Эльвира Барякина - White Ghosts

It turned out that Nina hadn’t learned anything about my injury. Having received no news, she had decided to go to Canton to find me. The suitcases were ready and packed in her living room, and half a dozen different guidebooks were lying on the table.

We were both stunned and confused. In the months since our last meeting, we had conceived a thousand different plots of betrayal and death, and now it was hard to accept they had been completely unfounded.

Nina told me what had happened to her. The Jesuits had cheated her, her competitors had ruined her business, and she had little or no money to get by. I wondered how my brave girl had coped with it all?

I told her about my adventures and encounter with “Comrade Krieger.”

“Daniel never told me a thing about it,” Nina gasped.

I felt as though someone had just run a high-voltage through my entire body.

“Did he come here?” I asked.

Nina went deathly pale and began to explain in earnest that she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. At that moment, there was a knock at the door, and there was the man himself at the doorstep, as large as life.

Nina was the first to pull herself together and began to shove the intruder out of the door. “Leave us alone. Please!”

I saw the way he looked at us and realized in an instant that my wife had broken his heart.

“Did you hear the gunshots?” he said. “The police have just dispersed a demonstration on Nanking Road. Edna has been wounded and lost consciousness.”

“I’ll tell the driver to take you to the hospital,” Nina said.

She literally pushed him out and slammed the door behind him.

“We need to find out how Edna is,” I said, but Nina stood in my way.

“Don’t you dare go out there. The servants will take care of her. Don’t you realize that you and Daniel will end up killing each other?”

Through the window, I watched Nina’s car driving out of the gate. Daniel put Edna and Ada into it and they left.

“I’d better go,” I said. “I don’t want you and Kitty to get into any more trouble on my account. I’m sure Daniel Bernard will use every opportunity to rid himself of me, and Wyer isn’t likely to have forgotten my past misdeeds either.”

But Nina was confident that we still had a little time.

“The police won’t come visiting just yet,” she said. “They’ve got more than enough on their hands with the demonstration, and anyway Daniel will have already put two and two together that I know all about your encounter in Canton. There’s nothing he can do about it now.”

I really wanted to find out what had passed between her and Daniel, but I decided not to pry: the details would only lead to pain and recriminations. What we needed was to start all over again, from scratch, and right now the only thing I wanted to do was to play at happy families.

When we are children, it doesn’t matter to us who we are in real life. A boy can play a brave hero, and a girl can be a beautiful princess. If everybody agrees to play their part then there is nothing to stop us making our fantasy a reality.

We feasted until well into the evening, played with Kitty, danced, and kissed, our lives and very essence melding into each other’s. It was mind blowing how rapidly it all happened. The most trivial things, such as washing our faces next to each other at the sink, or me passing Nina a piece of soap behind the shower curtain acquired the most intense meaning. I never dreamed of being entitled to such joy.

It’s now eleven-thirty at night, my body is exhausted but relaxed, however, I still can’t get to sleep. I’m sitting in Nina’s bedroom at her dressing table and writing my new diary, having moved her hairbrushes and perfume bottles to one side. My previous diary, “Receipts and Expenditures,” has been lost in the vagaries of the Chinese mail service, but I don’t regret it. There are some details of my life that I need to forget.

I constantly want to take a peek at my sleeping wife, to check that she is really here with me and that I haven’t dreamt all this up. A mosquito net floats over her like a translucent cloud. My heart sings with hymns of praise, and my only regret is that I can’t pick up a telephone to God and thank him for his sublime generosity.

1 SKETCHES ^{Klim Rogov’s diary}

The Nanking Road massacre of May 30 claimed the lives of thirteen students with dozens more injured. The next day, the Chinese trade unions announced a general strike, and now the foreign concessions have found themselves left with neither telephone nor tap water.

Garage owners refuse to sell gas to foreigners, the trams have stopped working, and rickshaw boys no longer carry white passengers. I guess this must be the reason why nobody has come to kill us so far. Wyer’s cutthroats are probably out on strike as well, and Daniel Bernard is feeling too lazy to go anywhere by foot in this heat.

Nina has come up with a new business idea. She wants to set up a security agency and hire former White Army military men to guard us and her potential customers. The demand for these sorts of services is huge: everyone who has money is terrified of thugs coming to rob them. The rich who have come to Shanghai from the war-torn provinces are in a particularly difficult situation. They have neither friends nor relatives here. The police have gone on strike, too, and the prospect of hiring Chinese bodyguards, who might easily be gang members themselves, is a scary one.

Russians make perfect bodyguards in this situation: they have no ties with the local community and no connections with the Chinese underworld. They have combat experience, and they are eager to work, exhausted by their long-term unemployment.

Nina has learned the ins and outs of business the hard way, and now she is drawing up a proper plan and calculating how much money she will need to rent a new office and train her staff. I watch her and think that the act of setting up a business is, in its own way, a form of art, like creating a novel, a painting, or an invention.

I need to be ready for the day when my wife might start earning more than me. I guess I will flatter myself that I am a “gardener” who has spent many seasons tending to a rose bush that has produced into the most exotic blossom.

When I returned to Shanghai, I had mentally prepared myself for a long spell of unemployment, but the general strike has played into my hands: the demand for news from China has soared to the heavens, and now I have started writing for Reuters.

Previously, the world didn’t care much about what was going on in China, but now it is obvious that we are all interconnected. The general strike in Shanghai caused immediate ripples in stock markets, and now the world is waiting for an explanation. What the devil is going on over here?

I have a difficult job: the Chinese are not very willing to talk to white journalists and often banish us from their meetings, claiming that we lie and distort what they say. The police are tough on us as well, dispersing demonstrations with horse charges and fire hoses. Several times I’ve returned home covered in bruises and soaked from head to toe.

The unions are prepared to call off the strike if the whites are ready to make significant compromises and reconsider the unequal treaties, but the Municipal Council is a local government and as such does not have the power to change international agreements. The strike ringleaders know this but they are doing their best to turn this small dispute into a major conflict, telling the people that the “white ghosts” are not interested in a peaceful solution. The more damage that can be inflicted on the colonialists, the harder the bargain the unions can negotiate for themselves at a later date.

White Shanghai is laying low, bristling and wrapped up in itself like a cornered porcupine. The mobilization of a Volunteer Corps has been announced, and marines from foreign ships have been summoned ashore to man the patrols. Rather than seeing these as protective measures, the Chinese mutter darkly about the foreign powers preparing for an occupation, and the situation only gets more heated.

The time and effort I spent on Wyer would now appear to be paying dividends. The small waves of discontent set in motion by my articles have grown into a tsunami of righteous wrath, and now the captain is possibly the most hated man in Shanghai. He is generally held to be the main culprit behind the events of May 30, although that Saturday he was actually out hunting ducks and only learned what had happened the next day. His very name has become synonymous with injustice, violence, and extortion, and the city is littered with leaflets calling for his death.

I don’t crave Wyer’s blood—after all, he is Edna’s father—but I do want him out of Shanghai.

2

The International Settlement is full of rumors of Chinese workers stoning foreign foremen and pillaging the stores of their countrymen suspected of collaborating with the “white ghosts.” In the wake of these rumors, Nina had no problems obtaining the license for her security agency and hired three dozen White Army men living in the Russian neighborhood along Avenue Joffre.

She is fully committed to her new business and has no time to deal with the calendars, leaving them to Binbin. She now spends all her time in negotiations with her new customers and signing security contracts for warehouses, shops, and weddings.

In the evening, tired and happy, we gather in Kitty’s room to play with our daughter, to dance, and to invent plays with her plush toys.

I have learned to understand Kitty to some extent. She babbles in three languages: Russian words are meant for parents, English is associated with toys and the playground, and the Shanghai dialect she picked up from her amah is used while eating, bathing, and sitting on the potty.

No one could have convinced me three years ago that the awful events of that period could have marked the starting point for my new life. Now I find it funny to look back and remember what a fool I had been. Mistrust and resentment are like dust on the window; if you don’t wash it off, the dirt makes it impossible to see what’s going on both inside and outside the room. You make one mistake after another, the window gets increasingly smudged, the room gets darker, and you end up blaming everybody except yourself.

I feel sorry for Ada, who’s making the same mistakes. I visited her at the House of Hope, but she refused to talk to me, didn’t even open the door. “You left me behind, and I hate you,” was all that she would say.

Ada won’t even entertain the notion that she might have misinterpreted events, and I can’t help her clean the window if she can’t see that it’s dirty. I’ve decided to let her be. She’s a big girl now, and frankly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to get into an argument with her.

Nina and I are intoxicated by our happiness. I’m constantly astonished by such simple everyday miracles as finding Nina’s hand on the pillow next to mine in the mornings. I stroke it gently in grateful wonder—just because it’s there and I can.

Our life has become a joyful round of sweet and simple rituals. At night, Nina has got into the habit of putting her head on my chest. Within a minute my breathing lulls her into sleep, and I spend hours with my eyes open, unable to believe that it is her curls that I am running my hands through.

3

The Aulmans’ servants left to join the strike, and Tamara and the children spend their evenings alone in the candlelight, waiting for Tony’s return. Tamara’s telephone was silent, and none of her friends offered her any help during the strike.

The bell at the front door rang.

“Daddy is back!” Roger shouted and rushed to open the door.

But it was Nina. Serious and practical as ever, she entered the living room and put a small kerosene stove on the table.

“I thought you wouldn’t have anything to boil water with,” she said. “Now let’s see about dinner, shall we?”

“Thank you for coming,” Tamara said, deeply touched.

The boys followed Nina’s every move as she deftly sorted out the pots and spoons. They had never seen a white woman cook before.

“Five minutes and everything will be ready,” Nina announced. “Boys, bring the plates.”

As they sat at the dinner table, Tony swept into the house, bringing with him the smell of horses, fires, and the sweet stiff pomade he used on his mustache.