Эльвира Барякина - White Ghosts

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.

Klim stopped and gave her a serious look. “Please, don’t be scared but… we’re going to a brothel.”

“Excuse me?”

“We need to look around and learn the news.”

Should I run away? Ada thought. She looked around and suddenly noticed the familiar face of one of the women who had been with them on the ship. She was sitting on the ground next to a shop, bowing low to every person entering and exiting it. She was begging, but no one was giving her any money.

3

Klim brought Ada to a small courtyard behind a two-story brick building. A rusted bicycle frame lay in a pile of litter; somebody’s drawers drooped morosely on a washing line.

Klim approached the porch and hammered on the flaking door.

“Martha, open the door,” he shouted in English.

Ada cautiously looked around. She was about to enter a brothel. The shame of it!

They heard footsteps, and a blue eye appeared at the peephole. “Who is it?”

“Martha, don’t you recognize me?”

The door flew open, and a petite and voluptuous woman with paper curlers in her hair threw her arms around Klim’s neck. “You’re back!”