Today we made a deaclass="underline" she swore that she would stop pestering me, if I found her a job. I forced her to agree that the moment she breaks our agreement, I will immediately take away her allowance and move to another apartment. Ada gave in but on condition that our agreement will only be valid until she comes of age. She is convinced that in a year I will forget about Nina and be looking to marry again—a successful, caring, albeit mildly grumpy potential husband.
I feel as if I’m standing at the cinema box office; I really want to see the Fair Lady, but the only tickets available are for The Extra Girl.
Klim bounded into the apartment with the news that he had found a job for Ada. Mrs. Edna Bernard needed a competent and well-organized person who could keep her library in order.
“Be sure to mind your p’s and q’s,” Klim told Ada, “and whatever you do, don’t mention a word about the Havana. Edna is a member of the Moral Welfare League, and she would never dream of employing someone who used to work as a taxi-girl.”
Ada had heard the other girls mention the League: it was largely made up of rich ladies on a crusade to rid China of prostitution. They would regularly publish damning articles in their church bulletins, organize propaganda meetings, and even picket the Municipal Council. But no matter how hard these upstanding and well-meaning ladies fought against vice, they achieved little or nothing. Unknown to them, most of Shanghai’s legislators were regular patrons of the city’s brothels.
Klim explained to Ada how to get to the Bernards, and after a delightful ride on a tramcar, she reached a quiet leafy street, where she saw nobody except a Chinese gardener trimming hedges.
Ada looked in wonder at the follies with their towers, weather vanes, and gates decorated with cast-iron curlicues. She felt as if she had entered into some fairytale kingdom, and that sooner or later someone would chase her away. Mere mortals evidently didn’t belong here.
When a young servant let Ada into the house, she almost panicked. There were statues in every corner, the walls were decorated with paintings, and huge fans the size of windmill sails spun from the ceiling.
Goodness me, Ada thought, what do these people do to earn the money to buy all this?
The servant ushered Ada into a cramped studio, bowed, and disappeared. The mistress’s appearance shocked Ada to the core. Mrs. Bernard’s hair was twisted into a bun and fixed with a couple of pencils instead of hairpins. Her hands were smeared with ink, and a black telephone wire was coiled around her bare foot. She was sitting at a desk and talking on the phone.
Mrs. Bernard made a sign for Ada to wait. “We have established a rescue fund for the hostages from the Blue Express,” she yelled into the receiver. “The bandits have requested two million dollars in ransom, but we have found a middleman who has negotiated a smaller amount.”
Finally, Mrs. Bernard hung up and turned to Ada. “Miss Marshall? Klim Rogov gave you glowing references. What can you tell me about yourself?”
Ada had never been good at talking about herself. What did people expect her to say: “I’m a pretty, kind, and bright… modest sort of girl”?
Thankfully, Mrs. Bernard asked the questions, and with a little expert coaxing Ada told her all about her childhood and her odyssey from Izhevsk to Shanghai.
“I’m so sorry to hear you’ve been through so much, and at such a young age,” Edna said. “But if you work hard, you’ll be fine here.”
She took Ada to a large sunny room filled with boxes of books. Books were littered all over the floor and piled precariously on the chairs. Some of them had been carefully stacked on the shelves, while others had been hurriedly stuffed into bookcases.
“Your task is to make a detailed catalog of all these books and arrange them so that they’ll be easy to find,” Mrs. Bernard said. “I can pay you twelve dollars a week. Is that alright with you?”
Ada nodded, stunned. She tried to find the right words of gratitude, but the telephone rang again from the studio, and Mrs. Bernard rushed off to answer it.
“You can start right now,” Ada heard her calling from the corridor.
Twelve dollars a week—a princely sum. And Ada was going to earn it for the pleasure of sorting out books in a stunning library.
With trembling hands, she picked up the first book, then the second, and the third… To be honest, she was surprised and disappointed at the Bernards’ taste. The library was filled with a hodgepodge of different topics that ranged from Agriculture in Central China to The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. How could this couple possibly be interested in such dull topics?
Ada spent the whole morning repairing torn book covers and replacing missing pages. By twelve o’clock, a neat-looking Chinese lad knocked at the library door.
“Hi! My name is Sam, I’m boy number five,” he introduced himself. “Our cook, Yun, told me to invite you down to the kitchen for lunch.”
On their way, Sam told her that there were five Chinese boys, three maids, two grooms, a gardener, a laundress, a dishwasher, a chauffeur, a kitchen boy, a housekeeper, and a messenger boy all serving in the house.
“And all this for a family of two people?” Ada asked.
“It’s good to have a lot of servants,” Sam said proudly. “It shows that you are rich and can afford to invite lots of guests over. Did they hire you part- or full-time?”
Ada shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’d like to stay here.”
“Then find yourself extra work, and when you’re done with the books, try to persuade Missy to keep you on. But don’t go taking on other people’s work. If they start hating you, they’ll drive you out within a week. Not long ago, Yun fell out with one of the maids. He ended up putting special herbs into her food, which made her gassy. It became impossible to be in the same room as her, and Missy had to discharge her.”
“I really have no intention of stealing anyone else’s job—” Ada began, but Sam reassured her that she had nothing to be afraid of.
“Just be nice to everybody and you’ll be fine.”
He took Ada to the small kitchen, not the one that was used for cooking the masters’ food, but the one with a whitewashed Chinese stove and a brood of blackened pots huddling in the corner.
A warped and grease-stained image of the kitchen god, the patron of the hearth and household, stood in a wall niche. Yun, an old man with a copper-colored face and a gray beard tucked into the collar of his jacket, was busy at the chopping board. He took an onion out of a basket and had it cleaned and sliced into translucent rings in a trice. The staccato of his chopping knife resembled the sound of a sewing machine.
Most of the servants had already had their lunch and had returned to their duties, leaving the kitchen boy to clean their plates. As Sam and Ada entered the kitchen, Yun ladled them bowls of soup with yellow noodles.
“May I have a spoon?” Ada asked timidly, looking down at the chopsticks that had been placed next to her bowl.
“No, you can’t,” Yun cut her short. “Learn to use chopsticks, like everybody else.”
Frightened out of her wits, Ada sat next to Sam, trying to pick up her noodles with her chopsticks.
“Praise Yun’s cooking,” Sam whispered.
“Mmm, this is lovely!” Ada said. The noodles were delicious, but it was fiendishly difficult to pin them down with the chopsticks.
She tried lifting her bowl to her mouth, like Sam, but this was even worse, and she ended up spilling half the soup down her dress.
“Here comes the second course,” said the kitchen boy.
Yun took a round basket from under the table, picked up a fork with a long handle, and used it to pull out… a live snake. In one deft movement, he cut its head off and skinned it.