White Gardenia ONE Harbin, China We Russians believe that if you knock a knife from the table to the floor, a male visitor will come, and if a bird flies into the room, the death of someone close to you is at hand. Both these events occurred in 1945, around my thirteenth birthday, but there had been no omens of dropped knives or stray birds to warn me. The General appeared on the tenth day after my father''s death. My mother and I were busy removing the black silk that had been draped over the mirrors and icons for the nine days of mourning. My memory of my mother on that day has never dimmed. Her ivory skin framed by wisps of dark hair, the pearl studs in her fleshy earlobes, and her fiery amber eyes piece together into a sharply focused photograph before me: my mother, a widow at thirty-three. I recall her thin fingers folding the dark material with a languidness that was not usual. But then we were both shell-shocked by loss.
When my father had set out on the morning of his doom, his eyes shining and his lips brushing my cheeks with parting kisses, I had no anticipation that my next view of him would be in a heavy oak coffin, his eyes closed and his waxen face remote in death. The lower part of the casket remained shut to hide the legs that had been mutilated in the twisted wreck of the car. The night my father''s body was laid out in the parlor, white candles on either side of the coffin, my mother bolted the garage doors shut and fastened them with a chain and padlock. I watched her from my bedroom window as she paced back and forth in front of the garage, her lips moving in a silent incantation. Every so often she would stop and push her hair back over her ears as if she were listening for something, but then she would shake her head and continue her pacing. The next morning I slipped out to look at the lock and chain. I understood what she had done. She had clasped shut the garage doors the way we would have clasped onto my father if we had known that to let him drive into the lashing rain would be to let him go forever.
* * * In the days following the accident our grief was diverted by a constant rotation of visits from our Russian and Chinese friends. They arrived and left hourly, by foot or by rickshaw, leaving their neighboring farms or city houses to fill our home with the aroma of roasted chicken and the murmur of condolences. Those from the land came laden with gifts of bread and cake or the field flowers that had survived Harbin''s early frosts, while those from the city brought ivory and silk, a polite way of giving us money, for without my father, my mother and I faced hard times ahead. Then there was the burial. The priest, craggy and knotted like an old tree, traced the sign of the cross in the chilly air before the casket was nailed shut. The thick-shouldered Russian men jabbed their spades into the dirt, dropping frozen clods of earth into the grave. They worked hard with set jaws and downcast eyes, sweat slipping from their faces, either out of respect for my father or to win the admiration of his beautiful widow. All the while our Chinese neighbors kept their respectful distance outside the cemetery gate, sympathetic but suspicious of our custom of burying our loved ones in the ground and abandoning them to the mercy of the elements.
Afterwards the funeral party returned to our home, a wooden house my father had built with his own hands after fleeing Russia and the Revolution. We sat down to a wake of semolina cakes and tea served from a samovar. The house had originally been a simple pitched-roof bungalow with stovepipes sticking out from the eaves, but when my father married my mother he built six more rooms and a second story and filled them with lacquered cupboards, antique chairs and tapestries. He carved ornate window frames, erected a fat chimney and painted the walls the buttercup yellow of the dead Tsar''s summer palace. Men like my father made Harbin what it was: a Chinese city full of displaced Russian nobility. People who attempted to re-create the world they had lost with ice sculptures and winter balls. When our guests had said all that could be said, I followed behind my mother to see them off at the door. While they were putting on their coats and hats I spotted my ice skates hanging on a peg in the front entrance.
The left blade was loose and I remembered that my father had intended to fix it before the winter. The numbness of the past few days gave way to a pain so sharp that it hurt my ribs and made my stomach churn. I squeezed my eyes shut against it. I saw a blue sky race towards me and a thin winter sun shining on ice. The memory of the year before came back to me. The solid Songhua River; the cheerful cries of the children struggling to stay upright on their skates; the young lovers gliding in pairs; the old people shuffling around in the center, peering for fish through the sections where the ice was thin. My father lifted me high on his shoulder, his blades scraping against the surface with the added weight. The sky became a blur of aqua and white.
I was dizzy with laughter. "Put me down, Papa," I said, grinning into his blue eyes. "I want to show you something." He set me down but didn''t let me go until he was sure that I had my balance. I watched for a clearing and skated out into it, lifting one leg off the ice and spinning like a marionette. "Harashó! Harashó!" My father clapped. He rubbed his gloved hand over his face and smiled so widely that his laugh lines seemed to come to life. My father was much older than my mother, having completed his university studies the year she was born.
He had been one of the youngest colonels in the White Army and somehow, many years later, his gestures had remained a mix of youthful enthusiasm and military precision. He held out his hands so I could skate to him, but I wanted to show off again. I pushed myself out farther and started to turn, but my blade hit a bump and my foot twisted under me. I smacked against the ice on my hip and knocked the wind out of my lungs. My father was at my side in an instant. He picked me up and skated with me in his arms to the riverbank. He set me down on a fallen tree trunk and ran his hands over my shoulders and ribs before slipping off the damaged boot. "No broken bones," he said, moving my foot between his palms.
The air was freezing and he rubbed my skin to warm it. I stared at the white streaks that mingled with the ginger hair on his crown and bit my lip. The tears in my eyes were not from the pain but from the humiliation of having made a fool of myself. My father''s thumb pressed against the swelling around my ankle and I flinched. Already the purple stain of a bruise was beginning to show. "Anya, you are a white gardenia," he smiled. "Beautiful and pure. But we need to handle you with care because you bruise so easily.
" I rested my head on his shoulder, almost laughing but crying at the same time. A tear splashed onto my wrist and dripped onto the tiles of the entranceway. I quickly wiped my face before my mother turned around. The guests were on their way out and we gave them one more wave and "Da svidaniya" before switching off the lights. My mother took one of the funeral candles from the parlor and we made our way up the stairs by its gentle glow. The flame trembled and I felt the quickness of my mother''s breath on my skin. But I was afraid to look at her and see her suffering. I couldn''t bear her grief any better than I could my own.
I kissed her goodnight at her door and scurried up the stairs to my room in the loft, falling straight into bed and covering my face with a pillow so she wouldn''t hear me sobbing. The man who had called me a white gardenia, who had lifted me on his shoulders, and twirled me until I was dizzy with laughter, would not be there anymore. Once the official mourning period was over everyone seemed to dissolve back into their daily lives. My mother and I were abandoned, left to learn to live again. After we had folded the cloths and stacked them in the linen press, my mother said that we should carry the flowers down to my father''s favorite cherry tree. While she was helping me with the laces of my boots we heard our dogs, Sasha and Gogle, barking. I rushed to the window, anticipating another round of mourners, but instead I saw two Japanese soldiers waiting at the gate. One was middle-aged with a sabre in his belt and the long boots of a general.
His square face was dignified and carved by deep wrinkles, but amusement twitched in the corners of his mouth when he eyed the two huskies leaping at the fence. The younger soldier stood motionless beside him, a clay doll illuminated only by the flicker of his narrow eyes. The color leached completely from my mother''s face when I told her the Japanese army was waiting at the gate. From a crack in the front door I watched my mother speak with the men, first trying slow Russian and then Chinese. The younger soldier appeared to grasp the Chinese comfortably, while the General cast his gaze about the yard and house, and only paid attention when his aide translated my mother''s answers for him. They were requesting something, bowing at the end of each sentence. This courtesy, not usually extended to the foreigners living in China, seemed to make my mother even uneasier. She was shaking her head, but giving her fear away in the flushed skin around her collar and in her trembling fingers which t.