Эльвира Барякина - White Ghosts

He imagined that every driver coming towards them was an assassin sent to kill Nina.

“Be extremely careful,” he told her repeatedly. “Lock the doors and close all the shutters. What if we really do have to leave Shanghai?”

“It’s not going to be possible for the time being,” Nina said. “You can only work at an English language newspaper or news agency, so our only options are Peking or Hong Kong. But we have to get there first and we don’t have enough money.”

Their situation was untenable: Klim lived from one paycheck to the next, and Nina’s account had been frozen.

At her house, they put the baby into Katya’s outfit. It seemed unreal to see her lying in the bed where only two days earlier their baby had been sleeping.

Nina started to cry again, and Klim hurriedly took her out of the nursery.

“We’re not going to give up,” he whispered, hugging Nina’s shoulders.

Klim was afraid that she would say that there was no ‘we,’ but she said nothing. Emboldened a little, he recited his reassurances like an incantation: “Everything will be alright. Everything will fall into place.”

“It really doesn’t matter to you, what child is lying in that bed,” Nina said suddenly, with a tortured look in her eyes. “But why are letting me know about this now? Why now?”

Klim was taken aback. “I’m just trying to help you.”

“Exactly!” Nina freed herself from his arms. “These aren’t your sufferings. You’re not sharing them with me, you’re just another ‘sympathizer.’ You would never have brought me this Chinese girl if you had thought Katya was your daughter. As far as you were concerned, Katya was just my toy, and you really don’t see the difference between her and this other girl lying in that nursery. You think that if one toy is lost or broken, you can always just get me another one.”

“Why are you always so unkind and unfair?” Klim began. “I did it because I love you—”

“Hell no!” she interrupted. “You don’t accept me for what I am, the same way as you didn’t accept Katya. For you, I’m just a woman that you don’t want to share with anybody else.”

Klim felt as though his whole life had just collapsed in on itself.

“And who am I for you? Just a substitute for Daniel Bernard? If he hadn’t left you, you wouldn’t have given me the time of day.”

It was a foul, insane, and meaningless fight. They hurled the most appalling accusations at each other, without any regard for the consequences.

“If you want my respect, earn it first,” Klim said. “How can I accept you for who you are if you run around behaving like a hustler?”

Nina gave as good as she got. “Great! Your wife is a whore, your baby a bastard. Can’t you see that it’s you who ruin everything you touch?”

“I promise I won’t touch you ever again.”

Klim marched off to the nursery. “If that’s your attitude to the baby, I’ll take her back. What sort of mother are you going to be anyway?”

Nina barred his way, her face contorted in a cold fury. “Get out of here and don’t ever come back!”

Klim went outside and looked for a while at the glowing windows of Nina’s house. His mind was in a state of dark chaos. Instead of comforting each other, they had said things that could never be forgiven.

Nina was right: his heart was drained of love. She would expect warmth and intimacy from him, and he would no longer be able to provide her with them. She would become indignant, and he would become ever colder and go deeper into his shell.

Previously, Klim had felt that one day they might break out of this vicious circle, or that at least they could try. But Katya’s death had dashed the last of his hopes, and this Chinese baby wouldn’t be able to help them.

I’m still going to keep the girl, Klim kept repeating to himself as he walked home. If I wasn’t able to love my own child, I’ll love somebody else’s baby.

His despair gradually transformed into rage. Wyer had crushed Klim’s life by destroying his daughter’s. And he had done this without the slightest personal malice; the captain probably hadn’t even given Klim a second thought. He had done it because he was used to solving problems with force and violence. Wyer believed that he could do whatever he wanted, and if that led to some foreign immigrants suffering, then so be it. After all, nobody had invited them to come to Shanghai in the first place.

As God is my witness, Klim thought grimly, he’s going to pay for this.

1

That evening when Klim went for the lamp oil, Ada told Nina what she had heard from the servants at the Bernards.

When Edna and Tamara were young, they had been best friends and both had fallen in love with Daniel, who had just arrived in Shanghai from Europe. He had ended up proposing to Edna, but the servants suspected that Daniel was more taken with her father’s connections, than Edna herself.

Mrs. Bernard knew that her husband occasionally visited places of ill repute and, feeling powerless to stop him, she avenged herself on the city’s prostitutes.

When she had been told that Daniel had got himself a mistress and made her pregnant, Edna almost gone crazy with grief.

“She hates you so much!” Ada told Nina with a sigh. “She calls you that femme fatale.”

“Oh really?” Nina smiled bitterly. “Well, I and your stupid Edna have a lot more in common than she thinks. But unlike her, I don’t have money or an influential daddy to fight my battles for me.”

Nina was more convinced than ever that her acquaintance with Daniel Bernard had been no coincidence. Tamara had clearly never got over her rivalry with her old friend, despite her own marriage being much more successful. In all likelihood, it was Mrs. Aulman who had spread the word about Nina’s illegitimate child. Nina would have loved to tell Tamara to her face that she was partly responsible for the death of her daughter, but she couldn’t afford even that luxury. Nina’s house belonged to the Aulmans. Where would she go if she had to move? To Klim and Ada?

Besides, Tony had promised her he would get her confiscated savings back, and she could forget about them if she fell out with Tamara.

The next time Tamara called, Nina told her that she wouldn’t be able to visit her. “I’ve adopted a Chinese baby girl that I found on the street, and goodness knows what people would think if they saw me breastfeeding her. Your reputation would be in tatters.”

“What induced you to do such a thing?” Tamara gasped. “It’s utter madness. You’ll become a complete pariah in polite society. You’d have been better off adopting a monkey.”

“It’s a bit late to be worrying about polite society in my position, don’t you think?” Nina said.

On the plus side, Nina’s Chinese baby provided her with the means to escape from Tamara’s suffocating custody without having to have an open fight with her.

2

The case of Katya Rogov’s and her nanny’s murders was pushed from one office desk to another until the investigating officer finally announced that the suspect had probably fled to the Chinese territory and it would be impossible to find him.

Nina tried to console herself with the thought that most women would have to deal with the death of a child at some time in their life, be it through miscarriage, abortion, or a fatal illness. But nothing made it any easier for her. Every night Nina dreamed of her daughter, only to wake up to the reality of having to take care of Kitty, the name Klim had given to his foundling.

Everybody who knew Nina thought that she had gone completely crazy adopting a Chinese baby. After all, it was clear from the outset that the girl would have a hard life: an Asian child would never be allowed into a good school for white children or completely accepted into white society. Kitty was destined to be like a zebra in a herd of horses, and with the handicap of Russian foster parents, she would never be a fully signed up member of Chinese society.

But Nina realized from the start that rejecting Kitty would mean losing Klim as well, and she couldn’t face being all alone. She knew that there was no point arguing with him about the foundling. Nina had recognized that familiar stubborn obsession in his eyes: in the most difficult moments, Klim would make sudden decisions that would dramatically change his life, and no one could change his mind. This was what had happened many years ago when he had run away from home, after a quarrel with his father, leaving his family fortune behind. The same had happened when he had decided to stay with Nina in revolutionary Russia, even though he could have gone back to Buenos Aires and escaped all the hardship they had had to endure. These decisions had cost him dearly, but Klim had his own unswerving view on what was the right and the wrong thing to do.

Although Nina had told him to never come back, he still returned, bringing her money and looking after the baby to allow Nina to get some sleep. But now he treated her as if she was merely a wet-nurse for his surrogate daughter. Klim found it easier to act this way. Tired of its unwieldiness, he had deprived his love of its freedom, constraining it in a straitjacket like a psychopathic criminal.

Nina and Klim had reversed roles. It was she who now felt secretly jealous of the baby and performed her parental duties reluctantly, while Klim behaved as if there was no one in the world dearer to him than Kitty.

3 RECEIPTS AND EXPENDITURES ^{Klim Rogov’s Notebook}

Ada tries hard to convince me that no good can come from adopting a Chinese child and that I’m just wasting my time with Kitty.