White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  Near the door was a window displaying Red Cross handicrafts. I glanced over the satin-covered coathangers and crocheted blankets and told myself that I would buy something for Betty on the way out. She had been kind to give me time off work before I had even started.

  When a clerk opened the doors I headed straight for the fire stairs, not wanting to wait for the elevator. I burst into the tracing department and startled the receptionist, who was settling into her desk with a cup of tea. She pinned on her volunteer’s badge and asked me how she could help. I told her I was trying to find my mother and she handed me some registration forms and a pen. ‘It’s hard to update the tracing files,’ she told me, ‘so make sure you include as much information as you can this morning.’

  I took a seat by a water cooler and flipped through the forms. I didn’t have a photograph of my mother and I hadn’t noted the number of the train that took her from Harbin. But I filled in as much information as I could, including my mother’s maiden name, her year and place of birth, the date I last saw her and a physical description. I paused for a moment. The image of my mother’s despairing face with her fist to her mouth came back to me and my hand started to tremble. I swallowed and forced myself to concentrate. There was a note at the bottom of the last form explaining that, due to the number of inquiries and the difficult process of gathering information, it could take six months to several years to receive a reply from the Red Cross. But I didn’t let that discourage me. ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ I wrote next to the disclaimer. I gave the forms back to the receptionist. She slipped them into a file and told me to wait until a tracing officer called me.

  A woman with a child in her arms walked into the waiting area and asked the receptionist for forms. I looked around the room, noticing for the first time that it was a museum of grief. The walls were covered in pictures with notes under them that read: ‘Lieba. Last seen in Poland 1940’; ‘My beloved husband, Semion, disappeared 1941’. The photograph of a little brother and sister holding hands almost broke my heart. ‘Janek and Mania. Germany 1937.’

  ‘Omsk,’ I said to myself, rolling the name over my tongue as if that might help me unlock the memory. Then I remembered where I had heard that name before. It was the town where Dostoyevsky had been imprisoned as a political exile. I tried to recall his novel Notes from the Underground but all I could remember was the darkness and misery of the main character.

  ‘Miss Kozlova? My name is Daisy Kent.’

  I glanced up and saw a bespectacled woman in a blue jacket and dress staring down at me. I followed her through a paper-flooded administration area, where volunteers were checking and filing forms, to an office with a frosted-glass door. Daisy asked me to sit down and closed the door behind us. The sun was burning through a window and she closed the blinds. The fan rotating on one of the filing cabinets did little to relieve the stuffiness of the room. I was finding it hard to breathe.

  Daisy pushed her glasses higher up on her nose and studied my registration form. I looked over her shoulder at the poster of a nurse with a red cross on her cap comforting a wounded soldier.

  ‘Your mother was taken to a labour camp in the Soviet Union, is that correct?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, leaning forward.

  Her nostrils quivered and she folded her hands in front of her. ‘Then I’m afraid the Red Cross can’t help you.’

  My fingers and toes turned to ice. My mouth fell open.

  ‘The Russian government doesn’t admit to having labour camps,’ Daisy continued. ‘Therefore it is impossible for us to determine where they are and how many there are.’

  ‘But I think I know the town. Omsk.’ I heard the tremble in my voice.

  ‘Unfortunately, unless it’s a war zone, we can’t help you.’

  ‘Why?’ I stuttered. ‘The IRO said that you could.’

  Daisy sighed and clenched her hands. I stared at her neat trimmed nails, not able to believe what I was hearing. ‘The Red Cross does all it can to help people, but we can only assist in countries involved in international or national wars,’ she said. ‘This is not the case in Russia. They are not considered to be breaking any humanitarian rules.’

  ‘You know that’s not true,’ I interrupted. ‘Labour camps are the same in Russia as they are in Germany.’

  ‘Miss Kozlova,’ she said, taking off her glasses and pointing them at me, ‘we are supported by the Geneva Convention and we have to abide by their strict guidelines or we wouldn’t exist at all.’ Her voice was clinical rather than kind. I got the impression that she had faced these types of questions before, and had decided it was better to crush all hope at the outset rather than be drawn into an argument.

  ‘But surely you have some connections?’ I went on nervously. ‘Some organisation that can at least give you information?’

  She slipped my papers back into the folder as if to demonstrate the futility of my case. I didn’t move. Did she expect me to just leave?

  ‘Can’t you do anything to help me?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve already explained to you that there is nothing I can do.’ Daisy picked up another folder from the pile next to her and started writing notes on it.

  I saw that she wasn’t going to help me. I couldn’t reach that soft part which I had believed existed in everyone, except perhaps people bent on revenge, like Tang and Amelia. I stood up. ‘You weren’t there,’ I said, a tear leaking out of my eye and running down to my chin. ‘You weren’t there when they took her away from me.’

  Daisy dropped the folder back onto its pile and lifted her chin. ‘I know this is distressing but…’

  I didn’t catch the last part of her sentence. I rushed out of her office and crashed into a table in the administration area, sending files sliding across the floor. The receptionist glanced up at me when I ran by but said nothing. Only the photographs on the wall in the waiting area, with their sad, lost eyes, showed me any sympathy.

  I arrived back at the coffee lounge just as the midmorning rush was beginning. My head was pounding and I was nauseous with the tears I was holding inside. I had no idea how I would get through my first day of work. I changed into my uniform and pulled my hair into a ponytail, but as soon as I walked into the kitchen my legs gave way beneath me and I had to sit down.

  ‘Don’t be put off by the Red Cross,’ Betty said, fetching a glass of water and putting it on the table in front of me. ‘There’s more than one way to skin a rabbit. Maybe you can join the Russian–Australian Society. You might find something out through them.’

  ‘You might find yourself being investigated by the Australian government as a possible spy as well,’ said Vitaly, slicing a loaf of bread. ‘Anya, I promise I will write to my father tonight.’

  Irina took the slices from Vitaly and began buttering them for sandwiches. ‘The Red Cross is inundated and has to rely on volunteers,’ she said. ‘Vitaly’s father can probably do more to help you anyway.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Vitaly. ‘He’d like a project. Believe me, he will see it through to the end. If he can’t find my uncle, he will get another contact for you, somehow.’

  Their support helped buoy me a little. I looked at the menu and tried to do my best to memorise it. I shadowed Betty while she took orders and, although there were still tears in my eyes, I smiled at each customer before leading them to their tables. Her lounge, Betty told me, was famous not only for its American-style coffee but for its chocolate and real vanilla bean milkshakes and iced tea served in tall glasses with striped paper straws. I noticed some of the younger customers ordering something called a ‘cola spider’, and in the afternoon Betty gave me one to try. It was so sickly sweet that it gave me a stomach ache. ‘The young ones love them,’ laughed Betty. ‘They consider them glamorous.’

  The lunchtime crowd ordered mainly salads, devon sandwiches or pies, but by the late afternoon I was carting out trays of New York cheesecake, blancmange served with jelly, and a dish called ‘rarebits’.

  ‘Rabb
its?’ I repeated to the first customer who asked me for it.

  The man scratched his chin and tried again. ‘Rarebits.’

  ‘How many?’ I asked, trying to appear as if I knew what he was talking about.

  ‘Just one serve,’ the man said. He looked over his shoulder and pointed to Betty. ‘Ask the lady over there. She’ll know.’

  I blushed from my collar to the part of my hair.

  ‘The man at table two wants a serve of rabbits,’ I whispered to Betty.

  She squinted for a moment then picked up the menu and pointed to ‘rarebits’ and told me to go to the kitchen and ask Vitaly to show me the dish. It turned out to be toast topped with cheese mixed with beer and milk. ‘I’ll make one for you after we close,’ said Vitaly, trying not to laugh.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I told him. ‘Not after my experience with the cola spider.’

  On Friday I spent my morning off in the State Library. Bathed in the ethereal light from the library’s vaulted glass ceiling, I pored over Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. It was difficult to read such a complex work in translation. I used a Russian–English dictionary to help me and persevered with it until it became clear that it was a fruitless endeavour. It was a dark novel about the nature of humanity, but it gave me no clues to my mother other than to confirm what I had already found out from an atlas: Omsk was in Siberia. Finally I had to admit that I was clutching at straws.

  I returned to Potts Point, tired and defeated. The sun was hot but a sea breeze was starting to whip up from the harbour. I picked one of the geraniums near the gate and studied it while I walked up the path. A man burst through the front door, pushing a hat down onto his head. We almost collided. He stepped back, startled at first, then a smile spread over his face.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You’re one of Betty’s girls, aren’t you?’

  The man was in his early thirties and his jet-black hair and green eyes reminded me of Gregory Peck’s portrait in the coffee lounge. I noticed his glance drop from my face to my ankles and back again.

  ‘Yes, I live with Betty,’ I said. I wasn’t going to give him my name until he told me his.

  ‘I’m Adam. Adam Bradley,’ he said, reaching out his hand to shake mine. ‘I live upstairs.’

  ‘Anya Kozlova,’ I said.

  ‘Watch out for him! He’s trouble!’ a woman’s voice called out.

  I turned around to see a pretty girl with blonde hair waving to me from across the street. She was wearing a pencil skirt with a fitted blouse and carrying a bunch of dresses over her arm. She opened the door to a Fiat and draped the clothes on the back seat.

  ‘Ah, Judith!’ Adam shouted back. ‘You’ve called me out before I’ve even had a chance to start afresh with this beautiful young woman.’

  ‘You’ll never start afresh,’ the woman laughed. ‘Who was that à la mode waif I saw you sneaking home the other night?’ The woman turned to me. ‘By the way, I’m Judith.’

  ‘I’m Anya. I saw your dress in the window. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling with big white teeth. ‘I’m off to a show this weekend but drop in and see me any time. You’re tall, slim and gorgeous. I could use you as a model.’

  Judith slipped into the driver’s seat of her car, did a U-turn and came to a roaring stop in front of us.

  ‘Do you want a lift to the newspaper, Adam?’ she asked, leaning over to the passenger window. ‘Or is it true reporters don’t work afternoons?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Adam, tipping his hat to me and opening the car door. ‘It was nice to meet you, Anya. If Judith can’t get you a job, maybe I can.’

  ‘Thanks, but I already have a job,’ I said.

  Judith tooted the horn and slammed her foot on the accelerator. I watched the car zoom up the street, narrowly missing two dogs and a man on a bicycle.

  I walked up the stairs to the flat. I still had two hours until I had to return to the coffee lounge to help with the Friday afternoon crowds. I went into the kitchen and decided to make myself a sandwich. The air in the flat smelled stale and I opened the French doors to let in the breeze. There was some cheese in the icechest and half a tomato in the cupboard, so I sliced those onto the bread. I poured myself a glass of milk and took my lunch out to the verandah. There were choppy waves on the harbour and some sailing boats were moving quickly along it. I had not expected Sydney to be such a beautiful city. To me it had the atmosphere of a holiday resort, the way I imagined Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires to be. Though appearances could be deceptive. Vitaly had told me that where he lived, he never went out on his own at night if he could avoid it. Two friends of his had been attacked by a gang after they heard them speaking Russian. It was a side of Sydney I hadn’t seen yet. Some customers became impatient when I didn’t understand them, but usually people were polite.

  A door banged at the back of the flat. I guessed it was either the bedroom door or that I hadn’t closed the entrance door properly. I walked back inside to fix it. The front door was shut and so was the tilting window above it. I glanced around the corner and noticed that the door to my room was shut too. I heard another bang and saw that it was the door to the room next to ours that was opening and shutting in the breeze. I grasped the knob, intending to pull the door shut tightly, but curiosity got the better of me. I pushed the door open and peered inside.

  The room was slightly larger than the one I shared with Irina, but like ours it had two single beds pushed against opposite walls. The covers were maroon with black tassels and there was a chest of drawers under the window. The air was old but the room had been dusted and the rug was clean. Hanging on the wall above one of the beds was a framed poster for a cricket match held in 1937, and some athletics ribbons were pinned above the other wall. My gaze moved from the fishing tackle on top of the wardrobe, to the tennis racket behind the door, to the photograph on top of a small dresser. In the picture two young men in uniform were standing either side of a smiling Betty. There was a ship in the background. Next to the photograph was a leather album. I opened the cover and found myself looking at a sepia photograph of two blond toddlers sitting in a boat. They were both holding up birthday cards with the number two on it. Twins. My hand flew to my mouth and I collapsed onto my knees.

  ‘Betty,’ I wept. ‘Poor, poor Betty.’

  Sadness washed over me in waves. My mother’s crying face flashed before me. I understood what the room represented. It was a place for memory and private grief. Betty kept all the pain she felt inside in this room so that she could go on with her life. I understood why she kept it because I had a place like that too. It wasn’t a room, it was the matroshka doll. That was something I retreated to when I needed to still believe that the mother I had lost had at some time been a part of my life. It was a way of reminding myself that she wasn’t a dream.

  I stayed in the room, crying until my ribs hurt and my eyes were so dry that I couldn’t cry any more. After a while I got up and stepped out into the hall, closing the door tightly behind me. I never mentioned the room to Betty, although from that afternoon on I felt a special bond with her.

  After work Irina and I took a stroll along the Kings Cross strip. Darlinghurst Street was a scene that time of the evening, with people spilling out of the bars and cafés, drinks in their hands, smoking and laughing. We passed one bar and I could hear ‘Romance in the Dark’ being played on a piano. I wondered if the piano player was Johnny. I peered in the doorway but couldn’t see a thing through the crowd.

  ‘I used to sing in places like that in Shanghai,’ said Irina.

  ‘You could do that here,’ I told her.

  She shook her head. ‘They’d want songs in English. Anyway, after a week in the kitchen I’m too tired for anything else.’

  ‘Do you want to sit down some place?’ I asked, indicating a coffee lounge across the street called Con’s Palace.

  ‘After all the milkshakes we’ve had this week?’

  I slapped my palms together. ‘Of
course not! What was I thinking?’ I laughed.

  We walked on past the shops selling trinkets from India, cosmetics and second-hand clothes until we reached the junction with Victoria Street and turned to go home.

  ‘Do you think we will ever fit in here?’ Irina asked. ‘I feel like I’m on the outside, looking in.’

  I watched a smartly dressed woman step out of a taxi and hurry past. I used to be like her, I thought.

  ‘I don’t know, Irina. Maybe it’s easier for me because I speak English.’

  Irina glanced at her hands and rubbed at a blister on her palm. ‘I think you’re trying to be brave,’ she said. ‘You used to have money. Now you have to save up just to go to the pictures once a week.’

  All I’m worried about, I thought, is finding my mother.

  ‘I’m just stepping out to the bank,’ Betty said one slow afternoon. She slipped on a light coat over her uniform and checked her lipstick in the shine of the coffee percolator. ‘You’ll be right with any customers, Anya, won’t you?’ she asked, squeezing my arm. ‘Vitaly’s in the kitchen if you get stuck.’

  ‘Sure,’ I told her.

  I watched her step out onto the street. It was one of those overcast days that was neither hot nor chilly, but if you didn’t wear a jacket you felt cold and when you put one on you felt too warm.

  I wiped down the counter and the tables although they were already clean. About half an hour later I heard the front door open and looked up to see a group of girls saunter into the lounge and take the Joan Crawford booth. They were wearing office suits with straight skirts and pumps, and hats and gloves. They seemed to be in their late teens, but they were trying to look sophisticated by lighting up Du Mauriers and shooting puffs of smoke towards the ceiling.

  They gave me the once-over when I approached their table. One of them, a girl with large shoulders and pimples on her cheeks, whispered something and the other girls laughed. I could feel trouble coming.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said, ignoring their rudeness and hoping they only wanted small orders. ‘What can I get you to drink?’