” the seller asked. “No? No one wants them! The Chinese think white girls are not pretty, they only like their own kind.”
A rickshaw stopped nearby and a Chinese lady appeared from her cart. She wore a modern hat and had a long beaded necklace. She pulled a round mirror from her purse, checked her fringe and went to the front door. Her feet were healthy, not deformed.
“You know who she is?” asked the seller. “Hua Binbin, the actress. My husband works in a cinema, rolling films. Miss Hua is a big celebrity. Her first film was such a success.”
“What is it about?” asked Nina.
“It goes like this: a father wants to marry his daughter to a wealthy official, but she doesn’t obey and runs off with a young student. This is very amazing for the Chinese—all their marriages are not by love, but arranged by parents. They can watch this movie a hundred times.”
Nina shoved the seller some coins. “Give me one of each calendar and write which ones are selling better and which ones are not selling at all.”
2.
At home, Nina spread the calendars on the floor in the living room. She stood there, examining every detail of the pink-cheeked faces.
Klim and the little girl came back after a stroll. “What’s the beauty contest? Are you up to something?” he inquired.
Nina nodded, “I’ll be printing calendars with women.”
“Hmm…frivolous ones?”
“Sometimes. But I’ll need Chinese models and artists who know what the locals want.”
Klim thought for a bit. “Go to Siccawei, to the Jesuits. There’s a workshop at the monastery and the monks send all the talented orphans there to draw saints. They’re quite skillful.”
Nina pulled an address book from the shelf.
“Will you give me a share in your enterprise?” asked Klim.
“You don’t have any business skills.”
“Yes, I do. Once I found a dead whale on a beach and put an ad in a paper: Wonder of the World: a Sea Monster. I organized tours to watch it. Unfortunately, the whale soon started to stink and scared everyone away, but I earned about a hundred dollars.”
Nina looked him straight in the eye. “Will you really be helping me? It’ll be difficult for me alone: I don’t know anything about printing, and you were in the magazine business, you know the ins and outs…”
Klim smiled, “Of course, I will. Do I have a choice?”
3.
Klim kept thinking how the loss of a child, a human creature that they had known only a few days, could drain their spirits so badly.
Of course, it was easier for him: straight away there was his cure: Katya, Catherine the Second�
��strong, wild and loud.
But Nina refused to heal her wound. Klim wouldn’t dare console her; he knew from experience she’d never be the first to start talking about how they would live day to day, treat the adopted girl and care for each other. But he couldn’t gather the courage to talk to her. Being with Nina was like walking on a mine field: you never knew where it was likely to blow. He stuck to every-day topics and kept a safe distance. Nina thought he was indifferent to it all: if he never mentioned their daughter’s death then he had probably forgotten about her.
It wasn’t easy to find a stable job. Edna was right: Mr. Green only laughed when Klim came to him. “I told you, you shouldn’t have left us! You’ve only yourself to blame.”
Ask Edna for help? This was impossible, her brother-in-law, Robert Wayer, was the killer of Klim’s daughter. He could scrape along only by writing the odd article, either in Russian-language newspapers or in cheap English ones. But they paid poorly.
Klim wanted to believe Mitya: souls reincarnate, and his daughter didn’t die, she’d changed her body. Otherwise, his head would start spinning: Wayer in a red car, the pram with a bloody stain. … There had been many times when Klim visited Lissie, said hello to her husband, not knowing what this person would end up doing.
It was painful to look at Nina. Klim was ready to print calendars, look for artists and himself pose for paintings—whatever she asked, if only she’d feel better. It seemed like she had a huge hole in her chest with wind whistling through it.
How to mend it, hey God?
4.
Nina headed to the Siccawei Jesuits—to look for an artist. She walked past a stocky observatory tower and the St. Ignatius Cathedral, with its sharp spikes. A boy-novice took Nina to Father Nicolás, a serene old man wearing a dark robe. Light from a window softly lit his clean-shaven face with his big nose and high forehead. His wide gray eyebrows lifted up near the bridge of the nose, giving his face a slightly tragic look.
“I’m so happy you’re interested in our talented students,” he said to Nina, but didn’t answer if he had a suitable artist.
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