Whispering Death

29

No Home Digest or Decor this time. Grace had pictures in her head.

She dressed down that Saturday morning-a broad-brimmed green cotton hat, cheaply elaborate sunglasses, shapeless T-shirt and outmoded cargo pants-and drove to Geelong, where she bought time at an Internet cafe. She needed to find out more about the Niekirks without leaving the search record on her own gear. The disguise was for the CCTV cameras.

First she Googled ‘Warren Niekirk’, assuming he was the main player, but quickly learned that he’d been no more than a vaguely competent real estate salesman who’d had the brains, or luck, to marry into the Krasnov family, prominent Sydney art dealers. Under their patronage he’d become a vaguely competent second-hand dealer, specialising in vintage and veteran motorcars and aircraft.

So Grace concentrated on Mara Niekirk. According to the official Krasnov website, Marianna was the daughter of Peter (born Pyotr) Krasnov and granddaughter of the late Theodor (Feodor) Krasnov, the man behind Cossacks, a successful gallery and art dealership on Sydney’s North Shore. It was all froth and bubbles, so she searched other sites, finding whispers and murmurs of Krasnov dodginess. Fake and stolen art, forged catalogues and provenance, and artists ripped off.

Grace returned to the Krasnov website and a moment later was reading something that made her scalp prickle. Mara’s grandfather came from a White Russian family in the city of Harbin, on the wild and sparsely settled Manchurian steppes. That explained why she’d been so riveted by the icon she’d seen hanging inside the Niekirks’ glassed-in walkway.

She closed her eyes. She hadn’t journeyed through life with much of a past to anchor her, only a couple of names-‘Harbin’, ‘Nina’lurking in her consciousness, and one old photograph.

The photograph, currently stashed in her safe-deposit box, showed an old man and an old woman posed against a whitewashed interior wall, a hint of sturdy peasantry in their squat shapes, their shapeless coats, the old woman’s headscarf. And, hanging behind the old man’s shoulder, was the Niekirks’ icon. And, inked on the back of the photograph, were the words: Nadezhda and Pavel, Harbin, 1938.

Who were Nadezhda and Pavel to her?

What was Mara Niekirk doing with their icon?

If it was the same icon.

The town of Harbin linked them, so Grace Googled it.

Harbin had started life as a collection of tents erected by Russian railway engineers in the late nineteenth century. It remained a railway outpost for thirty years and then, almost overnight, became home to tens of thousands of White Russians who had fled from the Red Army after the 1917 revolution. By the Second World War, Harbin was a bustling regional city of some grace and culture: opera and ballet companies, a symphony orchestra, a conservatorium, a technical college, many fine Russian Orthodox churches, Churin’s department store and exclusive schools in the old St Petersburg style. But if Harbin’s White Russian refugees were preserving pre-revolutionary Russian life and culture in Harbin, they were also waiting for anti-monarchist and anti-Christian Soviet Russia to fail. When that happened, they would return. ‘We are temporarily deprived of our Motherland,’ one man wrote, ‘but the battle for the true Russia has not ceased, merely taken on new forms.’

Grace glanced around the Internet cafe. A couple of backpackers, one or two poor-looking students, some elderly men and women. No one was interested in her. They were reading their e-mails, looking for aristocrats or convicts in their family trees. She returned to the history of the Krasnovs.

Mara’s grandfather Theodor was born in 1920, the son of a White Russian colonel who had escaped from Vladivostok in 1919 and married a young woman named Tatiana, a true Harbintsy, born and raised on the outpost, the daughter of a engineer on the Chinese Eastern Railway. The family had servants, wealth, influence. They prospered even during the Great Depression and the occupation by Japanese forces.

Wealth, thought Grace. Influence. How did they get it? How did they keep it? They even survived the Red Army liberation of Harbin in 1945, the year Mara’s father was born, although according to the website they were passionate anti-Reds. There were plenty of stories of treachery in Harbin. Some White Russians collaborated with the Japanese, others spied on and harassed anyone with Soviet citizenship or sympathies, and a handful robbed and kidnapped wealthy Jews, and even made their way west to help the Waffen SS fight the Red Army.

But at the war’s end the Krasnovs slipped through the net, and by 1949 were living in Shanghai.

So who did they pay off? Where did the money come from? Grace pictured the old couple in her photograph; nothing to their names but a few treasures from the motherland, some jewels, an icon. An old couple like that might fall into debt to a family like the Krasnovs.

What was the true story of the Krasnovs in Manchuria? She Googled a range of words and phrases but found only references to the family website and the North Shore gallery.

And the sugar-coated story of how, in the emigration wave of the 1950s, with time running out for the White Russians in China and most headed for Europe, Canada and the United States, the Krasnovs chose Australia. Theodor, by then in his early thirties, thrived as an art and antiques dealer-using valuables stolen from fellow Russians, guessed Grace-and set up the gallery, Cossacks. When he died his son, Peter, built on his success.

Not only that: Peter’s daughter, Mara, true to the traditions of her family, had branched out to establish a successful art and antiques business on the beautiful Mornington Peninsula in Victoria.

Blah, blah, blah.

It was almost 1 p.m. Grace paid for another half hour and gave herself a crash course in icons. Strange tingles went through her as she searched, ghost memories, trace emotions from her childhood, echoing the punch to the heart she’d felt yesterday, when she’d peered through Mara Niekirk’s glass wall.

First she tried to date the icon. More modern than the Kiev and Novgorod schools of the thirteenth century; smaller, too. Grace thought the icon hanging in the Niekirks’ walkway, like the one depicted in her heirloom photograph, was about 20 cm x 30 cm. Most of the icons she found pictured and described on the Internet were three or four times that size, but the later ones seemed to get smaller. She found a Simon Ushkarov from 1676, The Archangel Michael Trampling the Devil Underfoot that was 23 cm x 20.5 cm.

Subject matter. Usually the Virgin, or the Madonna and child. Painted on wood, the halo in gold leaf, sometimes the face and background too. Considered to be the Gospel in paint. Praises to the Mother of God, they were titled. The Softening of Cruel Hearts.

Then Grace found O All-Hymned Mother, created in the late 1700s in the Old Believers’ workshop in Holui village in the Volga River region of central Russia. It showed mother and child posing in vivid colours, a rich play in the folds of drapery, tender melancholy in the Virgin’s face. Decorated with gold leaf and a thin film of tempera, it glowed on Grace’s screen as if lit from within.

Not her icon, but pretty close; possibly from the same village.

‘Oh, that’s so beautiful.’

Grace turned carefully. An elderly woman was looking over her shoulder.

‘Don’t mind me, I’m just a busybody. You must be an art student.’

‘Yes,’ Grace said, and she reached, very carefully, for the mouse and closed down the site, sighing, ‘and I’ve got an essay to write.’