The Last Mandarin

by Stephen Becker

“Then let it be Whore Street.”

  Feng took them into a dark and narrow side street out of the flow. A wineshop was open. A clam-and-mussel shop was just closing. Two women tripped along, bearing what seemed to be huge bundles of laundry. A late, forlorn noodle merchant noted the foreigner and stared. Above them a few stars struggled in a heavy sky.

  Whore Street was brighter lit: bulbs, lanterns, windows. From the Nagging Wife Wine Place came a gust of laughter. Burnham knew the street and was worried only that there would be foreigners, perhaps one who knew him. Such accidents could spoil a day and evoke gossip.

  Feng drew up. “If the gentleman would descend and display money.”

  “Why not?” Burnham asked, stepping down. He extracted his wads of paper money and made a show of riffling and counting. “Here, take a bundle. These ruffians may do me in.”

  Two beggars approached as if on cue, and beyond them more glided from crannies and doorways. Feng accepted the sheaf of bills, and tucked it away. The beggars did not touch Burnham, but whined. “I starve.” “The great lord will take pity.”

  Burnham’s flesh seemed to contract. This too was the smell of China, and not so romantic: pus, skin disease, the body’s careless wastes. The men were skeletons in rags, one disfigured by pockmarks, the other by slashed scars. One limped. “I have money,” Burnham said loudly.

  The two became six, then more. Their soft whine was scary; he wished they would jabber and shout. Through the robe he touched his pistol. “You listen,” he said, “all of you.” The whine continued. “There is money,” Burnham said, “but first silence.” Slowly the keening whimper subsided.

  All his life Burnham had known beggars, and still they horrified him. Maimed scarecrows outside all law, scarcely human, yet reminding him what men and women might become. Dull faces, only the gleam of avarice; twisted bodies, hands like birds’ feet.

  “I have traveled a thousand li,” he began. He had traveled thirty thousand li, but the number must be reasonable. “I have come a thousand li to speak with Head Beggar.” He had said kai-t’ou; now he used the second name, “the chi-t’ou.” They gazed stupidly. “There is money,” he repeated. “But I must find the kai-t’ou.”

  One murmured, “Who knows the kai-t’ou?”

  “You know your district leader.”

  The scarecrows stood silent, cold.

  “Then your neighborhood leader.”

  They blinked and spat. Again Burnham was overcome by the night, the dreamlike street, sinister shadow. Somewhere a woman spilled silver laughter.

  “There is no way,” a beggar said.

  “There is always a way,” Burnham said. “Come here now. All of you.”

  They stepped closer, their stench with them. Quickly Burnham peeled bills: “Here. One each. For this you will do me a service. I am the only foreigner at the Willow Wine Shop in Stone Buddha Alley. The chi-t’ou may find me there. You will tell others, and they will tell still others. There are lives to be saved or lost, do you understand?”

  They snatched at the bills. Burnham’s breath came shallow, and he stood tense: if they jumped him?

  “It is mysterious,” one said.

  “And irregular,” another said.

  “Still, it can be done,” a third said.

  “With luck.”

  The third said, “Very well. You have raised the wind, but do not hope for immediate rain.”

  Burnham breathed easy. “Go, then.”

  They melted away like phantoms.

  “Yüü.” Feng sighed. “It is perhaps not so bad to be a ricksha man.” He raised his right hand; the knife gleamed faintly.

  “A scary moment,” Burnham said.

  “They are evil men, and will take you by hidden ways. They will steal your money and send you to the house of the long sleep.”

  “That journey may be taken anytime,” Burnham said, “though I confess I am in no hurry. Still, he who hunts the tiger must not fear stray dogs.”

  “If they send for you,” Feng said, “you will take me along.”

  “No. If the worst is to be, then you must survive to tell the story later of the foolish foreigner who stood in Whore Street at night with a bag of gold.”

  “The gentleman is not foolish,” Feng muttered, “and not a foreigner.”

  “I thank you for that, my friend Feng. If you believe it, then will you, in the name of all the gods, stop calling me ‘the gentleman’?”

  “But what then?” Feng protested. “‘Elder brother’?”

  “It must be thought about. Meanwhile you may take me to the Beggars’ Hospital in Rat’s Alley.”

  “As the gentleman says.”

  Burnham descended from the pedicab and hesitated. His package lay on the seat. Accidents. A heart attack or a stray bullet, and Feng left to explain this odd parcel. Burnham tucked it under one arm. “Once again I may be some time.”

  Feng showed the open hands of acquiescence, pedaled toward the cumbersome two-wheeled wagon, ranged himself alongside and took the passenger’s seat. Burnham saw the bright eyes roving: Feng liked to know where the exits lay.

  Burnham too. He walked back to the open entrance and the admissions office. A distant machine gun clattered. He knocked and entered. In the glow of a feeble bulb he saw a desk, and at the desk, asleep, the dumpy woman of the sharp tongue.

  From the shadows a figure glided to him: another woman, gray-haired, a surgical mask, a black gown of medium length over the padded black trousers. She placed a finger to her lips.

  “Good evening,” Burnham whispered.

  The woman touched her surgical mask, and her forefinger said No. Burnham was annoyed; he had only whispered. But she pointed again to her own mouth, and he understood: she was dumb.

  The sleeping woman woke. Her chair creaked. Burnham turned to see, and caught his breath. The woman might or might not be beautiful, but in the dreamlike wash of dim and friendly light her round face and soft features emerged from centuries of night, dynasties, millennia: symmetrical, almond-eyed, a face from a scroll or sculpture. With that face she should be tall and her body willowy.

  She rose, peering, and he saw that glasses hung on a chain about her neck. She put them on. The woman was nearsighted and short. She might be willowy but that would be hard to say: she wore padded trousers and a short padded jacket buttoned in man’s fashion. Yet she was lovely, and he smiled.

  She was also sleepy, and still short-tempered. “What is it?”

  “Good evening,” Burnham said, only slightly offended, “and forgive me. I came some hours ago, and I am looking for Dr. Nien Hao-lan.”

  “Yes, I remember. And what do you want with Dr. Nien Hao-lan?”

  Again Burnham was stung. “‘Little ceremony and less grace.’”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said in queerly reminiscent English. “You must be American. Where did you learn a phrase like that?”

  “Aw, hell,” Burnham said. “Everybody talks English here.”

  “And why is that wonderful? You speak Chinese.”

  “True. Will you tell me where I can find Dr. Nien?”

  “I am Dr. Nien Hao-lan,” she said. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me where it hurts.”

  So he introduced himself, and they shook hands. Immediately there was much asking and telling, in a salty stew of Chinese and English, strangely intense talk, nervous, as if they had been introduced at a party where everyone else was handsome and rich and only they were uninteresting and homely. “I went west with the universities, I was just out of middle school,” she said. “You know about the great migration? The great trek west?”

  “Yes, of course. I went back to the States after … after Nanking, but I kept in touch.” Then did-you-know-this-one-and-that, and he had once met Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yatsen, and she remembered May 1938, when Chinese planes actually flew over western Japan and dropped leaflets, a moment of exaltation, like a great victory. She said wryly in Chinese that she was of good family—both par
ents dead now—and a brilliant student, and had proceeded from Chengtu to medical school in London. Burnham said, “Of course. That lovely accent.”

  “If you flatter,” she said, “I will confine myself to Chinese,” and he repeated what he had said to Tun the bicycle man—“He who lives by flattery works harder than the peasant”—at which she laughed a full, rich laugh and opened a box of Players to offer him one. He accepted the unaccustomed cigarette for companionship and because yes was more natural than no and refusal would chill the moment. He smoked and told her of his parents and his days in college and his war with and against the United States army, and how he had met the White Mikado and discovered in himself a disputatious tendency. She laughed again, a good round laugh and booming, almost a man’s laugh, but his mind saw her in silks, that liquefaction of her clothes, though at the moment she was a shapeless and nearsighted bundle, and bad-tempered to boot, as he now knew at first hand. He remembered also the vigorous and colorful language of her rebuke to the police, and the bull of a cranky sawbones he had imagined. He could not say why this dowdy doctor called to mind princesses, canopied boats on the Yangtze and tinkling cymbals.

  “Why do you look at me so?” she asked.

  “‘The flowers blush, and the moon hides her face.’”

  “Oh no,” she warned. “That is dangerous. Besides, you have said it before.”

  “Two hours ago,” he boasted, “the proprietor of a bicycle shop said it to me.”

  “An admirer,” she said. “That is social success indeed.”

  “I rebuked him. This isn’t an ordinary hospital, is it?”

  “It is scarcely a hospital at all. Officially, the Children’s Clinic. Unofficially …” She shrugged.

  “Unofficially, the Beggars’ Hospital.”

  “You know that?”

  “I have heard.”

  “Then we come back to my question. What do you want with Dr. Nien Hao-lan?”

  “I want to invite her to dinner,” he said.

  “Of course. Then a walk on the moon bridge, and a recitation of ancient poetry.”

  “Don’t be difficult. Have you eaten?”

  “No. I fell asleep.”

  “Then come to dinner.”

  “I’ll have to change.”

  “Change? Is this the Nien Hao-lan who curses police?”

  “You know that too. How do you know it?”

  “Come to dinner,” he said.

  “I have no choice. Mother!” she called. “Mother!”

  Burnham was alarmed. He had not intended to meet the family. The mute woman entered. “I must go out,” the doctor told her. “Send Dr. Shen to me.” The mute woman departed. “And now I will change,” Dr. Nien said to Burnham. “Wait here, please.” Her walk was brisk, not willowy. Not a princess but a doctor who knew more of him than he knew of himself: where his spleen was, for example, and possibly even why he wanted to smile like a child.

  Dr. Shen shambled in, muttering, and stopped short. He was a skinny young man and made white eyes. Burnham rose, and they introduced themselves and exchanged small talk, until a stunning, bosomy young woman, in a red-and-silver brocade dress slit well up both thighs, joined them, peered myopically at Burnham and said, “Claridge’s or the Ritz?”

  At which Dr. Shen gaped, and Mr. Burnham swallowed his astonishment and with difficulty subdued a savage pang of pure desire.

  Outside he said, “No, no. This way. I have my own vehicle.”

  “A rich Yankee.” She took his arm, and they walked to Feng, who scrambled to his feet and bowed.

  “This cart here,” Feng said.

  Burnham glanced at it. A tarpaulin covered it. “Yes?”

  “Perhaps the gentleman should look.”

  “Perhaps the gentleman should not,” Dr. Nien said, but made no move to stop him. “Perhaps not before dinner.”

  Burnham flung back the tarp.

  He did not understand. Piglets, perhaps.

  He peered closer. By the light of the full moon he saw the cold, naked corpses of perhaps thirty newborn babies.

  At the Black Duck he set his package on the table and ordered strong drink. Dr. Nien smoked with weary, ironic sympathy. “They cannot be left in the streets.”

  “You collect them?”

  “Mother collects them. It is her career.”

  “She is not your mother. Your mother is dead.”

  “True. This one is only a mute with no home. The beggars also bring us babies. Mother takes them to the burial ground, pushing her little cart. Picturesque Peking.”

  They spoke Chinese now, in public, in a pleasant, dim restaurant of many tables and no chairs, only benches. The walls and ceiling were smoked black. The waiter was expeditious; Burnham poured two cups of hot wine and dried his own at once.

  “It is worse in Shanghai,” she said. “Here we expect winter. In Shanghai winter seems to be a surprise every year, and the city is full of former country people who cannot cope.”

  “The war drove them in.”

  “As well starve in one place as another. But there are hundreds of thousands homeless.”

  “Well,” Burnham said awkwardly, “drink up.” What more could he say? Words failed: what words bore on death-in-life? Statistics, yes: in forty years the flower of civilization. East and West, had murdered sixty million men, women and children, and allowed to die how many hundreds of millions? And allowed to live in hopeless squalor and chronic hunger how many hundreds of millions more? What were thirty dead babies? Here diners laughed; dice rattled. A warm, subdued room, the smoky comfort of old wood, the lapping gleam of an open fire, the mellow odor of roast duck, the reassuring sight of fat birds on a turning spit. Burnham felt grossly foreign, and wondered who he really was.

  “Please.” She touched his hand. “It must be lived with.”

  His impulse was to cover her hand with his own, but he refrained. “There are simply no degrees,” he said. “I have seen more dead men than I could count, as you have, but …”

  “I know. Babies. Think of them as the lucky ones.”

  “In the house of the long night there is always room.”

  “You invent proverbs. You went to a Chinese school?”

  “Yes. My father insisted. Age six to age twelve.” He poured again and sipped. “Standing with Full Nose and Fat Ass—we all had nicknames—and shouting the classics. Then I would go home and my mother would teach me geography and English and Christianity and arithmetic.”

  “That was good luck. I learned English in middle school and college, from Americans, and then when I went to London I had to learn it all over again. Bung-ho, Burnham. Mud in your eye.”

  He raised his cup. “There’s more old drunkards than old doctors.”

  “That’s the stuff.” They caromed from language to language. Her eyes were bright, her gaze clear and affectionate; she was enjoying herself. Burnham felt gallant and unselfish; he patted her hand, and let his own lie on hers for a moment.

  “Before we go to hand-holding,” she said, “you must tell me what you want with Dr. Nien Hao-lan.”

  “Oh yes.” He sighed. “I was forgetting.” And he told her.

  “It’s all such nonsense,” she said. “In the first place, it’s none of your business. Americans, I mean. You want revenge for Nanking? You had Hiroshima. And Nanking is not yours to avenge.”

  The duck lay sliced, and a platter of pao-ping, little crêpes that the foreigners called “doilies,” to Burnham’s disgust; and leeks, and two sauces. Elegantly, with chopsticks, Burnham plucked up a pao-ping, laid it flat, dipped a slice of duck in plum sauce, set it on the pao-ping, added a leek, and then, still with chopsticks and frankly showing off, rolled up the pao-ping, picked it off the plate, and bit it in two. The taste had not changed; he made animal sounds. The pleasures of Chinese cookery were always mitigated by the ironies—famine, malnutrition, dead babies—but apparently some gustatory life-force was unquenchable. In the midst of death there is duck. Dumplings thou art
and to dumplings shall return.

  With clinical precision, Hao-lan outdid him.

  He admired: “You surgeon!”

  “Pediatrician.”

  The waiter hovered, a slim, aged man with a cobwebbed face. Burnham tapped the cruet and he glided off.

  “Who did what to whom is not my concern,” Burnham told her. “Some rough justice is being done. I’m only a hunter.”

  “The hunters are always foreigners,” she grumbled. “We Chinese could find the man.”

  “But we Chinese have not, and three years have passed.” He made the flat face of empty courtesy.

  “Now we have it,” she said. “The corrupt Chinese, hiding this monster.”

  “Or only indifferent, or busy with other matters. All things are possible,” he said. “Things have their root and their branches. Listen one listen, Doctor. I myself may be no more than bait for this fish. I may already be impaled on Fate’s hook. Lecture me no lectures.” In English: “Honest folks like you and me don’t know nuthin’.” And back to Chinese: “Only tell me about the hospital.”

  “Well, there is more to you than flirtation,” she said, and stabbed moodily at the platter. She constructed another duck roll, ate it in silence, and drank three full cups of wine with it.

  “We are almost six hundred million here,” she began then. “Just after the war there were fifteen thousand doctors. That is about one for every forty thousand people. There were also six thousand certified nurses and as many mid wives. One nurse or midwife for every fifty thousand people. Do you know how many trained modern dentists we had? Licensed to practice? Three hundred and fifty.”

  She had begun a long story, but Burnham made no objection. He had started this day in another country, hung over, and life had improved by the hour: Yen’s car, the Willow Wine Shop, tea in a defunct whorehouse with the last of the red-hot Manchus and an apprentice pimp. Wonders, freaks and prodigies. And here he sat, luckiest of men, at table in the Black Duck, the food and wine hot, and across from him shone the Lady Chrysanthemum, or Princess Snowdrop, who had journeyed around the world, performed wondrous feats and passed taxing tests, and returned to the Middle Kingdom bearing the magical caduceus. “It is, professionally speaking, a great balls-up,” she was saying. In the firelight her cheeks glowed ruddy, her black hair lay soft and threw off auburn sparks; her eyes were deep and sad, and the line of her jaw was so graceful, the pout of her lips so lush, that he ached. Not with desire—not yet, not now—but with foolish bliss. He would not exchange Peking for any other city, or Nien Hao-lan for any other woman, or, he thought, champing happily at his leek, the Black Duck for any other beanery.