White Ghosts

2. THE HOUSE OF HOPE

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.

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.

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!”

What a dressing gown she had on! Ada had never seen such a robe in her whole life. It had a dragon on the back, and its hem and sleeves were trimmed with fur.

Klim and Martha embraced each other. “How are you doing, my lovely?” he asked.

Ada gave him a puzzled look. Has he gone blind? His friend’s face was puffy, and she had a large nose and a double chin.

“Come on in. It’s cold out here,” Martha said, shivering, and led her guests into the lobby.

Ada followed Martha and Klim upstairs, her face blushing and her heart racing. The walls were papered with striped wallpaper, the stairs were laid with carpet, and a dusty chandelier made of different colored glass hung from the ceiling. So this is what brothels look like, she thought.

Upstairs was a large elegant room with a green grand piano, a gramophone player, and velvet sofas. Clients had evidently been carousing there recently, and the maid hadn’t had time to sweep the floors and take the dirty glasses away.

“So where have you come from, Mr. Rogov?” Martha asked, scrutinizing Klim’s shabby outfit. “Just out of jail?”

“Just out of a civil war.”

“I bet you came out of it decorated?”

“Of course. The Order of the Legion of Refugees and the broken Purple Heart.”

“Did you come with the Russians? Sit down and tell me all about it.”

Klim told her his story and those of a number of mutual acquaintances they both knew. Ada was sitting next to him, embarrassed, holding her blanket and books close to her chest.

Oranges and cookies were sitting in a dish on the round table in front of her. It would be nice of Martha if she offered us a treat, Ada thought. It must have been five years since she last had a cookie, and she had only ever seen oranges in pictures before.

But Martha was busy talking and complaining about the Russian refugees who were ruining her business.

“I used to get a good price for a white girl,” she said. “Now anyone can just go to the Russian Consulate and choose any sweetheart they want. There are hundreds of them. All a man needs to do is to take a frightened little chick to a café, order a muffin, and the poor thing will be happy to do anything for her shining new Prince Charming.”

“I need a job,” Klim said. “I don’t have two pennies to rub together.”

Martha shook her head pensively. “It’s difficult with jobs now. The Chinese are ready to do anything for ten cents a day. And now we have your Russians on our hands. Only a nice-looking girl can get a job in certain establishments.” She glanced at Ada. “Who is she?”

Klim frowned. “Her mother died, and she has nowhere else to go.”

“How is she going to support herself?”

“I can teach English and French,” said Ada, blushing.

“Let me have a look at you.” Martha stretched her hand to undo Ada’s coat.

“Don’t touch me!”

Martha started to laugh. “She’s going to teach French—to whom, may I ask?”

“Give her a job as a taxi-girl in the Havana,” suggested Klim. “We used to have dancing parties on our ship, and I think she’s a very good dancer.”

Ada froze. “What is a ‘taxi-girl’?”

“A paid dance partner,” Klim explained. “There are a lot more men in Shanghai than women, and all the bachelors hang around the restaurants. They don’t have their own girlfriends, so they dance with taxi-girls. There’s no prostitution involved.”

Klim stood up and undid his jacket and took off his scarf.

“Come on. Let’s show off your talents.”

Trembling, Ada placed her blanket and books on the sofa and approached Klim.

“If Martha gives you an offer, take it,” he whispered in Russian. “It’s a difficult job, but this way you might earn a living.”

Martha wound up the gramophone, and the strangled melody of a tango poured from its flaring horn. Klim pulled Ada to him by the waist, and again she experienced that novel flush of sensation caused by the close proximity of an adult male. His breath was too hot, his eyes were too ardent; it was as if in a split second Klim had fallen in love with her.

She readily anticipated his every move. If there was one thing you could say about Ada Marshall, it was that she loved to dance.

“Oh, my girl! Bravo, bravo!” Martha said, clapping her hands. “She’s very good indeed.”

“Then get her something to wear,” said Klim, releasing Ada from his embrace. “She must have grown out of this dress three years ago.”

“I’ll find something for her,” Martha replied and ran into the next room.

Panting with excitement, Ada sat down on the edge of the sofa. She didn’t dare look Klim in the face. What had happened between the two of them? While they had been dancing, he had been so gentle with her.

Ada looked at him out of the corner of her eye. It was strange: now, there wasn’t even a hint of the passion he had shown on the dance floor. His face betrayed nothing but indifference and fatigue.

Martha returned with two dresses on hangers. “I won’t let you try them on—you clearly haven’t had a bath for ages. I’ll just hold the dress up to you.”

Ada obeyed, silently.

“So, this one will be alright and this one will do, too,” Martha said. “Do you have shoes? Show me your foot.”

She gave Ada a pair of expensive, but slightly worn shoes and announced that she would give her a dollar and a half a day and deduct the cost of the dresses and the shoes from Ada’s salary.

“I’ll skin you alive if the girl runs away with the dresses,” Martha warned Klim.

“Where’s she going to run?” he replied glumly. “Back to the Bolsheviks?”

“You brought her here so you’re responsible for her. Where are you staying?”

“We haven’t got anywhere yet.”

“Ask Chen—he rents rooms and speaks English.” Martha scribbled Chen’s address on a piece of paper. “Now go—I need to get my beauty sleep. Make sure that the girl is at the Havana at seven tonight.”

Klim gallantly kissed Martha’s hand and headed towards the stairs. Ada followed him, with a sigh. No oranges today, she thought.

As Ada was about to go, Martha grabbed her by the shoulder. “If you’re a virgin, I beg you, don’t sleep with anyone without letting me know first,” she whispered, giving Klim a meaningful look. “I could get you the sort of client that you could only dream of.”

After a long search, Klim and Ada found a three-story building, a bizarre U-shaped hodgepodge of classical European architecture and Chinese poverty. The last time its walls had seen whitewash must have been well into the last century, and its latticed gate was bent, as if it had been hit by a truck. Above it, a plaque read in Chinese and in English: “The House of Hope and a Burgeoning Career.”

“Well, with a name like that, we can’t go wrong here,” Klim chuckled.

Ada followed him into the inner courtyard, a grim enclosure of gray walls and windows, each adorned with caged pet birds. The rectangle of sky overhead was cross-stitched with bamboo poles festooned with washing. In the center of the yard under a ragged straw canopy stood a stove. A dark-skinned woman in a quilted vest over her long shirts was busy cooking.

Klim asked her something, and she made an incomprehensible din, pointing at a grand but dilapidated old entrance with a door knocker in the form of a lion’s head.

“Wait for me here,” he told Ada and went off to negotiate with the landlord.

Please God, help us find a room! Ada prayed silently. To get a job and a place to live in one day would be incredible luck. I wonder where Klim met Martha? she thought. Surely, he wasn’t using her services when he used to live here?

A sudden recollection of their tango sent shivers down Ada’s back. What would she do if Klim were to make advances towards her? The very idea made her blush, and she hugged herself, as if in self-defense. Oh, what a horrible thought! But on the other hand, maybe it might be quite nice to drive a grown man crazy with passion for you.

Klim emerged from Chen’s apartment. “It looks like we’ve agreed on a price: we pay ten dollars a month and get a room and boiling water in the dorm kitchen. I’ve told the landlord that you are my concubine; otherwise he wouldn’t let us stay together. The Chinese are very strict when it comes to moral standards.”

Now even Ada’s ears were flushing with embarrassment.

Klim laughed. “Don’t worry, no one’s going to check.”

Chen, a stooping Chinese man with a long thin pigtail, led them upstairs on squeaking wooden steps.

He didn’t stop at the third-floor but took them even higher.

“We’re in the pigeon-loft,” Klim said to Ada.

“Please, please,” Chen repeated as he pointed to a low cracked door.

Behind it was an unheated cubbyhole that smelled of damp wood and was only a tad bigger than a train compartment. A stove fashioned out of a metal barrel and labeled Kerosene stood in one corner, and a bunk bed, made out of boards and bamboo poles, was positioned by the wall.

“Where’s the lavatory here?” Ada asked.

“Chinese houses don’t have sewage systems,” Klim explained. “Everybody uses night pots with lids. Early in the morning, they put them outside, and the night-soil man collects them and then returns them clean.”

“So there’s no bathroom at all? How are we supposed to wash ourselves?”

“You can lug water up here, heat it up, and wash yourself. Or you can go to the river. But I wouldn’t recommend it: it’s full of cholera.”

“Are you going to bring water up here?”

“I’m going to use the public bathhouse.”

While Ada was spreading her blanket on the top bunk and arranging her books along the wall, Klim procured some wood chips to heat the samovar and, taking several cents from Ada, went to get some food. He came back with a packet of boiled rice and six little sticks beaded with something brown.

“What is it?” Ada asked suspiciously, remembering Klim’s tales of Chinese fertilizer.

“These are frogs’ brains. They’re a real local delicacy,” said Klim, laughing at Ada’s look of horror. “Just kidding. I’ve got no idea what it is.”

The Chinese food was too greasy and not salty enough, but Ada ate all of it ravenously.

“Mr. Chen swore to me there are no bedbugs here, and that’s the most important thing,” Klim said as he shook the remnants of the rice into his palm. “The first time I came to Shanghai, I ended up renting a bedbug colony. It got so bad that in the middle of the night I sought shelter in the landlord’s shed and ended up falling asleep on what I thought was a trunk or a chest. In the morning, I was woken by the landlord screaming his head off at me, ‘You dirty blasphemer! How dare you sleep on my grandmother’s coffin!’”

Ada smiled. Today had really been her lucky day: she had found someone who could protect her, got a job in a restaurant attached to a brothel, had to pretend that she was someone’s concubine, and to top it all, she had eaten frog’s brains. If only her school friends in Izhevsk could see her now!

Once it had got dark, Klim escorted Ada back to Martha’s.

There wasn’t a single light in the back lanes and alleys, but the main shopping streets of Shanghai shone with huge electric signs and billboards.

“It’s so beautiful!” Ada whispered, looking around.

Klim was surprised, too. He didn’t remember the city being like this the last time he was here. Everything had changed—national flags, automobiles, fashion, and signs. Martha had told him the tea company that he used to work at no longer existed; it had been replaced by a riding accessories store. The little red-tiled house where Klim used to rent a room was also long gone.

He would have to start all over again.

Dressed in her new clothes, Ada felt like Cinderella going to the ball. She was terrified and exhilarated at the same time, keeping up a constant stream of nervous chatter.

A fifteen-year-old shouldn’t be working as a taxi-girl, Klim thought grimly. But there was no chance of her finding another job, and without money, Ada would be doomed to starve for a couple of days and then start walking the streets.

Reluctantly, Klim told Ada the rules of the Havana. “While the taxi-girls sit at the designated tables, their customers buy fifty-cent tickets at the box office and then choose a girl to dance with. If the client is very unpleasant, she is entitled to refuse him, but if she’s too picky, she’ll end up earning nothing. After a dance, you should ask your client to buy you some wine and snacks. You’ll get a commission from the proceeds.”

“What if I’m offered an alcoholic drink?” Ada asked.

“Try to make sure that he buys you a different bottle for yourself. The waiter will bring you weak apple cider, but will charge the client as if it were champagne. If the client insists on pouring you a drink from his bottle, be sure to only take small sips. Just try not to get drunk, otherwise you’ll never be able to dance through the night. If it all gets too much, and you can’t handle it any more, take your shoes off. It’s a sign you’re tired.”

“How do you know all this?” Ada asked, surprised.

“I used to have a friend who worked as a taxi-girl.”

“Where is she now?”

“Went up in the world: got married.”

Klim’s first love, a Chinese girl named Jie Jie, had come to Shanghai from Canton, a big city not far from Hong Kong. There, in the south, they didn’t bind girls’ feet, and Jie Jie had been free to dance. She had been so good that Martha had made an exception and offered her a job, even though the Havana was meant to be a strictly “whites only” establishment.

Klim had fallen in love at first sight. He would spend all his money on dances with Jie Jie and then walk her to her house in the morning. He would even get into fistfights with the sailors, if they ever dared to insult his “chinky” girlfriend.

When his employer, a chronic racist, had found out Klim wanted to marry an Asian, he had banded together with his friends to send the “black sheep” out of China. The Shanghai ex-pats perversely believed it was their duty to protect the purity of the supreme race, and they were prepared to do everything to prevent the very idea of interracial marriage.

Klim had been kidnapped and taken to the port, but the Russian steamer had already left, so they had thrown him on a ship to Buenos Aires instead. That was how Klim had found himself in Argentina. He had worked like a dog just to save enough money for a return ticket—first in a printing shop, then at a newspaper. He would write Jie Jie passionate letters every day, promising his sweetheart that he would soon return and take her to Russia. But one day he received a telegram from Martha saying that Jie Jie had left Shanghai with some rich merchant, becoming another adornment in his considerable harem. She had never learned that Klim had become one of the best journalists in Argentina and had even been well received by the president.

Klim had thought he would never forget her, but life had proved him wrong. He had met Nina, and it had started all over again—the glow in his eyes and the delightful mess in his head. But he had lost that woman as well, to the horror of the civil war and to typhus that had shaken her mental state.

At the Havana, Klim escorted a trembling Ada to the dressing room and then went down to the restaurant hall. It was already packed with tourists and sailors from the Great Powers. Two huge bouncers at the door made sure that no Asians or blacks, except servants, would be allowed onto the premises.

An orchestra was playing a foxtrot. Waiters in white jackets scurried around the tables. They were working for tips to buy their own dinners and bent over backwards to please their customers.

The Havana had changed too, Klim noticed. Now beer advertising illuminated with electric lights hung above the tables, where before there had been gas lamps. The brick walls were freshly plastered and painted with murals, and the stage had been remodeled. Only the smoky wine cabinets remained the same with their rows of assorted bottles, cloudy mirrors, and a gilded little god of luck sitting on the top shelf.

The taxi-girls emerged from the back rooms and ceremoniously sashayed to the tables. Ada was the last one to come out. The other girls had blackened her eyebrows, painted her lips with bright red lipstick, and dolled up her hair with a rose. Immediately, two British sailors rushed up to Ada with their tickets. Slightly taken aback, she squinted, searching for Klim. The manager efficiently sidled up to her and sorted out which of the two men should dance with her first.

The music started, and Ada disappeared into the merry crowd.

“Tell your girlfriend she’s welcome to our club,” Martha said, taking a seat next to Klim. “I’ve already got a lot of clients asking after her.”

“She’s just a kid—” Klim began, but Martha interrupted him.

“So what? I wasn’t even thirteen when I became a taxi-girl. Are you going to sit here guarding her all night?”

Klim nodded.

“Don’t worry, nothing will happen to her,” said Martha, laughing. “I’ve already told everyone that your little chick doesn’t work upstairs… for the time being.”

Dawn was breaking just over the horizon. Smoke was rising from the chimneys, and the roosters were crowing. The first hawkers, carrying churns and baskets on their yokes, hurried through the streets.

Ada held onto Klim’s arm, limping slowly. Her feet were blistered and bleeding from the new shoes that Martha had given her.

“Thank you for waiting for me,” she stammered in a drunken voice. “There was a time when I used to think, ‘What do I have to live for? What future do I have?’ But I’m not so scared when I’m with you. We’ll figure things out somehow, right?”

Back in their room at the House of Hope, Ada collapsed on to Klim’s bed and immediately fell asleep.

He remembered how he had danced with her yesterday, imagining that he was holding another woman in his arms. Thank God for the tango! When you dance, you can be anyone you want to be, and with anyone you want to imagine. When the music stops, reality returns, but it’s all worth it just for those few minutes of escape.

Klim covered Ada with her blanket and went over to the window, which offered a peculiar view of grand palaces on the left and a shanty town on the right. A dilapidated tower dominated the crossroads between the two. Covered in inscrutable hieroglyphs, it reminded him of the ancient stone signpost in the Russian folk tale that directs the hero on his journey towards happiness or doom.

It would be good, Klim thought, if someone could tell this traveling knight which road will lead him safely to his Swan Princess.

But what would be the point? Even if he were to meet Nina now, what could he possibly say to her? I love you? Apparently, this was not enough for her. Before the knight could dream about his Princess he needed to heal his wounds, polish his armor, and procure a decent steed.