White Gardenia (27 page)

The morning light flickered over the flaking paint on the floorboards. A rooster greeted the day with a cry. From somewhere nearby a horse snorted and sheep were bleating. I rubbed my eyes and sat up. Irina’s eyes were squeezed shut, as if she was resisting the idea of waking up. Everyone else was fast asleep too and the air in the hut was stale and hot. There was a gap between two of the planks in the wall next to my bed and I could see golden light sparkling off the tin roofs and fences. A truck was parked outside and a dusty sheepdog crouched under it. The dog pricked up his ears when he spotted me spying on him. He wagged his tail and yelped. I quickly lay down, not wanting his bark to wake the others.

As the light increased, the other women began to stir, kicking their bedsheets aside like caterpillars emerging from cocoons. I said good morning to Elsa but she averted her eyes, gathered a brunch coat and towel and scurried out the door. The other women, who looked to be in their twenties and thirties, blinked at me, wondering when Irina and I had
appeared. I said hello and tried to introduce myself. A few of them smiled back and one girl, whose English was not as fluent as mine, commented that it was awkward that we didn’t have a common language between us.

Irina pushed herself up onto her pillow and combed her hair with her fingers. She had flakes of sleep in her eyelashes and her lips looked dry.

‘How are you?’ I asked her.

‘Not good,’ she said, swallowing hard. ‘I’ll stay in bed.’

‘I’ll bring you some food. You must eat something.’

Irina shook her head. ‘Just water, please. Don’t bring back any of that soup.’

‘How about beef stroganoff with vodka, then?’

Irina grinned and lay back down, covering her eyes with her arm. ‘Go and discover Australia, Anya Kozlova,’ she said. ‘And tell me all about it when you get back.’

I didn’t have a robe or brunch coat. Not even a towel. But I couldn’t stand the musky smell of my hair and skin any longer. I took the cleanest-looking blanket from the ones we had been issued and a bar of soap I had brought from Tubabao. I held them up to the girl who could speak some English, hoping she would understand what I wanted. She pointed to a map on the back of the door. The ablutions block was marked with a red X. I thanked her and picked out the last fresh dress from my suitcase before heading out into the sunshine.

The barracks in our area were almost identical. Here and there people had taken time to put curtains up or create flowerbeds with pieces of rock, but there was none of the pride and solidarity of
Tubabao. But then we had all been Russians. I had only been in Australia a day and already I had seen racial tensions. I wondered why they didn’t organise all the migrants and refugees into our national groups, it would have been easier for us to communicate and for them to administer, but then I recalled the phrase they used on our identity cards—‘New Australians’—and I remembered that they wanted us to assimilate. I thought about the term ‘New Australian’ and decided I liked it. I wanted to be new again.

My jovial mood left me when I stepped into the toilet block. I would have put my foot straight into an overflowing pan if the stench hadn’t stopped me first. I clasped the blanket to my nose and looked around the hut in horror. There were no doors on the cubicles, just leaking pans set low on the ground with blowflies buzzing around them. The seats were caked with excreta and dirty paper was clumped on the wet floor. There had been two chain toilets in the dining hall but that would not be sufficient for the whole camp. ‘Do they think we are animals?’ I screamed, hurrying back out into the air.

I had never seen conditions so foul for white people, not even in Shanghai. After seeing Sydney I thought that Australia was going to be an advanced country. Surely the camp organisers knew about disease? We had eaten at the army base in Darwin, and I began to wonder if Irina had something worse than influenza, perhaps hepatitis or even cholera.

I heard voices from the shower block and glanced inside. It was clean but the shower stalls were nothing more than rusty tin sheets with gaps. Two women were showering with their children. I was so upset that I forgot all about privacy and tore off my
nightdress, huddled under the pathetic dribble of the shower rose and cried.

At breakfast my fears grew worse. We were served sausages, ham and eggs. Some people discovered maggots in their meat and one woman rushed out of the hall to be sick. I didn’t eat the meat, I only drank the acidic-tasting tea with three teaspoons of sugar and a piece of bread. A Polish group near me complained about the bread. They told one of the Australian kitchen hands that it was too doughy. He shrugged and told them that was how it was delivered. The Chinese bread I ate in Harbin was steamed and much more sticky, so I was used to it. I was more concerned about how clean the kitchen was and whether the cooks understood anything about hygiene. My hair hung in limp strands around my ears and my skin smelled like wool from the blanket. I couldn’t believe how far I had fallen. A year ago I had been a new bride with an elegant apartment, married to the manager of the most famous nightclub in Shanghai. Now I was a refugee. I felt the degradation of it more keenly than I had on Tubabao.

Irina had been asleep when I returned from my shower, and I was relieved that I didn’t have to face her until I had a chance to compose myself. I had promised myself that I would never complain to her about Australia. She would blame herself for making me come, although it had been my choice. I thought of Dmitri in America and my spine prickled. But to my surprise I didn’t focus too long on him before my thoughts started shifting to Ivan. What would he have made of all this?

A man in army uniform entered the hall and made his way past the tables to the podium. He climbed
up the step and waited for us to fall silent, clasping a swatch of cardboard sheets to his side and coughing once into his fist. It was only when he had the attention of every person in the room that he began to speak.

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Australia,’ he said. ‘My name is Colonel Brighton. I am the camp director.’ He put the sheets of cardboard down on the podium and picked up the first sign, holding it up so that everyone could see. It had his name written on it in large letters so neatly printed that they could have been typed.

‘I hope that those of you who can speak English will translate what I have to say for your friends,’ he continued. ‘Unfortunately, my translators are busy with something else this morning.’ He smiled at us from beneath his dark moustache. His uniform was too tight and made him look like a little boy who had been tucked firmly into his bed.

Until the Colonel addressed us, my arrival in Australia had seemed like a dream. But when he started talking about our work contracts with the Commonwealth Employment Service and how we must be prepared to do any sort of work, even if we considered it beneath us, to pay back our passages to Australia, the magnitude of what Irina and I had done hit me. I glanced around at the sea of anxious faces and wondered whether the announcement was worse for those who couldn’t understand English or whether it was affording them the luxury of a few more minutes’ reprieve from reality?

I dug my fingers into my palms and tried to follow the Colonel’s lecture on the Australian currency, the state and federal political systems, and the relationship to the British monarchy. For each new
subject he held up a card to illustrate the main points and ended his talk with, ‘And I implore you all, both young and old, to learn as much English as you possibly can while you are here. Your success in Australia will depend on it.’

There wasn’t a sound in the room when Colonel Brighton finished speaking, but he simply grinned at us like Father Christmas. ‘Oh, by the way, there is someone I need to see,’ he said, glancing at his notebook. ‘Can Anya Kozlova please come forward?’

I was startled by the mention of my name. Why was I being singled out from three hundred new arrivals? I made my way through the tables to the Colonel, tucking my hair behind my ears and wondering if something had happened to Irina. A crowd of people had gathered around him to ask questions. ‘But we don’t want to live in countryside. In city,’ a man with a patch on his eye was insisting.

No, I told myself, Irina is safe. I wondered if maybe Ivan had heard we were in Australia and was trying to contact us. I dismissed that thought too. Ivan’s ship was bound for Sydney, but he had told us he intended to go straight to Melbourne by train. He had enough funds to stay out of a camp.

‘Ah, you’re Anya?’ said the Colonel, when he saw me waiting. ‘Come with me, please.’

Colonel Brighton marched at a sprightly pace towards the administrative area and I had to almost skip to keep up with him. We passed more rows of barracks, kitchens and laundries and a post office, and I began to appreciate the size of the camp. The Colonel told me that the camp used to belong to the army and that a lot of ex-army barracks were being turned into migrant accommodation all over the
country. Although I was anxious to know why he wanted to see me, his small talk assured me that it wasn’t anything too serious.

‘So you’re Russian, Anya. Where from?’

‘I was born in Harbin in China. I’ve never been to Russia. But I spent a lot of time in Shanghai.’

He tucked his cardboard signs further under his arm and frowned at a broken window in one of the huts. ‘Report that to the maintenance office,’ he told a man sitting on the steps, before turning back to me. ‘My wife is English. Rose has read a lot of books about Russia. She reads a lot of books in general. So where were you born? Moscow?’

I didn’t take the Colonel’s lack of concentration to heart. He was shorter than me with deep-set eyes and a receding hairline. The lines on his forehead and his button nose made his face seem comical, although his upright posture and his manner of speaking were serious. There was something likeable about him, he was efficient without being cold. The Colonel had mentioned that there were over three thousand people in the camp. How could he remember us all?

Colonel Brighton’s office was a wooden hut not far from the cinema hall. He pushed open the door and ushered me inside. A woman with red hair and horn-rimmed glasses glanced up from her desk, her fingers perched over a typewriter.

‘This is my secretary, Dorothy,’ the Colonel said.

The woman smoothed the folds of her floral dress and pinched her lips into a smile.

‘I am pleased to meet you,’ I said. ‘I am Anya Kozlova.’

Dorothy glanced over me before deciding to fix her gaze on my straggly hair. I blushed and looked
away. Behind her were two unoccupied desks, and another desk from which a bald man in a fawncoloured shirt and tie smiled at us. ‘And this is the welfare officer,’ the Colonel said, indicating the man. ‘Ernie Howard.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Ernie said, getting up from his seat and shaking my hand.

‘Anya’s from Russia. She arrived last night,’ the Colonel said.

‘Russia? Probably China,’ said Ernie, releasing my hand. ‘We have a few people from Tubabao here.’

Colonel Brighton didn’t notice the correction. He flipped through some files on Ernie’s desk, picked one up and indicated a door at the end of the room. ‘Come this way, Anya,’ he said.

I followed the Colonel into his office. The sun through the windows was brilliant and the room was hot. The Colonel opened the slats on the windows and turned on a fan. I sat in the chair opposite his desk and found that I was facing not only Colonel Brighton but the long, sour face of the British King, whose portrait hung on a wall behind him. The Colonel’s office was orderly, with files and books packed neatly along the sides of the walls and a framed map of Australia in the far corner. But his desk was in chaos. It was overloaded with files and looked in danger of collapse. The Colonel placed the file he was carrying on top of the others and opened it.

‘Anya, I have a letter here from Captain Connor of the IRO saying that you worked for him. That you speak good English, which is obvious, and can type.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Colonel Brighton sighed and leaned back into his chair. He considered me for a long time. I shifted in my seat, wishing he would say something. Finally, he did.

‘Can I persuade you to work for me for a month or two?’ he asked. ‘Until they send me more staff from Sydney. We are in rather a mess. This camp is not at all what it should be, especially not for women. And there will be another thousand people arriving here over the next fortnight.’

The Colonel’s admission that the camp conditions weren’t acceptable was a relief. I thought we might have been expected to live with them.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

‘I need someone who can help me, Dorothy and Ernie. We urgently need to do something about the cleanliness of the camp, so I want you to take over the filing and other general duties. I can pay you above the allowance and will give the employment officer a special recommendation for you when you finish.’

The Colonel’s offer took me by surprise. I hadn’t known what to expect from him, but I certainly hadn’t been expecting that he would offer me a job on my first day at the camp. I had only one American dollar left from Tubabao and I couldn’t sell the jewels I had brought from Shanghai until I got to Sydney. Some extra money was just what I needed.

The Colonel’s honesty gave me confidence to tell him that I thought the toilets and food were serious problems, and that we were in danger of an epidemic.

He nodded. ‘Until yesterday’s intake we were just managing. This morning I organised for the Sanipan company to come three times a day, and Dorothy is assembling new teams for the kitchens right now. There’s no time for mucking about. As soon as I see a problem, I do my best to fix it. The only difficulty
is that I have far too many problems to fix quickly.’ He pointed to the files on his desk.

I wondered if I should accept the job and go, as he had a lot to do, but he seemed to enjoy talking to me so I asked him why the Australian government was bringing so many people into the country if it couldn’t provide adequate places for them to live.