White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘Anya!’

  I stood up and ran to the water’s edge, feeling the relief of the cooler sand on my burned feet.

  ‘Anya!’

  She was calling out my name.

  ‘Mama?’ I cried, padding over the wet sand. When I reached the rockpool, I sat down. The midday sun was high. It had turned the water as clear as glass and I could see schools of fish in the waves, and the dark shadow of the rocks and the seaweed that clung to them. I glanced back along the beach. The carnival crowd had dispersed and most of the lifesavers were relaxing, drinking sodas and talking to girls. All except Ivan, who had taken off his cap and was jogging along the sand. I couldn’t see Irina.

  I heard her call again and turned back to the ocean. My mother was standing on the rocks, looking at me. Her eyes were as transparent as the water. Her hair was loose about her shoulders and flapped in the breeze like a black veil. I stood up and breathed deeply, finally understanding what I had to do. Once I allowed the first thought, all the other thoughts came quickly. I was elated, realising how easy it would be, what the answer had always been. The pain would stop and I would defeat Tang. My mother and I would be together again.

  The wet sand felt light and soft under my feet, like snow. The icy cold rush of water over my skin was invigorating. At first I had to struggle against the ocean and it tired me. But then I thought of the boats, fighting against the waves, and used all my strength to wade into the deep water. A wave rose like a shadow above me, then crashed down, sending me swirling to the sandy bottom. My back struck the ocean floor. The blow winded me and I could feel the water seeping from my throat into my lungs. It hurt at first, but then I looked up and saw my mother standing on the rocks above me and I sensed myself moving into a new world. I closed my eyes, listening to the sea ripple and bubble about me. I was in my mother’s womb again. For a moment I was sad, thinking how Irina would miss me. I thought of them all, Betty, Ruselina, Ivan, Diana. They would say I had so much to live for, that I was young and pretty and clever. I was guilty that all those things never meant as much to me as they should have. They never stopped the loneliness. And now I would never be lonely again.

  Suddenly I was pulled up and thrown to the surface, lifted high on the crest of a wave like a child tossed up in her mother’s arms. For a moment my sense of sound returned and I could hear the cries and laughter of the people on the beach, the waves crashing on the shore. But a second later I was plunged down again. This time the water rushed into my nostrils and throat more quickly, as if I were a leaky boat. ‘Mama, I’m coming,’ I cried. ‘Help me! Help me!’

  The water was heavy in my lungs, bubbles rose from my mouth and nostrils and then stopped. I could feel it, the cold creeping through my veins, the exhaustion. I closed my eyes against the pain and let the current rock me back and forth.

  There was movement next to me. A flash of sunlight on flesh. I wondered what it was: a shark or a dolphin coming to witness my last moments? But then human arms slipped under my shoulders and dragged me to the surface.

  The sunshine burned my salty eyes.

  In the distance a woman was screaming. ‘No! Oh my God! No!’

  Irina.

  A wave washed over me. The ocean ran over my face and hair. But the arms lifted me higher and I was thrown over someone’s shoulder. I knew my rescuer. Another wave crashed over us, but still he held onto me, his fingers digging into my thighs. I coughed and spluttered. ‘Let me die,’ I tried to say, with nothing coming out but water.

  But Ivan didn’t hear me. He lay me on the sand and put his head against my chest. His wet hair brushed against my skin but he must have heard nothing. He turned me on my chest and pressed his hands on the back of my ribs, then rubbed my limbs vigorously. The sand on his palms scratched my skin and I felt the grit on my lips. His fingers were shaking and the leg he had pressed against mine trembled. ‘Please don’t,’ he shouted at me, tears choking his voice. ‘Please don’t, Anya!’

  Although my cheek was pressed against the sand, I could see Irina standing at the water’s edge, sobbing. A woman had thrown a towel over her shoulders and was trying to comfort her. My heart ached. I did not want to hurt my friends. But my mother was waiting for me on the rocks. I wasn’t the strong person everyone thought I was, and only she knew that.

  ‘Let it go, mate. Let it go,’ I heard another lifesaver say when he kneeled down to examine me. ‘Look at the colour of her face. The froth on her lips. She’s gone.’

  The other one touched my arm, but Ivan shoved him away. Ivan wouldn’t let me go. I struggled against him when he pressed down on me, fighting everything he did to save me. But his will was stronger than mine. He beat his fists against me until something like a ferocious wind blew into my lungs. I felt a sharp spasm and the ocean gave way to the rush of air. Someone picked me up. I saw a crowd and an ambulance. Irina and Ivan were standing above me, holding onto each other and weeping. I turned my head to the rocks. My mother was gone.

  Every evening for the next week Ivan came to visit me in St Vincent’s Hospital, his hair smelling of Palmolive soap and a gardenia in his hand. His face was sunburned and he walked slowly and stiffly, exhausted from the traumatic weekend. Whenever he arrived, Betty and Ruselina, who spent their days reading to me or listening to the radio while I slept, got up to leave. They always acted as though there were important things to be said between Ivan and myself, and drew the green curtain around us for privacy before scuttling off to the cafeteria. But Ivan and I said very little to each other. We had a communication that went beyond words. Love, I saw, was more than feelings. It was the actions you took too. Ivan had saved me and breathed life into me with as much determination as a woman giving birth. He had pounded life into me with his fists and would not let me die.

  On my last night at the hospital, when the doctors declared my lungs clear and strong again, Ivan reached out and touched my hand. He looked at me as if I were a priceless treasure he had plucked from the sea, and not a suicidal young woman. I remembered what he had said about understanding being more important than forgetting.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, intertwining my fingers with his. I knew then that whatever had stopped me from loving him was gone. When he touched me I wanted to live again. He had a will strong enough for both of us.

  NINETEEN

  Miracles

  We Russians are pessimists. Our souls are dark. We believe that life is suffering, relieved only by momentary sketches of happiness that pass as quickly as clouds on a windy day, and death. Australians, however, are pessimists of the oddest sort. They, too, believe life is harsh and that things go wrong much more than they go right. However, even when the ground they depend on for food turns as dry as a rock and all their sheep and cattle die, they will still lift their eyes to the sky and wait for a miracle. To me that suggests that deep in their hearts they are optimists. And perhaps this is the way my new country has changed me. For the year I turned thirty-six, when hope began eluding me, I experienced two miracles one after the other.

  The year before, Ivan and I had moved into our new home in Narrabeen. The house had been a twoyear project that had started with the inspection of a corner block of land on a hill in Woorarra Avenue. It was covered in eucalypts, angophoras and tree ferns and looked over the lagoon. Ivan and I fell in love with it at first sight. He walked the boundary, pushing aside the green fronds of the fishbone ferns and stumbling over rocks, while I fingered the grevillea and native fuchsia and began envisioning a garden alive with the exotic, verdant plants of my second homeland. Two years later a split-level home stood on it with feature walls of apple or orange and wall-to-wall carpet. The two bathrooms were mosaic-tiled and wood-panelled. The Scandinavian kitchen overlooked a swimming pool, and the triple windows of the lounge room opened onto a balcony facing the water.

  There were four bedrooms: ours, the main bedroom with an ensuite; one on the ground level, which I used as an office; a guest room with two single beds; and a sunny room next to ours wi
th no furniture at all. That room was our sadness, the only grief we knew in an otherwise happy marriage. Despite all our efforts, Ivan and I had not been able to conceive a child and it began to seem unlikely that we ever would. He was already forty-four, and in those days, at thirty-six, I was considered well past a woman’s prime. Yet, with no words spoken, we had left a room for her, as though we were hoping that by providing a beautiful place for our baby, she would finally appear. That is what I meant by looking to the sky and hoping for a miracle.

  I had often seen her, that child who would not become a reality. She was the one I had thought of in Shanghai when I cried out for a child to love. She had not come, I thought, because Dmitri was not the right man to be her father. But Ivan was a good man, a man capable of great love and sacrifice. He listened to me and remembered what I told him. When we made love he would cup my face in his palms and gaze tenderly into my eyes. But still the child had not come. I called her my little running girl for whenever I saw her that is what she was doing. Sometimes in the supermarket I would see her peeking through the canned goods, her tousled black hair limp over her amber-coloured eyes. She would smile at me with her shiny rose-coloured lips, her grin bejewelled with miniature teeth. Then as quickly as she appeared she would run away from me. She came to the garden of our new house, where I worked like mad to make up for the loss I felt by not being able to bring her into being. I would hear her cheerful laughter among the crimson bottlebrushes, and when I turned I would catch just a glimpse of her chubby baby legs running away from me. Running and running so fast that I could never catch her. My little running girl.

  Irina and Vitaly, however, had been more than fertile. They had produced two girls, Oksana and Sofia, and two boys, Fyodor and Yuri, and were talking about the possibility of one more. Irina approached forty like a duck to water. She was proud of her wide hips, her thickening olive skin, the few grey hairs on her crown. I, on the other hand, still looked something like an adolescent in a grown woman’s body, thin and nervous. My only concession to my age was to wear my long hair in a chignon as my mother had done.

  Irina and Vitaly had bought the coffee lounge from Betty and opened another one in North Sydney. They’d moved into a house in Bondi with a neat front garden and a carport. They would scare the local population by jumping into the ocean midwinter with half a dozen of their other Russian Club friends. I once asked Irina whether she regretted not pursuing her singing career. She laughed and pointed to her happy children eating at the kitchen table. ‘No! This is a much better life.’

  I had quit my job at the Sydney Herald when I married Ivan, but after years of childless boredom I accepted Diana’s offer to write a column for the lifestyle section. Australia in the sixties was a different country to the one I had known in the fifties. Young women were leaping off the pages in the women’s section and into all areas of journalism. ‘Populate or perish’ had changed the face of the nation from a British clone to a cosmopolitan country, with new foods, new ideas and new passions blending in with the legacy of the old country. The column kept me in touch with the world a couple of days a week and stopped me from thinking too much about what I didn’t have in my life.

  We also experienced a sad loss. One day when I went to visit Ruselina and Betty in their flat, I was shocked to find that vibrant, energetic Betty had suddenly become old. Her shoulders stooped and her skin hung over her like a loose dress.

  ‘She’s been listless like that for a couple of weeks now,’ whispered Ruselina.

  I insisted that Betty go to her doctor for a checkup. He sent her to a specialist and we returned the following week to get the results. While Betty spoke with the doctor I sat outside in the waiting room, flipping through magazines, sure that the door to the consulting room would open any minute and the doctor would tell me that Betty needed vitamins or a change of diet. I wasn’t prepared for the grave expression on his face when he called my name. I followed him into his room. Betty was sitting in a chair, clutching her handbag. I turned to the doctor and my heart lurched when he told me the verdict. Inoperable cancer.

  We nursed Betty at the flat in Bondi for as long as we could. Irina and I were concerned about how Ruselina would take her friend’s illness, but she was stronger than the rest of us. While Irina and I took turns to cry, Ruselina played cards with Betty and cooked her favourite foods. They took evening walks on the beach, and when Betty could no longer stand without the aid of a stick, they sat outside the front door and talked for hours. One evening when I was in the kitchen I overheard Betty say to Ruselina, ‘I’ll try and come back as one of Irina’s children, if she decides to have any more. You’ll know it’s me. I’ll be the naughty one.’

  When Betty became too sick to stay at home, her decline was more rapid. I looked at her in the hospital bed and thought how small she had become. I decided to test my theory by measuring the distance from her feet to the end of the bed with my hand, and I found that from the time she had been admitted to hospital, she had shrunk three inches. As I pulled my hand away, Betty turned to me and said, ‘When I see your mother, I’ll tell her what a beautiful girl you turned out to be.’

  Then one evening in September, while Ruselina was on watch, we were all called to the hospital. Betty’s condition had worsened. She was barely conscious. Her cheeks were sunken and her face was so pale that it looked moonlit. Towards the morning, Ruselina began to turn ashen herself. The nurse came in to check on us. ‘She’ll probably still be here until the afternoon, but not long after that,’ she said, patting Ruselina’s shoulder. ‘You should get something to eat and have a lie-down.’

  Irina stood up, understanding that if Ruselina didn’t take a break, she wouldn’t have the strength for what was to come. Vitaly and Ivan went with the women while I stayed behind to keep watch.

  Betty’s mouth was open, and her uneven breathing and the hum of the airconditioning were the only two sounds in the room. Her eyes flickered now and then, as if she was dreaming. I reached out and touched her cheek and remembered the first day I saw her, standing on the balcony in Potts Point with her beehive hairdo and cigarette holder. It was hard to believe that she was the same wasted woman who lay before me. It occurred to me that if my mother had not been taken away from me prematurely, then we would have faced a similar separation one day. I realised then that whatever time we have with someone is precious, something to be treasured and never wasted.

  I leaned closer and whispered, ‘I love you, Betty. Thank you for taking care of me.’

  Her fingers twitched and she blinked. I like to think that if she’d had the strength, she would have touched her hair and squinted one more time.

  The day after Betty died, Irina and I went to collect Ruselina’s clothes from the flat. She was too distressed to return there herself and stayed at Irina and Vitaly’s house. Irina and I stood together in the third bedroom, where Betty had recreated her sons’ room in Potts Point. Everything was clean and in its place, and I suspected Ruselina must have been dusting it while Betty was ill.

  ‘What should we do about this room?’ I asked Irina.

  Irina sat down on one of the beds, her face deep in thought. After a while she said, ‘We should keep their photographs because they are family. But the rest we can give to charity. Betty and her boys don’t need these things now.’

  At the funeral, against all Russian or Australian tradition, Ruselina wore a white dress with a corsage of red hibiscuses pinned to the lapel. And after the wake she took a bunch of candy-coloured balloons and released them into the sky. ‘For you, Betty,’ she shouted. ‘For all the havoc you are causing up there.’

  I don’t know whether I believe in reincarnation or not, but I have always thought it fitting that Betty had the possibility to be born anew in the middle of the flower power generation.

  One year after we’d moved into our new home the first miracle happened. I fell pregnant. The news renewed Ivan and shaved twenty years off his demeanour. He walked with a bounce, smiled at everyt
hing and nothing, and stroked my belly before falling asleep at night. ‘This child will heal us both,’ he said.

  Lilliana Ekaterina was born on August twenty-first that year. In between contractions, the nurses and I listened to the radio broadcast of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and I thought about my mother more than I had allowed myself to since the news of her death. I thought of the mothers and daughters in Prague. What would become of them? The nurses held my hands when the birth pangs were intense and joked with me when they subsided. And when Lily slid from me after sixteen hours of labour, I saw my mother there before me in her shock of dark hair and her unusual eyes.

  Lily was a miracle because she did indeed heal me. I believe our bond to our mother is the most significant we have. The death of the one who brought us into the world is one of the biggest turning points in our lives. But most people have at least some time to prepare. Having my mother taken away from me when I was thirteen left me feeling lost in the world, like a leaf blown about by the wind. But becoming mother to Lily retied the cord. Holding her warm body in my arms, her face nuzzling my breast, grounded me to everything that was good and worth living for. And she healed Ivan too. He had lost what was most precious to him early in his life, and now in middle age, in a country full of sun and far from bad memories, he could rebuild his dream again.

  Ivan built a pinewood letterbox, twice the size of any other letterbox in the street, to honour Lily’s homecoming. On the front of it he glued a woodcut of a man, his wife and their baby. When I was strong enough to garden again, I planted a mat of violet dampiera around it. A baby huntsman set up home in the box and would scurry away whenever I opened the lid to pick up the afternoon mail. One day a few weeks later the spider decided to take up residence elsewhere, and that was the day I got the letter. The letter that was to bring about the second miracle and change everything.