White Gardenia Read Online Free PDF

remind you that you will always be my little girl.’
    I took the package from her and untied the knot, excited to see what was inside. It was a matroshka doll with the smiling face of my late grandmother.I turned to my mother, knowing that she had painted it. She laughed and urged me to open it and find the next doll. I unscrewed the doll’s torso and found that the second doll had dark hair and amber eyes. I smiled at my mother’s joke, and knew that the following doll would have strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes, but when I saw it also had a smatter of freckles across its funny face, I burst into giggles. I opened that doll to find a smaller one and looked up again at my mother. ‘Your daughter and my granddaughter,’ she said. ‘And with her smaller baby daughter inside her.’
    I screwed all the dolls back together and lined them up on the dressing table, contemplating our matriarchal journey and wishing that my mother and I could always be just as we were at that moment.
    Afterwards, in the kitchen, my mother placed an apple pirog before me. She was just about to cut the little pie when we heard the front door open. I glanced at the clock and knew it would be the General. He spent a long time in the entranceway before coming into the house. When he did finally enter the kitchen, he stumbled, his face a sickly colour. My mother asked if he was ill but he didn’t answer her and collapsed into a chair, resting his head in his folded arms. My mother stood up, horrified, and asked me to fetch some warm tea and bread. When I offered these to the General, he looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes.
    He glanced at my birthday pie and reached over to me, patting my head clumsily. I could smell the alcohol on his breath when he said, ‘You are my daughter.’ The General turned to my mother and with tears falling down his cheeks said to her, ‘You are my wife.’ Sitting back in the chair, he composedhimself, wiping his face with the back of his hand. My mother offered him the tea and he took a sip and a slice of bread. His face was contorted with pain, but after a while it relaxed and he sighed as if he had reached a decision. He rose from the table and, turning to my mother, gave a charade performance of her hitting him with the spade handle after discovering his secret hot tub. He laughed then, and my mother looked at him, astonished for a moment, before laughing herself.
    She asked him in slow Russian what he did before the war, had he always been a general. He looked confused for a moment, then pointed his finger to his nose and asked ‘Me?’ My mother nodded and repeated her question. He shook his head and closed the door behind him, muttering in Russian so well pronounced that he could have been one of us, ‘Before all this madness? I was an actor. In the theatre.’
    The next morning the General was gone. There was a note pinned to the kitchen door, written in precise Russian. My mother read it first, her frightened eyes scanning the words twice, then handed it to me. The General had instructed us to burn everything he had left in the garage and to burn the note after reading it. He said that he had placed our lives in great danger when his only wish had been to protect us. He told us that we must destroy every trace of him for our own sake.
    My mother and I ran to the Pomerantsevs’ house. Boris was chopping wood, but stopped when he saw us, wiping the sweat from his ruddy face and rushing us inside.
    Olga was by the stove, twisting her knitting in her hands. She jumped out of her chair when she saw us.‘Have you heard?’ she asked, white-faced and shaking. ‘The Soviets are coming. The Japanese have surrendered.’
    Her words seemed to shatter my mother. ‘The Soviets or the Americans?’ she asked, her voice rising in agitation.
    I could feel myself inwardly willing that it was the Americans who were coming to liberate us with their wide smiles and bright flags. But Olga shook her head. ‘The