Эльвира Барякина - White Ghosts

“Our white skin is all the passports we need,” Nina replied. “Klim told me that they even offer loans on a white man’s word of honor. Although I’m not sure that’s going to last for much longer.”

The bellboy led Nina and Jiří past stained-glass windows and sumptuous mahogany-paneled walls to a gallery that wound its way around a large ballroom. Downstairs, under a huge glass roof, an orchestra played next to tables covered with pristine white linen.

Nina stopped to look at the dancing couples. Half of the ladies had their hair cut short, and they wore dresses with belts that were fastened at the side to accentuate their hips. Wow!

“What kind of music is this?” Nina asked Jiří.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard anything like it before.”

“And you call yourself a musician?” Nina teased. “Oh, we’re hopelessly behind the times.”

The bellboy informed them that the music was known as jazz, and that the event going on downstairs was tiffin—a kind of late second breakfast complete with cocktails and dances.

He turned the lock on one of the polished doors. “Monsieur, madame, welcome!”

It was a little chilly in the room, and it smelled of lavender soap. Nina put her hat on the neatly made bed, threw the curtains open, and laughed. “Jiří, I love this city!”

5

After a luxurious bath and breakfast, they decided to go shopping.

Nina was awe struck by Shanghai’s wealth and modernity. She observed the well-heeled crowd promenading down Nanking Road and gasped at the staggering dresses on display in the giant shop windows. The trees had been trimmed, all the sidewalks had trashcans, and dashing traffic policemen stood at the road crossings, waving on pedestrians with their batons.

To all intents and purposes it was a European city, with the exception of the Chinese shop signs, rickshaws, and pedestrians carrying ducks in cages or bundles of cabbage on bamboo yokes.

It now seemed strange to Nina that she had ever been so afraid of emigrating. What was there to miss about ill-starred Russia? Shanghai was a city where you could live life to the full.

While she and Jiří were roaming the Wing On department store, Nina wanted to laugh and cry with happiness. To think that only yesterday she hadn’t even had enough thread to sew a button, and now she could buy herself whatever she wanted: an American photo camera or a set of fine porcelain cups from Japan, or a fine British leather purse, or even a fountain pen with a golden nib. Everything was available if you could afford it, without even waiting in line, and the prices were ridiculously cheap.

Clerks in gray gowns heaped silk on the counter, cut a little nick into the weightless fabric, and then tore it in a perfect line the rest of the way. “Bye-bye makee me pay,” they said. “Mee send chit.”

They didn’t ask for money in the shops, either; it was enough just to show a hotel card and sign for the purchase.

“Jiří, wake me up!” Nina moaned. But Shanghai had completely benumbed his senses as well.

They returned to their hotel completely different people: well-dressed, refreshed, and with a gleam in their eyes.

Nina led Jiří to the big mirror that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.

“This is the real us,” she said, “and this is how we should always remain. We’ve been under a curse, but now it has been lifted forever.”

Jiří glanced at his crippled hand and quickly hid it behind his back. “Yes, you’re right. Most likely.”

6

That evening, Nina lay in bed reading the menu from the French restaurant as if it were the most delightful novel. “Capon fillet and chestnut mash. Roasted pheasant in a sauce of woodcock mince, bacon, anchovy, and truffles. Mandarin fish aspic with wild saffron rice. Oh Lord, have mercy on us!”

Her feet ached from the shopping marathon, and she hadn’t quite found her land legs after the long days spent at sea. Shopping bags and boxes were spread all over the floor—‘a woman’s basic necessities’ as Klim used to call them.

Thinking of him made her feel uneasy. He would probably be devastated when he learned how she had escaped from the steamer.

There was a quiet knock, and Jiří appeared in her doorway, looking like a choirboy with his neat new haircut and his full-length terrycloth robe.

“I’m sorry to intrude on your daydreams,” he said. “But I have a question. How do you plan to pay for all of this?” He pointed at the shopping bags.

“I’ll think of something,” Nina replied breezily. “I can put an ad in the newspaper: ‘Impeccably bred young lady available to entertain and hold court with the cream of society. One hundred dollars an hour. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

Jiří snickered. “I’ve just read a very similar ad in the newspaper. The young ladies providing this service in Shanghai are geishas from the Japanese settlement, and they’re paid a miserly two dollars an hour.”

1

At the age of fifteen Ada Marshall had become an orphan. Her American father, who was contracted to an Izhevsk factory in Siberia, had been killed right at the start of the revolution, and Ada’s Russian mother had died from pneumonia on the refugee ship.

After her mother’s body had been buried at sea, Ada had found a hiding place for herself behind the large crate containing the life jackets, and it was there that she had created her own little world, complete with a red blanket on the floor and the stack of books that her mother had been carrying with her ever since they had left Izhevsk. Ada had stayed cocooned there for weeks, while the refugees negotiated with the Shanghai authorities.

Finally, the Russians were allowed to go ashore, but they had to leave all their weapons behind, and the ships had to remove themselves from Chinese territorial waters.

The news stirred joyfully throughout the ship.

“Come with us, poor child,” Father Seraphim said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ada whispered in fear. She had no idea what she was going to do in Shanghai.

“Well, suit yourself,” the priest sighed. “The ships will go to Manila soon, and it’s a long way from there to Russia. How are you going to get back home when the Bolsheviks are finally toppled?”

Ada had no reply.

Soon the only people on board were the volunteer sailors. Ada wandered about the empty corridors trying to decide what she should do now.

Several times she encountered Klim Rogov, who had also refused to go ashore at Shanghai. Nobody could understand why his wife would leave such a kindhearted, strong man who knew some English. There could only be one possible explanation for Nina’s betrayal: that funny little Czech man, Jiří Labuda, had been pretending to be poor and desperate when in fact he had a large sum of money, and that was how he had managed to seduce Klim’s wife.

On the rare occasions when they met, Klim and Ada would look askance at each other, carrying on their separate business in silence. Neither was in the mood to talk.

2

One morning, as Ada came up on deck, she saw Klim climbing over the ship’s side and beginning to descend a rope ladder down to a sampan. An old Chinese man dressed in a quilted jacket and a ragged woolen hat was waiting for him in the boat.

“Where are you going?” Ada gasped.

“I’ve decided to go to Shanghai after all,” Klim said.

Ada looked around her at a complete loss. It now finally dawned on her that she really would be the last passenger left on the ship.

“Wait, I’m going with you!”

Ada returned to her nook, folded her red blanket and tied up her books with a piece of twine. They were heavy and cumbersome, and she was in two minds whether she should take them or not. But they were her only memento of her former life, and in any case, it would be sad to live without books in Shanghai.

As Ada lowered herself into the boat, she lost her balance and nearly fell into the water. Fortunately, Klim managed to catch her. She felt a strange feeling coursing through her body as his strong hands saved her from her fall.

He told her to sit down on the straw mat next to his knapsack and a big battered samovar. The old man started moving his wide oar at the stern, and the sampan headed upriver.

“Do you have any relatives?” Klim asked Ada.

She shook her head. “No. I mean, yes, I have an aunt in America. My mom gave me her address and some money. I’m going to write her a letter.”

Waiting for Klim to say where they were going, Ada gnawed a fingernail on her thumb that was protruding through a hole in her mitten. What’s going to happen, she thought,if this man abandons me when we reach Shanghai? Where am I going to go then?

She regarded him furtively—his frowning brow, his stubble, and his dark hair that was rebelliously peeping out from underneath his newsboy cap.

“Why have you decided to go to Shanghai?” Ada asked.

“Yesterday, I had an epiphany when I was in the galley,” Klim said. “It occurred to me that a person’s life is rather like a sack of potatoes, and each day is like a single potato. It’s up to us what we do with each precious day that has been allotted to us. We can make something tasty, or we can throw it in the trashcan to rot. It didn’t make any sense to me to carry on rotting out there on the ship.”

Ada smiled. “But what if the potato has already been spoiled?”

“A smart person will figure out how to put it to good use.” Klim pointed at a boat with a huge fetid barrel on its deck. “Do you know what that is? The Chinese take the excrement out of their chamber pots and make fertilizer out of it for their fields. All the local vegetables are grown using it.”

Ada shuddered at the very idea and decided that she wouldn’t be touching any Chinese food.

The old boatman was planning to take his passengers to the luxury waterfront once the sampan reached Shanghai, but Klim told him to go further.

Upstream there were warehouses and factory shops next to unimaginable hovels made out of old broken boards and billboards. Brown smoke floated over the thatched roofs, and laundry hanging to dry on bamboo poles was stiff with the frost.

The boatman maneuvered the sampan next to a lopsided pier. Sleepy fishermen with makeshift rods sat on the shore while their dirty-faced womenfolk cleaned huge copper cauldrons next to them.

“You mentioned that you had some money,” Klim said to Ada.

She frowned. “Why do you ask?”

“I’ve told the boatman that I’ll give him my samovar as a fee, but it’s worth a lot more than twenty cents. I have no money on me, so it’s up to you whether we keep my last remaining possession or not. Personally, I think a samovar might come in handy for us.”

Ada’s heart leapt. Klim had said “us,” and that implied that he wasn’t going to abandon her.

She readily pulled a knitted moneybag out of her pocket. “Here, I have some Chinese dollars that my mom gave to me.”

Klim paid the boatman and took Ada along the crooked noisy street lined with two-story houses. The ground floors were occupied by shops with the floors above used as apartments.

Ada stared open-mouthed at the tiled roofs, the windows latticed with thin red slats, and the vertical boards with strange hieroglyphs painted on them.

“What are they?” she asked Klim. “Shop signs?”

He nodded. “The Chinese write from top to bottom, not from left to right.”

Peddlers were selling watermelon seeds, sunflower seeds, and sugar cane. Mountains of pickled cucumbers and carrots lay on the stalls along the road. Women were grilling something on their sooty braziers—it looked suspiciously like grasshoppers or even scorpions.

“Good gracious!” Ada kept gasping, as she marveled at the rickshaws, palanquins, and carts with huge wheels. Two young Chinese men were carrying an enormous bale hanging from a bamboo pole. In order to keep time, they shouted in unison: “Aya-hah! Aya-hah!”

A bus, packed with people, roared past, a policeman blew his whistle, car brakes squealed, and shaven-headed monks in orange robes climbed out of a huge shiny automobile.

Ada’s head was spinning. Where had she ended up? In Asia? In Europe? This city was an incomprehensible mix of all the world’s cultures and historical epochs, dating from the Middle Ages to modernity.

“Where are we going?” Ada asked plaintively. She felt that she was about to collapse from exhaustion.