by Jeremy Tiang
It is not far to the hostel, and she allows herself to meander through the trees. Prora is to her right, and although she looks hard for clues, she cannot work out which set of windows the party was in. Even with the graffiti as a marker, the surface is too uniform. And to her left is the Baltic Sea, flexing its surface with strong, regular waves. The green-black water reaches all the way to the horizon, and she imagines that she can just see, in the distance, other lands.
Sophia’s Aunt
WHEN DOCTOR’S WORDS confound Sophia’s patchy Mandarin, she says Pardon? but he just grows unhelpfully louder. Finally she says Wait, wait and calls her aunt. As the phone rings, she imagines the aunt’s ungainly progress through the camphorous apartment, catching her knee on the rosewood armchair, swearing in pungent bursts.
A click and muffled thud as the aunt pulls at the cord and demands, breathlessly, Yes?
I don’t know what Doctor wants. Can you ask him? Sophia has learnt that her aunt regards hellos and how-are-yous as wasted words, wasted time. She hands the phone to Doctor and leans her head against the smeary window as they have a quacking conversation. From four stories up, the view is bleak—gunmetal grey and churning dust. Yet whenever she mentions the pollution to a local, the reply is always the same: You should have seen it before the Olympics; it was a luxury to see the sky then.
A finger jabs her impatiently. It is Doctor, thrusting the phone back at her. The aunt says, He wanted to know about the— and then a jumble of sounds. I don’t— Sophia begins, and the aunt sighs. Artificial heart, she says in English. Mechanical.
We didn’t want that, protests Sophia. Gu Ma, can you tell him— she calls the woman Gu Ma, “Aunt”, even though she is Sophia’s father’s cousin, not his sister, from the branch of the family that stayed in China instead of coming to Singapore more than half a century ago.
Sophia passes the phone back to Doctor and they squawk away again. Both have Beijing accents, their voices arch and slurred. Her head aches. The noise is amplified by the narrow corridor, which smells not of antiseptic, as a hospital should, but of concrete and radiator dust. Doctor slots the phone into her hand as if she were a wall socket and marches away. She lifts it to her ear, but the aunt has already hung up.
She retrieves her bags from the nurses’ station and continues on to Nicholas’s ward. At visiting hours, families leave their doors open so the building feels like a many-storeyed village, children shuffling in corners and noisy wives telling husbands the latest gossip. She wanted Nicholas to go to a private clinic but the aunt vetoed that—the care wouldn’t be as good. Korean doctors, she sniffed. Japanese nurses.
They have at least insisted on a private ward. It is important that Nicholas has restful surroundings before his operation, and he can always earn the money to pay for this after his recovery. She turns a corner and the grinding noises of the lifts fade. The doors are farther apart here. They are the only foreigners in this section, though if she does not speak she can pass for a local.
Nicholas is watching television when she comes in, although he can’t understand a word of Chinese. He claims to follow the sense, but she thinks he just wants a voice in the room. She has left him a small stack of index cards on which her aunt has written “Bring water” or “Turn down heating”. A chaste kiss, as always, then she begins pulling containers from her bags. Over Sophia’s protests, the aunt insisted on doing the cooking. Your cooking is the reason he’s sick, she retorted, and there was enough truth in that to silence Sophia. She still remembers the consultant, after his first collapse, talking about hypertension, the silent killer; blaming stress as well as too much fat and salt—and her guilty recollection of all those steaks fried in butter, all that French patisserie.
The hospital does not provide food, which had surprised Sophia, but then she is not sure she would have trusted anything they served. She pushes the folding table out across Nicholas’s bed, and places bowls and plastic containers within easy reach. He will not eat all of this, the variety is intended only to stimulate his appetite. She sets out double-boiled soup—just a little, they are supposed to be restricting fluid intake—stewed pork, steamed fish, fluffy white rice. He brings a shaky spoonful to his mouth.
Sophia goes to the market every morning with the aunt, paying pennies for an array of meats, fish lifted live from a basin and splayed open in front of them, making sure everything is fresh and untainted. She has heard terrible stories about processed foods. One is playing out on the news at the moment: a milk powder scandal, babies dying from formula adulterated with melamine. She shudders, imagining sniffing at a bottle—Something’s off. A bit too chalky? No, I’m sure it’s fine…
When Nicholas has had enough, the food goes back into the tote bags it arrived in, boxes slotting neatly together, cutlery wrapped in a paper towel. She pours him some tea from a thermos and blows to cool it before touching it to his lips. In the first days, she felt the need to keep up a stream of chat, filling the dead air. Now she sees that her presence is enough. She reads him an article from The Economist— something about Elizabeth Warren, which he snorts at, a glimpse of his old self.
The nurses come as usual, day shift handing over to night. Both are young, alike enough to be sisters. They smile and jabber rapidly over his chart. Sophia is sure they linger in the doorway longer than is strictly necessary, as if still taken with the novelty of having a white man on their floor. Finally, she thanks them pointedly and they go.
They did more tests today, says Nicholas, shrugging as if to forestall her next question. Who knows what for? They took some blood, labelled it, and packed the vials neatly into a plastic box that whizzed off on a trolley. So much of him, circulating in unknown parts of the hospital.
Sophia nods, then remembers. The doctor said something about a mechanical heart. I got Gu Ma to say you’d never had one—though I’m not sure if he was asking that, or if you wanted one. This was an option they’d been offered in Singapore, when it became clear that Nicholas did not meet the criteria to get on the transplant waiting list. It seemed plausible at first. What is the heart except a pump, what does it do that a machine cannot? But this would only ever be a temporary measure, and he didn’t want to live a patchwork life, buying one year at a time, never knowing how much longer—
They already have this information, he says. They keep asking me the same questions. I hope nothing’s—
Gu Ma says nothing will go wrong. You’re a textbook case. The aunt works with liver, but knows someone in the heart work-unit and managed to get Nicholas admitted that way. As long as you’re able to pay, she said. They’ll do a good job for you.
They slip into another silence. She straightens his bedspread, which is far too short for him; his feet stick out at the end. His toenails need cutting, but she has not brought clippers. The sunlight has almost gone by the time she puts on the light, which shows up stained linoleum, grimy salmon-pink walls. She has never actually seen a cockroach in the building, but suspects they lurk just out of sight.
When Nicholas collapsed, her first thought was that this must be one of his opaque practical jokes, embarrassing her in the middle of IKEA. She stood helpless, cross, until people came running. A store assistant started CPR. Understanding only arrived with the ambulance. She sat in the back, thinking, But this doesn’t happen to people like us.
How long ago was that? Months. Weeks. She finds it hard to pin time down, and in the eternal summer of Singapore there are no natural breaks of season to mark its passing, only school holidays for those so afflicted. She sometimes passes on news of the outside world—a new Goldman Sachs scandal, some faraway natural disaster—which he contrives to seem interested in, but really the world has shrunk to the two of them, just these walls, just the stubborn passages inside his heart which will not function as they should.
We’re so lucky Gu Ma brought us here, she says ritualistically, for maybe the tenth time, unsure whether she is trying to arouse gratitude in herself, or merely appear grateful so th
e universe will not take even this chance away from them. Yes, says Nicholas. Very lucky. They could never, on their own, have negotiated their way into this hospital, not without the aunt to speak to certain people, to scribble her way through swathes of paperwork with the élan of someone who’s lived her life within a low-tech bureaucracy.
They play a word-hunt game on her iPad and Nicholas cheats flagrantly, which she pretends not to notice. It is a relief when Nurse comes to tell her to please leave, come again tomorrow. Sophia kisses her husband’s dry lips and joins the families clustering in the hallways, laughing and shouting at children to stop running. Her insides are heavy, as if the grey outside sky has taken up residence in her. She is somehow unable to fit into the rhythm of the people around her, and keeps getting bumped into.
Her phone rings as she reaches the car park. She knows it will be the aunt, and breathes in-out rapidly three times before pressing “answer”. Gu Ma?
Finished? Can’t pick you up today. Meeting. The aunt has a lot of meetings. Sophia has not been able to decipher what these might be—something to do with work, or the Party? She does not want to know.
That’s fine, she says. I’ll take a taxi. She remembers to use the proper Mandarin word, “jichengche”, not the Singaporean “deshi”—a bastardisation of the English.
Don’t tell the driver where you’re from.
Sophia sighs. Don’t worry. I’ll just say I’m from the South. The aunt is certain that all Beijing taxi drivers, being rogues, will overcharge her mercilessly if they find out she is foreign.
I don’t know what time I’ll be back. Don’t wait for me to eat.
Yes. Sophia hesitates, but the words bubble up. Gu Ma, will he be all right?
The aunt sniffs. Don’t worry for nothing. Old Cheng will do a good job. He’s done so many hearts over the years—for him, it’s just like putting a new battery into your alarm clock. Old Cheng is the former colleague. Sophia isn’t very sure about how they are connected. Camp-mates during re-education? Something like that.
Thank you, says Sophia to the click of the aunt hanging up.
The sky is inky blue as she walks round to the front of the building, the roadside trees are sharp silhouettes. She thinks of the Chinese word “qing”, which means something between black and green, the exact colour of a tree at dusk.
That was a good phone call, she considers. Talking to the aunt is an obstacle course, especially with her limited Mandarin. She counts a conversation successful if it passes without real awkwardness on either side. It doesn’t help that she barely knows the aunt—their families were only able to get back in touch after China opened its borders in the eighties. She has a childhood memory of a loud-voiced woman visiting once, her clothes plain and washed thin, smelling of unaired rooms. She is in her sixties now, a squat figure with formidable powers of persuasion.
It can’t have been easy being a female doctor, and perhaps this is why the aunt never married. Sophia knows she should show an interest, but can’t find the energy to ask these questions—to find out some of what the last fifty years have been like. And there are always more pressing things to discuss: Nicholas’s food, Nicholas’s medicine. She remembers her father once saying something about high-powered friends, about how she could have risen higher if not for political factions—but this is all part of the wall of unknowing that now surrounds Sophia: China, the aunt’s past, Nicholas’s illness. Each overwhelming, too large to contemplate or unpick.
Outside the hospital is a sculpture on a tall pedestal. High overhead, two bronze hands, each the size of a man’s head, clasp each other, the lower hand clearly being pulled out of some danger. The upper hand is fringed with the edge of a sleeve, on which it is just possible to make out the emblem of a five-pointed star, heraldic leaves below it.
Her own hands clasped for warmth, Sophia stands by the road. Even though winter is supposed to be on its way out. the air is chilly. She shivers as she checks that she still has all her bags. A man is selling roasted chestnuts nearby, his brazier exuding charred, smoky fumes. If only I could be saved, she thinks, stretching her arm out into the road to stop a taxi.
■ ■ ■
At two in the morning, the concrete walls begin to sweat. They must turn off the heating at night for the building to chill so rapidly. This is Nicholas’s worst time of night, when he gives up trying to force himself into sleep. Perhaps tonight it is better this way, rather than sleeping through what could be his last hours of life.
He tries to divert his mind, but now it slips into well-trammelled lines. If he dies on the table—or if he lives, but is no better off than before—or if it works, and he is magically back the way he was before, strong and whole, and they can go home. None of these possibilities feel real to him, and there seems to be no reason why he shouldn’t be here forever, in this dank bunker of a room, listening to the coughs seeping in from adjacent wards.
Most of all, it seems inconceivable that a stranger’s heart will beat inside his chest. He has spent the day visualising the heart of each person around him, doctors, cleaners, even Sophia—stripping away the layers, skin and fat and muscle, laying bare the dark red core, pistons pumping or sluicing in their grooves. He imagines giant scalpels neatly filching one swollen muscle, replacing it with another.
It has been a year of strangeness. The blank disbelief on Sophia’s face as they stretchered him away. All the way to the hospital, Sophia squeezed his hand. When he told her this, she said it was impossible, he didn’t recover consciousness until later that afternoon. Now he keeps his recollections to himself.
His vocabulary has expanded over this year. He has learnt the precise medical terms for each of his symptoms—the heaviness keeping him awake is pulmonary oedema, his weak heart no longer able to pump the fluid from his lungs. He knows the difference between aortic and ventricular aneurysms. Some of this comes from doctors, but also hearsay, piles of medical journals, and most of all the Internet. The last few days have been a release, no Wi-Fi at the hospital, the firewall preventing Sophia even reading out good wishes on Facebook: the deadening parade of friends who feel they ought to say something.
He makes a list in his head of people who might miss him when he is gone. He has no family to speak of. Sophia, of course—but for how long? And friends—but again, he can think of only a couple he would want in the room right now. Can he remember the names of all thirty-four MBA classmates, all twenty-seven people from his college choir? How many of them will remember him?
But this is morbid. He reaches for his bedside water bottle before remembering that it’s been taken away, the nurses placing their hands firmly across their mouths in a gesture of abstinence. He remembers an episode from his childhood: their family cat wasn’t supposed to eat anything before the spaying, but it jumped up on the breakfast table and snatched a scrap of food. They took it to the vet anyway, and it died under anaesthetic, choking to death on regurgitated ham.
If Sophia were here—and now he feels resentful that she is not. She would have stayed, but he sent her away. He couldn’t allow it. He’d be fine, he was a big boy. All the things he felt he was expected to say. And so she went off to spend another night on the aunt’s creaky sleeper-sofa, probably little more comfortable than one of the plastic hospital chairs, or indeed his current bed. He feels that she might have offered one more time.
And once again his mind fills with Sophia. He will never get to sleep at this rate. If she were here, if she were to attain one of her rare periods of calm—when she is still, her outline no longer flickering, her voice suddenly gentle. If she would just pull her fingers through his hair, just once, knead the precise spot on his neck that makes all the tension leave his body. Tears prickle at his eyes and he is horrified. To be sniffling like a schoolboy when he will see her tomorrow!
He imagines himself whole again. Perhaps a year, Doctor said—at least according to Sophia’s translation, which he mistrusts. He suspects her of eliding inconvenient statements, or glossing
over words she does not understand. She has never been particularly good at Mandarin. At her school, she once told him, it was an article of pride to speak it badly, to be ultra-fluent in English instead—and he has noticed her anxious, furrowed concentration whenever Doctor speaks.
Nicholas is still a young man with almost all his hair, but must acknowledge his outline is not as firm as it once was. He runs his hands over his belly, comfortably flat now he is lying down, and wonders if this degradation is the result of a year of enforced indolence—no gym, no five-a-side—or the inevitable decline of a man in his middle thirties, the first supports giving way before the entire edifice collapses. When I am strong again, he promises, I will start jogging.
The wall clock opposite the bed is barely visible. He squints through the gloom, trying to distinguish the minute hand from shadow. Is the short hand before or after three? He doesn’t want to turn on the light and bring himself to full wakefulness. At least in the dark he can glide along the surface of consciousness. Several times now he has felt a shift, as if he’d fallen into a stretch of light sleep, or at least had his mind empty momentarily.
This is his eighth night in Beijing, a city he has visited many times before, but never really seen. His memories are mostly of the insides of buildings—meeting rooms, cocktail bars. A world of work that once seemed barely tolerable, a laughable exercise in moneymaking until real success found him. Now he finds he cannot wait to get back to it. To knot his tie, step into polished shoes, allow the numbers to run through his brain, familiar as slipping into a warm bath.
He has been out with Sophia only once in Beijing, on a day when the low winter sunlight seemed too enticing to ignore. They took a taxi to one of the large parks, full of humanity even on such a cold day. Huai Hai Gong Yuan, Sophia read doubtfully off the sign at the entrance. “Hai” is “sea”, maybe that’s the lake? They had to pay to go in. His skin was grey in full daylight, actually grey.
