White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

I wanted to know if he had come back to me because he loved me or because things had gone wrong with Amelia. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask him. The words lay on my tongue like a foul taste. The uncertainty was a barrier between us. To talk of her was to conjure her up, and I was too afraid to do that.

  After a while he sat up and rolled his shoulders. ‘You have to move back to the house,’ he said.

  The thought of even seeing the house made my stomach turn. I didn’t want to live in the place where Dmitri had been with Amelia. I did not want to see betrayal in every piece of furniture. I baulked at the idea of sleeping in my old bed after it had been defiled.

  ‘No, I don’t want to,’ I said, pushing my plate aside.

  ‘It’s safer at the house. And for now that’s what we have to think about.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to the house. I don’t even want to see it.’

  Dmitri rubbed his face. ‘If the Communists storm the city, they will come to the Concession via your street first. The apartment has no protection. At least the house has the wall.’

  He was right, but I still didn’t want to go. ‘What do you think they will do if they come?’ I asked. ‘Will they send us to the Soviet Union like they did to my mother?’

  Dmitri shrugged. ‘No. Who will make money for them? They will take over the government and seize Chinese businesses. It’s the looting and rioting I’m concerned about.’

  Dmitri stood up to go. When he saw that I was hesitant he reached out his hand. ‘Anya, I want you to be with me,’ he said.

  My heart dropped when I saw the house. The garden was muddy from the rain. No one had bothered to prune the rosebushes. They had turned into menacing vines snaking up the walls, digging their tentacles into the window frames and leaving brown scars on the paint. The gardenia tree had lost all its leaves and was nothing more than a stick poking up through the ground. Even the soil in the beds looked clumped and dejected: no one had planted bulbs for spring. I heard Mei Lin singing in the laundry and realised that Dmitri must have moved her to the house yesterday.

  The Old Maid opened the door and smiled when she saw me. The expression transformed her sunken eyes. For a moment she looked radiant. In all the years I had known her she had not smiled at me once. Suddenly, as we were balanced on the brink of disaster, she had decided to like me. Dmitri helped her drag my suitcases into the entrance and I wondered when the other servants had left.

  The walls of the drawing room were bare, all the paintings were gone. There were holes where the light fittings had been removed.

  ‘I stored them away. To be safe,’ Dmitri said.

  The Old Maid opened the trunks and started carrying my clothes up the stairs. I waited until she was out of earshot before I turned to Dmitri and said, ‘Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie any more.’

  He flinched as if I had struck him.

  ‘You sold them to keep the club. I’m not stupid. I’m not a little girl, despite what you think. I’m old, Dmitri. Look at me. I’m old.’

  Dmitri slipped his hand over my mouth and held me against his chest. He was exhausted. Old too. I could feel it through his skin. His heart was barely beating. He clutched me, pressing his cheek against mine. ‘She took them when she left.’

  The words stung like a slap. My heart bore down on my rib cage. I thought it might burst into the pit of my stomach. So she had left him. He hadn’t chosen me over her at all. I pulled away from him and sank back against the sideboard. ‘Is she gone?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, watching me.

  I sucked in a breath, teetering between two worlds. One where I took my suitcases and headed back to the apartment, and the other where I stayed with Dmitri. I pressed my palms against my forehead. ‘Then we will put her behind us,’ I said. ‘She is out of our lives.’

  Dmitri fell against me and wept into my neck.

  ‘“She”, “Her”, “Gone”. That’s how we will talk of her now,’ I said.

  The Nationalist army tanks roared through the city day and night and the street-corner execution of Communist supporters became a daily occurrence. Once, on my way to the markets, I passed four severed heads spiked on street signs and didn’t even notice until a girl and her mother behind me screamed. In those last days the streets always smelled of blood.

  The new curfew limited us to opening the club only three nights a week, which was a blessing in a way because we were short-staffed. All our top chefs had left for Taiwan or Hong Kong and it was hard to find any musicians who were not Russian. But on the nights we did open, the old patrons were there in their finery.

  ‘I’m not going to let a bunch of disgruntled peasants spoil my fun,’ Madame Degas told me one evening, taking a long drag through her cigarette holder. ‘They’ll spoil everything if we let them.’ Her poodle had been run over by a car, but she had stoically replaced it with a parrot named Phi-Phi.

  Her sentiment was reflected in the faces of the other patrons who stayed on in Shanghai. The British and American businessmen, the Dutch shipping merchants, the nervous Chinese entrepreneurs. An obsessive kind of joie de vivre kept us going.

  Despite the mayhem in the streets outside, we drank cheap wine as if it were vintage stock and nibbled at cubes of ham the way we once ate caviar. When there were blackouts, we lit candles. Dmitri and I waltzed on the dance floor every night like newlyweds. The war, Sergei’s death and Amelia had all come to seem a strange dream.

  On the evenings the club was closed, Dmitri and I stayed at home. We read to each other or listened to records. In the midst of the disintegration of the city we had become a normal married couple. Amelia was nothing more than a ghost in the house. Sometimes I caught a whiff of her scent on a cushion or found a sleek dark hair on a brush or tile. But I never saw her or heard from her, until one evening, several weeks after I had moved back into the house, when the telephone rang and the Old Maid answered it. In the absence of the manservant the old woman had taken to speaking English and answering the telephone like a butler. I could tell who the caller was by the way the Old Maid shuffled into the room, nervously avoiding my glance. She whispered something to Dmitri. ‘Tell her I am not at home,’ he said. The Old Maid returned to the hall and was about to deliver the message when Dmitri called out loud enough so that Amelia would have heard him: ‘Tell her not to call here again.’

  The next day Luba sent me an urgent message to meet her at the club. We hadn’t seen each other for a month and when I found her sitting in the foyer in a smart hat but with a face as drawn as a dead woman’s, I almost cried with the shock of it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked her.

  ‘We are leaving the house,’ she said. ‘We depart for Hong Kong tonight. This is the last day for exit visas. Anya, you must come with us.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I told her.

  ‘It will be impossible for you to get an exit visa otherwise. Alexei has a brother in Hong Kong. You can pose as our daughter.’

  I had never seen Luba in such an overwrought state. She had been my voice of calm through my marriage crisis. But when I looked at the other women in the room, the few regulars who were left, all of them had the same panic-stricken eyes.

  ‘Dmitri came back to me,’ I said. ‘I know he won’t leave the club and I must stay with my husband.’ I bit my lip and stared at my hands. Another person was slipping away from me. If Luba left Shanghai, we weren’t likely to meet again.

  She opened her handbag and pulled out a handkerchief. ‘I told you he would come back,’ she said, dabbing at her eyes. ‘I’d help you both to get out, but you’re right about Dmitri. He won’t leave the club. I wish he was still friends with my husband. Alexei might have been able to convince him to leave.’

  The maître d’hôtel called us to say our usual table was ready. After he seated us, Luba ordered a bottle of the best champagne, and the cheesecake for dessert.

  When the champagne arrived, she almost gulped down her first glass. ‘I’ll send you our address in Hong Kong,’ she sa
id. ‘If you need our help in any way, you let me know. Though I would be a lot happier if I knew you were intending to leave.’

  ‘There’s still quite a crowd going to the club,’ I told her. ‘But if they start leaving, I promise I will talk to Dmitri about going too.’

  Luba nodded. ‘I have news about what happened to Amelia,’ she said.

  I dug my nails into the seat of my chair. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  ‘I heard she started chasing after a Texan with money. But that man was smarter than her usual prey. He took what he wanted and then left her. She’s been outdone this time.’

  I told her what had happened the previous night and how Dmitri had told Amelia never to call again.

  The champagne seemed to have helped Luba’s nerves. A smile came to her face. ‘So the bitch had to have one more try,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, Anya. He’s out from under her spell now. Forgive him, and love him with all your heart.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. But I wished we hadn’t spoken about Amelia. She was a virus that lay dormant in the system until you mentioned her.

  Luba took another swig of champagne. ‘The woman’s a fool,’ she said. ‘She’s been telling people about some rich connections she has in Los Angeles. She’s talking about her own nightclub, the Moscow-LA. What a joke.’

  It was raining when we came out of the club. I kissed Luba goodbye and was grateful for the numbing properties of champagne. I watched her push her way through the crowds to get to a rickshaw. What has happened to us all? I wondered. Those of us who had once waltzed on the dance floor of the Moscow-Shanghai and tried to sing like Josephine Baker.

  The night was full of the wail of sirens and in the distance there was gunfire. The next morning I found Dmitri standing ankle-deep in the muddy garden.

  ‘They closed the club,’ he said.

  His face was ashen. In his despairing eyes I saw the young Dmitri. A boy who had lost his mother.

  He shook his head in disbelief. ‘We are ruined,’ he said.

  ‘It’s only until everything settles down,’ I told him. ‘I’m prepared. We have enough of everything to last us a few months.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear the news?’ he said. ‘The Communists have taken over. They want all foreigners out. All of us. The American consulate and the International Refugee Organisation have arranged a ship.’

  ‘Then let’s get out,’ I said. ‘We’ll start again.’

  Dmitri sank to his knees in the mud. ‘Did you hear what I said, Anya? Refugees. We can’t take anything with us.’

  ‘Let’s just go, Dmitri. We are lucky somebody wants to help us.’

  He brought his muddy hands to his face and covered his eyes. ‘We’re going to be poor.’

  The word ‘poor’ seemed to break him but I felt strangely relieved. We weren’t going to be poor. We were going to be free. I hadn’t wanted to leave China because it had seemed the only connection to my mother. But the China we had known didn’t exist any more. It had slipped through our hands in a second. None of us should have tried taking it in the first place. Even my mother would have seen the open door before me, a chance for Dmitri and I to start again.

  The Old Maid’s face dropped when I told her that she and Mei Lin should leave because it wasn’t safe to be in our house. I packed whatever food I could for them into trunks, and sewed a pouch full of money and told the Old Maid to hide it in her dress. Mei Lin clung to me. Dmitri had to help me lift her into the rickshaw. ‘You must go with your old friend,’ I told her. She was still crying when the rickshaw moved off, and for a moment I thought of keeping her with me. But I knew they would never let her out.

  Dmitri and I made love to the sound of bomber planes and the thunder of distant explosions. ‘Can you forgive me, Anya? Can you really forgive me?’ he asked afterwards. I told him that I already had.

  In the morning a torrential rain was falling. It beat like gunfire against the roof. I slid out of Dmitri’s embrace and moved to the window. The rain was washing down the street in great floods. I turned to Dmitri’s naked form on the bed and wished that the rain could wash away the past too. He stirred and blinked at me.

  ‘Never mind the rain,’ he mumbled. ‘I will go by foot to the consulate. You pack our suitcases. I will come back and get you tonight.’

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ I told him, helping him with his shirt and coat. ‘They aren’t going to kill us. They are just telling us to get out.’

  He touched my cheek. ‘Do you really think we can start again?’

  Together we walked through the house, knowing that by the end of the day we would never again recline on its elegant furniture or gaze out its grand windows. I wondered what would become of it, to what use the Communists would put it. I was grateful Sergei wouldn’t have to witness the destruction of Marina’s beloved home. I kissed Dmitri and watched him run up the garden path, hunched against the rain. I felt the urge to go with him, but there was little time and I had to prepare for our journey.

  I spent the day breaking up my jewellery and sewing the stones and pearls into the toes of our socks and the seams of our underwear. I hid the remaining pieces of my mother’s jade necklace in the base of my matroshka doll. I had no practical clothes that I could pack, so I stuffed my most expensive dresses into my suitcase in the hope that at least I would be able to sell them. I was terrified and excited at the same time. We couldn’t be sure that the Communists would let us out. Not if they were like Tang. They might execute us in their thirst for revenge. But I sang as I worked. I was happy and in love again. When darkness fell I shut all the curtains and cooked by candlelight, using every ingredient in the kitchen to prepare a feast. I spread out a white tablecloth on the floor and set it with our wedding dishes and glasses, the last time we would use them.

  When Dmitri did not return in the evening I convinced myself not to think the worst. I speculated that the rain would keep the Communists at bay for at least another day and that Dmitri was streetwise enough to stay out of trouble. ‘The worst is over,’ I muttered to myself like a mantra and curled up on the floor. ‘The worst is over.’

  When Dmitri hadn’t returned by morning, I tried to call the consulate but the lines were down. I waited another two hours, nervous sweat pooling under my arms and slipping down my back. The rain eased and I threw on my coat and boots and ran to the consulate. The halls and waiting areas were crammed with people. I was given a ticket and told to wait my turn. I scanned the crowds desperately for Dmitri.

  I spotted Dan Richards coming out of his office and called out to him. He recognised me and waved me over.

  ‘Awful business, Anya,’ he said, taking my coat and shutting the door to his office behind us. ‘Can I get you some tea?’

  ‘I’m looking for my husband,’ I told him, trying to quell the panic that was churning inside me. ‘He came here yesterday to get us passage on the refugee ship. But he hasn’t returned.’

  Concern washed over Dan’s kind face. He helped me into a seat and patted my arm. ‘Please don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Everything has been chaotic here. I’ll find out what has happened.’

  He disappeared down the hall. I sat, numb like a stone, eyeing the Chinese antiques and books that were half packed into boxes.

  Dan returned an hour later, his face gaunt. I rose out of the chair, terrified that Dmitri was dead. Dan had a paper in his hands and lifted it up to me. I saw the photograph of Dmitri. The eyes that I loved so much.

  ‘Anya, is this your husband? Dmitri Lubensky?’

  I nodded, fear screaming in my ears.

  ‘Good God, Anya!’ he cried, sinking into his chair and running his hand through his unkempt hair. ‘Dmitri Lubensky married Amelia Millman last night and left for America this morning.’

  I stood in front of the Moscow-Shanghai, staring at its boarded-up doors and windows. The rain had stopped. Guns were sounding nearby. My eyes drank in the portico, the stone steps, the white lions that guarded the entrance. Was I trying to
remember or forget it all? Sergei, Dmitri and I dancing to the Cuban band, the wedding, the funeral, the last days. A family scurried by on the street behind me. The mother shooed her crying children like a hen. The father was bent over, pulling a cart of trunks and suitcases which I knew would be seized before they even got to the dock.

  Dan had given me one hour to return to the consulate. From there he had secured for me passage on a United Nations ship headed for the Philippines. I was going to be a refugee, but I was going to be one alone. The pearls and stones in my stocking toes jabbed me. All my other jewellery would be looted when the hordes broke into the house. All of it except my wedding ring. I lifted my hand and stared at its bands in the glary light. I climbed the steps towards the growling marble lion closest to the door and placed the ring on its tongue. My offering to Mao Zedong.

  Part Two

  EIGHT

  The Island

  The ship that took us from Shanghai groaned and listed to one side. It lurched forward at full speed, smoke billowing from its funnels. I watched the city slip further and further into the distance, waves splashing over my feet. The buildings of the Bund were devoid of light and activity, like grieving relatives at a funeral. The streets were quiet, waiting for what would come next. Once we reached the mouth of the river the refugees on board wept and laughed. One held up the white, blue and red royal flag. We had been saved. Other rescue ships had been shot at or sunk before they reached that point. The passengers sprang from railing to railing, hugging each other, buoyant with relief. Only I seemed to be sinking, weighed down by a loss wrapped around me like an anchor. I was being dragged down into the river, the murky water rushing over my head.

  Dmitri’s second betrayal had unleashed a longing for my mother stronger than I had experienced in all the years we had been separated. I called her up from the past. I saw her face in the overcast sky and in the white wake that spread like a sheet between me and the country where I had been born. Her image was the only thing that could bring comfort. Only she could help name the wretchedness that tormented me.