White Gardenia Read Online Free PDF Page A

that day; Olga wanted to buy some spices and Boris was going to get his hair cut again. Harbin was the place of my birth, and although many Chinese said that we Russians never belonged nor had any right to it, I felt that it somehow belonged to me. When we entered the city, I saw all that was familiar and home to me in the onion-domed churches, the pastel-coloured buildings and the elaborate colonnades. Like me, my mother was born in Harbin. She was the daughter of an engineer who had lost his job on the railways after the Revolution. It was my noble father who had somehow connected us to Russia and made us see ourselves in the architecture of the Tsars.
    Boris and Olga dropped us off in the old quarter. It was unusually hot and humid that day, so my mother suggested we try the city’s speciality, vanillabean ice-cream. Our favourite café was bustling with people and much livelier than we had seen it in years. Everyone was talking about the rumours that the Japanese were about to surrender. My mother and I took a table near the window. A woman at the next table was telling her older companion that she had heard the Americans bombing the previous night, and that a Japanese official had been murdered in her district. Her companion nodded solemnly, running his hand through his grey beard and commenting, ‘The Chinese would never dare do that if they didn’t feel that they were winning.’
    After my ice-cream, my mother and I took a walk around the quarter, noticing which shops were new and remembering the shops that had disappeared. A peddler of porcelain dolls tried to entice me with her wares, but my mother smiled at me and said, ‘Don’t worry, I have something for you at home.’
    I spotted the red and white pole of a barber’s shop with a sign in Chinese and Russian. ‘Look, Mama!’ I said. ‘That must be Boris’s barber.’ I rushed to the window to peek inside. Boris was in the chair, his face covered in shaving foam. A few other customers were waiting, smoking and laughing like men with nothing much to do. Boris saw me in the mirror and turned and waved. The bald-headed barber, in an embroidered jacket, also looked up. He had a Confucian moustache and goatee and wore glasses with thick frames, the kind popular among Chinese men. But when he saw my face pressed against the window, he quickly turned his back to me.
    ‘Come on, Anya,’ my mother laughed, pulling my arm. ‘Boris will get a bad haircut if you distract the barber. He might cut off his ear, and then Olga will be annoyed with you.’
    I followed my mother obediently, but as we neared the corner I turned one more time towards the barber’s shop. I couldn’t see the barber through the shine on the glass, but I realised that I knew those eyes: they had been round and bulging and familiar to me.
    When we returned home my mother sat me before her dressing table and reverently undid my girlish plaits and swept my hair into an elegant chignon like hers, with the hair parted at the side and bunched at the nape of the neck. She dabbed perfume behind my ears, then showed me a velvet box on her dresser. When she opened it I saw inside the gold and jade necklace my father had given her as a wedding present. She picked it up and kissed it, before placing it around my throat and fastening the clip.
    ‘Mama!’ I protested, knowing how much the necklace meant to her.
    She pursed her lips. ‘I want to give it to you now, Anya, because you are becoming a young woman. Your father would have been pleased to see you wear it on special occasions.’
    I touched the necklace with trembling fingers. Although I missed seeing my father and talking with him, I felt that he was never far away. The jade seemed warm against my skin, not cold.
    ‘He’s with us, Mama,’ I said. ‘I know it.’
    She nodded and sniffed back a tear. ‘I have something else for you, Anya,’ she said, opening the drawer near my knee and taking out a package wrapped in cloth. ‘Something to