White Ghosts

31. PEKING

On her journey to the capital, Nina tried to escape twice. After the second attempt, the chief of the guards made her spend the night standing on the platform of the railroad car with her arms tied to the handrail. She tried to persuade the teenage soldier who was guarding her to let her go, but he pretended not to understand English and entertained himself all night by lifting Nina’s skirt with the tip of his bayonet.

In the morning, she reported her tormentor to his superior officer, but he merely replied that this was her last warning.

“Next time you try to escape,” he added, “I’ll tell my boys to punish you as they see fit.”

These men could rape or even kill Nina with impunity. Shooting someone “while they were trying to escape” was an easy matter.

But the worst part was that Nina couldn’t see help coming from any quarter.

“Do you think your husband will try to save us?” she had asked Fanya when the guard brought her back into the compartment the two of them were sharing. “I’m sure the Dogmeat General will have informed your Mikhail that you’ve been captured.”

Fanya shook her head. “Those bourgeois generals believe they can blackmail my husband into betraying the revolution for me. They have no idea there are more important things in this world than a single individual’s devotion to his wife.”

Nina felt utterly helpless, and it was something she found very difficult to accept. She didn’t have a single foothold to cling to; she couldn’t expect any justice or any respect, and her fate would be decided by an obtuse little sadist taking pleasure in her humiliation.

Nina was so crushed that she spent the rest of the journey to Peking in the corner of the compartment, her knees pulled up to her chest.

The train pulled into the station, and the prisoners were put into covered palanquins dragged by two horses, one in front and the other behind it. Guards with carbines were lined up on either side, and the convoy set off along the bumpy unpaved street. The palanquin rocked from side to side, and Nina held on to her seat for dear life.

Finally, the horses stopped, and the guards ordered the prisoners to get out.

“We will never surrender,” Fanya told Nina when the warden separated and ordered them off into different directions. “Long live socialism!”

Nina was placed in solitary confinement, in a cell furnished with nothing but a bucket, a mug, and a rough bunk bed with two unclean blankets.

Her warden was an old crone with rotten teeth and unfeasibly long nails on her gnarled broken hands. She spoke some English: “Search, search…”

Nina set about undressing, but the warden made it clear that only she was allowed to take the prisoner’s clothes off. When the cold claws started moving over her body, Nina could only close her eyes and repeat to herself, This will all soon pass, it’ll pass.

Two younger female wardens checked through Nina’s clothes and shredded all the buttons, which were wrapped in fabric, off her jacket. They left Nina her skirt, shirt, and shoes—everything else was taken away, including her underwear.

Nina got dressed and spent a long time sitting on her bunk, her hands clasped over her knees. She was sure that the wardens were standing outside the door, pushing each other like rats at the feeder, trying to sneak a curious peek through the peephole. “How’s she coping? Is she afraid? Is she crying?”

That night Nina was interrogated. Three men sat in a smoky room; the area where the prisoner was meant to stand was clearly outlined on the floor.

“Stand in the center of this square,” said a tall stooped translator. He looked like a heron waiting for a chance to catch something in the shallows.

An elderly investigator in a military uniform asked questions, and a scribe quickly drew columns of Chinese characters on the paper in front of him.

“What is your relationship to Mikhail Borodin?”

Nina looked at them from under her knit brows. “Look, this is a mistake. I don’t know Borodin. I met Fanya on the boat. I lied that I was her cousin because I was hoping for leniency.”

Nina demanded that they invite someone from the American Embassy and send telegrams to Klim and Tony Aulman in Shanghai.

The translator mumbled something, the investigator nodded, but the scribe put his brush aside and didn’t even bother to write down Nina’s words.

“Don’t you believe me?” she asked, taking a step back.

Immediately a guard grabbed her arm roughly and pushed her back into the center of the square.

The investigator sighed. “Let’s start from the beginning. What’s your relationship with Mikhail Borodin and what was the purpose of your visit to China?”

He asked questions and proceeded to dictate the answers himself: Nina Kupina was a Soviet spy, she had been smuggling military equipment into the country and harboring an even more dangerous criminal, Fanya Borodin.

“What are you talking about?” Nina moaned. “What kind of military equipment?”

The investigator gesticulated towards a crumpled piece of paper, covered in writing in indelible pencil. “According to the search protocol, you were transporting an Avro 504 military airplane to Wuhan.”

“That’s not true!”

“Don’t bother denying it. The evidence is in right in front of you.”

The scribe scrawled endless tiny cobwebs of Chinese characters across the case notes with his spidery hand. Nina realized she was doomed.

Nina was allowed out once a day in the exercise yard, which was surrounded by white-washed stone walls. She was always alone and was forbidden to associate with any of the other prisoners.

On the second floor, there were narrow barred windows, and Nina could hear people talking and coughing, and occasionally a baby crying. But who the women in these cells were remained a mystery to her. She couldn’t see their faces from the yard.

Nina discovered a little plant next to the wall that had tenaciously gained a foothold between the stone slabs. She brought water into the yard and began to water its withered stalk. Within a few days, it begun to sprout bright green leaves. But as soon as she was spotted, the warden guarding Nina marched over and stomped it into the ground. Nina felt so sorry for it, as though a small bird had been trampled instead.

During the day she was exhausted by the heat and the constant anxiety. What was going to happen next? Would there be a trial? Would she be imprisoned? And if so, how long would her sentence be?

During the night she was tormented by bedbugs, screeching iron doors, and the other prisoners’ distant cries.

In the early mornings before sunrise, Nina would get up, walk to the window, and observe the pitched roof covered with black tiles. The city’s roofs stretched away like giant scaly fish on their way to their spawning grounds.

The sky turned pink, the smoke began to rise from the chimneys, and the trees were transformed from dark gray to bright green. The birds performed a cheerful if chaotic chorus, and finally the rich, low sound of the signal bell swept over the city.

One day Nina watched an oncoming yellow cloud rapidly fill the morning sky. A minute later the window quivered as it was hit by a strong wind, and the room became as dark as night. A dust storm had rolled into Peking from the Gobi Desert.

The prisoners spent the next few days inside their cells. Nina could barely see the ridges of the roofs in the brown haze that had descended outside her window, and the prison was filled with an eerie silence. Sometimes Nina was under the impression that everyone had died and she was the only survivor.

She had tried to avoid painful thoughts about Klim, but the dust clouds that swept past her window reminded her of the smoke from the fires during the Russian civil war. How had she and Klim managed to survive that nightmare only to destroy their lives once the worst had passed?

Nina was surprised to realize that despite everything, nearly all her best memories were associated with Klim.

One day she had casually mentioned that she was keen to read a book by an Italian opera singer called Lina Cavalieri. Nina hadn’t even asked Klim to buy it, but a few weeks later she found the book on her dressing table.

Gifts like these meant much more to her than diamonds and furs. Klim remembered what Nina was interested in and had tried to make her happy, even though he personally could see no value in Mme. Cavalieri’s writing.

Klim used to write little notes for Nina: “You are beautiful” next to the mirror in the lobby, “Look on the top shelf” in the pantry, where a bar of her favorite marzipan candy awaited her.

She remembered Klim lying in their bed and herself leaning over him to kiss him. He had pulled a white feather out of the pillow and blown it. It had floated through the collar of her blouse, out the other side and landed on his stomach. It had been silly but it had made them laugh at the time. Did he remember that?

Finally one night a storm broke over Peking. In the morning the roof tiles were shining like new, and a big tree behind the prison fence was in full blossom.

From that time on, Nina would admire it every morning and savor the memories of her precious but ill-starred love: that time when they had danced the tango and Klim had sung the words of the music to her in Spanish, that time when they had imagined what they would look like in their old age—a slim and sprightly couple at the head of a sparkling and talented family.

Initially, Nina thought she would soon run out of these kinds of reminiscences, but to her surprise, she had an amazing store of memories available to her from her ten years of married life with Klim.

Nina tried to recall similar memories of her time with Daniel. There had been a lot of witty talk, sarcastic remarks, excitement and emotions, but nothing that could compare with the kinship, freedom, and absolute trust that she had shared with Klim.

Like it or not, he had been the only man she had ever truly loved, even though they had experienced the most terrible and shameful ups and downs.