do. She checked herself in the mirror. A 17-year-old with eyes that had seen too much for one so young stared back at her. It didn’t matter. That was all finished now. She was safe here, safe at last.
She remembered when she met her father again. It was in Tsingtao at the awful Welfare Home for Young Women run by a missionary with eyes like holes in snow.
He had stood in front of her with his hand held out. Her own father greeting her with a handshake. She didn’t know what to do, so she reached out and took his hand in her own, feeling its cold skin against hers.
Before she knew it, he had picked up her bag and was ushering her off to the station. On the journey to Shanghai, he just asked her questions, interrogating her like a witness to a crime. Asking over and over again: What had she done? Where had she gone? What had happened next? Where was her mother? Always where was her mother?
She brushed a thread from the coat with the ends of her fingers. She didn’t tell him what she had done. She couldn’t tell him. Not now, not ever. So she had skipped over the details and invented others. But she knew he wasn’t convinced. Better to remain silent to say as little as possible. How could she trust him after what he had done, leaving her, her brother and his wife alone in Minsk? How could she trust any man after what happened? Better to rely on the one person she had in this world.
Herself.
She looked around the apartment before she left. God, she hated these white walls. There was no warmth, no life in them. The walls of a prison. She had done nothing to make the apartment more comfortable. There was no point, her father would never notice.
She checked that all the dishes had been done; washed and dried, and placed back in the cupboard above the sink. The living room had been swept clean with the cushions on the settee plumped up. She never went into her father’s bedroom, but she knew it would be as clean and as spartan as ever.
‘Everything in its place and a place for everything,’ her father had always said to her as a child, sharp green eyes staring down into her face. She had been a little scared of him then, especially when he wore his Imperial Police uniform with its shiny stars and brightly polished boots.
Luckily her mother had been the opposite; warm, friendly and with a laugh that would shake the world with its joy. How had two such different people ever fallen in love? She didn’t know then and still didn’t know now. But they had.
Perhaps it was odnoliub, that strange Russian word that described finding the person you were meant to spend the rest of your life with. The person that was going to be the only love in your life. She hoped it would happen to her one day, odnoliub, but she doubted it. For her to fall in love she would have to trust someone again.
Her mother and father loved each other with an abandon that she found difficult to understand. It was like the two sides of a penny; each completely different, yet when each joined with the other they made one whole.
And yet with her, he was indifferent, or even hateful. As if she reminded him of the wife he missed every day. Without her mother, he was a man lost in his own world, like an ancient church with the buttresses removed, ready to collapse at any moment.
She glanced at the old clock on the wall. She would have to hurry, the film would start soon. In the papers, Street Angel was showing at the Grand Theatre. She wasn’t that keen on the movies, but it passed the time. She had so much time on her hands in Shanghai.
She walked the streets. Or went to the movies. Or simply strolled around the shops looking at the merchandise from all over the world. She never bought anything, though. She didn’t know why. Her father gave her money. But after Harbin, all that stuff was so meaningless. She had enjoyed it all then, but now, there was just no point.
She picked up her keys from the table at the door and put them in her pocket, taking one last look at the apartment. She should be back before him tonight. When he was working on a case, he sometimes didn’t return till well past midnight.
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