Choir practice was the highlight of their day, and in the evenings they would sing for their mother the songs they had learned. Usually Katarina would listen with a faraway look in her eyes, but every once in a while she would join in, and they would want to cry with happiness. “Sing ‘Kalinka' for us, Mother, like you used to,” they would beg. “You sing so beautifully.” Katarina would sing the lyrics of the love song, and Olga and Tatiana would sing the ecstatic chorus—“Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka moya”—faster and faster until their mother would chime in once again with the slow, melodic verse to Lyuli, the goddess of the earth, of love and fertility. The song would bring tears to her eyes and, when her daughters realized it only made her sadder, they stopped asking.
Sergei decided Olga and Tatiana should also learn to speak English, so he sent them to Mrs. Wilkinson's English language class in the British district of the International Settlement. They attended these classes at her home every Saturday morning. Mrs. Wilkinson was a formidable woman but nothing like the nuns at Notre Dame. She was strict only because she had to be; otherwise her young students would have run roughshod over her. She was a tall woman who towered over them and spoke in a loud, resonant voice. In the style of the day, she wore long dresses with full mutton sleeves and a bustle that rode atop her rear end. She was like the prow of a ship and sailed around the room as if it were the ocean. Her students never once saw her slouch, and she constantly reminded them to sit up straight. “Good posture,” she intoned, “is essential to speaking well. The voice must emanate from the solar plexus, not the throat. We must speak as an opera singer sings, with a full voice and round, robust tones.” Her students had no idea what she was talking about, but words like emanate and solar plexus sounded important, so they nodded in agreement. When Mrs. Wilkinson rolled her r's around words like round and robust, they could only dream of doing the same.
Mrs. Wilkinson had a portrait of Queen Victoria in the makeshift classroom in her large drawing room, which was furnished in the English style with uncomfortable horsehair-stuffed chairs and sofas and solid, heavy-legged wooden tables laden with porcelain bric-à-brac and figurines. The students sat on low wooden stools and were forced to crane their necks to look up at Mrs. Wilkinson as she sailed by. By the end of class, their necks would ache. They imagined that the late queen had behaved and spoken just like Mrs. Wilkinson; they both had piercing eyes that could look right into the soul and spot the evil lurking there. When Mrs. Wilkinson wasn't looking, Tatiana would cross herself and recite the Hail Mary, just in case. Between Mrs. Wilkinson and Queen Victoria, it seemed there was no chance of escape. But every now and then, Mrs. Wilkinson would let down her guard, and they could relax for a bit. She passed around candies, or sweets as she called them, and they were allowed to be children, laughing and making mistakes.
Olga and Tatiana first met Lily when she joined Mrs. Wilkinson's English class a couple of months after them. Tatiana remembered seeing the girl a few times at Notre Dame, but they were in different classes and had not spoken. Lily was the daughter of Sergei's business partner, a wealthy Chinese man with many interests in Shanghai. Soong Li-tan and his brothers were involved in businesses in China from banking to publishing, shipping to textile manufacturing. Their wealth and influence, once based solely on land, had expanded into other areas of opportunity almost as soon as the first foreigner with money to invest had arrived in Shanghai. The Soong family did not socialize with their European business friends, not even the Relnikovs. Their daughters, however, were not constrained by their parents' social boundaries.
Lily was very shy and very pretty. Her black hair was cut in a perfect, straight line across the back of her neck and across her forehead. She had fair skin and a heart-shaped face that reminded Tatiana of the pictures of delicately beautiful Chinese ladies she had seen in books. When Lily first came to Mrs. Wilkinson's, she spoke no English at all, but she could speak French well enough for her and Tatiana to establish a friendship. Lily was so terrified of making a mistake that she refused to speak any English at all for the first month.
“J'ai peur de Madame Weekeesoh,” she told Tatiana. “Elle est trop grande.” Lily had never seen a woman as tall as Mrs. Wilkinson, whose ample bosom protruded like a shelf above her cinched waist.
Although Olga and Tatiana were sent to Mrs. Wilkinson's in a rickshaw (Sergei would haggle with the driver every time to get half the quoted price), the sisters usually conspired to walk back through the crowded but endlessly fascinating streets of the Chinese district. Lily was horrified that they would even consider walking through the city. She was disgusted by the filth and the smells and told them they were mad to even consider it. Lily was picked up by the same rickshaw driver every week, a family retainer, she told them. The girls had no idea how wealthy Lily's family was, but from the way she talked, in the Soong household there was a servant for everything. If Sergei had known his daughters were walking home from class, he would have been livid. He always sent a rickshaw to pick them up, but the girls would pay the driver and send him away, begging him not to tell their father. Sergei gave them a certain amount of pocket money, which they happily spent on candied fruit from the sweet shops along the way, with their dusty glass windows and dirt floors. The girls were always careful to clean the telltale mud off their shoes before they got back to the house.
Although they were warned about pickpockets, beggars and crooked shopkeepers, Olga and Tatiana took the street life of Shanghai in their stride. They were careful never to show their few coins outside of the sweet shop and they knew not to step in the puddles of urine, animal and human. They stayed well clear of the gutters with their slimy green contents and grew adept at avoiding the grasping hands of lepers and beggars. They found their courage in each other and dared to do together what they would never have done alone. It was as though they had a pact between them never to be afraid, and perhaps that was why nothing bad ever happened to them. They were confident—or at least they appeared confident—and even the angry curses of beggars to whom they refused to give money didn't frighten them.
I can still close my eyes and see the streets of Shanghai as they were in my childhood, with rows of grubby wooden houses leaning into each other and looking like they were about to collapse like a row of dominoes, open storefronts that offered everything from straw brooms or baskets and several varieties of rice or tea or flour, all heaped in open cloth sacks that stood upright on the floor, to candy and sweet drinks in dusty glass bottles, and dried fish, beans, nuts and lentils. Everything was weighed on brass scales and the prices were calculated by nimble fingers that flew across an abacus with lightning speed. There was smelly litter everywhere and mangy dogs, often with only three legs, covered in sores yet managing, somehow, to survive.
Shanghai was a busy place, full of traffic and noise and endless chatter. Children with dirty faces stared at the two Russian girls and giggled when they stared back. Women, sitting on small stools and smoking shaggy cigarettes, nursed babies, whose black eyes stared out of round faces, their sparse black hair standing straight up from their head as though they'd just had the fright of their life. Barbers cut men's hair right on the street and cleaned their ears with long toothpicks wrapped in cotton. There were countless food vendors selling fruits and vegetables, small shiny onions, stalks of curly cabbage, pear-shaped eggplants no bigger than a fist, and long green beans that were folded over into bundles. Carrots were as thick as broom handles or as thin as fingers. Lichee nuts still in their husks were sold by the stalk. Sometimes there were apples and pears. Hawkers huddled over charcoal fires, charring fish until the scales were white as ash, and cooking pieces of duck or chicken on smoking black iron grills. Coolies in wide cotton pants and flimsy sandals made of straw on their flat, splay-toed feet ran by, yoked with bamboo poles from which were suspended clay or brass pots and baskets laden with goods. What you could not find in the shops, you could find on the street. To Olga and Tatiana, it was the most exciting place in the world. Tatiana especially had caught Sergei's fever and saw only the endless possibilities of life in Shanghai.
They lived in the Concession française, right next to the British sector of the International Settlement, where handsome bearded and turbaned Sikhs directed traffic with authority,