White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  In the main foyer a group of schoolchildren were lining up in front of a plaque, reading it while their teacher looked on with the kind of reverence a priest displays when he puts on his robes. A Russian family waited behind the children, curious about the plaque too, and were followed by a young couple. Vera asked us if we wanted to read the plaque. Ivan and I said yes. When it was our turn we stepped closer to the plaque and I saw that it was a dedication for the museum. As well as acknowledging the museum’s founder, Pavel Tretyakov, the plaque announced: ‘After the dark days of the Tsars and after the Great Revolution, the museum was greatly able to expand its collection and make many masterpieces available “to the people”.’

  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. What it meant was that after the Bolsheviks cut the throats of the noble and middle-class families or sent them to die in labour camps, they stole their paintings. The hypocrisy made my blood boil. Those families had paid the artists for their paintings. Could the Soviets say the same? There was no mention on the plaque that Tretyakov had been a wealthy merchant whose lifelong dream was to make art available to the people. I wondered if sometime in the future, the authorities would try to rewrite Tretyakov’s background and make him out to have been a working-class revolutionary. My father’s parents and sisters had been slaughtered by the Bolsheviks, and Tang’s partner in separating me from my mother had been a Soviet officer. Such things were not easy to forget.

  I glanced at the Russian family and the faces of the young couple. They were expressionless. I wondered if they were thinking the same things I was, but, like Ivan and I, had to keep quiet in order to protect themselves. I’d thought I had returned to my father’s Russia, but I saw that wasn’t the case. My father’s Russia was only a remnant. A relic from a lost era.

  Vera ushered us into a hall full of icons. ‘“The Virgin of Vladimir” is the oldest in the collection,’ she said, leading us towards a depiction of the Virgin holding her child. ‘It arrived in Kiev from Constantinople in the twelfth century.’ I read on the plaque underneath that the icon had been painted over many times, but had kept its original despairing expression. Lily was quiet in my arms, fascinated by the colours around her, but I found it hard to feign interest in the artwork. I scanned the groups of elderly women in the museum’s guide uniform who were sitting along the walls. My eyes were wide and watchful, looking for my mother. She would be fifty-six years old. I wondered how much she would have changed since I last saw her.

  Ivan asked Vera about the origins and themes of the icons, and slipped in questions about her personal life. Had she always lived in Moscow? Did she have any children?

  ‘What is he up to?’ I asked myself. I stopped in front of Rubliov’s icon of winged angels to listen to her answers. ‘I’ve only worked as a guide with Intourist since my sons went to university,’ Vera told him. ‘Until then I was a housewife.’ I noticed Vera gave away little of herself when she answered his questions and she didn’t ask Ivan anything about us or Australia in return. Was that because it wasn’t wise to have such conversations with Westerners? Or was it because she already knew what was important to know?

  I walked impatiently on, and noticed through an arch that the guide a few rooms down was looking in my direction. She had dark hair and long, narrow hands, the kind you find on tall women. Her eyes glinted like glass in the light. My throat constricted. I edged my way towards her but as I got closer I saw that the dark hair on her head was just a scarf and that one of her eyes was clouded with a cataract. The other was pale blue. She couldn’t be my mother. The guide frowned at my stare and I quickly looked up at the portrait of Alexandra Struiskaya, whose gentle expression seemed too lifelike for comfort. Flustered by my mistake, I stumbled on through the gallery, stopping to examine the portraits of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. All of them seemed to be regarding me with a kind of anxious foreboding. turned to the paintings of the noblemen and women for reassurance. They were dignified, elegant, dreamy. The colours floated up around them like magical clouds.

  ‘What happened to you after your portraits were completed? Did you know what the fate of your sons and daughters would be?’ I secretly asked them.

  I waited by Valentin Serov’s ‘Girl with Peaches’ for Ivan and Vera to catch up with me. I’d seen the picture in a book but was amazed at the sincerity the painting projected when I stood before it in real life. ‘Look, Lily,’ I said, holding her so that she faced the painting. ‘You’ll be as beautiful as that girl when you grow up.’ The image of the girl’s radiant youth, her carefree eyes, the brightness of the room in which she sat, brought memories flooding back of the house in Harbin. I closed my eyes, frightened that I might begin to cry. Where was my mother?

  ‘I can see Mrs Nickham has a love of old art,’ I heard Vera say to Ivan. ‘But I think she will find that the best art in this museum belongs to the Soviet era.’

  I opened my eyes and looked at her. Was she smiling or squinting at me? She led the way to the Soviet paintings and I followed dutifully, looking back at the ‘Girl with Peaches’ one more time. After all the ugliness I’d seen on my first day in Moscow, I could have stood in front of that painting for hours.

  I did my best not to grimace while Vera spoke rapturously about the flat, lifeless art in the Soviet section. I thought if she used the terms ‘social message’, ‘poetic simplicity’ or ‘the people of the revolutionary movement’ once more, I would walk out of the museum. But of course I couldn’t. Too much was riding on my good behaviour. Still, I found that the more I looked around the rooms, the more I found paintings that made me put aside my prejudices and acknowledge what I thought was good. There was a picture called ‘Students’ by Konstantin Istomin which caught my eye. Two delicate young women, caught in the dusk of a short winter’s day, gazing at the fading light from their apartment window.

  Vera stepped up behind me. Was I mistaken or did she click her heels? ‘You like works that show femininity. And you seem to like dark-haired women,’ she said. ‘Come this way, Mrs Nickham, I think there is something in the next room which will be very much to your taste.’

  I followed her, keeping my eyes to the floor, wondering if I had given myself away. I hoped that I would be able to express myself appropriately when she showed me another piece of Soviet propaganda.

  ‘Here we are,’ Vera said, positioning me in front of a canvas. I looked up and gasped. I found myself face to face with the close-up portrait of a mother holding her child. The first things I thought of were warmth and gold. The woman’s fine brow, the way she wore her hair in a low chignon, her chiselled features, were those of my mother. She looked gentle, but also strong and courageous. The child in her arms had gingery hair and pouting lips. The image of me as a baby.

  I turned to Vera and stared into her eyes, my questions too obvious to voice. What is the meaning of all this? What is it you are trying to say to me?

  If Vera was setting out some sort of puzzle for us, then the pieces weren’t coming together fast enough. I lay on the hotel bed, my back curved into the sag, and stared at the clock on the wall. Five o’clock. February the second was almost over and there was still no sign of my mother or the General. I watched the light fade into blackness through the grimy window. If I don’t see my mother at the ballet tonight, then it’s all over, I thought. My last hope is gone.

  My throat tingled. I reached for the jug on the bedside table and poured myself a glass of the metallic-tasting water. Lily was curled up beside me, her fists bunched by the side of her head as if she were holding onto something. When Vera dropped us off at the hotel after the gallery, she asked me if I had anything ‘to keep Lily quiet’ during tonight’s performance. I told her that I would bring her dummy and give her a dose of baby Panadol to help her sleep, though I had no intention of doing either. I would feed her, and that was it. If Lily started crying, I would sit in the foyer with her. The way Vera was insisting on the ballet made me uneasy.

  Ivan was sitting by the window, scri
bbling in his notebook. I opened the bedside drawer and pulled out the guest folder. A faded brochure for a resort on the Caspian Sea fell into my lap, along with a crinkled envelope with the hotel logo on it. I took the stub of pencil that was attached to the folder by a piece of twine and wrote on the envelope: ‘Vera’s waited too long to give me news of my mother. She doesn’t have a heart if she can’t understand what I’m going through. I don’t believe she’s on our side.’

  I pushed my hair from my face, stood up on wobbly legs and handed my note to Ivan. He took it from me and, while he was reading it, I glanced down at what he had been writing in his notebook. ‘I thought I was Russian, but in this country I don’t know what I am. If you asked me a day ago what were the typical characteristics of the Russian people, I would have said their passion and their warm-heartedness. But there is no backslapping gregariousness in this place. Only cowering, stooping people with eyes full of fear. Who are these ghosts around me…?’

  Ivan wrote under my words on the envelope: ‘I’ve been trying to figure her out all day. I think the painting was her way of trying to tell you. She probably can’t talk because we are under surveillance. I don’t think she’s with the KGB.’

  ‘Why?’ I mouthed to him.

  He pointed to his heart.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘You’re a good judge of character.’

  ‘I married you,’ he smiled. Ivan tore the page he had been writing on from his notebook and, together with the envelope, ripped them into tiny pieces which he carried to the toilet and flushed away.

  ‘This is an impossible way to live,’ he said, half to me and half to the hissing cistern. ‘No wonder they look so unhappy.’

  Vera was waiting for us in the hotel foyer. She stood up when she saw us step out of the elevator. Her coat was beside her but she’d kept the rose-coloured scarf over her hair. The apple blossom scent had given way to something stronger, lily of the valley, and I noticed a slash of lipstick on her lips when she smiled. I tried to smile back but it came out as a wince. I couldn’t keep up the show. This is ridiculous, I told myself. If I don’t see my mother at the Bolshoi, I’m going to confront her.

  Vera must have noticed my irritable mood because she glanced away from me and spoke to Ivan. ‘I think you and Mrs Nickham will enjoy tonight’s performance very much,’ she said. ‘This is Yuri Grigorovich’s Swan Lake. Ekaterina Maximova is the principal dancer. People are desperate to see this performance, which is why I wanted to make certain you wouldn’t miss out. It was wise of your agent to book you tickets three months in advance.’

  An alarm went off inside my head. Ivan and I didn’t look at each other, but I could tell he was thinking the same thing. We didn’t see the travel agent until we had received our visas. We only went to see her a month before we left, and only to book our air tickets. Everything else we had organised ourselves. Was the agent Vera was referring to the General? Or had the whole tour been a ploy to keep us separated? I glanced around the foyer for the General, but he was nowhere to be seen among the people chatting near the reception desk or waiting in the chairs. When we walked through the doors towards the taxi Vera had waiting, there was one thought in my mind: tonight would either end in me seeing my mother or inside the walls of the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters.

  Our taxi stopped in the square in front of the Bolshoi Theatre, and when I stepped out of it I was surprised to find that the air was fresh rather than cold, a Russian winter’s version of balmy. A sprinkle of snow, as fragile as petals, fluttered against my cheeks. I looked across to the theatre and drew a breath, the sight of it making me forget all the evils of Moscow architecture I had seen yesterday. My gaze followed the giant columns to Apollo and his chariot draped in snow on the pediment. Men and women, wrapped in fur coats and hats, were scattered about the colonnade, talking or smoking. Some of the women had fur hand-muffs and pouches. It was as if we had gone back in time, and when Ivan took my hand and we walked towards the steps, I felt as though I were my young father, accompanied by his bejewelled sisters, rushing up the stairs to be in time for the ballet. What would he have seen then? Giselle or Salammbô? Or maybe even Swan Lake choreographed by the infamous Gorky. I knew that my father had watched the great Sophia Fedorova II dance before she went mad, and Anna Pavlova perform before she left Russia for good, and that he’d been so taken with the latter that he had named me after her. I had the sensation of being lifted into the air, and thought that perhaps for a moment I would catch a glimpse of old through his eyes, like a child peering into a richly decorated shop window.

  Inside the theatre doors, usherettes in red uniforms were urging people to take their seats, for if there was one thing that started on time in Moscow, it was the Bolshoi Ballet. We followed Vera up the stairs to the cloakroom and found over a hundred people already packed in there, each trying to push their way to the counters to check in their coats. The noise was louder than a crowd at a football stadium, and my jaw dropped when I saw a man shove an elderly woman aside in order to get by her. Her response was to pummel her fists into his back.

  ‘You hold Lily,’ Ivan said to me, ‘I’ll take your coats. You ladies are not going in there.’

  ‘If you go in there, you’ll get a black eye,’ I warned him. ‘Let’s take everything with us into the theatre.’

  ‘What? And make ourselves look uncultured?’ He grinned, then pointed to Lily. ‘We’re already sneaking in more than we should, remember.’

  Ivan disappeared into the swarming mass of elbows and arms. I slipped the ballet program out of my handbag and read the introduction. ‘After the October Revolution classical music and dance became accessible to millions of workers, and on this stage the best revolutionary characters based on heroes from our history were created.’ More propaganda.

  Ivan returned twenty minutes later, his hair dishevelled and his tie askew.

  ‘You look like you did on Tubabao,’ I told him, patting down his hair and straightening his jacket.

  He pressed a pair of opera glasses into my palm.

  ‘You won’t need them,’ Vera said. ‘You have excellent seats. Right near the stage.’

  ‘I wanted them for the novelty,’ I said, lying. I had wanted them so I could get a better look at the audience, not the stage.

  Vera put her arm around me, but she wasn’t being affectionate, she was trying to hide Lily as she guided me towards our section. The usherette slouching by our box seemed to be expecting us. Vera slipped something into the woman’s fist and she pushed open the door, releasing a blast of violins tuning up and the pre-concert chatter. ‘Hurry! Quick! Move inside!’ the usherette hissed. ‘Don’t let anybody see you!’

  I rushed to a seat near the front of the box and laid Lily down in my lap. Ivan and Vera slipped into the seats on either side of me.

  The usherette held up her finger and warned me, ‘The moment she cries you must leave.’

  I had thought the outside of the theatre was beautiful but the auditorium left me breathless. I leaned over the balcony, trying to take in the red and gold interior all at once. There were five tiers of balconies, each ornamented in gold, reaching up to a crystal chandelier that hung from a ceiling decorated with Byzantine paintings. The air was tinged with the scent of old wood and velvet. The giant curtain across the stage was a sparkling montage of sickles and hammers, music scrolls, stars and tassels.

  ‘The acoustics are the best in the world,’ Vera told us, smoothing down her dress and smiling with such pride we could have been forgiven for thinking she had been responsible for the design.

  From where we were seated we had a good view of the audience in the front section of the auditorium but not in the boxes above us or towards the back of the hall. Still, I searched for my mother and the General among the people making their way into their seats, but I didn’t see their likenesses anywhere. From the corner of my eye I noticed that Vera was staring across the hall. I tried to be subtle and slowly followed her gaze to the box opposite us. At that
moment the lights started to dim, but before they went out completely I caught a glimpse of an old man sitting in the front row. It wasn’t the General but for some reason he seemed familiar. There was a rush of coughing and rustling before the orchestra hit the first note.

  Vera touched my arm. ‘Do you know how this is going to end, Mrs Nickham?’ she whispered. ‘Or are you trying to guess?’

  I caught my breath. Her eyes looked pink in the glow from the stage, like a fox caught in the light. ‘What?’

  ‘Happily or unhappily?’

  My mind blurred then came into focus. She was talking about the ballet. Swan Lake could have two endings. One where the prince was able to break the spell the wicked magician had cast and save the swan princess, and the other where he couldn’t and the two lovers could only find each other again in death. I squeezed my fist so tightly I snapped the opera glasses.

  The curtains swung open to reveal six trumpeters in red capes. Ballerinas in festive dresses with huntsmen for partners dashed across the stage, Prince Siegfried leaping after them. I hadn’t seen a live ballet since Harbin, and for a brief moment I forgot what I was doing in the theatre and became transfixed by the dancers and the graceful shapes they were making with their bodies and feet. This is Russia, I told myself. This is what I have been trying to see.

  I glanced down at Lily. Her eyes were sparkling in the glittering light. My ballet lessons had been cut short when the Japanese came to Harbin. But Lily? She was a child of a peaceful country and could do anything she wanted. She would never be forced to flee her home. When you are older, Lily, I told her with my eyes, you can do ballet, piano, singing, anything that makes you happy. I wanted her to have everything I had missed out on. More than any of those things, I wanted to give Lily her grandmother.

  I heard the first strain of the swan theme and turned back to the stage. The scenery had changed to a craggy mountain and a blue lake. Prince Siegfried was dancing, and the wicked magician, disguised as an owl, was mirroring the dance behind him. The owl was a terrifying shadow, always near, lurking with ill intent, pulling the prince back when he thought he was moving forward. I glanced across at the man in the box Vera had been looking at earlier. In the blue light he seemed unearthly. The blood drained from my face and I clenched my teeth, convinced for a moment I was looking at Tang. But the light in the theatre brightened and I realised that wasn’t possible. The man was white.