They put Edna on the grass.
“Stay here, I’ll be right back,” he told Ada.
He ran up to Nina’s house and banged on the door with his fist. A skinny dark-haired man appeared on the porch.
“What do you want?” he said with a Russian accent.
“Is Nina there?” Daniel asked, and only then recognized Klim Rogov staring at him.
As a teenager, I often wondered what my own funeral would be like. In my mind’s eye, I imagined there would be at least five hundred mourners, a military band, and a heartbroken fair lady at my coffin. Who would have turned up if I had given up the ghost in Canton? The best I could have hoped was Don Fernando, One-Eye, and a couple of coolies impatiently leaning on their shovels. Some send-off that would have been.
Perhaps it was this prospect that helped me survive, an act of protest against having the sum of my life marked in such an unseemly way. Besides, I had to find out what had happened to Nina and why she hadn’t written to me after receiving so many of my letters via Don Fernando.
I tried to send her a cable before my departure but quickly came to an impasse. Canton was busy fighting spies, and they weren’t allowing any Tom, Dick or Harry to send a telegram anywhere without authorization and ID.
On my way home, I prepared myself for the worst. Was Nina alright? Or perhaps she had found another admirer and forgotten all about my existence?
On May 30, 1925, the Santa Maria sailed into Shanghai, and Don Fernando generously agreed to drive me to Nina’s.
“If you find your wife with a lover, come back and join me,” he said as he left.
I was as tense as a coiled spring. The weather was clement, the sun shining, and the birds chirruping without a care in the world, but here I was feeling as if I was about to be read a death sentence.
When I came in, Kitty and her amah had just returned from a walk. My daughter had grown so much that I could hardly recognize her. When I left she couldn’t even walk.
Kitty picked up a twig and gave it to me, saying, “Take this!” I squatted down, deeply touched, and asked her how she had been doing. She answered me in her baby language, which was absolutely incomprehensible to me.
The amah called Nina, and my wife ran to the porch, still in her white bathrobe, her hair dripping wet. Before I could say a word, she threw her arms around me and cried, “Why didn’t you write to me?”
It turned out that Nina hadn’t learned anything about my injury. Having received no news, she had decided to go to Canton to find me. The suitcases were ready and packed in her living room, and half a dozen different guidebooks were lying on the table.
We were both stunned and confused. In the months since our last meeting, we had conceived a thousand different plots of betrayal and death, and now it was hard to accept they had been completely unfounded.
Nina told me what had happened to her. The Jesuits had cheated her, her competitors had ruined her business, and she had little or no money to get by. I wondered how my brave girl had coped with it all?
I told her about my adventures and encounter with “Comrade Krieger.”
“Daniel never told me a thing about it,” Nina gasped.
I felt as though someone had just run a high-voltage through my entire body.
“Did he come here?” I asked.
Nina went deathly pale and began to explain in earnest that she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. At that moment, there was a knock at the door, and there was the man himself at the doorstep, as large as life.
Nina was the first to pull herself together and began to shove the intruder out of the door. “Leave us alone. Please!”
I saw the way he looked at us and realized in an instant that my wife had broken his heart.
“Did you hear the gunshots?” he said. “The police have just dispersed a demonstration on Nanking Road. Edna has been wounded and lost consciousness.”
“I’ll tell the driver to take you to the hospital,” Nina said.
She literally pushed him out and slammed the door behind him.
“We need to find out how Edna is,” I said, but Nina stood in my way.
“Don’t you dare go out there. The servants will take care of her. Don’t you realize that you and Daniel will end up killing each other?”
Through the window, I watched Nina’s car driving out of the gate. Daniel put Edna and Ada into it and they left.
“I’d better go,” I said. “I don’t want you and Kitty to get into any more trouble on my account. I’m sure Daniel Bernard will use every opportunity to rid himself of me, and Wyer isn’t likely to have forgotten my past misdeeds either.”
But Nina was confident that we still had a little time.
“The police won’t come visiting just yet,” she said. “They’ve got more than enough on their hands with the demonstration, and anyway Daniel will have already put two and two together that I know all about your encounter in Canton. There’s nothing he can do about it now.”
I really wanted to find out what had passed between her and Daniel, but I decided not to pry: the details would only lead to pain and recriminations. What we needed was to start all over again, from scratch, and right now the only thing I wanted to do was to play at happy families.
When we are children, it doesn’t matter to us who we are in real life. A boy can play a brave hero, and a girl can be a beautiful princess. If everybody agrees to play their part then there is nothing to stop us making our fantasy a reality.
We feasted until well into the evening, played with Kitty, danced, and kissed, our lives and very essence melding into each other’s. It was mind blowing how rapidly it all happened. The most trivial things, such as washing our faces next to each other at the sink, or me passing Nina a piece of soap behind the shower curtain acquired the most intense meaning. I never dreamed of being entitled to such joy.
It’s now eleven-thirty at night, my body is exhausted but relaxed, however, I still can’t get to sleep. I’m sitting in Nina’s bedroom at her dressing table and writing my new diary, having moved her hairbrushes and perfume bottles to one side. My previous diary, “Receipts and Expenditures,” has been lost in the vagaries of the Chinese mail service, but I don’t regret it. There are some details of my life that I need to forget.
I constantly want to take a peek at my sleeping wife, to check that she is really here with me and that I haven’t dreamt all this up. A mosquito net floats over her like a translucent cloud. My heart sings with hymns of praise, and my only regret is that I can’t pick up a telephone to God and thank him for his sublime generosity.
21. THE GENERAL STRIKE
The Nanking Road massacre of May 30 claimed the lives of thirteen students with dozens more injured. The next day, the Chinese trade unions announced a general strike, and now the foreign concessions have found themselves left with neither telephone nor tap water.
Garage owners refuse to sell gas to foreigners, the trams have stopped working, and rickshaw boys no longer carry white passengers. I guess this must be the reason why nobody has come to kill us so far. Wyer’s cutthroats are probably out on strike as well, and Daniel Bernard is feeling too lazy to go anywhere by foot in this heat.
Nina has come up with a new business idea. She wants to set up a security agency and hire former White Army military men to guard us and her potential customers. The demand for these sorts of services is huge: everyone who has money is terrified of thugs coming to rob them. The rich who have come to Shanghai from the war-torn provinces are in a particularly difficult situation. They have neither friends nor relatives here. The police have gone on strike, too, and the prospect of hiring Chinese bodyguards, who might easily be gang members themselves, is a scary one.