White Shanghai

by Elvira Baryakina

  “Hello, do you know where Klim is?” one asked in Russian.

  Massively disappointed, Ada squeezed between them. “I don’t know. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

  She opened the hatch and disappeared into her room.

  “Wait, we need to talk!”

  “What about?”

  “We’re Klim’s friends, Pasha and Glasha Zaborovas. We—”

  “Let them in,” Mitya said. “They’re very good.”

  Ada cast him an angry look. “What do I have to do with them?”

  But she let the girls in anyway. One bent awkwardly to close the hatch, and a wad of crumpled papers fell out of her bag. They were propaganda leaflets written in English, French and Russian, stating the USSR’s good intentions.

  “What is this?” Ada frowned.

  Pasha and Glasha looked at each other and blushed. “We had to take it to the Soviet Consulate, but the streets are all patrolled, everyone with large bags is stopped and searched. We thought we’d wait at Klim’s.”

  “I’ll have nothing to do with it!” roared Ada.

  Mitya glanced out of the window. “There’s a policeman in front of the house.”

  “Oh my God,” gasped one of the twins.

  Ada had no idea what to do. Throw them out? They’d kick up noise and then the police would definitely come up. The girls were her age— why the hell had they got into politics? But on the other hand, they had little hope with anything else: both were pimply, clumsy and smelled like two cigarette stubs.

  “What do you do for a living?” one of Zaborovas asked Ada in friendly voice.

  “I work.”

  “Where?”

  “In a house.”

  Ada was hungry and thought of the bread and jam she’d hidden in the basket under the table. If she took it out, she’d have to share it with the visitors. I wonder if they’re going to sit here till nightfall? she thought, impatiently.

  But the Zaborovas seemed oblivious to her grudge. They chirped on about lectures and clubs inviting Ada somewhere.

  “You have to come and visit us: we have so much fun! And we have lots of guys too!” They exchanged glances and giggled.

  Ada pursed her lips. Who needed their unemployed boys? The great Daniel Bernard had courted her and flown her in his airplane.

  Ada felt Mitya’s stare and heard his words or rather read his lips: I’ll take them away now.

  “Bring some water,” Mitya asked, getting a straight razor out of his sack. “Also, I’ll need your orange curtain.”

  In under an hour, there were three young monks sitting in Ada’s room. The cleanly shaved Zaborovas were touching each other’s heads. “We look so funny!”

  The orange curtain was enough to make two robes. Now the twins were totally undistinguishable from each other.

  “Are you sure they can’t tell we’re girls?” Pasha or possibly Glasha asked.

  “I’m sure,” Ada said.

  Mitya wiped the razor with a cloth. “I’ll take them to the Soviet Consulate.”

  They said their thank you and goodbyes. Ada closed the hatch behind them and heard their voices from the stairs, “Come to our meeting,

  Mitya. It’s okay that you’re a monk. This year, ten thousand people have joined our party and everyone has to be looked after, convinced and taught. You speak Chinese, don’t you? You could translate revolutionary songs.”

  “Sadly, I’m not a poet,” Mitya replied.

  From her window, Ada watched them leave. The policeman didn’t pay any attention to them.

  She took out her bread and jam and made the longed-for sandwich.

  Ada was surprised by Mitya’s resourcefulness. She’d been sure he could only pray and bow to the ground.

  The only thing Mitya didn’t think of was cleaning up his little communist friends’ hair.

  2.

  Makar Zaborov’s job was guarding a tram depot and he couldn’t have hoped for better work. There were three guards, all his countrymen, one even had a dog nicknamed Sharik, which meant a ball in Russian. The dog was actually Chinese, but it wasn’t written on its muzzle, so you would never know the difference.

  Makar had to sign in at the guardroom whenever he arrived at work, then he’d stroll around with a torch, checking on trams. Naughty Chinese boys liked to steal anything off them. These narrow-eyed law-breakers purposefully thought up tricks to distract him. They would make a noise on one side, he would dart there with a rifle, shoot one warning shot, but while he was there they would unscrew a tram door on the other side.

  What do they need it for? Makar’s colleague, Mitrofanych, said the Chinese would nail tram doors to their own houses. They were a status symbol of living in grand style.

  Sometimes the little bastards would nick an entire glass pane or remove a wicker armchair from the first-class. The tram company didn’t like the losses.

  Makar once caught a little Chinese and dragged him to the guardroom to give him a hiding. He took off his belt, but his pants slid down. It was no joke: Makar stood there with his pants dangling at his knees. He was so ashamed that he wished the earth could swallow him up.

  Colonel Lazarev had reached such heights! Now his trousers had stripes on the sides like a general’s, and his mustache was smothered in pomade. He combed his hair with a smart parting on the side and even had a car, though it was a used one. He was the right hand man of Nina Kupina, the mistress.

  Business was booming: the Chinese kidnapped each other like mad dogs on the loose. Four wives of one fat cat went missing; one of them was his good one, the favorite. So, he rushed to Ms. Kupina and bowed to her feet. “Save me,” he said. “I’m perishing from love.”

  She actually did.

  Mitrofanych said the mistress probably had friends among the bandits, and that they split the ransoms. But Mitrofanych was a lousy gossiper, not worth taking seriously. He was grumpy individual, with a contusion in his head, and sometimes lost himself in drinking bouts.

  Makar found a filthy envelope under his front door. He propped up his glasses and moved to the window to read the tiny uneven letters.

  “Goodness gracious, it’s a message from Nazar!” he exclaimed. “Maria! Hey Maria!”

  She was splitting firewood in the yard. “Why are you yelling like crazy?”

  “Maria, look!”

  She leant over the windowsill, took the letter and opened the envelope.

  “What’s in it?” asked Makar impatiently.

  She didn’t have time to reply. A thin boy with a shaved head walked into the yard. He was white, though wore Chinese clothes.

  “Hello,” he bowed pressing his palms together on his chest. “I’d like to tell you about your daughters.”

  Makar took off his glasses. “Who are you?”

  “Mitya. Your girls have to leave Shanghai to Hankou. A Russian man in the Soviet Consulate told them they can’t stay here anymore, because they’ll be thrown in jail. I’ll escort them and make sure they get safely to their destination.”

  “To Hankou?” Maria gasped. “But it’s already been captured by the Revolutionary Army!”

  Mitya bowed. “Maybe. The Soviet man said they’ll go to Russia afterwards. Goodbye.”

  “What are you standing around for, Daddy?” Maria screamed as the boy disappeared behind the gates. “Run after him. Quick! Bring him back!”

  Makar leapt out of the house, but the boy had vanished. What was the Hankou this boy would take his precious girls to? Where was it on the map?

  He ran to one side of the street then darted to another. He lost track of things and asked passers-by in Russian whether they had seen a white boy dressed like a Chinese? He staggered and almost fell down. Oh God! Why do you punish us, sinners?

  “Daddy, I told you!” Maria shrieked in hysterics as she ran out of the gates with the letter in her hands. She shoved Makar a photograph, her face horribly pale. “Look what Nazar has sent!”

  The person on the photo wasn’t standing or sitting as
promised. He was lying on the floor.

  Maria took her father by the shoulders. “It’s very, very bad in Russia… We can’t let our girls go there!”

  Makar put his face into his hands—what could he do?

  CHAPTER 66

  THE NORTHERN EXPEDITION

  1.

  Soldiers of the Revolutionary Army marched barefoot in the sun. Everything was carried by hand. Each piece of artillery was disassembled into six parts: one part per crew of coolies on a track too narrow for even a cart to trundle on. Behind them came five hundred mismatched boxes of artillery ammunition. Brown heels kneaded the dirt, sweat poured from the hard-working bodies. The columns were dozens of miles long.

  The aviators couldn’t wait for action. Daniel was constantly arguing with the Soviet military advisor, Blücher, about the lack of airfields, maps and compasses. “We’ll waste the machines!”

  And they did. One airplane landed on the sandy bank of a river, another ended up swamped in a rice field with no way to get it out.

  On the last day of summer, the Revolutionary Army began a siege of the ancient fortress Wuchang. The artillery was ineffective as the shells couldn’t penetrate such thick stone walls.

  Through his binoculars, Daniel watched the troops storming the gates. Infantry were climbing up on bamboo ladders, and the defenders were spilling molten tar on them. Stones and logs of wood rained down on the hapless troops.

  At dawn, Blücher and Daniel flew over the fortress. Below was a sea of tiled roofs. The soldiers of the garrison noticed Daniel’s airplane and started to rush around. Soon shots were heard.

  “We’ll bomb them,” Blücher said. “We’re not vegetarians.”

  His troops needed a quick victory: they had suffered too many casualties and were craving for rest and replenishment of supplies.

  The siege lasted a month. It was a wild scene: medieval warfare with armed planes roaring in the sky.

  2.

  The gates of an old mansion were opened wide. General Wu Peifu had fled the city, and his personal belongings, including a vast art collection, were arranged on large tables for sale. The hospitals were overcrowded without enough medicines, and the commanders of the Revolutionary Army were ordered to auction most of the trophies. All the income would go to the Red Cross.

  Daniel Bernard wasn’t going to buy anything: he came to the mansion for another reason. If you had ever admired pale-blue vases, the color of sky after the rain, or thin-walled bone china cups made out of finest porcelain, you would understand why he was there.

  Works of embroidery, light as breath; ancient lacquered jewelry boxes which had hidden many generations of secrets; paintings on rice paper known as hush of a shadow moved by wind. A jade scepter represented Yang, a symbol of masculinity and the divine power of knowledge, while Yin, the female symbol, was in the form of a little bell.

  A thin soldier hung around, carefully watching Daniel’s hands, probably thinking, What if he shoves something into his pocket? Daniel suffered under the scrutiny; he turned his back on the soldier, which only made the thin fellow more suspicious.

  A monk stood nearby and looked at examples of calligraphy. His eyes were blue and his eyelashes—white. Daniel became curious and moved closer to him.

  “It’s very beautiful,” said the monk in Russian, as if he knew Daniel would understand him. “Master Song told me about calligraphy. For years he practiced this art, trying to perceive it, but kept failing. And one day, on a little path in the mountains, he saw two snakes standing on their tails. They were fighting, wanting to kill each other, but it looked like a dance. That is the essence.”

  “Do you know what’s written here?” Daniel asked, showing the drawing.

  The monk nodded. “Beauty.”

  Then he said that he’d brought two ladies who wanted to work for the revolution.

  “Where are they?” Daniel asked.

  “There, on the porch. They don’t understand beautiful Chinese things.”

  “Let’s go, I’ll take you to the headquarters,” Daniel offered.

  On the porch, he found the Zaborova ladies wearing rags, and their hair cut very short.

  “Mister Daniel!” they exclaimed. “Fancy seeing you here! Sokoloff sent us to Hankou. We couldn’t stay in Shanghai any longer: the police were on our tail. Sokoloff said you have a great need for typists who speak Russian and English. Mitya dragged us around the city for a whole day and then brought us to this silly exhibition.”

  As they walked to the headquarters, the twins told their former boss how they had hid at one girl’s place and how Mitya helped them to trick the police. Daniel looked at the young fellow: it was the same monk Ada had told him about.

  “Is she married?” he asked in whisper.

  Mitya instantly understood who Daniel was talking about.

  “It’s difficult for Ada to get married. She doesn’t want a poor man, but rich ones won’t take her without a dowry.”

  Daniel asked what had happened with her suitor, Felix, but Mitya didn’t know.

  They organized a hotel room for the two Zaborovas.

  “I need to go back. Ada needs me,” Mitya said.

  Daniel asked him to take her a letter, and Mitya hid it in the folds of his robe.

  “Your wife has died,” he said in farewell. “I’m very sorry for you.”

  3.

  Mitya returned to Shanghai in the middle of November. His robe was burned with many holes; one of his sandals held together with a telephone cable. He walked into the room, pulled out a flask with water and greedily quenched his thirst.

  His neck was sun-browned and his hands were covered with golden growth. Mitya looked five years older.

  “You were at war?” Ada asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And how is it?”

  “Bad. But the girls are in a safe place: I took them where they wanted. And I have a letter for you.”

  “From who?”

  Mitya handed an envelope over to Ada. She at once recognized Daniel’s handwriting.

  Dear Ada:

  I happen to be in a situation I never imagined possible.

  Ada felt uncomfortable with Mitya watching her and couldn’t keep reading. She thought he would judge her: after all, he knew how much she loved Felix.

  Ada stuffed the letter into her pocket, putting on an indifferent air as if she wasn’t interested in it.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She made him a sandwich.

  “Daniel is a good person,” Mitya said chewing bread with jam. “He works for the communists and flies airplanes. Everyone hugely respects him.”

  “Wait here, I’ll get some water,” said Ada, unable to restrain her curiosity any longer.

  She picked up a bucket and climbed out of the room. Blood rushed to her cheeks as she took the letter from her pocket.

  The northern warlords wage war like in the old days; they don’t take care of their soldiers who are ordered to charge machine guns with swords. One night, Wu Peifu let out a herd of rams with burning torches tied to their horns, probably trying to scare us. We sent him a thank you note for providing us with free mutton.

  There are whole villages contaminated with illnesses unknown to European medicine. First, the skin dries out, then it turns into ceratoid scales, and the whole body becomes covered in tumors as large as a hen’s eggs. When these monsters were closing in on our column I thought they would even contaminate the dirt under their feet.

  And so on he wrote for five full pages with not a word about his love for Ada. But Daniel hadn’t forgotten her.

  Mrs. Wayer said that the Revolutionary Army would overrun Shanghai in a couple of months, and foreigners could only protect their concessions and not the whole city. At any moment, the factory workers could riot and advance to meet the Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers. If there are raids, it would be better to stick with the winners.

  Felix had disappeared, and no one knew whether h
e was alive or not. Daniel was now a widower and if he really loved Ada, who knew what could come of it?

  She poured some water into the bucket and returned to her room. “If I write a reply to Daniel, do you think the letter will reach him?” “I think it won’t,” Mitya said, without a hint of ridicule or accusation.

  CHAPTER 67

  SPIRITUAL HEALING

  1.

  The doctor said it wasn’t possible that a person could be both terminally ill and, at the same time, live as if nothing had happen.

  A new attack caught Tamara while she was broadcasting. The light left her eyes, she felt like somebody had stuck an iron rod into her back. Klim was the first to notice something was wrong. He somehow managed to finish the program and started a record to fill the gap. Tamara had morphine in her bag, in an empty powder compact, but no one understood her desperate groans. They dragged her home, tormented, almost insane from pain.

  Everything went back to her earlier hell: the room with a broken-out wall overlooking bare shrubs. Tamara watched a gardener with his spade and could hear laughter on the other side of the fence. People’s life carried on, flowing past. Hers had stopped.

  The doctor started with threats: he said if Tamara carried on at the radio he would refuse to treat her. Tony strictly forbade the servants from taking the mistress out of the house regardless of what she promised them.

  “And you, Brutus?” she said with a sad smile.

  Tony cried hiding his face in her blanket. “You have no right to kill yourself!” That meant you have no right to live life outside this prison. She was to be a mummy—bandaged and immobile.

  Morphine and dreams made a good couple. The doctor said there was no hope of getting better: her vertebrae were completely distorted.

  Tamara knew her husband kept phoning somebody. He feverishly read medical books that had no answer anyway. He asked all his friends about healers and witch doctors, not giving up or succumbing to the inevitable.

  The gardener gathered leaves into a pile; kitchen maids carried ducks, the dead birds with eyes of great martyrs, hung from their feet on the maids’ yokes.

  A door squeaked and Tamara turned her head. A quiet hallucination slid into the room—a shaven-headed boy wearing a monk robe.