White Gardenia (33 page)

Early the following morning, Betty sent Irina and myself out into the backyard to pick passionfruit off a vine that sprawled over the fence.

‘What do you think of her?’ Irina whispered to me, holding open a string bag so I could toss in the purple fruit.

‘At first I thought she was strange,’ I said, ‘but the more she talks, the more I like her. I think she’s nice.’

‘Me too,’ said Irina.

We presented Betty with the two bags of fruit. ‘I use it for the Tropical Ice-cream Boat,’ she told us.

Afterwards we all caught a tram into the city.
Betty’s coffee lounge was at the Farmer’s Department Store end of George Street, near the cinemas. The decor was somewhere between an American diner and a French café. It was split into two levels. On the first level there were round tables with straw chairs. On the second level, which was reached via four stairs, there were eight musk-pink booths and a counter with stools. Each booth had a picture of an American movie star hanging on the wall above it: Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable, Rita Hayworth, Gregory Peck and Bette Davis. I eyed the one of Joan Crawford when we passed it. Her severe eyes and tight mouth reminded me of Amelia.

We followed Betty through two swing doors with round windows in them and down a short corridor into the kitchen. A young man with spindly legs and a cleft in his chin was mixing flour and milk over a bench. ‘This is Vitaly,’ said Betty. The man looked up and smiled. ‘Ah, here you are,’ he said. ‘Just in time to help me with the pancake mix.’

‘No work for you just yet,’ said Betty, taking the string bags from us and putting them on the table in the centre of the room. ‘Sit down and talk for a bit before the customers start arriving. You need to get to know each other.’

The café’s kitchen was as clean as Betty’s one at home, though the floor was straight. There were four cupboards, a gas stove with six rings, a large oven and two sinks. Betty pulled an apron from one of the cupboards and tied it around her waist. I noticed the two pink uniforms hanging on a peg, one of which I guessed would be mine. I was to help Betty as a waitress. Irina was going to be Vitaly’s assistant in the kitchen.

Vitaly brought in chairs from the back room and we sat around the table.

‘How about eggs for you all?’ Betty asked. ‘You girls only had toast this morning and I don’t want my staff half starved and on their feet all day.’

‘I know you two from Tubabao,’ Vitaly said to us.

‘Ah yes, I remember,’ laughed Irina. ‘You asked me for my autograph after the concert.’

I stared at Vitaly’s ruddy cheeks, sandy hair and protruding eyes, but I couldn’t recall him at all. We told him about our camp and he said that he’d been sent to a place called Bonegilla.

‘How old are you?’ Irina asked him.

‘Twenty-five. And how old are you?’

Betty cracked some eggs into a bowl and glanced over her shoulder. ‘Don’t try to speak in English just because I’m here,’ she said. ‘You can speak Russian to each other.’ She patted her hair and squinted. ‘That’s as long as you’re not sharing juicy gossip. Or, for that matter, if one of the customers comes in. I don’t want my staff carted off as Communist spies.’

We clapped and laughed. ‘Thank you,’ Irina told her. ‘That is much easier for me.’

‘And you, Anya,’ Vitaly said, turning to me. ‘You seemed familiar to me from somewhere before Tubabao. I wanted to introduce myself to you, but then I heard you were from Shanghai and I assumed we couldn’t have known each other after all.’

‘I’m not from Shanghai,’ I told him. ‘I am from Harbin.’

‘Harbin!’ he said, his eyes flashing. ‘I am from Harbin too. What’s your last name?’

‘Kozlova.’

Vitaly thought deeply for a moment, rubbing his
hands together as if he were trying to entice a genie from a lamp.

‘Kozlova! Daughter of Colonel Victor Grigorovich Kozlov?’

My father’s name took my breath away. It had been a long time since I had heard it. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then I do know you,’ Vitaly said. ‘Although you might have been too young to remember me. My father was friends with your father. They left Russia together. But we moved to Tsingtao in 1938. I remember you though. A little girl with red hair and blue eyes.’

‘Is your father with you?’ Irina asked him.

‘No,’ said Vitaly. ‘He’s in America with my mother and eight brothers. I am here with my sister and her husband. My father doesn’t trust my brother-in-law, so he sent me to look after Sofia. Are your parents with you, Anya?’

His question caught me off guard. I looked down at the table.

‘My father died in a car accident before the end of the war,’ I said. ‘My mother was deported from Harbin. By the Soviets. I don’t know where they took her.’

Irina reached over and squeezed my wrist. ‘We are hoping that the Red Cross in Sydney might be able to trace Anya’s mother in Russia,’ she told Vitaly.

He rubbed the cleft in his chin then rested his fingers on his cheek. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘my family is looking for my uncle. He stayed in Harbin and also went to the Soviet Union after the war. But he wasn’t forced. He and my father had very different ideas. My uncle believed in the principles of Communism and never served in the army with my father. He wasn’t exactly an extremist. But he was a supporter.’

‘Have you heard from him?’ Irina asked. ‘Perhaps he would know where Anya’s mother was sent.’

Vitaly snapped his fingers. ‘He might, you know. It’s possible they were on the same train from Harbin to Russia. But my father has only heard twice from my uncle since his return, and even that was only through people we knew. I do recall that the train stopped in a place called Omsk. My uncle went on from there to Moscow, but the rest of the passengers were taken to a labour camp.’

‘Omsk!’ I cried. I had heard the name of that town before. My mind turned over, trying to remember where.

‘I can ask my father to try to make contact again,’ said Vitaly. ‘My uncle is afraid of my father and what he might say to him. We always have to rely on other people to convey the messages, so it will take time. And of course everything is checked and censored nowadays.’

I was too overwhelmed to speak. In Shanghai, Russia had seemed like an entity too big for me to tackle. Suddenly, in a coffee lounge on the other side of the world, I had more information about my mother’s whereabouts than ever before.

‘Anya!’ Irina cried. ‘If you can tell the Red Cross that you think your mother is in Omsk, they might be able to trace her for you!’

‘Hey, hang on a minute!’ said Betty, setting three plates of scrambled eggs and toast before us. ‘You’re not being fair. I said you could speak in Russian if it wasn’t anything exciting. What’s going on?’

All three of us started to speak at once, but we couldn’t make any sense to Betty that way. Irina and Vitaly stopped talking and let me explain. Betty glanced at her watch. ‘What are you waiting for?’
she said to me. ‘I’ve lasted without you for a month, I’ll last without you for another morning. The Red Cross will open at nine o’clock. If you leave now, you should be the first person there.’

I dodged in between the secretaries and office workers, hardly taking in anything of George Street as I raced towards downtown. I glanced at the map Betty had drawn for me on a serviette. I turned into Jamison Street and found myself standing outside Red Cross House ten minutes before it opened. A directory was posted on the glass door. My eyes scanned over the blood transfusion service, the convalescent homes, the hospital and repatriation departments, to the tracing department. I checked my watch again and paced back and forth on the pavement. My God, I thought, I’m finally here. A woman walked past me and smiled. She must have thought I was desperate to donate blood.

Near the door was a window displaying Red Cross handicrafts. I glanced over the satin-covered coathangers and crocheted blankets and told myself that I would buy something for Betty on the way out. She had been kind to give me time off work before I had even started.

When a clerk opened the doors I headed straight for the fire stairs, not wanting to wait for the elevator. I burst into the tracing department and startled the receptionist, who was settling into her desk with a cup of tea. She pinned on her volunteer’s badge and asked me how she could help. I told her I was trying to find my mother and she handed me some registration forms and a pen. ‘It’s hard to update the tracing files,’ she told me, ‘so make sure you include as much information as you can this morning.’

I took a seat by a water cooler and flipped through the forms. I didn’t have a photograph of my mother and I hadn’t noted the number of the train that took her from Harbin. But I filled in as much information as I could, including my mother’s maiden name, her year and place of birth, the date I last saw her and a physical description. I paused for a moment. The image of my mother’s despairing face with her fist to her mouth came back to me and my hand started to tremble. I swallowed and forced myself to concentrate. There was a note at the bottom of the last form explaining that, due to the number of inquiries and the difficult process of gathering information, it could take six months to several years to receive a reply from the Red Cross. But I didn’t let that discourage me. ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ I wrote next to the disclaimer. I gave the forms back to the receptionist. She slipped them into a file and told me to wait until a tracing officer called me.

A woman with a child in her arms walked into the waiting area and asked the receptionist for forms. I looked around the room, noticing for the first time that it was a museum of grief. The walls were covered in pictures with notes under them that read: ‘Lieba. Last seen in Poland 1940’; ‘My beloved husband, Semion, disappeared 1941’. The photograph of a little brother and sister holding hands almost broke my heart. ‘Janek and Mania. Germany 1937.’

‘Omsk,’ I said to myself, rolling the name over my tongue as if that might help me unlock the memory. Then I remembered where I had heard that name before. It was the town where Dostoyevsky had been imprisoned as a political exile. I tried to recall his
novel
Notes from the Underground
but all I could remember was the darkness and misery of the main character.

‘Miss Kozlova? My name is Daisy Kent.’

I glanced up and saw a bespectacled woman in a blue jacket and dress staring down at me. I followed her through a paper-flooded administration area, where volunteers were checking and filing forms, to an office with a frosted-glass door. Daisy asked me to sit down and closed the door behind us. The sun was burning through a window and she closed the blinds. The fan rotating on one of the filing cabinets did little to relieve the stuffiness of the room. I was finding it hard to breathe.

Daisy pushed her glasses higher up on her nose and studied my registration form. I looked over her shoulder at the poster of a nurse with a red cross on her cap comforting a wounded soldier.

‘Your mother was taken to a labour camp in the Soviet Union, is that correct?’ Daisy asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, leaning forward.

Her nostrils quivered and she folded her hands in front of her. ‘Then I’m afraid the Red Cross can’t help you.’

My fingers and toes turned to ice. My mouth fell open.

‘The Russian government doesn’t admit to having labour camps,’ Daisy continued. ‘Therefore it is impossible for us to determine where they are and how many there are.’

‘But I think I know the town. Omsk.’ I heard the tremble in my voice.

‘Unfortunately, unless it’s a war zone, we can’t help you.’

‘Why?’ I stuttered. ‘The IRO said that you could.’

Daisy sighed and clenched her hands. I stared at her neat trimmed nails, not able to believe what I was hearing. ‘The Red Cross does all it can to help people, but we can only assist in countries involved in international or national wars,’ she said. ‘This is not the case in Russia. They are not considered to be breaking any humanitarian rules.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ I interrupted. ‘Labour camps are the same in Russia as they are in Germany.’

‘Miss Kozlova,’ she said, taking off her glasses and pointing them at me, ‘we are supported by the Geneva Convention and we have to abide by their strict guidelines or we wouldn’t exist at all.’ Her voice was clinical rather than kind. I got the impression that she had faced these types of questions before, and had decided it was better to crush all hope at the outset rather than be drawn into an argument.

‘But surely you have some connections?’ I went on nervously. ‘Some organisation that can at least give you information?’

She slipped my papers back into the folder as if to demonstrate the futility of my case. I didn’t move. Did she expect me to just leave?

‘Can’t you do anything to help me?’ I asked.

‘I’ve already explained to you that there is nothing I can do.’ Daisy picked up another folder from the pile next to her and started writing notes on it.

I saw that she wasn’t going to help me. I couldn’t reach that soft part which I had believed existed in everyone, except perhaps people bent on revenge, like Tang and Amelia. I stood up. ‘You weren’t there,’ I said, a tear leaking out of my eye and running down to my chin. ‘You weren’t there when they took her away from me.’

Daisy dropped the folder back onto its pile and lifted her chin. ‘I know this is distressing but…’

I didn’t catch the last part of her sentence. I rushed out of her office and crashed into a table in the administration area, sending files sliding across the floor. The receptionist glanced up at me when I ran by but said nothing. Only the photographs on the wall in the waiting area, with their sad, lost eyes, showed me any sympathy.

I arrived back at the coffee lounge just as the midmorning rush was beginning. My head was pounding and I was nauseous with the tears I was holding inside. I had no idea how I would get through my first day of work. I changed into my uniform and pulled my hair into a ponytail, but as soon as I walked into the kitchen my legs gave way beneath me and I had to sit down.

‘Don’t be put off by the Red Cross,’ Betty said, fetching a glass of water and putting it on the table in front of me. ‘There’s more than one way to skin a rabbit. Maybe you can join the Russian–Australian Society. You might find something out through them.’