Эльвира Барякина - White Ghosts

Out of mischief, Daniel began to tease the poor foolish child. Whenever he saw Ada, he would pass a weary hand over his eyes, sigh, and then abruptly turn his head away, as if her beauty were too overwhelming for him to behold. Without fail, Ada would blush and run back into the library.

One day when she was out for lunch, Daniel went into the library and found a blotting paper on the desk, covered with doodles of hearts, doves, and the letters “D. B.” next to them.

4

Edna had decided to go to a meeting of philanthropists and had let the house servants go home early. From his window, Daniel watched Ada as she headed towards the gates and out of the house.

“My car, please,” he told Sam.

Daniel caught up with Ada at the crossroads. She was trying to get into a grocery store but was surrounded by a gang of child beggars, no older than six or seven.

“No mama, no papa, no whiskey-soda,” they whined, stretching their dirty palms towards her.

Clutching her bag to her chest, Ada backed away, frightened.

“Go away!” Daniel snapped at the children and pressed the horn several times. The little ragamuffins scattered.

“Get in,” he told Ada, and swiftly she leapt into his car. “How on earth do you manage here in Shanghai if you can’t deal with some street urchins?”

“They scared me to death,” she said. “I heard they can bite you, and their saliva is full of rabies… What are you laughing at? I read an article about it in the newspaper.”

“Do you want me to take you home?” Daniel asked.

Ada was taken aback. “Really? I’ll be fine, you don’t need to waste all that fuel for my sake.”

However, Daniel ignored her protestations and insisted that he give her a lift to her home in the French Concession.

All the way Ada was as excitedly as a schoolgirl who has unexpectedly been given the top grades in her class.

“Edna told me that you only get twelve dollars a week,” Daniel let slip casually, once they had stopped outside the gate of the House of Hope. “How can you get by on such a small amount?”

Ada blushed. “Well, it’s not much, of course. To tell the truth, I’m a bit worried my landlord will kick me out of here soon.”

“Show me your bills,” said Daniel.

He followed her to her modest but neat apartment, which smelled of faded flowers, and Ada showed him a big pile of menacing messages from the landlord.

Daniel glanced through them. “Don’t you have friends or relatives to help you?”

“No.” Ada frowned. “Before I had a roommate, Klim Rogov, but he left for Canton.”

Daniel’s heart skipped a beat. He had been right about Klim.

“I know that Mr. Rogov sent you some papers,” he said. “May I see them?”

Ada’s expression changed. “But—why do you need them? They’re in Russian, and you don’t speak Russian, do you?”

“I have business in the south, and it would be very useful for me to have the latest first-hand news.” Daniel took a ten-dollar bill out of his wallet. “This will be your fee for translating it for me.”

“I can’t,” Ada protested. “It’s a private diary. Klim didn’t send it to me but to Nina Kupina.”

“What has she got to do with Klim Rogov?”

“The two of them were married back in Russia. But she never fully appreciated him—she seems to be like that with all the men she meets.”

Daniel took out his cigarette case, but no matter how hard he tried to get the lighter to work, his fingers betrayed him.

Ada obligingly offered him a match.

“So let me get this straight,” Daniel said inhaling deeply. “You haven’t given Nina Mr. Rogov’s diary yet?”

“I didn’t have time. I have so much to do at work, and—”

He counted out forty dollars. “That’s more than enough to pay off your debts. Now translate for me what Mr. Rogov has written.”

Ada looked at the money, then at Daniel, and nearly in tears she nodded her assent.

5

Ada was sitting at the open window, recounting to Daniel what was written in the small notebook with the worn corners.

Daniel listened to her, stunned. Only now did he realize what his acquaintances had been talking about when they had been dropping hints about some baby. Nina had had a daughter, and everybody had decided that Daniel was the father of the child.

As God was his witness, Daniel had had no intention of starting an affair with Nina Kupina. But this woman had attracted him like the mystical will-o’-the-wisp lights that lead travelers astray at night in fairy tale forests.

She had reminded him of the magical foxes of Chinese and Japanese folklore who could transform themselves into beguiling women. In China, they were known as húli jīng and in Japan kitsune. With their magical abilities, these vixens could fool men into falling in love with them. And woe to the man who failed to recognize the bushy tail concealed beneath her silk robe. Even if she were to reciprocate the love of a mere mortal, nothing good could ever come of it. Sooner or later the fox would reveal her true nature.

“What has made Nina and I so angry and suspicious?” Ada continued reading Klim’s diary. “We have fenced ourselves in with barbed wire and minefields only to become the victims of the traps that we ourselves have created.”

Daniel clenched his jaw and fists until they hurt. Then he tried exhaling to relax but to no avail. He was overwhelmed by an all-consuming, suffocating jealousy. How was it even possible for that man, Edna’s courier or whoever he was, to dream about Nina?

Back then, in 1923, Daniel had tried to reduce his relationship with Nina to a game between two adults who enjoyed living in opulent style, engaging in ironic debate, and abandoning themselves to an all-consuming but obligation-free lasciviousness. But Nina’s intentions had turned out to be serious, and this had discouraged Daniel. What had she seriously expected him to do? Marry her? The idea was too absurd.

He had realized all that but had waited for his orders to go south with a heavy heart. He could see his life being reduced to a shapeless lump like a festival marquee that has crumpled to the ground after its main pole has been snapped in a storm. No longer would he enjoy the almost excruciatingly painful anticipation of their trysts, or the furtive exchange of stolen looks or ambiguous, witty remarks, which he loved to recall at the end of the day.

On arriving in Canton, Daniel had tried to spend as much of his time as possible in the cockpit. He had slept six hours a day and eaten whatever came to hand. He had done everything he could to exhaust himself completely so that he would have no time to wallow in his fond memories. What was the point of regretting that which was beyond his reach?

Klim Rogov had made no mention of Comrade Krieger or the airfield in his diary. When Ada finished reading it, she wanted to put it back in the drawer, but Daniel wouldn’t let her.

“Give it to me,” he said.

Ada silently handed him the notebook.

“I’ll increase your salary, so you can pay your rent,” Daniel said curtly and left the apartment.

6

The Filipino women were hanging their laundry in the courtyard, and the tortured sound of a badly played violin was coming from the open window.

Daniel felt dizzy as if he had been poisoned. As soon as he got home, he locked himself in his studio.

So, the kitsune woman that had driven him crazy had given birth to another man’s baby. A hatred for her flared up within Daniel and then as quickly receded. He reproached himself and then Nina, laughing hoarsely. Then he began to leaf through Klim’s diary, tightly packed with its small Slavic letters.

I should kill that son of a bitch right away, he thought in impotent rage.

That evening, Daniel sent a cable to Canton demanding to find out what had happened to Rogov.

He couldn’t work out why he felt such a strong resentment for Klim—there was nothing to be envious of. And yet he felt like an ugly freak who has been spurned on the dance floor by a beautiful woman for a handsome and inspiring tango dancer.

It was a mystery to him how he could ever have let another man have Nina. What had he, Daniel Bernard, been doing with his life instead? Serving Sun Yat-sen’s cause at the expense of his own? Propping up a joke of a marriage with Edna for the sake of the ties that her brute of a father had to offer?

Daniel had desperately wanted to possess and take Nina away with him, no matter the cost. He was sure she had been ready to love him. Her pregnancy had been an irrelevance. She could always have had an abortion.

Daniel felt as though he had missed the greatest chance of his life. He was thirty-eight; all he had to look forward to was a civil war and, quite possibly, a senseless death, but he still hadn’t experienced even the palest semblance of the love that Klim Rogov had enjoyed.

1

Don Fernando replied to Daniel Bernard’s telegram telling him that he had been with Klim Rogov when they both came under artillery fire and that the fugitive journalist had been struck on the head by a falling statue of the Guan Yin goddess. It appeared that the celestial forces had decided to come to Daniel’s aid.

On his return to Shanghai Daniel had bought the Avro 504 from the Cossacks, and every day now, he went up in the air to spy on the movements of the warships on the Yangtze and Huangpu rivers. He made a point of flying over Nina’s house on these reconnaissance missions. Sometimes he would see a woman’s silhouette down below, and every time his heart felt as if it were falling into an abyss.