The Fan Tan Players, page 9
There was a long silence in the temple. Eventually, Izabel said, ‘‘I want you to tell me what’s happened. What has upset you?’’
Nadia picked at her fingernails, looking at the ground. ‘‘It’s hard to explain.’’ She lifted her gaze and saw Izabel’s concern. ‘‘I get overwhelmed sometimes,’’ she said.
‘‘Why?’’
She closed her eyes briefly then looked again at Izabel. ‘‘There are times when I get angry and confused with what’s happened in my life. Sometimes I break down trying to make sense of it all.’’ Nadia fixed her stare on a pool of lamplight on the altar table. ‘‘Do you remember what Uncle Yugevny told you about the fire that burned down our home?’’ She felt a fierce throb of emotion in her throat. ‘‘Well, the peasants not only razed the house, they also dragged my grandparents and my father into the garden, beat them with sticks.’’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘‘I remember sitting in the kitchen, eating my uzhin, the evening meal – potato cakes with mushroom sauce – I remember cutting up some sweet boiled cabbage that was set on a side dish. Then cook rushing to the window when we heard the dogs barking and the screams. I rose quickly from my chair, not knowing what I had just heard.’’
Izabel stroked Nadia’s hair then rested her elbows on her knees, cradling her friend’s head in her hands. ‘‘That night,’’ Nadia said. ‘‘When they set fire to our home I thought I’d lost everything. The mob separated me from my parents.’’ Nadia once more saw the mob on her doorstep, their faces streaming in a frenzy of destruction. She saw the yellow smoke, the flaring eyes, the rampaging sweating bodies descending on her with cudgels and horsewhips. ‘‘I thought Papashka was in his study,’’ she said. ‘‘I heard Mamuchka calling me but I had to try to save him. I didn’t know that they’d taken him into the dovecot and poured paraffin onto his clothes. I remember screaming his name, over and over, trying to get into his study but the banister had fallen down and there was smoke everywhere. The floor had started to shift and groan. The noise was petrifying, with sheet glass rupturing as it warped and tinned food exploding in the kitchen. I couldn’t see anything, and then I felt the flames run up inside the arms of my shirt. The pain took my voice away. That was when my mother grabbed me and fell on me with her overcoat. We ran through the garden listening to the housemaids wailing for their children – the mob was attacking everybody – and then we fled into the woods.
‘‘There were people screaming and shrieking everywhere. I remember seeing a man assaulting one of the servant girls, pinning her down by the potting sheds. Her name was Svetlina. She was one of my friends. It was … terrible. As we ran we saw that the grounds were crowded with people fighting, cheering, two men were climbing the spruce trees to affix ropes. They were the trees I used to climb. By the main driveway Marit, one of our kitchen staff, was hanging by his neck, feet dangling. His face was purple and his swollen tongue was sticking out of his mouth. Someone had slashed his stomach open. His distended entrails were fluttering in the breeze. I remember my mother covering my eyes. I was only seven years old,’’ she said softly. ‘‘Later, we hid under the cover of some thick bushes by the river, waiting for the sounds to go away.’’
‘‘The day after the fire, we returned to our home. It was just a blackened shell. Mamuchka and the estate manager, Mr. Bogdanov, cut the bodies of my grandmother and grandfather down from out of the spruce trees. Mr. Bogdanov only survived because he hid in the nearby church.’’
‘‘Why did the peasants suddenly rise up? What made them behave so viciously?’’
‘‘There were many reasons. In 1904 Russia went to war against Japan for control of Korea and Manchuria. We lost. Worse, we were humiliated, lost the entire Baltic fleet. The economy was ruined. The collapse led to revolts by industrial workers, demonstrations, railroad strikes, mutinies, and Bloody Sunday.’’
‘‘What was Bloody Sunday?’’
‘‘A massacre that happened in 1905 in St. Petersburg. Over 200,000 peasants and workers gathered in a peaceful march to deliver a petition to the Tsar. They demanded an eight-hour workday and an increase in wages. But the army panicked and opened fire. Some say over a thousand men, women and children were killed. A few months later, the peasants began to rise up all across rural Russia.’’
‘‘What happened to the culprits, the people who attacked your home?’’
Nadia sighed and shook her head. ‘‘There was an official enquiry. The prime minister, a man called Stolypin, made a statement which Mamuchka read to me. In it he blamed ‘the tragic loss of life and property to a band of scoundrels and rogues that had infiltrated the many peasant communities to drum up sedition and insurgence in order to overthrow the Tsar and his government.’ About a thousand citizens were hanged by Stolypin. His gallows were known as Stolypin’s necktie.’’
‘‘And your father? What happened to your father?’’
‘‘We looked everywhere for Papashka’s body. Had it been left in a ditch, under a pile of stones, or thrown over the avrak onto the rocks below? We didn’t know. Perhaps he’d been burned up along with the house, his ashes rubbed into the earth – there was no way of telling. We checked every hospital, every neighbour’s home, every barn and stables, but found no trace of him.
‘‘Eventually someone was sent from the city. A gorodvoi from the Imperial Russian Police came with his white-and-black hat and showed us photographs of peoples’ bodies. Charred corpses, lying in rows, wrists and arms and legs in tangles. He said thirty-seven people had been killed in our area. Mamuchka identified four cadavers from the photographs: a count and his wife from one of the neighbouring estates, a doctor that lived beyond the stream, and our servant-girl Svetlina, whose naked body was found a mile from the house.’’
‘‘And your father?’’ Izabel asked again, gently.
‘‘Papashka wasn’t amongst them but Mamuchka didn’t give up looking for him. After burying my grandparents, we stayed for a time in Mr. Bogdanov’s cottage. But with the aftermath of such violence none of the muzhiks were willing to cooperate. She searched and searched … but nothing. She didn’t give up though. She knocked on villagers’ doors, turned the forests upside down, was constantly writing letters to the Imperial Police asking for information, but nobody seemed to know anything. With each passing day she grew more desperate. Most of the time I just clung to her, frightened that the peasants would return. Eventually a senior gorodvoi came to see her and told her that Papashka was most likely dead.
‘‘A few months afterwards, Mamuchka and I travelled east with what was left of our lives to stay with cousins in Chelyabinsk. I didn’t want to go. I remember beginning to cry and shaking with the crying, me hugging my arms and Mamuchka hugging me. I didn’t want to leave Papashka behind, didn’t want to leave the memory of my grandparents behind. I made life hell for her. It was exhausting for both of us.
‘‘When we got to Chelyabinsk we stayed for three long winters. Eventually, four years passed, and with still no word about Papashka’s remains, Mamuchka decided she had to leave Russia. Everything about that day kept replaying in her head. My mother would see Papashka standing by the manor house, his tanned face against the sun-crinkled stone, waiting for the mob of villagers to come and take everything away from him.’’
Nadia’s eyes took on the cheerless light of the Siberian sun. She folded her hands and placed them on her knees.
‘‘Is that when you came here?’’ asked Izabel, her voice deliberately quiet and calm.
Nadia nodded. ‘‘Yes. In 1912 we journeyed further east to meet Uncle Yugevny in Irkutsk. We went by train, skirting the southeastern shores of Lake Baikal to Chita, then on to Harbin, and Vladivostok. From there we boarded a ship to Macao.’’ Her face paled a little. ‘‘After a few years in Macao we heard there’d been a revolution in Russia. We stayed in close contact with our cousins in Chelyabinsk. Then one day we received a letter with a different postmark.’’
Nadia looked down. Bits of her hair fell into her eyes. ‘‘It was a moment I’ll always remember. It was a Thursday morning, February 21st, 1919, a cool day with blue, cloudless skies. I was eighteen years old. Mamuchka read me the words, saying they were from a doctor at the Alexander II Homeopathic Hospital in St. Petersburg. They’d found him. They’d found my father, Izabel. And he was alive.’’
12
Either side of the main altar, the wax candles burned bright. Nadia was rubbing her eyes, which were stinging a little from the joss stick smoke. She and Izabel were still on their knees.
‘‘Papashka had been found some years earlier. The hospital had treated him, but for a long time they couldn’t establish who he was.’’ Nadia could feel her eyes beginning to pinken again. She felt as though she was lost on the edge of some wild jungle. There were small tears in her eyes. ‘‘The day of the fire, he’d been set alight in the dovecot and dragged behind a horse into the forest. They’d left him to die in a stream. He was covered in burns. But it was the cool water that saved his life. He was found by a man, a beekeeper,’’ Nadia gave a short laugh. ‘‘Can you believe it? A beekeeper had kept him alive by dressing his ravaged skin in honey and herbs.
‘‘He’d suffered terrible injuries, his legs had been burned up to mid-thigh. Worse still, for a while his brain had been deprived of oxygen. He was half-blind, he couldn’t speak and his memory was badly impeded. He’d stayed in the care of this beekeeper for years, three, four years maybe, I don’t know how long. Then some doctors from the city on a charitable mission discovered him, and he was moved to this specialist homeopathic hospital in St. Petersburg.’’ Nadia stopped talking. She thought about what her Mamuchka had said, that time heals everything. But Nadia knew better – time didn’t heal, it simply picked at the scab, scraped at the sore, until fresh blood appeared. And if she was honest with herself, she didn’t want to be healed; she embraced the sorrow, accepted it, because it was the sorrow more than anything that kept Papashka’s memory alive. Without it his face would blur into nothingness, a circle of featureless dough.
She shook her head. ‘‘Everything just went misty for a long time after that. The whole process of not knowing his fate, and then grieving for him, having gone through hell picturing and imagining how he might have died, wasn’t easy. And then finding out years later that he didn’t die at all, that he’d been so badly hurt … the feelings of grief and sorrow came rushing back again … you’ll never know how hard …’’ Her voice failed her. She took a deep breath. ‘‘Mamuchka wrote letter after letter to him and to his doctors. We wrote to the Portuguese Embassy in Shanghai, to the offices of White Russian solicitors, to Soviet state ministers in Moscow. But there was no way of getting him out of Russia, not with the current regime in charge. My father is alive, Izabel, but we will never be a family again.
‘‘Over nine years have passed since we received that first letter … nine years is a long time for a family to live like this … sometimes I can’t work out what’s going on inside my head. Do I have a father or not? I don’t know what he looks like, or what his voice sounds like anymore … it’s like a dream. Maybe some people would have run away from the problem. I can’t run away from the situation because of Mamuchka. And it isn’t an option, for me, to run away. It’s not my nature. So I write to him once a month, telling him of my life, my hopes. Some of the letters get through, and only very occasionally do I receive a reply. He must be getting people to write for him, because the handwriting is rarely ever the same, opening each letter with My dear little chimp. It was what he used to call me as a child. ’’
Izabel looked at Nadia in a new way now, with caution in her eyes. ‘‘Where do you write? Where is he now?’’ she asked.
‘‘Blagoveshchensk.’’
‘‘Where on earth is that?’’
‘‘On the Russian/Chinese border in Manchuria.’’
‘‘How did he get there? And how did he find you?’’
‘‘It’s a long story. We’ve had to rely on scraps of information, half a dozen letters from various people; the news has been sporadic at best. But we’ve managed to reconstruct the lost years nevertheless. While he was in hospital in St. Petersburg, he was being treated by a German-Russo doctor, and there were clear signs of improvement. He and the doctor, a man called Riedle, became friends and Papashka had already started to recall huge chunks of his past – things like his name, his family, his old home, but it was our whereabouts that flummoxed him. That was until he remembered our cousins in Chelyabinsk. It was through them that the hospital managed to find us.
‘‘Our Chelyabinsk cousins offered to take care of him, but they have a mentally ill son who needs constant attention. It wouldn’t have been fair on them or on Papashka. In 1920 Papashka was moved to an asylum, but in 1921 it was forced to close from lack of funds. After that Papashka went to live with Doctor Riedle and his family on a small farm in the Urals. But then in 1922 we received a letter from Doctor Riedle saying that, with the formation of the collectives in Russia, the Riedle family had to leave their land, otherwise they would be sent to labour camps. They headed east with the rest of the German-Russo diaspora, and Papashka went with them. They now live by the Amur River somewhere near the border with China. Riedle works in the small hospital outside Blagoveshchensk.’’
‘‘And there is no way of seeing him?’’
‘‘No.’’ She sighed. ‘‘At first, I had nowhere to put my anger. I’d walk the nearby hills up to Guia lighthouse for an hour every morning just to get rid of all the frustration and fear. Now I keep it bottled up. Sometimes, of course, it boils over.’’
The temple once again grew silent. A fly flew around the joss sticks and landed on the altar table, on one of the kumquats. It crawled on the pitted skin, stopped to wash its face with its front legs.
‘‘Do you feel better having talked about it?’’ said Izabel.
‘‘Yes …’’
‘‘Nadia, these are terrible and shocking events. I feel for you so much,’’ said Izabel, cradling her friend once again.
‘‘Thank you.’’
‘‘Phooey, for what?’’
‘‘For listening,’’ Nadia said. ‘‘I haven’t spoken about this for a long time.’’
‘‘Will you be alright now?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
Izabel nodded hard, smiled. They embraced.
A few more minutes went by. Nadia felt her mouth pulling into a shape of a smile. ‘‘Don’t you think you ought to find Carlos? We don’t want him wandering the Rua da Felicidade without an escort, do we?’’
‘‘That’s a good point.’’ Izabel gave a wave and was gone. Nadia heard her footsteps recede down the hutong.
A moment later Nadia got to her feet and started walking towards the circular moon-shaped doors. She saw Iain kneeling by an oil burner, his jacket folded on the ground. She’d been aware that he’d been in the temple too but she’d been so wrapped up in her own memories that she didn’t really care that he had heard her monologue. He stood up and they looked at each other for a few seconds. ‘‘Hello,’’ he said. She looked away. The air was filled with the sound of cat meows and distant music, somebody on a nearby balcony was listening to a gramophone record. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ he eventually said. ‘‘Will you forgive me?’’
She turned her back to him, and when he tried to touch her hand she wouldn’t let him.
‘‘I’m so terribly sorry about your father, Nadia. I really am. I never meant to upset you by talking about him.’’
There was gentleness and compassion in his voice. She turned and looked at him. He had another cigarette in his mouth, his forehead was furrowed and his red hair was damp with perspiration.
‘‘Did you come in with Izabel?’’ she asked, knowing full well that he had.
He nodded.
She noticed how his sweat-soaked shirt clung to his back.
‘‘You’ve been waiting quite some time for me then.’’
‘‘I’d have waited all night if necessary.’’ His eyes fell from hers in embarrassment.
She smiled. ‘‘How’s your face?’
He gave his cheek a rub. ‘‘You pack quite a wallop for a wee lass.’’
They began to walk back to the club. ‘‘You know, I know so little about you, Mr. Sutherland,’’ she said. ‘‘Tell me a little about yourself. Your home in Scotland, this Helmsdale, where is it?’’
‘‘Way up in the north, on the east coast, fifty miles from John O’Groats.’’
‘‘But you don’t sound very Scottish?’’
‘‘My Scottish accent was hammered out of me at school. Christ’s rinsed the ‘Scottishness’ away.’’ And in its place, he wanted to add, had come something alien, something anxious and impatient; a hot stone to fill the hollow void.
‘‘Ah yes, the school in Sussex. Do you have any family here?’’
‘‘No, not here in Macao, but back in Scotland I have a mother and two brothers, well one now. His name is Callum. My big brother James was killed in the war.’’
‘‘What about your father?’’
He hesitated. ‘‘I have a father as well, but we don’t … we don’t speak.’’
‘‘No other dependants?’’
‘‘There’s a barman at the Rex who’s quite dependent on me, but no, nobody else.’’
‘‘So, we’re both living with loss,’’ said Nadia. Conscious of a sense of fellow-feeling, they fell silent. They strolled past the buildings with the carved red lacquer facades and the painted Cantonese girls in the brightly-coloured cheongsams, past the oil lanterns suspended from hooks and the urchins playing with bamboo hoops. Midnight bells chimed somewhere in the distance. The white scar of a youthful moon shone vivid in the sky like a wise, slow-moving eye. It was the start of a new day.
