White Shanghai

by Elvira Baryakina

  “Hello,” he said in a quiet voice.

  2.

  Mitya sat on a little bench and tucked his legs in. The mistress looked at him, still trying to figure out what kind of guest had materialized in her room. There was a whitish glow above her head, like fog over a river; it meant the life force was flowing from her.

  This morning, Mitya had been sitting in his usual place under a monastery wall when he saw Klim walking towards him with another person. Klim’s companion looked very presentable with a mustache, beautiful buttons and shiny shoes. But Mitya saw a dark gray-blue glow above the man: he was scared.

  “His wife is in pain. Pray for her please,” Klim pleaded. “Like you did for Seraphim.”

  They took Mitya to the Aulmans’ house, asked if he needed anything and sent him into the mistress’s quarters.

  Her palm was thin and white. Lines spread across it like the veins on a chestnut leaf, each tiny one visible. Here was the illness: the channel for qi flow was ruined.

  Mitya told her about the special gift she possessed.

  “It’s called choice. And it works like this: imagine you are shopping at the market or on Nanjing Dong Lu, in your language Nanking Road. Such a crowded place, isn’t it? Everywhere you look are people, goods and rubbish on the pavements. Your eyes see everything, every cigarette stub, but you wouldn’t remember anything apart from the face of a friend you ran into or a particular shop sign. Because you just can’t remember everything.

  “What remains in your memory—that’s what your life is. Switch off your recollections and you’re not a human being anymore. In front of every person’s memory there is a special sieve; it lets something in and keeps something out. But every sieve has different holes: one size only allows money to get through, another lets in insults, another—happiness and joy.

  “If somebody says, Life is cruel, he is right. He has a thousand correct reasons to prove it. If a person says, Life is wonderful, he is also right, he’ll find thousands of valid reasons to believe this.”

  The mistress lifted her eyelids—her pain had subsided.

  “How can I be happy when I’m like this?” She motioned to her dried out legs and all the rest below her belly-button.

  It’s because she thought of other people and remembered that they walk and jump around.

  “Birds fly in the sky and look down at us thinking, What cripples they are with no wings,” Mitya said. “But you don’t envy them. Well, maybe sometimes you do in your overly emotional moments. Fish have gills; cockroaches walk on ceilings upside down. They have their own life, and you have your own, why do you have to look up to them? Is it not enough that your eyes can see this beauty?” He motioned to a wonderful flower in a fat-bellied pot. “Is it not enough that you can breathe? It’s such a divine and amazing feeling! You have been given so much. If you are grateful for every glimpse of beauty, then you’ll be the happiest person in the world. If you envy cockroaches that walk on ceilings, your every day will turn into hell. That’s what choice is.”

  The mistress kept silent.

  “I’m scared of death,” she whispered very quietly. “Scared of not being.”

  Mitya stood up from the little bench. “Why not?” he said and opened the room’s glass door to the outside. “Did you see the way little pile of snow, which was just swept up, blew away in the next minute? Don’t think about yourself as a whole, think of yourself as snowflakes making a shape. They’ll scatter with the wind, but is that the end? No. Will they disappear from the face of the earth? No. Before you, they’ve been thousands of things and creatures, and after you, they’ll be mixing together and transforming into an infinite amount of things. That’s what life is about—to let everything have time to be everything. That’s the beauty of it all.”

  CHAPTER 68

  THE COMMUNIST UPRISING

  1.

  Early that morning, Maria Zaborova heard gunshots coming from the outskirts of the city. The wounded streamed into the hospital. No one knew what was going on in the Chinese City; only one thing was clear: the communists were to blame.

  Nurses rushed up and down corridors, yelling at patients and at each other. There were not enough beds, so the wounded lay on the floor.

  Maria Zaborova ran in front of Chinese hospital attendants carrying a wounded person. “To the examination room! I’m telling you: to the examination room!” she shouted.

  One man, in a ragged French police uniform, lifted his head, “Nurse, dear…some water, please…” he whispered in Russian.

  Maria rushed to get a mug. She came back, lifted the man’s head up and gave him a drink.

  “What’s the news?” she asked.

  “The commies wanted to take Shanghai before meeting up with the Revolutionary Army,” he said, through chattering teeth. “Governor Sun Chuanfang threw his troops at them, we also helped. … You see, my leg got scratched a bit.”

  Maria cast a look at the blood-saturated sheet covering him from the middle down. “I’ll call a doctor for you,” she said.

  “It’s okay. … Don’t worry…I’m afraid we’ve already lost Shanghai. Factory workers now have guns—from the Bolsheviks. Our Governor’s army isn’t an army, but a gang of fools. Mark my words, nurse: it’ll be the same in China as it was in Russia. The commies have spies everywhere, even in the consulates. They use gals—they’re less suspicious.”

  The wounded man leant back, his lips turning gray.

  “Is it sore?” Maria whispered.

  “Let me rest a bit. I caught one manicurist girl, not too long ago— she was polishing officers’ nails and at the same time sniffing out information. I told the heads we need to watch everyone who leaves the foreign concessions, and find out their purpose. But they brushed me off. … And you know what? That manicurist gal was in contact with a Soviet Consulate representative and gave him details about the number of our troops, what barracks we lived in…everything. … My friends and I caught her and wrung her neck. The Police Commissioner doesn’t give a damn about Shanghai. Any time he can just pack up and jump on a steamer back to Europe. We’re the ones who have nowhere to run.”

  The doctor arrived and told Maria to fetch some camphor. She ran out into a white corridor packed with people, and froze, not knowing where to go to first.

  Years of fighting, so many casualties, so many deaths…and the Red virus is still spreading over the world. Pasha and Glasha—dumb, stupid girls! You’ll get your socialism, silly geese, you’ll have your fill of sorrow, mark my words.

  2.

  For five long years of the Russian Civil War, Maria washed countless bloody bandages in the White Army field hospital. She’d traded her baptismal cross for an empty tin so the wounded in a medical train car had somewhere to pee. After all this, she only had one wish left: to die fighting Bolshevism.

  Her daddy used to say, “You have no fear of death, Maria. Not yours or anybody else’s. And that’s not good for a woman.”

  Yes, she had no fear. Maria lived thriftily; almost everything she earned was sent to the Fascist Circle’s fund.

  It took her a long time to recover from the arrest of her brothers-in-arms, but after some time she started over again, setting up secret meetings and spreading fascist literature.

  At the law faculty of the Harbin Russian University, professors read lectures on the fascist movement and the role of Jews and Masons in the Russian Empire’s devastation. Maria’s trusted friends would carefully take notes and send them to all the cities where patriotic groups had sprouted.

  Liberalism leads to war between the classes, socialism leads to the destruction of the classes, but fascism strives for class consolidation for the sake of national prosperity.

  The White Army lost because they lacked unity and a common ideology. They had nothing to offer the peasants who were the majority of the population. They were fighting only with rifles, but the Reds used rifles and propaganda. The more improbable their promises, the more the great unwashed believed and followed the
m. The instigators didn’t give a damn about being honest. They were ready to swear to the people that the government in Moscow could make wine out of water.

  How could the White Army leaders equal this? With more lies, even more spicy ones? But in what way could they better the propaganda of the communists? That was the tragedy of the White Army: they were fighting for a truth no one wanted to know.

  Maria’s daddy was a perfect example of that stagnant, indifferent mass of people who don’t care about anything except their beer and warm socks for the winter.

  Makar would say, “You, Maria, keep telling me that activity and sacrifice is the base for fascism. But all you are succeeding in is sacrificing active young people who would otherwise live long and full lives. The first ones will be jailed by the authorities here, and the poor second ones, which you send on missions to the Soviet territories, will be murdered anyway.”

  Maria clenched her teeth. “The fallen ones will be replaced with new warriors.”

  “Ah, my dear, new ones first have to be born and brought up. Look at yourself, you don’t want to get married, you’d rather wage war for the good of the Motherland. But what is this good? Who defines it?”

  “We do, the fascists!”

  Her daddy just didn’t understand that national interests must be held higher than anything else. Only the strongest can win the battle, that’s why the Russian people need to free themselves from the deadweight: they should exterminate the weak-willed and self-satisfied ones who are prone to bourgeois complacency.

  Makar continued arguing with her, “But maybe those satisfied ones are not the enemy, but actually the saved ones? They’re happy, and the more happy ones you have, the less work you have to do. You’re fighting for the people’s happiness, aren’t you?”

  Goodness me, how to talk sense to such an ignoramus?

  Maria tried to contain herself, holding back her anger. “Swine are also happy, just give them grub and dirt, the thicker the better.”

  “Well, they are swine so why do you care? Why do you set about turning them into wolves? And especially against their own will? In your hospital, you help all people without distinction and that’s the right thing to do. Who taught you to exterminate someone? Definitely not your old father. It’s those meetings you go to at night that screw with your brains.”

  That was the enemy—indolence and unresponsiveness, and the Bolsheviks were just a wart on a sick body.

  If one day, those like Maria’s daddy would flock with shining eyes to the flag of national ideals, then she could count her life well-spent. She wished for more time to educate that slack, lazy mass about the glories of fascism before the commies beat her to it. But she did not possess such a luxury as time.

  At night, the hospital received the latest newspapers reports: the workers’ revolt had been suppressed, all the ringleaders’ heads had been cut off.

  Maria urgently called a meeting of her fellow fascists.

  “The Bolsheviks aren’t going back,” she said to her friends. “It’s them or us. Their spies are working the city and supply them with information. The police are inactive, that’s why it’s our responsibility to watch all suspicious people who leave the borders of the foreign concessions. Death to spies!”

  “Death to spies!” her brothers-in arms declared.

  3.

  Lissie sat on her bed, naked, except for her high heels and a beaded necklace. She was drawing Johnny Collor’s disheveled head. His pants and her dress were lying on the floor, embracing each other.

  Collor glanced at Lissie’s sketches. “You’d be good drawing criminals on the loose.”

  Lissie liked Collor’s confidence, his hidden inner power and his brutality. He could rudely throw her on a bed and push her knees apart.

  Ever since Collor appeared in Lissie’s house, they met every week. For each date, she prepared herself as if she was going to a ball. At first, Collor pretended he didn’t notice her glances and her stocking-rim flashing through the slit of her dress. One day he told her to come to a conspiratorial flat, a tiny, haphazardly furnished room with a musty smell. Lissie rattled off new information about the Kuomintang Central Political Council who had decided to move the capital from Canton to Hankou, so they would be closer to the theater of war.

  She walked from one corner of the room to another, gently swaying her hips. Collor watched her with wicked eyes. Of course, he understood everything and was not thinking about capitals and political councils. Lissie stopped in front of a window, so that Collor could better see her silhouette, wrapped in an almost transparent dress.

  “Sokoloff is very pleased with me,” she said. “Yesterday, he took me to a trade union meeting at a factory. He also complained about the disgustingly slow connection with Moscow. The cables are very expensive and he only has a budget allotted for fifteen pages a year. It takes their couriers two to three weeks to deliver a message. Sometimes the local Bolsheviks don’t receive instructions from the center for months.”

  Collor came up to her, grasped her by the waist and turned her to him. “Don’t they have a hotline?”

  Lissie felt his hot breathing on her cheek. “The quota for a hotline is twenty-four hours a year.”

  She scratched his back and he left her breasts strewn with love bites.

  “Not a word to anyone, got it?” Collor said in a menacing voice.

  Lissie smiled. She knew she had him under her little finger.

  In a month, Collor started to pay her money as she told him she wasn’t going to work for free.

  “We’ll jail you,” Johnny threatened.

  “I hope you’ll visit me in prison?”

  Collor would swear. “I haven’t met such a mercantile individual in my entire life!”

  Each time after that thing, he would go to the bathroom and have a long shower. Lissie was amused: he thought she was dirty.

  She became cynical and stopped taking life seriously: after Edna’s death, a screw came loose in her head. Lissie acknowledged it herself, but couldn’t and didn’t want to change a thing. After all, what fun it was to make love, count money, play politics and not give a damn about death!

  “At the moment, fifty-three hundred people patrol the foreign concessions: English, Americans, French, Italians and Japanese,” Lissie told Sokoloff. “It’s obviously not enough to stand up to the Revolutionary Army. The Municipal Council asks its mother countries for help, and from January to March, they expect to receive about forty military ships. The number of soldiers will reach thirteen thousand. The only thing the Municipal Council is concerned about is that the reinforcements won’t come in time and the Revolutionary Army will get to Shanghai first.”

  Sokoloff was convinced he’d converted Lissie to his faith and dragged her to all the meetings where she entertained herself memorizing minute details of the audience’s faces. If she wanted to, she could easily draw them—not perfectly, but close enough. Sokoloff was right: Lissie had an immense talent for espionage work.

  Sun Chuanfang, the military governor of the Chinese City, was committing atrocities: not one day passed without public executions in the streets. They would lead a person out, swoosh went the sword, and it was done.

  Lissie wasn’t horrified anymore at the bloodstained heads stuck on telegraph poles—she’d become totally indifferent.

  “I know, I’ll die young,” she told Collor. “Which is good—I don’t want to turn into a sick old wreck.”

  Johnny would shake his head. “You’re already sick.”

  What a fool he was! Lissie thought.

  She decided to become cleverer and kinder. When Robert read his father’s letters aloud, she didn’t wish old Hugh would be carted off to a mental asylum anymore. Even her mother was forgiven.

  For the first time in many years, Lissie received a letter: Mother had learned of Edna’s death and asked how it happened. That old, familiar feeling of jealousy awoke in Lissie’s chest, I’m alive and am of less interest to you than dead Edna, but she ex
tinguished it. She sent her mother a cutout of the newspaper obituary column and the letter from the hotel manager. She decided to not tell her that Daniel Bernard was guilty of Edna’s death.

  CHAPTER 69

  THE GREEN GANG

  1.

  Don Fernando, a bulldog, heaved his filthy paws and dribbling jowls into Nina’s house. He sat sideways on a chair, pulled out a cigar and lit up without asking permission.

  “Sorry, I didn’t catch you in your office,” he said. “But, it’s better no one can hear us. I’m here on someone’s behalf.”

  “Who?” Nina inquired.

  “An important Chinese man. Probably the most important in Shanghai.”

  “Big-Eared Du?”

  Don Fernando played with his eyebrows. “Maybe. You, my dear lady, are close to Fessenden. We’d need to know what these Municipal gentlemen are thinking. Any day now, the Revolutionary Army will enter Shanghai and our situation could quickly turn to custard. What are we going to do?”

  “Du wants to contact Fessenden?” Nina asked.

  The Don did not answer directly. “You and I have the same interests. We want to keep our businesses running and leave everything as it was before.”

  Nina smiled ironically. During her breakfast in the Palace Hotel, Sterling Fessenden hinted that the foreigners should look for allies among strong Chinese parties.

  “In Shanghai, there’s only one strong Chinese party, the bandits,” Nina said.

  Fessenden looked around all the people present: the cotton tycoon Spunt, the fat-cheeked banker Sir Elly Kadoorie, the financial genius Sir Victor Sassoon who in the middle of war started to build the thirteen-story Cathay Hotel. There were loud rumblings from his construction site across the road.

  “Well, if we have no other alternative—” Fessenden muttered.

  Those presented didn’t object: that meant they agreed.

  Then they discussed a Christmas memorandum from Britain’s Foreign Office: if China had a legitimate government, the Cabinet was ready to revise unequal agreements. That was an unspoken promise to Chiang Kai-shek: We’ll recognize you and even help you to become a national hero if you provide certain guarantees to foreign businesses.