White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Aimka.

  ‘I’m coming too,’ I said.

  ‘No!’ she said, holding up her palm. ‘Not if you want to keep your job with the Colonel. Not if you ever want to get a job in Sydney.’

  ‘Stay,’ Irina whispered to me. ‘Don’t make it bad for yourself too.’

  I watched Aimka march Irina out the door. Elsa flashed her eyes at me before tucking in her blankets and turning down her bed. I felt such rage that I imagined myself pummelling her back with my fists. I grabbed the matroshka doll off the shelf and finished packing my suitcase. Romola and her English-speaking friend didn’t take their eyes off me the whole time.

  ‘Go to hell!’ I screamed at them. I picked up my suitcase and slammed the door behind me before rushing out into the darkness.

  The night air didn’t make me feel any better. What was going to happen to Irina? Surely they wouldn’t send her to gaol? I imagined her pitiful uncomprehending face in a courtroom. ‘No, stop it,’ I told myself. They were not going to put her in gaol over that. But she might be punished in some other way and that was not fair. They might put it on her record and make it hard for her to get a job. I heard laughter from one of the huts. A woman was telling a story in Russian and other women’s voices were egging her on. God, I thought, why weren’t Irina and I put in there?

  I heard the door to our hut slam, and turned to see the two Hungarian girls running towards me. I thought they might be coming to beat me up and I picked up my suitcase to defend myself. But the girl who could speak English said, ‘We know your friend didn’t take the necklace. Elsa did. You’d better go to the Colonel and try to help your friend. We will write a note but anonymous, okay? Don’t trust Aimka.’

  I thanked them and ran to the administration office. Why had I let Aimka stop me? Did I care more about my job than Irina?

  When I reached the Colonel’s office I saw that the light was still on inside. Irina and Aimka were just coming out the door. Irina was weeping. I ran to her and threw my arms around her shoulders. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘She’ll have to move her things to a tent,’ Aimka said. ‘And she won’t work at the crèche any more. She’s been warned once and if it happens again she will be more severely punished.’

  Irina tried to say something but couldn’t. I was confused by Aimka’s sudden coldness. I was starting to get the impression she was enjoying seeing Irina punished.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ I said to Aimka. ‘You know she didn’t take it. You said yourself Elsa was a troublemaker. I thought you were our friend.’

  Aimka snorted. ‘Did you? Why did you think that? I’ve only known you a few days. Your people stole plenty of things when they came to liberate us.’

  I was lost for words. Aimka’s mask was slipping away but I couldn’t yet see what was underneath. Who was this woman, this pianist who at first had seemed so intelligent and kind? Only a few days before she had criticised those who brought their national conflicts with them to Australia. Now it seemed that her real problem with us was that we were Russians.

  ‘She said if we want to be together, you can come to the tent too,’ Irina sniffed.

  I looked into Irina’s bloodshot eyes. ‘Of course I’ll come with you,’ I told her. ‘Then neither of us will have this bitch as our block supervisor.’ I had never used such a word before and I shocked myself, but somehow I was proud of myself too.

  ‘I knew you were common,’ said Aimka.

  The door to the Colonel’s office swung open and he stuck his head out. ‘What’s all this commotion?’ he asked, scratching his ear. ‘It’s late and I’m trying to work.’ The Colonel did a double take when he saw me. ‘Anya, is everything all right?’ he asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘No, Colonel Brighton,’ I said, ‘everything is not all right. My friend has been wrongly accused of theft.’

  The Colonel sighed. ‘Anya, come inside for a moment, will you? Ask your friend to wait. Aimka, that’s all for the evening.’

  Aimka glowered at the Colonel’s tone of regard for me. She squared her shoulders before heading down the path back to the huts. I told Irina to wait and followed the Colonel into his office.

  The Colonel sat down at his desk. He had circles under his eyes and he seemed annoyed, but I didn’t let that worry me. My job planting trees and filing letters wasn’t as important to me as Irina.

  He sucked on the end of his pen, then pointed it at me and said, ‘If you speak to Rose she will tell you that I always make snap decisions about people and that once I’ve made my decision I never change my mind. The one thing she will neglect to tell you is that I have never been wrong. Now, I made a decision about you the moment I met you. You were honest and prepared to work hard.’

  The Colonel walked around his desk and loomed dangerously close to the map of Australia. I wondered if there was going to be another lecture on ‘populate or perish’.

  ‘Anya, if you say your friend didn’t take that necklace, I believe you. I had my own doubts anyway and checked her file. There’s a letter in there from Captain Connor, just like there was for you. He wrote about her bravery in caring for mental patients during a typhoon. Now if Captain Connor was like me, a busy man, which I imagine he was, he wouldn’t have had time to set down reports on just anybody. He’d have to have had a good reason for praising them.’

  I wished Irina could be in the room to hear what the Colonel was saying, although she wouldn’t have been able to understand it anyway.

  ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ I said. ‘I appreciate what you’re saying.’

  ‘I didn’t assign her to a tent to punish her,’ he said, ‘but to get her away from Aimka. But I’ll say no more on that because I’m desperate for people who can speak languages. I’ll get Irina something better when I can, but for the moment she’ll have to make do with a tent.’

  I wanted to hug him but that wouldn’t have been appropriate. I thanked him again and headed towards the door. The Colonel opened a notebook and began writing.

  ‘And Anya,’ he said, as I was about to close the door, ‘don’t tell anybody about this conversation. I cannot be seen to be playing favourites.’

  The weeks following the necklace incident were miserable. Although Colonel Brighton hadn’t put a black mark against Irina’s name, and even Romola and her friend, who was called Tessa, tried to piece enough Russian together to tell her they knew she wasn’t to blame, Irina lost her enthusiasm for Australia. The situation wasn’t helped by our new accommodation. Our tent was pitched at the edge of the camp, away from the other tents which were occupied by Sicilian men waiting for transport north to the cane fields, and a long way from the women’s facilities. If I tried to stand up straight the roof of the tent scraped the top of my head, and our floor was nothing more than dirt, which made everything we owned stink like dust. At least I didn’t have to spend a lot of time there, but Irina, with no job, spent her days lying in bed or milling around the post office waiting for more news from Ruselina.

  ‘France is far away,’ I tried to reassure her. ‘It will take weeks for a letter to get here and Ruselina can’t send telegrams all the time.’

  The only thing Irina showed any enthusiasm for was her English classes. At first that made me feel better. I’d return to the tent and find her practising her vowels or reading the Australian Women’s Weekly with a dictionary. I thought as long as she kept up that interest, things would get better. That was until I realised the English practice was part of her preparation to go to the United States.

  ‘I want to go to America,’ she told me one morning when I returned from my shower and was dressing for work. ‘I must take the chance that they will let Grandmother in when she’s better.’

  ‘Everything will settle down,’ I told her. ‘We’ll save some money and get jobs in Sydney soon.’

  ‘I’ll perish here. Do you understand, Anya?’ she said. Her eyes were bloodshot. ‘I don’t want to stay in this ugly country with its
ugly people. I need beauty. I need music.’

  I sat down on her bed and took her hands in mine. Irina was voicing my worst fears. If she had given up hope for a good life in Australia, how was I supposed to maintain it?

  ‘We are not migrants,’ I told her. ‘We are refugees. How can we leave? We must at least try and make money first.’

  ‘What about your friend?’ she said, clutching my sleeve. ‘The American?’

  I didn’t dare tell her that I had thought about writing to Dan Richards many times myself. But we had signed a contract with the Australian government and I doubted there was much Dan could do to help us now. At least not until our two years were up. I’d heard the punishment for breaking the contract was deportation. Where were they going to deport us to? Russia? We would be executed there.

  ‘I promise that I’ll think about it if you promise to spend the day with Mariya and Natasha,’ I told her. ‘They said they need help in the kitchen and that the job pays well. Irina, we will work hard, save up some money and go to Sydney.’

  At first she wouldn’t agree, but then she thought about it and decided that if she worked in the kitchen she could start saving up for America. I didn’t argue with her. As long as she didn’t spend all day alone I would be happy. I waited for Irina to dress and fix her hair and we walked to the dining hall together.

  Irina’s state of mind must have worried Mariya and Natasha too, because when I returned to the tent in the early evening, Lev was busy clearing the long grass that surrounded it and Piotr was building us a wooden floor.

  ‘Irina’s terrified of snakes,’ Piotr said. ‘This ought to put her mind at ease.’

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked.

  ‘Mariya and Natasha took her to the cinema hall. There’s a piano there and Natasha wants to start playing again. They are trying to convince Irina to sing.’

  There was a pick in the sack of tools they had brought. I asked if I could use it to dig a garden patch at the front of the tent.

  ‘The one you made around the entrance and the flagpole is beautiful,’ said Lev, straightening up and tossing aside his sickle. ‘You have a talent for gardening. Where did you learn?’

  ‘My father had a spring flower garden in Harbin. I must have learned from watching. He said it was good for your soul to put your hands in the earth every once in a while.’

  Piotr, Lev and I spent the rest of the daylight hours making improvements to the tent. When we had finished, it was hardly recognisable. The interior smelled of pinewood and lemon. Outside I’d planted a ring of bluebells and daisies and some grevillea. The trimmed lawn was a great improvement.

  ‘Everyone in the camp is going to be jealous now,’ laughed Lev.

  Working with Mariya and Natasha improved Irina’s depression a little, but not much. She didn’t want to go on living in a camp forever, and we still had no idea when we could go to Sydney. I tried to cheer her up by taking her into the town which could be reached in twenty minutes on the local bus. Several other people from the camp were travelling into the town that day, but none of them spoke Russian or English so we couldn’t ask them anything about it. When the bus reached the outskirts of the town, we saw that the streets were as wide as two Shanghai blocks. They were flanked on either side by sandstone bungalows and cottages with white picket fences. Elms, willows and tall liquidambars shaded the roads with their sprawling limbs.

  The bus terminated in the main street, which was lined with houses with cast-iron railings and shops with corrugated-iron awnings. A Georgian-style church was situated on the corner. Dust-covered cars were parked front end to the kerb, side by side with horses tied to water troughs. Across the road we saw a pub that was three storeys high and had a Toohey’s Beer poster of a man playing golf painted on its side.

  Irina and I strolled past the draperies, hardware and general stores to an ice-cream parlour that was playing Dizzy Gillespie on a transistor radio. Afro-Cuban jazz seemed so out of place in the dry, dusty environment that even Irina smiled. A woman in a button-down dress served us chocolate ice-cream on cones, which we had to eat quickly because the ice-cream started to melt the moment we stepped out of the store.

  I noticed a man with a pockmarked nose staring at us from a bus stop. His face was red and his eyes white with drink. I told Irina that we should cross the road.

  ‘Go home, reffos,’ the man growled at us. ‘We don’t want you lot here.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Irina asked me.

  ‘He’s just a drunk,’ I said, trying to hurry her along. I didn’t want Irina to collect any evidence about ugly Australians.

  ‘Go home you bloody reffo sluts!’ the man screamed at us. My heart thumped in my chest. I wanted to look over my shoulder to see if he was following us, but I didn’t. I knew it wasn’t wise to show fear.

  ‘Bloody reffo sluts!’ the man screamed again. Someone from the pub opened a window and shouted back, ‘Shut up, Harry!’

  To my surprise, Irina laughed. ‘I understood that,’ she said.

  Behind the main street was a park bordered by pine trees, with ornate fountains and flowerbeds bursting with marigolds. A family was sitting on a blanket near a bandstand draped in bougainvillea. The father wished us good morning when we passed. Irina wished him good morning back in English, but we felt self-conscious after the incident with the drunk and didn’t stop to talk.

  ‘This park is pretty,’ I said to Irina.

  ‘Yes, it’s an improvement on the camp.’

  We sat down on the steps of the bandstand. Irina picked clover flowers from the grass and started to make a chain. ‘I didn’t think there was anything civilised around us,’ she said. ‘I thought we were in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘We should have come here sooner,’ I replied, encouraged that Irina was talking about something positive for a change.

  She finished her chain and hung it around her neck. ‘I would hate me if I were you, Anya,’ she said. ‘Just think, if it wasn’t for me and Grandmother, you’d be in New York now.’

  ‘I’d be on my own in New York,’ I said. ‘And I’d rather be with you.’

  Irina lifted her eyes to mine. They were filled with tears. I knew that I couldn’t have said anything more true. No matter how hard life in Australia seemed, there was nothing to guarantee that life in America would have been any better. It was people who were important, not the country in which you lived.

  ‘The only thing that matters,’ I said, ‘is that Ruselina gets better and we bring her here.’

  Irina took the flower chain from around her neck and put it around mine. ‘I love you,’ she said.

  Apart from Irina’s unhappiness, what had unnerved me most about the necklace incident was the way Aimka had turned on us. I couldn’t understand why she had been so warm towards us in the beginning if, deep down inside, she resented Russians. The mystery was solved several weeks later when I met Tessa in the laundry.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, my hands deep in soapy water.

  ‘Hello,’ Tessa replied. ‘How is your friend?’

  ‘Getting better.’

  Tessa reached into her pocket and took out a matchbox. She struck a match and lit the boiler, then used the same match to light her cigarette. ‘I heard your tent is pretty nice, yeah?’ she said, blowing out a stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth.

  I squeezed out a blouse and dropped it in the rinsing tub. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a palace now.’

  ‘Things are pretty unhappy where we are,’ she said.

  I asked her if Elsa was still making trouble. She did a double take and said, ‘Elsa’s just crazy. It’s Aimka who’s the bitch. She makes everyone miserable.’

  I pulled the plug out of the sink and wrung out the rest of the clothes before dropping them into my wash basket. ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘She sets Elsa up against us. We are young, we want some of the men around sometimes, you know? Aimka should put Elsa in with some older women or some other uptight Germans who want to follow
the rules. But Aimka won’t do it. She’s always baiting everybody.’

  ‘I don’t understand her,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘She came from a family in Budapest that used to hide Jews during the war. They must have been kind people.’

  Tessa’s eyes nearly sprang from her head. ‘Who told you that?’ She stubbed out her cigarette and took a step towards me, glancing over her shoulder before whispering, ‘She’s Hungarian but she lived in Poland. She was a collaborator. She helped send Jewish women and children to their deaths.’

  I returned from work that day feeling that there were whole layers of existence I knew nothing about. Something had happened in Europe that would probably never be fully understood. I had thought Shanghai was full of deceit and corruption, but suddenly Shanghai life as we had lived it seemed fairly simple: if you had money, you enjoyed life; if you didn’t have money, you couldn’t.

  As I was walking towards the tent, I saw Irina creep around the back of it through the vegetable patch we had made. I squinted through the late sun to see what she was doing. She was on her hands and knees and peering around the side of the tent at something. I wondered if she had found a snake after all. But when I came up behind her she grinned and put her finger to her lips.

  ‘Come,’ she whispered, signalling for me to look over her shoulder.

  I crouched down on my hands and knees and crept up beside her. On the other side of our tent an animal with a round back, muscular legs and a long tail was gnawing at the grass like a cow. He must have sensed us looking at him and turned his face towards us. He had ears like a rabbit and brown, sleepy eyes. I knew what he was, I’d seen a picture of one in the Australian Women’s Weekly. A kangaroo.

  ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ Irina said.

  ‘I thought you were going to say that he was another ugly Australian.’

  We both laughed. ‘No, he’s very cute,’ she said.

  One morning, at the beginning of February, I was in the administration office, sorting correspondence and eavesdropping on the Colonel and Ernie talking about problems with the camp.