Эльвира Барякина - White Ghosts

“Nina, wait!” Daniel called when she was out in the street.

She pretended to be pleasantly surprised.

“How nice to see you again. How are you?”

“Very well, thanks.”

They stood in the middle of the crowd looking into each other’s eyes.

“Do you always find your target?” Daniel asked.

“If I thought I was going to miss, I wouldn’t bother going hunting,” Nina said.

He clasped both her hands in an intimate, sensual, almost imploring gesture. “You’ve had your sights on me in the last couple of months. What do you want of me?”

Nina freed her hands and gave Daniel a reproachful stare, as if he had suggested something indecent.

“I’m just looking for some advice on Chinese art,” she said. “A friend of mine has an unusual collection of antiques. He’s an old man now and wants to sell it but has no idea how to go about it.”

Daniel had such a distraught look on his face that it was all Nina could do to stop herself laughing.

“Well, you must let me see the collection,” he said. “Name a time and a place and we must meet.”

Suddenly Edna rushed up to them, hot and bothered.

“Have you completely lost track of the time?” she said to Daniel. “Everyone is waiting for us in the Administration Booth.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” Daniel said to Nina and tipped his hat. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

Nina clenched her fists. Edna had come at just the wrong moment. But on the plus side, it was clear that Daniel had succumbed to the inevitable and that the idea of another woman entering his life had taken root in his mind. The rest would be a matter of time.

4

He called Nina two days later, and it was a while before she managed to locate the receiver of the telephone standing on her bedside table.

“Hello!”

“Good morning,” Daniel said. “Do you still want to show me those antiques?”

Nina pressed her hand to her forehead. The previous day, she had held a Spanish masquerade at her house and had been dancing flamenco until the small hours. Now her head was still buzzing from the excesses of gathering.

“Let’s meet up in couple of hours,” she said.

“Agreed.”

She pulled herself out of bed and looked at her triptych vanity mirror. Goodness gracious! Remnants of make-up were smudged under her eyes, and her hair was a total mess. But worst of all she had a horrendous hangover.

“Qin!” Nina called to her amah, the Chinese maid. “Could you bring me a glass of seltzer water and ice, please?”

5

Daniel met Nina at the entrance of the antique market. It was packed with tourists, sightseers, and art collectors, all wandering around the numerous tents and stalls. The air was thick with the scent of old wood and incense sticks smoking in front of small shrines and altars. Inscrutable dealers sat deep in the cave-like interior of their stalls, surrounded by mountains of colorful bric-a-brac and nonchalantly cooling themselves with fans. Every now and then a heated dispute would break out over the provenance or price of an item. The vendors would invoke the gods and ancestral spirits as their witness, a deal would eventually be agreed on, and a couple of old chairs or a temple bell would pass from one hand to another.

Nina led Daniel along a line of stalls that seemed to have every imaginable item for sale: pots, statues, palanquins, lanterns, vintage embroidered clothes, implements of torture, fortunetelling bones with century-old predictions, and even images of Zigu, the goddess of the privy, to whom people would pray for good luck in their family matters.

Gu Ya-min’s antique shop took up two-floors of a creaky old house, rickety ladders leaned against the shelves on its walls, and light shone in through its colored-glass windows. The owner, who appeared at least a hundred years old, had become so shrunken and dark with age that he looked more like one of his own ancient teak carvings than a living human being. Even in the height of summer he felt the cold and would wander around his shop in a quilted coat and felt slippers.

Gu Ya-min gave Daniel a long searching look and asked Nina who he was and what he wanted. After introductions were made, he agreed to show Daniel his collection.

“A lewd and licentious man lost these items to me at cards,” the old man said, heading for the back room. “He told me they were worth at least three thousand taels of silver, but I can’t even get a yuan for them. It’s against the law for me to sell them.”

The dark, hot, and stuffy back room was cluttered with boxes that reached right up to the ceiling. Nina pushed aside a carved screen and opened the window. She had been hoping that Gu Ya-min would leave her on her own with Daniel, but instead the old man sat down on a stool, resting his hands on the intricately carved head of his stick. “Be my guests,” he said.

Nina had hatched her plan to lure Daniel to this room a long time ago, but now her hangover and nerves had thrown these well laid schemes into complete disarray. To make things worse, Gu Ya-min followed her movements with a disapproving look, as if fathoming what was on her mind.

Daniel opened a cardboard box and pulled out a smaller one covered with silk. Inside was a jade disc depicting a beautiful smiling girl lying on nine chrysanthemum petals, her naked body gleaming and her eyes closed in ecstatic abandon.

Daniel glanced at Nina but said nothing. He took a porcelain bracelet out of a different box. It was decorated with a painted garden along with a pagoda and humpbacked bridge. On the other side of the bracelet was a playful looking woman with a high coiffure. Her gown had slipped open revealing her breasts, and its red belt slid over her stomach disappearing between her thighs.

In the next box there was a fragment of a mammoth tusk covered with carvings of nude figures enjoying every possible sensory delight.

“Do you know how much this thing is worth?” Daniel asked Nina.

“No idea,” she mumbled, rubbing her aching temples.

“This collection could be sold for a very large sum of money. Not here but in Europe.”

Gu Ya-min suddenly dropped his head on his chest and began to snore, his gray mustache quivering in time with his breathing like a pennant in a light wind.

“If Gu Ya-min tries to send these things abroad,” Nina whispered in Daniel’s ear, “he could be accused of selling pornography and end up in jail. That’s why I turned to you: the old man needs advice on what to do with this stuff.”

“What if you were to send the collection under the protection of one of your diplomatic bags?” Daniel said. “You could avoid customs by sending it through your Czechoslovak Consulate. You know there’s a lot more money in illicit antiques than in illicit champagne.”

Nina went cold. Daniel had twigged her little scheme after all.

“You’re a dangerous man,” she said hesitantly.

Daniel laughed. “If I was so dangerous, would you have invited me here on your own?”

“I can explain—”

“Don’t bother. You’d be better off helping me to make an inventory of these treasures.”

They sorted through the remaining boxes together. There were albums with brass corners and prints that smelled of spices, sets of painted fans depicting the most unimaginably debauched scenes, porcelain figurines, and laced puppet figures for the shadow theater. Daniel looked at them in the light while recounting the plots of the famous Chinese medieval stories in an excited whisper. But all Nina could manage to do was to nod and smile stiffly.

Daniel showed her a scroll yellowed with age, depicting a samurai writing thin columns of characters on the thigh of a naked Japanese lady.

“Do you want me to translate it for you?” Daniel asked.

I slept all night on your kimono sleeve,

Your delicate aroma preserved in its folds.

Before the dawn, the curtain swayed.

Your dew-grass footprints barely seen.

Gu Ya-min woke up suddenly and looked reproachfully at Nina and Daniel.

“Forget about these footprints,” he grunted and pointed at a big box with his stick. “You’d be better off having a look in there.”

Daniel opened the box and pulled out a saddle with a sharp peg sticking out of the middle of it.

“What is it?” he asked in surprise.

“A very useful thing,” Gu Yamin said with a smile. “It’s a donkey saddle for adulterous wives. The philandering hussy is placed on top of the peg by her cuckolded husband, and then the donkey is goaded into a gallop.”

Nina pulled Daniel’s sleeve. “Let’s get out of here. I need some fresh air.”

He accompanied her out into the street. “I didn’t know you were so impressionable. Did you not realize the old man was just teasing you?”

Nina nodded, fanning herself briskly. Hot and cold flushes coursed up and down her body, and the thick pall of sweet-smelling incense that hung over the street was making her feel nauseous.

“If you agree to bring the collection to Europe,” Daniel said, “I can make enquiries to see if any of my clients would be interested in buying it.”

“Thank you,” said Nina. “But I’m afraid I really have to go now.”

“Have I done something wrong?”

“No. Bye.”

Nina disappeared around the corner. If she had stayed with Daniel a minute longer she might have been sick right in front of him.

Even on her return home, it was a while before Nina managed to get over her nausea.

What on earth was it? she pondered. From the very first moment of their meeting, it was as if her body had felt a physical revulsion for him.

However, when Daniel called her again, Nina agreed to meet up. The only omens she ever chose to believe were those with a prediction that she approved of.

1

Nina had been hoping to rekindle the bond and intellectual kinship that she and Daniel had enjoyed back on the train, but instead they fell into a strange and exciting game of feigning indifference towards each other.

Daniel was nothing Nina had imagined. After visiting Gu Ya-min’s treasure chamber, he decided that there was no need to be a perfect gentleman in her presence. He spent much of his time with her now making scabrous and unflattering comments about other people and made no pretense of the fact that he found Nina “really rather attractive.”

“Thank God I’m a cynic and a misanthrope,” he told her, “and I have the good sense not to have an affair with you.”

“It’s me, not you, who has the good sense here,” Nina said. “I prefer to steer well clear of cynical married misanthropes.”

Pretty soon she figured out that Daniel didn’t love Edna.

“The Chinese believe that it’s a great virtue if a woman has no talent,” he said. “Unfortunately, Edna is crazy talented.”

“What are you complaining about?” Nina asked, surprised.

“Because I can’t bury her talent in the ground. When I come home at night, I always find my wife inspired. When the muse starts hovering over Edna’s shoulder, she forces her to rattle away on her typewriter until two in the morning.”

“Have you tried buying a trombone and rehearsing in the next room?”

“I wish it would help, but during the Great War, Edna lived in London and soon learned to ignore even the bombs and sirens.”

It was obvious that the problem was not Mrs. Bernard’s talents. Her mother had died at childbirth, her father was a tough, uncommunicative man, and Edna had become accustomed to finding solace in the church, eventually becoming a religious prude. For her, everything related to sex was ugly and sinful, and she believed that a man and wife should “keep their minds and bodies pure.” Daniel had deemed it unwise to explain his feelings on the matter or try to persuade her otherwise, and it had all ended with his banal and sordid little trips to the brothels.

“Alas, the woman I married is a complete cold fish, as unfeeling, flat, and one-dimensional as a flounder,” Daniel sighed.

He had a weakness for lively, sensual women, and Nina shamelessly took advantage of it, constantly teasing him but not allowing him to get too close. Daniel returned the compliment by making fun of Nina’s dream of one day having a legitimate income. Every time she shared her latest business idea with him, he couldn’t resist the pleasure of cutting her down to size.

“For goodness sake,” he told her, “why are you so eager to engage yourself in men’s business? I can see the point of Edna’s writing—she has a gift after all—but what do you have to offer?”