Эльвира Барякина - White Ghosts

“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?”

These “jokes,” as he liked to call them, drove Nina up the wall. After each put-down she would promise herself that she would never discuss her business ideas with Daniel, only to seek his opinion again at the first opportunity. She felt too insecure too be alone with her dreams.

However, it was impossible to win approval or praise from Daniel.

“You’re such a nitpicker,” Nina raged after another put-down. “You’re constantly putting me in the shade.”

“I’m just protecting you from sunburn,” Daniel said, shrugging. “You do want to be treated and regarded as a white lady, don’t you?”

Still, he willingly helped with Nina’s consulate business and gave her good advice on financial matters and how to keep her scam a secret.

He had photographed each item from Gu Ya-min’s collection and sent the pictures to his friends in Europe, who were expert collectors and antique dealers.

“If you manage to strike a deal, you can keep the commission,” he told Nina.

She was certain that Daniel had a crush on her, because he would often talk about her femininity, which he found impossible to resist.

“Thank God, you don’t realize its power,” he said.

“Sure I do,” she protested.

“If you did, dabbling in something as banal as business wouldn't even occur to you. Can you imagine anything more absurd than Botticelli’s Venus with a briefcase under one arm and an abacus under the other?”

“But she’s butt naked.”

“And she carries it off very well. People should stick to where their talents lie.”

She felt that the inevitable would soon happen: Daniel would divorce Edna and ask Nina to marry him. But she was uneasy about her own divorce. Klim and Nina had had a church marriage and that wouldn’t be so easy to dissolve. Besides that, Chinese law favored men, and if a husband refused to let his wife go, there was nothing she could do about it.

Should I pretend I’ve never been married to Klim? Nina thought. He can’t prove we’re married without any documents. And anyway, there is no way he’s going to find out in this huge great city.

Just to be on the safe side, she asked Tony what the punishment in China was for a woman found guilty of having more than one husband. The answer was more than a little alarming: ninety lashes with the bamboo cane.

2

In summer 1923, not much was left in Nina’s memory besides fights with Daniel, reconciliations, and crazy flirtation. She had hoped to keep their relationship a secret, but Daniel told her from the very beginning that he was not going to sneak about in the shadows. He didn’t care what Edna or the rest of the world would think of him.

Whenever Nina began to worry—“People will see us!”—Daniel laughed at her. “How old are you? Thirteen? What are you afraid of?”

“You know perfectly well,” Nina snapped. “I shouldn’t draw attention to myself.”

Daniel assured her that as long as she was under his protection, she had nothing to fear. It seemed as though he didn’t realize how vulnerable Nina was, and there was no persuading him otherwise. He didn’t risk anything, but Nina had lost a lot: the ladies who had been happily attending her parties now saw her as a potential danger to their marriages and a bad example for their teenage daughters. Increasingly, Nina started receiving cards with polite notes: “Unfortunately, we can’t come to you tonight.”

Jiří believed that Nina had gone crazy, getting into an affair with Daniel.

“You’ll destroy both of us!” he yelled at her. “Do you want Tamara kicking us out of her house? If Daniel hasn’t proposed yet, he won’t do it.”

That made Nina scared. “Daniel can’t live without me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. His father-in-law is a police commissioner, and Mr. Bernard isn’t such a fool as to upset him.”

I should make Daniel choose, Nina thought again and again. This situation can’t continue indefinitely. Let him either marry me or leave me alone.

But the thought of her victory was equally frightening to Nina. She was attracted to Daniel not by passion but by her desire to arrange her future. She always found something annoying about him—the tobacco smell or his irritating laughter. When indignant at something, Daniel would roll his eyes, and his pupils disappeared under his upper eyelids. When Nina was a child, her mother had told her about a “white-eyed monster” who comes to naughty children and carries them into the woods. Now that was Nina thought about when she was looking at her Mr. Right.

What if I’m unhappy staying with him? she thought. She knew that he was capable of leaving her behind if she lost her “feminine charm” or simply did something he didn’t like. She couldn’t expect eternal love from him, similar to Aulmans’. He was not that type of a person.

Anxiety made Nina ill; she felt weak, suffering from headaches and nausea. Sometimes it was so bad that she was unable to leave the house.

3

Everything was clarified in the beginning of September, and not in the way Nina had hoped.

After Japan had had a major earthquake and Edna had gone to Tokyo for her newspaper, Daniel called Nina and asked her if she wanted to visit the Chinese Сity.

But the heavy rain interrupted their walk, and they found shelter under the archway at the entrance to the spice shop. Daniel took off his jacket and put it around Nina’s shoulders. They stood quietly in the moist dim, listening to the sound of the rain and inhaling the pungent herb aromas coming from the door to the shop.

“Should we run to the car?” Nina suggested.

She felt Daniel was looking at her in a new way, with annoyance and impatience, as if he had missed the target while hunting.

“Aren’t you tired of pretending to be bashful school children?” he said and suddenly pulled her to his chest. “We both know how it ends.”

Nina didn’t expect him to be so straightforward. She tried to wriggle herself out of his hands.

“Do you want to get warm holding me like this? I’ll give you your jacket back, or you’ll crumple my dress.”

Daniel didn’t listen to her. “God is my witness, I’d tried to stop it before it was too late.”