White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  We walked along a street that sloped towards the harbour. I was amazed at the mix of trees that grew out of sections of the footpath: giant maples, jacarandas and even a palm tree. Some of the terrace houses looked genteel with wrought-iron balconies, black and white tiled verandahs and pots of aspidistras in their entranceways. The other houses were badly in need of a coat of paint. They must have been grand once too, but their shutters were half rotted and some of the windowpanes were broken. We passed a house that had its front door open. I couldn’t resist peering into the dingy corridor. It reeked of something close to opium mixed with wet carpet. Irina tugged my arm and my eyes followed the drainpipe up to the open third-floor window. A man with a beard streaked with paint was leaning out and pointing at us with an artist’s brush.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

  His wild eyes rolled back. He saluted and shouted: ‘Vive la Revolution!’

  Irina and I quickened our pace, almost running down the street. But it wasn’t easy to move speedily with a suitcase each.

  Towards the end of the street, near a flight of descending sandstone stairs, was a house with a ball gown displayed in its ground-floor window. The dress was daffodil yellow with a white fox-fur trim. The backdrop of the window was pink satin with silver stars embroidered onto it. I hadn’t seen anything as glamorous since Shanghai. My eye fell to the gold plate by the door: ‘Judith James, Designer’.

  Irina called out to me from across the road. ‘This is it!’

  The house she was standing in front of was neither elegant nor shabby. Like most of the other houses in the street, it was a terrace with wrought-iron trimmings. The window frames and verandahs sloped to the left and the path to the door was cracked in places, but the windows gleamed and there wasn’t a weed in the small garden. Pink geraniums blossomed near the mailbox and a maple stretched towards the third-floor windows. But it was the gardenia plant blooming from the strip of grass in front of the verandah that caught my eye. It reminded me that I was finally in the city that would help me find my mother. I took the envelope from my bag and looked at the number again. I knew it but I was frightened that such serendipity was a dream. A gardenia still blooming in late summer had to be a good omen.

  One of the doors on the second-floor verandah opened and a woman stepped out. She balanced a cigarette holder on the rim of her lip and rested one hand on her waist. Her sharp-eyed expression didn’t change when Irina and I said hello and put our suitcases down near the gate.

  ‘I heard you’re a singer,’ she said, pointing her chin at Irina and folding her arms over the ruffled neckline of her blouse. With her capri pants, spike-heeled shoes and bleached-grey hair she looked like a taller, tougher, tartier version of Ruselina.

  ‘Yes, I do the cabaret,’ said Irina.

  ‘And what use are you?’ the woman asked, looking me up and down. ‘Besides beautiful. Can you do anything?’

  gaped at her rudeness and struggled for something to say. Surely this woman couldn’t be Mrs Nelson?

  ‘Anya, she is smart,’ Irina answered for me.

  ‘Well, you’d better come on in then,’ the woman said. ‘We’re all geniuses here. I’m Betty, by the way.’

  She lifted her hand to her beehive hairdo and squinted. Later I would learn that this gesture was Betty Nelson’s version of a smile.

  Betty opened the front door for us and we followed her through the entrance and up the stairs. Someone was playing ‘Romance in the Dark’ on a piano in the front room. The house seemed to have been subdivided into an apartment on each floor. Betty’s was on the second. It was almost railroadstyle with windows at the front and rear. At the back of the house, at the end of the corridor, there were two identical doors. ‘This is your bedroom,’ Betty said, opening one of the doors and leading us into a room with peach-coloured walls and a linoleum floor. The two chenille-covered beds were pushed against opposite walls, with a bedside table and lamp between them. Irina and I put our suitcases near the armoire. My eyes fell to the towels and the sprigs of daisies that had been left on our pillows.

  ‘You girls hungry?’ Betty asked. It was more a statement than a question and we scurried after her into the kitchen. A collection of battered pans hung over the oven, and the furniture had been propped under the legs with pieces of folded cardboard because the floor sagged in the middle. The tiles above the sink were old but the grout was clean. The tea towels had lace trimmings and the air smelled like butter cookies, bleach and cooking gas.

  ‘Through there is the living room,’ Betty said, pointing to double-glass doors beyond which was a room with polished floorboards and a wine-red rug. ‘Take a look if you like.’

  The room was the airiest in the house, its high ceiling decorated with wedding-cake swirls. There were two tall bookshelves and a lounge with matching armchairs. A wireless stood in the corner next to a stand with a maidenhair fern on it. Two French doors led out onto the verandah.

  ‘Can we look outside?’ I called out.

  ‘Yes,’ Betty replied from the kitchen. ‘I’m just putting the kettle on.’

  From the verandah, crammed between two houses, there was a slip of a view of the harbour and the lawns of the Botanic Gardens. Irina and I sat for a moment in the wicker chairs, surrounded by pots of spider plants and fishbone ferns.

  ‘Did you notice the photograph?’ Irina asked me. She was whispering although she was speaking in Russian.

  I leaned back and peered into the living room. On one of the bookshelves was a wedding photograph. From the blondeness of the bride and the ritzy gown with fitted bust and straight skirt, I guessed it was Betty and her late husband. Next to that photograph was one of the man in a double-breasted suit and hat. The groom, several years later.

  ‘What?’ I asked Irina.

  ‘There are no pictures of the sons.’

  While Irina helped Betty make the tea, I found the bathroom, a closet-sized space off the kitchen. The room was as well scrubbed as the rest of the flat. The rose-patterned mat on the floor matched the shower curtain and the skirt around the basin. The bathtub was old with a stain around the plughole, but the water heater was new. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror above the sink. My complexion was clear and lightly tanned. I leaned closer and stretched the skin of my cheek between my fingers where the tropical worm had eaten my flesh. The skin was smooth and soft, only a light brown patch remained where I had been so hideously marked. At what point had it healed so well?

  I returned to the kitchen and found Betty lighting a cigarette from the stove flame. Irina was sitting at a card table covered with a sunflower cloth. There was a vanilla cupcake perched on a plate in front of her and at the setting opposite there was another cupcake. ‘These are our “Welcome to Sydney” cakes,’ Irina said.

  I sat down opposite her and watched Betty pour the boiling water into a pot and cover it with a cosy. The piano from downstairs started up again. ‘I’ve got the Sunday evening blues,’ Betty sang along with it. ‘That’s Johnny,’ she said, pointing with her chin towards the door. ‘He lives with his mother, Doris. He plays at some of the clubs up at Kings Cross. We can go to one of the more respectable ones sometime if you like.’

  ‘How many people live in this building?’ I asked.

  ‘Two downstairs and one upstairs. I’ll introduce you to everybody once you’ve settled in.’

  ‘And how about the café?’ asked Irina. ‘How many people work there?’

  ‘Just one Russian cook at the moment,’ Betty said, bringing the pot to the table and sitting down with us. ‘Vitaly. He’s a good boy. A hard worker. You’ll like him. Just don’t either one of you fall in love with him and run off, okay? Not like my last kitchen hand and waitress.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Irina, peeling the paper mould off her cupcake.

  ‘They left me flat out on my own for a month. So if one of you girls even thinks about falling in love with Vitaly, I’ll cut your little fingers off!’

  Irina and I froze
, our cupcakes poised halfway between our mouths and the plates. Betty glared at us, her hand to her beehive and a squint in her eyes.

  I woke in the night with a start. It took me a few seconds to remember that I wasn’t in the camp. A streak of light from the window of the third-floor apartment reflected off the house behind ours and shone across my bed. I breathed in the freshly laundered scent of the sheets. There was a time when I’d slept in a four-poster bed with a cashmere cover and gold paper on the walls around me. But I’d lived with canvas and dust so long that even a single bed with a soft mattress and crisp sheets seemed luxurious to me. I listened for the sounds of the night that had become familiar in the camp—the breeze through the trees, scurrying animals, the cry of a night bird—but it all was quiet except for the faint whistle of Irina’s breathing and an insomniac upstairs listening to the radio. I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry. I slipped out of bed and felt my way to the door.

  The apartment was silent except for the tick of the clock in the corridor. I ran my hand down the frame of the kitchen door for the light switch and flicked it on. There were three glasses turned upside down on a tea towel on the draining board. I picked one up and turned on the tap. Someone moaned. I peered into the living room and saw that Betty was asleep on the lounge. She had a coverlet pulled up around her neck and her head was resting on a pillow. From the pair of slippers by the side of the lounge and the hairnet she was wearing, it was clear she had intended to go to sleep there. I wondered why she didn’t sleep in the other bedroom, then decided that there was probably more air in the living room. I made my way back to my bed and pulled the sheet around me. Betty had said that we would have one and a half days off a week. It was Sunday and my half-day would be Friday morning. I’d already looked up the address of the Red Cross. As soon as I could, I would be heading to Jamison Street.

  Early the following morning, Betty sent Irina and myself out into the backyard to pick passionfruit off a vine that sprawled over the fence.

  ‘What do you think of her?’ Irina whispered to me, holding open a string bag so I could toss in the purple fruit.

  ‘At first I thought she was strange,’ I said, ‘but the more she talks, the more I like her. I think she’s nice.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Irina.

  We presented Betty with the two bags of fruit. ‘I use it for the Tropical Ice-cream Boat,’ she told us.

  Afterwards we all caught a tram into the city. Betty’s coffee lounge was at the Farmer’s Department Store end of George Street, near the cinemas. The decor was somewhere between an American diner and a French café. It was split into two levels. On the first level there were round tables with straw chairs. On the second level, which was reached via four stairs, there were eight musk-pink booths and a counter with stools. Each booth had a picture of an American movie star hanging on the wall above it: Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable, Rita Hayworth, Gregory Peck and Bette Davis. I eyed the one of Joan Crawford when we passed it. Her severe eyes and tight mouth reminded me of Amelia.

  We followed Betty through two swing doors with round windows in them and down a short corridor into the kitchen. A young man with spindly legs and a cleft in his chin was mixing flour and milk over a bench. ‘This is Vitaly,’ said Betty. The man looked up and smiled. ‘Ah, here you are,’ he said. ‘Just in time to help me with the pancake mix.’

  ‘No work for you just yet,’ said Betty, taking the string bags from us and putting them on the table in the centre of the room. ‘Sit down and talk for a bit before the customers start arriving. You need to get to know each other.’

  The café’s kitchen was as clean as Betty’s one at home, though the floor was straight. There were four cupboards, a gas stove with six rings, a large oven and two sinks. Betty pulled an apron from one of the cupboards and tied it around her waist. I noticed the two pink uniforms hanging on a peg, one of which I guessed would be mine. I was to help Betty as a waitress. Irina was going to be Vitaly’s assistant in the kitchen.

  Vitaly brought in chairs from the back room and we sat around the table.

  ‘How about eggs for you all?’ Betty asked. ‘You girls only had toast this morning and I don’t want my staff half starved and on their feet all day.’

  ‘I know you two from Tubabao,’ Vitaly said to us.

  ‘Ah yes, I remember,’ laughed Irina. ‘You asked me for my autograph after the concert.’

  I stared at Vitaly’s ruddy cheeks, sandy hair and protruding eyes, but I couldn’t recall him at all. We told him about our camp and he said that he’d been sent to a place called Bonegilla.

  ‘How old are you?’ Irina asked him.

  ‘Twenty-five. And how old are you?’

  Betty cracked some eggs into a bowl and glanced over her shoulder. ‘Don’t try to speak in English just because I’m here,’ she said. ‘You can speak Russian to each other.’ She patted her hair and squinted. ‘That’s as long as you’re not sharing juicy gossip. Or, for that matter, if one of the customers comes in. I don’t want my staff carted off as Communist spies.’

  We clapped and laughed. ‘Thank you,’ Irina told her. ‘That is much easier for me.’

  ‘And you, Anya,’ Vitaly said, turning to me. ‘You seemed familiar to me from somewhere before Tubabao. I wanted to introduce myself to you, but then I heard you were from Shanghai and I assumed we couldn’t have known each other after all.’

  ‘I’m not from Shanghai,’ I told him. ‘I am from Harbin.’

  ‘Harbin!’ he said, his eyes flashing. ‘I am from Harbin too. What’s your last name?’

  ‘Kozlova.’

  Vitaly thought deeply for a moment, rubbing his hands together as if he were trying to entice a genie from a lamp.

  ‘Kozlova! Daughter of Colonel Victor Grigorovich Kozlov?’

  My father’s name took my breath away. It had been a long time since I had heard it. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Then I do know you,’ Vitaly said. ‘Although you might have been too young to remember me. My father was friends with your father. They left Russia together. But we moved to Tsingtao in 1938. I remember you though. A little girl with red hair and blue eyes.’

  ‘Is your father with you?’ Irina asked him.

  ‘No,’ said Vitaly. ‘He’s in America with my mother and eight brothers. I am here with my sister and her husband. My father doesn’t trust my brother-in-law, so he sent me to look after Sofia. Are your parents with you, Anya?’

  His question caught me off guard. I looked down at the table.

  ‘My father died in a car accident before the end of the war,’ I said. ‘My mother was deported from Harbin. By the Soviets. I don’t know where they took her.’

  Irina reached over and squeezed my wrist. ‘We are hoping that the Red Cross in Sydney might be able to trace Anya’s mother in Russia,’ she told Vitaly.

  He rubbed the cleft in his chin then rested his fingers on his cheek. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘my family is looking for my uncle. He stayed in Harbin and also went to the Soviet Union after the war. But he wasn’t forced. He and my father had very different ideas. My uncle believed in the principles of Communism and never served in the army with my father. He wasn’t exactly an extremist. But he was a supporter.’

  ‘Have you heard from him?’ Irina asked. ‘Perhaps he would know where Anya’s mother was sent.’

  Vitaly snapped his fingers. ‘He might, you know. It’s possible they were on the same train from Harbin to Russia. But my father has only heard twice from my uncle since his return, and even that was only through people we knew. I do recall that the train stopped in a place called Omsk. My uncle went on from there to Moscow, but the rest of the passengers were taken to a labour camp.’

  ‘Omsk!’ I cried. I had heard the name of that town before. My mind turned over, trying to remember where.

  ‘I can ask my father to try to make contact again,’ said Vitaly. ‘My uncle is afraid of my father and what he might say to him. We always have to rel
y on other people to convey the messages, so it will take time. And of course everything is checked and censored nowadays.’

  I was too overwhelmed to speak. In Shanghai, Russia had seemed like an entity too big for me to tackle. Suddenly, in a coffee lounge on the other side of the world, I had more information about my mother’s whereabouts than ever before.

  ‘Anya!’ Irina cried. ‘If you can tell the Red Cross that you think your mother is in Omsk, they might be able to trace her for you!’

  ‘Hey, hang on a minute!’ said Betty, setting three plates of scrambled eggs and toast before us. ‘You’re not being fair. I said you could speak in Russian if it wasn’t anything exciting. What’s going on?’

  All three of us started to speak at once, but we couldn’t make any sense to Betty that way. Irina and Vitaly stopped talking and let me explain. Betty glanced at her watch. ‘What are you waiting for?’ she said to me. ‘I’ve lasted without you for a month, I’ll last without you for another morning. The Red Cross will open at nine o’clock. If you leave now, you should be the first person there.’

  I dodged in between the secretaries and office workers, hardly taking in anything of George Street as I raced towards downtown. I glanced at the map Betty had drawn for me on a serviette. I turned into Jamison Street and found myself standing outside Red Cross House ten minutes before it opened. A directory was posted on the glass door. My eyes scanned over the blood transfusion service, the convalescent homes, the hospital and repatriation departments, to the tracing department. I checked my watch again and paced back and forth on the pavement. My God, I thought, I’m finally here. A woman walked past me and smiled. She must have thought I was desperate to donate blood.