White Ghosts

27. GOOD-BYE, SHANGHAI!

Klim watched Nina as she packed her suitcase.

“Where are you going?”

“To Wuhan.”

Nina slammed her suitcase shut and tightened the fasteners.

“Take my luggage to the car,” she told the servant.

“May I ask why you’re leaving?” Klim asked.

“Because I can’t live with a man who doesn’t love me.”

“I assume that you have someone in Wuhan who is in love with you? Is his name Daniel Bernard by any chance?”

Nina left the room without even saying good-bye.

She went into the hallway and froze, listening. There was no hope for them. It hadn’t even occurred to Klim to stop her.

As her car roared down the street, Nina stared indifferently at the bank of low-hanging clouds and the flags barely trembling in the wind.

“To Avenue Joffre,” she commanded her driver.

For several years the citizens of the Great Powers had been looking down their noses at the Russian community in this backwater in the French Concession. The penniless refugees had disturbed the established way of life and shattered the myth of the superiority of the white race.

Now even Mr. Sterling had to acknowledge a basic unpalatable fact: It was not their race or knowledge but their circumstances that had given the whites their all-powerful reputation in China. A ticket on a steamer to the Far East was an expensive item and not an option for the poor of Europe or America. However, as soon as a big, randomly-formed group of white people had arrived in Shanghai, it became clear that there was nothing particular “superior” about being white. The differences between white and Chinese society weren’t as great as everyone liked to pretend. White society was also divided into the educated and the illiterate, the simple-minded and the intelligent, those who contributed and those who didn’t.

The outcome was visible here, in Avenue Joffre. Some of its inhabitants had vanished without a trace, but its libraries, schools, theaters, and shops were proof that the rest of the Russian refugees were a breed of survivors who had managed to rebuild their lives from the ashes.

What had Shanghai taught Nina? That fears are illusory and exist largely in your head. There was a time when the very idea of emigration would have chilled her heart, but in December 1922, she had taken a step towards the unknown and had succeeded. Now she was confident she would do the same.

Don’t lose heart, Nina repeated to herself, but as the funnel of the Pamyat Lenina hove into view, her heart sank. Armored steel panels had been riveted along the sides of the boat, and she could make out the shape of machine guns hidden under their canvas covers on the stern.

There was a war on, but it was too late to turn back now, and Nina stepped decisively onto the gangplank.

When she reached the upper deck, she saw Don Fernando, puffing on a cigar.

“What are you doing here?” he asked in surprise. “Does your husband know where you’re going?”

Nina nodded reluctantly. She felt a pang of shame that Don Fernando should witness her affair with Daniel. However, maybe it was all for the best. Let him give Klim a blow-by-blow account. It was all he deserved.

Time passed, but there was still no sign of Daniel. Nina walked along the deck of the boat, looking askance at the Russian-speaking crewmen. It was incomprehensible: a couple of weeks ago, they had been in Soviet Russia, a completely different, parallel world.

Nina couldn’t stand it any longer. “Do you know where Mr. Bernard is?” she asked Fernando. “He should be on this boat.”

The Don looked at her in a strange way. “Oh… Mr. Bernard has already left.”

“What? Where to?”

“To Wuhan. He… He’s got some business there.”

Nina looked at him, shocked. What was she to do? Go back home? That bastard Daniel had left her in the lurch again. She would be completely lost without him.

Rushing down the stairs, Nina caught her sleeve on the handrail and hit her elbow on a cast iron joist. The pain was so great that everything went dark for a moment.

There was a prolonged whistle, the anchor chain rattled, and the boat set sail.

Nina sat down on the step cupping her injured elbow in her hand. That was it; she was going to Wuhan. Her Shanghai adventure had begun with her being stranded on a boat with Don Fernando, and now history had repeated itself.

Nina tried to guess why Daniel hadn’t told her that he had left early. Was he waiting for her now? Or were all the promises he had made back in the cinema some sort of practical joke?

To calm herself down a little, Nina leafed through a newly-printed Russian book she had found in her cabin. It had been published using the new Soviet alphabet and Nina found it difficult to read. However, the author’s logic was even more baffling. The Bolsheviks regarded persecuting, robbing, and murdering the bourgeoisie as a justified means to their revolutionary ends. They seemed to believe that they would obliterate class barriers by destroying the exploiting classes and deciding who should live and who should die on the basis of their social origins.

Hasn’t anyone noticed, Nina thought, this ideology’s similarity to racism?

What kind of times did they live in when people around the world judged each other using such arbitrary categories as race or social origin instead of their personal merits?

She put the book aside, went to the window, and parted the curtains with the words “Glory to Labor!” printed on them. The steam engine was roaring, a muddy bow wave ran along the side of the boat. The river bank with its abandoned farmhouses was powdered with snow.

Is Klim worrying about me? Nina thought. Or was he just glad to see the back of me?

“Hey, Miss Nina!” Don Fernando banged on the wall. “Dinner is served. I ordered them to bring it to my cabin. Let’s eat together to stave off the boredom.”

Nina took her purse with her money and documents and went to visit the Don. One-Eye stepped aside, letting her through the narrow cabin door.

“Come in and make yourself comfortable,” Fernando told Nina.

She sat down at the table and immediately noticed an opium pipe next to her plate, its silver bowl intricately cast in the form of a demon’s head. This was all she needed.

“Why aren’t you eating with the other passengers in the dining lounge?” Nina asked nervously.

“Forget that,” Don Fernando snorted. “Do you know who’s sailing with us? Fanya Borodin, the harridan of a wife of Mikhail Borodin, Chiang Kai-shek’s political adviser from Moscow. She and the other Soviet diplomatic messengers are also on their way back to Wuhan.”

Fernando complained heatedly and at some length about Fanya, who had accused him of being a liar and a crook. “She’s a fine one to talk when it comes to the truth. She just told the Shanghai authorities that she was a civilian, but in fact she was on a mission to help the communists.”

Nina remembered Daniel telling her that it would be better to stay away from Shanghai.

“How do you know Mrs. Borodin?” she asked.

“I have a lot of acquaintances. I’m a useful man, you know.”

The Don showed Nina the pipe. “Do you want a smoke? You look terrible, all pale and miserable. Don’t worry, I won’t offer you any opium; you’d get hooked in no time. Try some hashish instead. Have your dinner, relax, and then we can retire to my bed for a bit of fun.”

Nina jumped up. “What the devil are you talking about?”

“Oh come on! You don’t need to play the innocent with me. We’re going to have to spend several days on this rust bucket before we reach Wuhan. Why not have a bit of fun before we get there? Klim doesn’t want you anymore—everyone knows that you’re not getting along with each other. And we don’t need to tell Daniel anything.”

Nina went cold at the thought that Fernando saw her merely as some cheap whore who was running away to her lover. In furious silence, she threw the napkin in Don’s face and stormed outside.

Once back in her cabin, she could hear the Don’s voice from the other side of the thin wall. “I can’t guarantee you’ll find Daniel in Wuhan, and I wouldn’t recommend wandering around the streets on your own. A defenseless young woman like you could easily find herself with a big bump on her head, and without her astrakhan coat, stockings, and knickers, assuming you’re wearing any of course.”

Evidently, Fernando had decided that if he couldn’t entice Nina into his bed, he would have fun harassing her with his dirty jokes and bawdy songs.

Nina decided to ask the captain if she could move to another cabin, away from Fernando, but as soon as she went out into the corridor, she stumbled across One-Eye.

“Follow me,” he said and pointed to Fernando’s door. “The master is waiting for you.”

Nina took a step back. How had she ever ended up on this steamer? She had already given up on the whole idea of going to Wuhan.

I’ll ask the captain to drop me ashore at the nearest village, she decided. Then I’ll hire a carriage and return to Shanghai.

One-Eye grabbed Nina by the arm, but she pulled herself away and ran down the corridor.

The light in the passenger lounge was on, and Nina could hear voices coming from behind the glass door. She entered the room and saw three men and a plump dark-haired woman sitting at the dinner table.

“Good evening,” Nina said in Russian, with a forced smile. “May I join you?”

“Sure you can,” the woman said. “Judging from your accent you’re from Moscow, aren’t you? My name is Fanya. What’s yours?”

Nina guessed that Mrs. Borodin had taken her for a Bolshevik. Who other than a Bolshevik would be sailing up the Yangtze towards Wuhan in a Soviet steamer?

“Is that character bothering you?” Fanya asked as she noticed Nina’s nervous glances at One-Eye’s silhouette behind the door.

“He’s been following me for some reason.”

Fanya got up from the table and headed to the door, her worn-out shoes shuffling over the parquet floor.

“Who sent you here to eavesdrop on our conversation?” she snapped in her broken English. “Get lost!”

To Nina’s surprise, One-Eye shrugged his shoulders and disappeared.

“I don’t know how to thank you—” Nina began, but her new acquaintance just waved her hand.

“You need to play hard with types like him.”

“If he keeps pestering you, tell us, and we’ll sort him out,” promised one of the diplomatic messengers, a strong young man with a luxuriant blond mustache.

The men tried to be as gallant with Nina as possible and treated her to cookies and candy with a portrait of—Felix Dzerzhinsky, of all people!—the head of the secret police.

“Why don’t you just leave the poor woman alone?” Fanya exclaimed, laughing at her comrades’ clumsy attempts to win Nina’s favor.

Gradually Nina calmed down. The irony of it all: her enemies, the Bolsheviks whom she had feared more than anyone else, had taken her under their wing.

She stayed with them until the early hours of the morning. They sang songs, told stories, and then played cards.

Finally, Fanya rose from the table and yawned. “It’s already dawn—let’s get some sleep.”

At that moment an artillery shell whooshed overhead, and the entire company fell silent.

Felix sat on a log, smoking a cigarette, watching the scarlet sunrise over the Yangtze, while Chinese artillerymen tried to figure out how to take their guns across the river.

Things were really bad in the Dogmeat General’s army. Russian and Chinese officers were constantly at one another’s throats, many of them had taken to the bottle, and confusion in the rear was common place. Supply officers would only buy food from profiteers who paid them bribes, and half of the army was suffering from disease and illness. Medical care was almost non-existent, and Dogmeat’s soldiers were so hungry that they were no longer as interested in attacking the enemy’s position as they were in their logistical supply lines.

Father Seraphim approached, wearing a padded coat decorated with a Red Cross armband. His beard was completely wild and his eyes were red and bleary.

“Are they gonna give us our money or not?” he asked Felix. “They owe us five months pay and that’s no laughing matter.”

“Dogmeat probably thinks he’s better off keeping us as cannon fodder, and then fodder for his army when the supplies finally run out. He’s got no plans to pay us and let us go,” Felix muttered.

Sadly, it was true: they had nowhere to go and no other choice but to fight to survive one day at a time. They knew that if they were taken prisoner, they would be horribly tortured before being executed.

Felix looked up and noticed a small steamer sailing round the bend of the river.

“Do you see that red flag on her stern?” a Chinese officer shouted as he ran past. “It’s a Soviet ship! We must stop it. It’s bound to be delivering food to Wuhan.”

The Chinese discharged a warning shot across its bows, and the steamer anchored in the middle of the river.

As a Russian speaker, Felix volunteered to head the inspection on board, and along with other soldiers, he jumped in the rowing boat and rowed to the Soviet steamer.

Having ascended its rope ladder, he ordered the captain to hand him all his consignment notes. According to the ship’s papers, the Pamyat Lenina was sailing to Wuhan to pick up a cargo of tea and was only carrying spare parts for a power plant in its hold.

“Tea?” Felix shouted angrily. “They’re reduced to eating dogs and cats in Wuhan and you’re planning to ship a cargo of tea!” He turned to his soldiers. “Search the steamer. Put the crew under arrest and bring all the passengers into the lounge.”

The soldiers’ impatient knocks shook the Don’s cabin door to its timbers.

“Open up!” someone with a Russian accent shouted.

Fernando hadn’t expected Dogmeat’s soldiers to stop the Pamyat Lenina. There was a trade agreement between the Peking government and Moscow which allowed Soviet ships to freely navigate all Chinese rivers, despite the war.

The Don rushed around his cabin. If Dogmeat’s men were to find out about the Avro, it would be curtains for him.

There was a heavy blow, and the door flew off its hinges. A tall, hook-nosed young man with a revolver in his hand burst into the cabin, followed by a number of Chinese soldiers behind him.

Fernando hurriedly handed him his passport. “I’m a citizen of Mexico. I’m a neutral here.”

The man looked through the Don’s documents and grinned.

“Jose Fernando Burbano? Nice to see you.”

The Don turned yellow. “How do you know me?”

“I used to be a policeman in the International Settlement. Your name regularly featured in our reports.”

Fernando put his hand to his heart. “It’s all lies and slander! I am an honest businessman. I have a radio station in Shanghai—”

But the young man wasn’t having any of it.

“What are you doing on a Soviet boat?” he barked.

“I’m on a secret mission, under Mr. Sterling’s orders. I have been told to negotiate the evacuation of foreign refugees from Wuhan—with Mikhail Borodin. By the way, did you know that his wife is here?”

“What are you talking about?” the man said, frowning. “We have reviewed the lists of passengers—”

“She is traveling with forged documents.”

The man grabbed Fernando by the shoulder and dragged him to the lounge, where the other passengers were sitting, terrified.

“Stay here,” the man ordered and left.

The Don leaned against the wall, casting glances at the white-faced Bolsheviks. Nina was there too. She was sitting on the couch, shaking like a leaf.

Now Fernando could hear the sound of iron hitting iron as the soldiers started searching the hold.

They’re bound to find the airplane, Fernando thought, his heart skipping a bit.

A Chinese officer entered the lounge. “Which of you is Madame Borodin?” he asked the women.

Nina looked at Fanya, but she said nothing.

“No point denying it,” Don Fernando whispered. “This way at least you become a bargaining chip. If the Chinese think you’re small fry, they’ll just throw you overboard to feed the fish.”

Fanya stepped forward. “I am Mrs. Borodin. Why?”

The officer looked at Nina. “And who is she?”

“She’s my cousin. I warn you, sir: touch one hair of our heads, and you’ll be in serious trouble.”

“Do you confirm what this lady says?” the officer asked Nina.

“Yes,” she replied hesitantly.

The hook-nosed young man came back into the lounge and, without a word, dragged Fernando out into the corridor.

“Who owns the airplane in the hold?” he hissed, grabbing the Don by his lapels.

“I… I don’t know.”

“Liar! The crewmen told me that you were in charge of it.”

The man shoved a docket under the Don’s nose.

“It says that the Avro belongs to Ms. Ada Marshall. I know that girl: she doesn’t have enough money to buy a pair of decent stockings, let alone an airplane.”

In a panic, Fernando looked back at the glassed door. Behind it, he could see Nina, hunched on the settee.

“It’s all her fault,” he whispered. “If you served in the police, you would know that Ms. Kupina has been engaged in arms smuggling before. I guess she used your friend as a front and put her name on the papers. Ms. Kupina is in cahoots with the crew and told them to blame it all on me if an emergency arose.”

“Are you talking about Klim Rogov’s wife?”

That was a bad idea, Fernando thought. It seems that all these Russians know one another.

“Klim kicked the whore out long ago,” Fernando said in a muffled voice. “She cheated on him with Daniel Bernard. He was arrested a week ago for espionage, but she managed to escape. By the way, did you know that Ms. Kupina is Mrs. Borodin’s relative? She just admitted it as much. Didn’t she?”

The man swore in Russian. “How do you know all this?”

“Oh, I know a lot. I’m a very useful person.” The Don forced himself to smile. “You can send a cable to the Municipal Council and ask Mr. Sterling whether he gave me the order to go to Wuhan or not.”

“You can depend on that,” the man muttered, releasing the Don’s lapel. “If you’re lying, I’ll personally stove your head in with a rifle butt, but if Sterling confirms who you are, you can go wherever you want.”

He paused, and his face softened a little.

“Thanks for the information about Borodin and her cousin. Without you, we would never have guessed who they were.”

“My pleasure.” Don Fernando looked into his eyes. “Can I give you a bit of advice? If you don’t want that young friend of yours involved in the case, you’d better destroy all the Avro papers and present your report saying that ‘The airplane was confiscated from an enemy spy, Nina Kupina.’”

The man nodded and escorted the Don back to the lounge.

Fernando felt weak from relief. He wished he could kneel down and thank the Holy Virgin for his miraculous salvation there and then.

Miss Nina has only got herself to blame, he thought, looking up at the ceiling. She shouldn’t have annoyed me. I feel sorry for her, of course, but what am I to do? I’ll say a prayer of penance for her and donate some money to the church for a new sacristy. But holy Mother of God, please, don’t desert me! I need you now more than ever!”