Sunday, 14 February

Tenth day of the first lunar month

In the afternoon Vice Consul Zhao invited me to have dinner at the Consulate. I had a bath and hair cut at the Consulate and then a look in the shops. There was nothing worth buying as the wartime rations are so strict. The Consulate position was quite good, but the house is very old and dilapidated. I was told it was given to the Consulate by Overseas Chinese. In future I shall ask the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for some funding, either to build another office, or have it repaired.

In the evening the Special Envoy came to take me to a small Philharmonic Theatre for Concerts to watch Natasha Poltavka (Musical Comedy in 3 Acts). It was a story depicting the Ukraine. The first scene was set in front of a poor family’s house in a small village in the Ukraine. Natasha was a girl from a poor family, her father was an alcoholic and went bankrupt, and she moved with her mother to the small; village. When she was young she was in love with a young man called Petro and they saw each other as lifelong partners, but Petrov was also very poor, so he went away to try to make good. But no news had been heard from him for a long time and therefore Natasha missed him so much and sang the lyrics as “although you are poor, I am still waiting for you.” She sang quite well, and she also danced in the Ukrainian style but it was just average. A big landowner in the village, who was old and not very handsome, liked Natasha very much and proposed to her. Natasha sang the lyrics “although you are rich, I am not going to marry you”. In the second scene, the chief of the village the girl belonged to came to convince Natasha’s mother on behalf of the big landowner, and force Natasha to marry the big landowner. For the sake of her mother, she gave in reluctantly. She then sang “God, who is going to help me?” In the third scene, Natasha married the big landowner. The wedding ceremony is very odd in the Ukraine. The mother-in-law gives bread to the son-in-law, and the groom wears a red cloth over his shoulder, and the matchmaker has a red and white belt. After the ceremony, Petrov came back to his village via here. Petrov had already made a lot of money in the big city Kharkov and now looked for her. He then knew that she was already married, and was really disappointed. But the girl wanted to go back to Petrov.  Petrov sang two songs as “I should have arrived a day earlier”, and “if I cannot marry you I cannot live, I will die.” The tenor was quite good. The big landowner realised he couldn’t force it so he agreed to dissolve the marriage, so that the two lovers could marry. The whole play was not cast with first-class actors and the theatre was just average.