The Fan Tan Players Read online

  It took a few months of puzzled conversation with Uncle Yugevny before Nadia realized that she simply did not want to marry. She liked men; she liked talking to them, looking at them, even occasionally kissing them, but everything beyond that was out of the question. She put it down to some psychological block; something to do with what she’d witnessed in Tver when she was a little girl, something she had seen on the night of the great fire – she carried with her a mental image of a brutal ambush, a ferocious assault – and it left a deep, complex scar. And now it was abundantly clear to everyone who resided around the Largo da Sien that the pretty Russian girl with the short-haired flapper look and the sea-blue eyes would forever be single.

  If only, Nadia thought, pulling at the mosquito netting above her head, she could meet someone who reminded her of Papashka. Someone with his strength, his kindness, someone who could make her feel alive with joy. Maybe then she would reconsider marriage. And for that she was prepared to wait. Who cares if I’m almost thirty, she thought, if a man can’t give me what I want in life then I’ll simply stay home and quietly run the Tabacaria. To hell with these gloopee Macanese bachelors and their garlic-stuffed shrimps! To hell with black olives and authentic Portuguese cooking! Give me borsht and vegetable goluptsy any day! Nadia exuded a deep, long sigh, suddenly deflated. I’m twenty-eight, she thought once more, and my life has reached a dead end.

  For a while Nadia lay on her back, staring at the cracked plaster lines on the ceiling, then, feeling her body finally relax, she bit her lip gently and closed her eyes. She dug into a pocket of her nightgown and furled her small fist over something the shape of a crown; a piece of cloudy glass, weathered and smooth, the colour of aquamarine syrup. It was a keepsake, a lucky charm given to her by her father. The edges were rubbed soft. She felt the polished, fluid texture in her palm. Held it to her mouth.

  A heavy rain had started again outside. The emptiness of the night presented itself to her. She considered getting out of bed and scrubbing the bathroom walls, cleaning the sinks, but thought better of it. She pulled off her nightdress and imagined the sheets of water that lashed at the windows were soaking her, dousing her, cleansing her of something.

  Unclothed, on the edge of sleep, curled into a ball, she started to dream. A smell of scorching filled her thoughts. Pine cones exploded. Stone walls glowed. The sun disappeared beneath a sawtoothed layer of black cloud. No sooner had the images appeared behind her eyes than Nadia found them quickly fogging up, like breath on a mirror. Somewhere in the back of her dreams she began remembering – a yellow manor house, an estate deep in the forest, misty lean skies, bowls of lumpy gogol-mogol pudding, and, high in the trees, jewel-eyed blackbirds pushing their blue wings against the wintry air.

  4

  When Wednesday morning arrived the sky was a crisp pink and the veins of pale cloud on the horizon resembled streaks of light in an over-exposed photograph. It was eight o’clock and Nadia was standing in front of her uncle’s shop looking at the pistachio-shaded faµade, the display bow window and the sign above with the emporium’s name – Fillipov Tabacaria. The colonial-style, three-storey building was looking even more ramshackle than usual, she thought. The black wooden shutters on the second floor looked broken and the balcony on the third floor appeared to be sagging more than ever.

  She breathed in the tired post-monsoon air, heard the sound of passing rain on leaf, on the broad palm leaves in the Largo da Sien. Close by, she could see activity in the Senate Square. The curator and his minions were busy opening the doors and gates to the art gallery, courtyard garden and library. Just a minute earlier, she’d been watching the coolies digging into the clogged-up storm gutters with their emery-grey hands, and counting the lines of children returning to school. She could still smell the stench of the open drains. She covered her nose with a handkerchief and waited for her new friend, Izabel, to appear.

  From the main road, through the colonnades, Nadia could see Senhora de Souza in the window of her dress boutique purposefully fastening corsets to mannequins. Inside, she knew, there would be drawers full of rayon bloomers, picoted lingerie, chiffon hose. Turning, Nadia saw that, in the hair salon opposite, a Chinese girl was having her braids touched up with tassels of silk, and by the tea-houses she spotted a couple of men chattering to their pet songbirds, tilting their bamboo cages in return for a tune.

  Across the road, Izabel emerged from the darkened interior of her low-rise apartment building. She was wearing a sleek, loose-fitting dress, the same beige shoes with the closed toe and pale cotton stockings turned down to the knees; in her hand she carried a furled white-laced parasol. Nadia looked down at her own dark shoes, at the bare flesh between her socks and skirt – she knew Izabel was going to roast in such thick stockings and wondered why she wasn’t wearing her rayon ones. She wanted to say something but felt that she didn’t know her well enough to give advice. She watched Izabel sniff noisily at the air and rub her eyes, wondered whether her Mediterranean body clock took time to adjust to the subtleties of morning.

  ‘‘Bom dia,’’ Izabel said, taking in a large gulp of air then proceeding to choke on it. ‘‘Sorry I’m late. I had to drop the children off with the lady across the hall.’’

  ‘‘Alo,’’ said Nadia. ‘‘The parade’s already started.’’

  Izabel nodded. They began to stroll from the smart boutiques of the Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, through the arcaded sidewalks, towards the Rua Central. All around them they saw brightly painted shop signs made out in Portuguese and Chinese characters. Nadia began to point them out one by one. To the left was the Ming Fung Mercearia and Yu Chong Hing’s Dentista (picturing a cartoon hippopotamus with a great maw of pink gums and white teeth), to the right the Barberia Li & Lo with its turning blue-and-red pole. Because of the heat, the doors to each was open agape and Nadia could see framed portraits of Cheng Kai-shek on the walls, often next to ones of King Manuel II, the last of the Portuguese monarchs.

  Nadia introduced Izabel to Senhora de Souza, who was still struggling with a mannequin, and then, a little further down the road, they encountered an egg distributor called Carlos Ferreira, whose business comprised of three types of eggs – the ordinary kind with chalky pale shells, a second type which seemed to have been wrapped in strips of grass and straw and immersed in dried clay, and finally black-onyx-coloured ones with a translucent tar-like coating.

  Izabel grimaced at the black eggs, held her tongue.

  ‘‘Tastes fine if you douse them in vinegar and rice wine,’’ Nadia said, turning away to smile.

  They pushed into an alleyway filling up with people. The narrow travesa smelled of linseed oil and wet, old vegetables. Shoeless urchins kicked a feathered shuttlecock up in the air, striking it with the soles of their feet. Professional letter writers took dictation from their clients. Nadia and Izabel carried on walking through the bright and tawdry festive market. The air bent again with new and curious perfumes. From here there came a smell of joss sticks and burned paper offerings, from there the quite startling aromas of fried eels and rancid bean curd.

  ‘‘Which way?’’ asked Izabel. Perspiration beads were forming on her brow and upper lip.

  ‘‘Follow me,’’ said Nadia, taking her hand. And from somewhere high above, on a second or third floor balcony, came the clap, the resonant tile-on-wood slap of mahjong playing.

  ‘‘It is like two worlds that have collided headlong,’’ Izabel said, as she spied an old Cantonese lady on the street corner reading a week-old copy of the Jornal Acoriano Oriental. Next to her an elderly Portuguese man was sucking on a crescent of Chinese pomelo, checking out the headlines over the old woman’s shoulder. ‘‘You know,’’ said Izabel. ‘‘I still find it amazing how 15th century Portuguese traders managed to get here from Europe.’’

  They walked past a group of ear-cleaners who were setting up their stalls, lining up bottles of ethanol and home-made wire plungers.

  ‘‘Even more amazing,’’ Nadia said, ‘‘when y
ou think how successful they became in China. Within fifty years of first arriving, the Portuguese were doing such brisk business all along the Chinese coast that they made a deal with the local Mandarins making Macao their base. It was only once they signed the treaty that the Portuguese ships began arriving in force from Goa, overloaded with all kinds of things.’’

  ‘‘Such as what? Indian cotton?’’

  ‘‘Silver inlay from Arabia, African Ivory, cinnamon from Malacca, rhinoceros horn from Java, and all sorts of Euro„pean merchandise. After that, for a few years anyway, Macao became one of the wealthiest places in the world. Now it is just a dilapidated old city full of girls, gambling and opium.’’

  ‘‘How on earth do you know all that?’’ said Izabel.

  ‘‘I told you, I like to read.’’

  A man on a bicycle rattled past, eyelids skipping on the cobblestones; a block of ice was propped on his handlebars on its way to one of the hotel bars. He bellowed at the crowd to make way.

  A little further on, the girls paused at a street market. Amahs in white tunics and housewives in cloth pyjama-suits jostled to see what chicken feet or pig entrails the butcher might be selling on the cheap. Raw meat hung from hooks, live quails trilled from bamboo cages, dried-seafood merchants displayed triangles of sharks’ fin and cuttlefish. Some of the housewives shouted out their orders in Cantonese, others cried out in pidgin-Portuguese.

  A Chinese man with a round straw hat was placing row upon row of dried salted fish onto rattan mats. Their skins resembled crinkled tree bark, or the hide from some ancient elephant. ‘‘Bacalhau,’ said Izabel. ‘‘Dried cod, just like you find in Lisbon.’’ There were baskets of tiny whitebait too, while lines of ogre-faced ling fish hung from footpath rails. She shook her head disbelievingly. ‘‘What you must have thought when you first arrived here from Russia … I can’t imagine. Was your father in the diplomatic service? Is that why you came?’’

  ‘‘No. My mother and I travelled alone.’’

  ‘‘Alone? What was your mother thinking?’’

  Nadia’s eyebrows knotted at the carelessness of the remark. ‘‘Unfortunately,’’ she said, ‘‘we had no choice. My Uncle Yugevny came to collect us when we reached Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal.’’ She stopped abruptly.

  ‘‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. Have I upset you?’’

  Nadia shook her head. There was a silence. ‘‘No,’’ she eventually said. ‘‘You haven’t upset me.’’ But the fine lines around her eyes had deepened.

  A group of sun-tanned children came barging into them, caught up in the excitement of the market. They were laughing and giggling. Nadia remembered it being like this in Russia – when aged five, playing in her garden, her arms and legs as brown as a gypsy, her chest full of laughter.

  Neelzya, she heard herself say, trying to sweep the memories aside, but the images kept coming, and once again she saw the scattered fields of barley, the thatched cottages and the winding country lanes. There were silver firs and mountain ash that veiled the hills, sandy paths where cattle boys drove herds to water. She recalled the chattering birds that played in the trees and the molehills on the lawn that drove her father to despair and the pine smells of the forest that carried through to the house on gusty days, bringing with it the wet-earth aromas of the soil and the summer fragrance of freshly picked cotton.

  The house sat beside a pond with a thin pebble surround, set back among a grove of spruce and pine, fifty yards from a mountain stream, pale against the darkness of the hills behind. Nadia remembered that there used to be a fountain, skirted by lawnchairs, spluttering in the front garden, while in the back garden a vestibule and paved courtyard looked onto pear and apple orchards planted against the slope. There was a dovecot with windows shaped as crescent moons and stars. She used to call the daisies curling in the flowerbeds ‘her drowsy old gentlemen’ and the blackbirds in the trees her ‘shiny-beaked ladies’.

  Izabel’s smile, fixed at first, shrank from her face. She lifted her hands apologetically, as if in a gesture of peace. ‘‘I’m sorry if I said something wrong.’’

  Nadia glanced around at the faces of the crowd. The children had vanished. She felt a physical hollowness in the pit of her stomach. ‘‘Wrong?’’ she said, blinking quickly. ‘‘No, sorry, I was just daydreaming.’’ The childhood memories faded, leaving her with a feeling of grief and remorse. Grief at what she had lost and remorse at what she had failed to do all those years ago. Looking at the sky she remembered the charm her father had given her mere days before the fire, and the words he had whispered in her ear; she had learnt the words off by heart: The problem with us Russians is that we spend all our time reminiscing and forget about the present. We must love what we have now before it has vanished forever.

  Nadia shook her head slightly to clear her mind. She heard a sudden stir of activity and pointed towards a mass of colour and movement. ‘‘Over there, Izabel. Look! The parade!’’

  The clash of cymbals and the thud of cudgel on drum carried clear in the damp air. Commotion was everywhere. People walked along the top of roofs to gain a better view. Children swarmed along the front of the road – there were gongs and discs and acrobats stripped to the waist holding swords that glinted in the feeble sunlight. Three lions made out of bamboo and papier mache cavorted to the cymbal and gong melody. The lion heads were as large as wine vats: they had red, fleece-lined mandibles and round, protuberant eyes. The drums followed the lions; the cymbals followed the drum-players and the stilt-walkers followed everyone else. The huge eyelashes of the lions blinked and fluttered to the rhythm of the throbbing noise as its torso pounced and weaved in rapacious rage. A wailing toddler grew separated from her parents and squatted on the ground, covering her head with her hands for protection. It was a holiday crowd that had come in from the villages of Coloane and Taipa to celebrate the festival. The din of the lion dance grew louder.

  Nadia had to cup her hand over Izabel’s ear to make herself heard. ‘‘Let’s move closer to the temple,’’ she cried. A latticework of bamboo scaffolding enveloped some of the bigger buildings. The tall structure of the Taoist temple only served to catch the noise and throw it back at them – the laughter of the multitude, the sharp bangs of the sparklers and pinwheels exploding, the manic tinkling of pedicab bells. ‘‘See that over there …’’ said Nadia, ‘‘that’s what the Chinese call Big Step Street.’’

  ‘‘Strange name for a street.’’

  ‘‘There’s no tree cover here. When it gets really hot in the summer the barefooted rickshaw boys have to race through as fast as they can otherwise the soles of their feet get burnt.’’

  Izabel stooped and grazed the ground with her fingers. ‘‘Feels like a furnace already.’’

  They went into the praca, a vast square area flagged with shiny pale cobblestones. Around its edge were hundreds of people watching the show that took place at its centre; men wearing dragon-heads cavorted and whirled, clutching reptile tails made of teak; women handed out decorated parcels of long-life rice. Gymnasts from the various martial arts schools were performing feats of strength and agility. Their muscled arms were adorned with sandalwood paste as they formed human pyramids and snapped wooden boards with their fists. Long strings of firecrackers exploded, filling the square with choking smoke, and a band made up of trawler fishermen played unmelodious Cantonese music using bizarre wooden instruments.

  After half an hour the parade moved on, down towards the Praya Grande, passing the gates of the Hospital S. Lourenco. Nadia noted the air was beginning to smell as the morning sun intensified and she could see that Izabel’s face had pinkened from the heat. The sulphureous stink of firecrackers competed with the stench of the nearby soy sauce factory, where vats of condensing soya beans were putrefying in the open air. She leaned forward and placed the back of her hand against Izabel’s shoulder. She noticed that Izabel was staring at a rattan basket hanging outside the hospital gates.

  ‘‘What is that?’’ asked Iz
abel, lines etching into her face.

  Nadia looked at the basket. A palm leaf was fastened over it to shield its contents from the elements.

  ‘‘An abandoned baby.’’

  ‘‘What do you mean, a live baby?’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘But it will die in this heat.’’

  ‘‘Sometimes the hospitals will take them in … other times not.’’

  ‘‘How can you sound so nonchalant about it?’’

  ‘‘In China there are baby towers where infants are thrown to their deaths. It happens all the time. At least here, with the hospital, there’s a chance the baby may survive. You get used to it, I suppose. It’s hard to change what’s ingrained in their culture.’’

  ‘‘Nonsense!’’

  All of a sudden Izabel was pale. Her forehead was crumpled and frowning. She raced up to the gates and pulled the basket down, dislodging the rope that secured it to the metal bars. But the pannier was empty.

  ‘‘I don’t understand?’’ said Izabel, blinking into the sunlight.

  ‘‘Perhaps the hospital people took the baby inside.’’