Winds Over Manchuria by Alla Crone

Author:Alla Crone
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504029681
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

PART III

Harbin, Manchuria

Chapter Twenty-one

In September 1931, the hot dust storms from the Gobi Desert that blew over Harbin each spring and early summer were only a memory, and autumn leaves floated to the sidewalks, nestling in grimy crevices of cobbled streets. Occasional gusts of wind filtering from Siberian steppes cooled the dry heat and chased the high clouds across the sky.

With the influx of Russian refugees during the 1917 Revolution, Harbin had now become a sprawling metropolis and a cultural center of its host nation. In uptown Novy Gorod schoolgirls in brown uniforms with black pinafores scurried to the Oksakovskaya School for Girls, and a few blocks away blue-uniformed children hurried to the YMCA Grammar School. Shortly thereafter their mothers appeared at the entrance of the Churin and Co. department store, a few blocks away, at the corner of the Bolshoi Prospekt and Novotorgovaya Street, to await its opening. The two-story gray-stone building occupied half a square block. With a Byzantine dome, ornate iron grille balcony above the main entrance, and fringed awnings over the ground-floor display windows, Churin’s dominated a busy intersection of uptown commerce and was a favorite with fashionable shoppers.

Inside, the busiest department was a grocery section, where delicatessen counters boasted gourmet items. There were chocolates from France; Turkish halvah of sesame and honey in both chocolate and vanilla flavors; smoked eel; spiced sausage from Germany; and Nadya’s favorite, Near Eastern prune sausage—a chewy, compact confection mixed with walnuts.

But it was beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea that she could never pass without buying at least a small can to take home. It gave her a certain sense of satisfaction to be able to indulge herself with an occasional treat without worrying about the expense.

She enjoyed shopping at Churin’s—a pleasure enhanced by the deference and recognition shown her by store employees and, not least, by the admiring looks of male shoppers. At thirty-five she had bloomed into a beautiful woman. Her figure had filled out, but her graceful bearing made her appear more statuesque than heavy and taller than her five feet six.

Today, wearing a pale green wool suit with a narrow skirt that reached to mid-calf and a matching hat slanted over one brow, she shopped in the store for an hour before picking up the wrapped caviar and walking out into the cool morning.

The sidewalk teemed with people, many of whom were sitting on long benches where shrubbery protected them from the street. This was a favorite place among the young to see and be seen, and Nadya, chuckling to herself, compared them to the promenaders on the English Quay in St. Petersburg. She turned onto the Bolshoi Prospekt and headed toward Girinskaya Street and her home two blocks away. She nodded frequently to passersby who recognized her, for after eleven years in Harbin she was well known as the sister of a prominent physician in town and a talented poet in her own right.

It had not been easy at first. When they arrived in

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