The Last Mandarin

by Stephen Becker

  “An internal infection caused by a parasite, borne by a fly. It used to be a problem in Szechuan and the northwest. With the war, and all the shuffling, it spread. A protozoan. No fun.”

  “No fun.” Some of these tots were skin and bones, others more potbellied than the stove. At least one girl seemed totally blind. The walls were streaked, the old floor waxed dark. Odors rose and mingled: urine, alcohol, a faint overlay of rot. The blind girl seemed to listen; was this strange language a menace?

  “What happens,” Hao-lan said, “is that these little Leishman-Donovan bodies muck about with the spleen and liver and phagocytes.” This was gibberish to Burnham but he knew the information was nothing and the tone was all, bitter and flat, an absence of passion that had set in long before, when anger was exhausted. “This causes anemia, emaciation, irregular fever and a sharp drop in the number of white corpuscles. The liver swells and the spleen balloons. If you want, I’ll let you feel a spleen. I have one so badly swollen that it runs all the way from the stomach down to the crest of the pelvic bone. The girl is eleven. The best way to diagnose is to stick a long needle right down into the spleen and—”

  “Stop it now,” he said, and slewed her gently, his hands firm on her shoulders; he kissed her forehead and held her for some moments. “It’s necessary work. It’s noble.”

  “It’s miserable and I hate it.” Her voice was like iron; she muffled it, pressing her face to his chest. “It’s mostly nursing care. We need something called a Romanovsky stain for diagnosis and we have none and the government won’t give us any and we have to beg it from the national hospital or the missionaries. And kala-azar isn’t all.” She pulled away and the words tumbled: “There’s simple malnutrition and battered children and girls raped. Little girls. And there are some with dysentery and some with meningitis, and we haven’t even started on normal diseases and accidents. The lucky ones are the little dead ones Mother brings in, or the beggars—twenty, thirty, forty a day.” Her voice had rung shrill, and Burnham tightened his hold: on her, on himself.

  She felt his anger. “We needn’t stay here,” she said. “The children amuse themselves.”

  “No need to flee.”

  “But it bothers you.”

  “Christ yes, it bothers me! I don’t like hospitals. I don’t like sick children. I don’t like a world where … ah, the Lord works in mysterious ways!”

  “The Lord.”

  “A notorious bungler,” he said. A boy of ten or so offered him a block. Burnham released Hao-lan’s hand and knelt to make a house of blocks. Children drifted closer. The house rose tier by tier. There seemed an infinity of blocks, wooden blocks, stone blocks, tiny concrete blocks.

  “From various demolitions,” Hao-lan said. “The beggars loot old sites. They bring pipes and wire, too, and tiles; they can be sold to the scrap merchants, and the money buys food.”

  Burnham’s house was waist-high. Enough. He stepped back, forcing a smile. Immediately a boy ran forward, buzzing like an aircraft, his arms wings, and flung himself onto the house, razing it with a great clatter. A shout of laughter rewarded him. Half a dozen kids commenced reconstruction, chattering and conferring. Many of the little heads were shaved. Many of the little eyes were caked. Many of the little faces were marred by sores. Ragged shoe soles flapped. The blind girl listened.

  A vast dismay chilled Burnham, a numbing horror. Swept by obscure shame, he wished for whiskey. What fun it was to gallivant through China! What a romantic, exotic life! Guns and drums and wounds and women! “I think I want to go now,” he said. Hao-lan touched his cheek.

  In the office he met Dr. Teng, lean and silent, nodded to Mother and a nurse, and sat with Hao-lan. The chill vanished; between them a dizzying, unquenchable joy seemed to leap and spark. “At this late date,” he said, “the foolishness of first love is embarrassing.”

  “Nobody will laugh at you,” she said shyly.

  “I’ll come for you tonight,” he said, “but I have things to do and I may be late.”

  “Things?”

  “I don’t really care much any more. Yesterday I saw mysteries, plots, wheels within wheels. Today I see a lot of tired, sick flesh and blood. Sung Yun even, with his dirty money. Yen playing cop while the world blows up around him. Ming from the funny papers.”

  “You’re tired.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  She dimpled with the guilty, gleeful smile of a sinful girl, and he laughed at the innocence of it. “I’ll give it one last try with the beggars,” he said.

  “Be careful.”

  “I will. I wish …”

  They were silent for a moment. “So do I,” she said. “Did you sleep?”

  “A little. I’ll nap now. You?”

  “A little. I wish we lived on some other planet.”

  “Just the two of us.”

  “Fields. Lakes.”

  “Fat fish.”

  “And no nasty protozoa.”

  “Poor girl. What a hell of a time you must have.”

  “It could be worse,” she said. “I could be a patient.”

  Feng took him home. “I saw nothing.”

  “Perhaps there is nothing to see. Perhaps it is all foolishness. The man may be dead. Back in Japan. Out west and a bandit. But come for me at six, will you? We must toss one last stone, to see if the sleepers wake.”

  But it was not Burnham who tossed the stone; Burnham was the sleeper who woke. He woke in gloom, confused, haunted by the last tatters of a bad dream: assassins, exile.

  He knew that he was not alone in his small room. He cursed Hai for a bungler. As usual, his weapons were not handy. He lay in the half-darkness, unmoving, barely breathing.

  A match flared, and lit the stub of a candle. Burnham saw two men. He saw only one knife but it was sufficient; its point approached and pricked his neck. This was annoying, and Burnham felt that resentment was justified, but the other thug held Burnham’s .38 affectionately, and the instant did not seem propitious for heroics.

  Knife said, “Come along now. Rise slowly, and dress warmly.”

  Pistol made big gray teeth.

  Burnham obeyed. His blood jangled, his brain creaked, and he wanted to brush his teeth. It was bad form to be abducted with hairy lips, an emery tongue and a head full of sawdust. “How did you enter?”

  Knife said, “The alleys and the window. One man’s out is another man’s in. Hsü! You are a big fellow.”

  “Who are you?” Better off without weapons. Do not stir up the natives. He would use his wits: a rare opportunity.

  “The scum of the earth,” Knife said.

  Burnham’s roll of bills seemed intact.

  “The hat,” said Knife.

  Burnham donned the fur hat. Knife grinned, and pricked Burnham’s chin. Later Burnham realized that Pistol had sapped him with his own .38. Now there was only an explosion of light, and then darkness.

  Shadows ebbed and surged like waves. Burnham saw a vast flat field and a red swastika. A crowd whispered.

  He lay on his back. The shadows ceased to ebb and surge, and only flickered. Lamps. He was in a room and staring at a wall. The red swastika was painted on the wall, the color of fresh blood. The crowd buzzed and hummed like bees.

  Burnham’s head ached slightly but he was glad enough to be alive. He was not bound; he rubbed his face and sat up. The voices died. His head throbbed.

  It was a left-handed swastika and therefore Buddhist. This was good news. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof without Nazis. Furthermore the Buddhist swastika signified good luck.

  The room seemed to be a disused restaurant or shop. A couple of dozen men and women watched him, some sitting on wooden benches along the wall and most smoking. To the rear a kettle sat on a stone stove.

  Burnham had been lying on a stone bed. His pistol and knife had not been restored to him. We’ll have to scrape by on charm, he told himself, and bobbed a nod at the men and women. Beggars all. “Is there water?” he asked. �
�I am always thirsty after being beaten about the head.”

  The others gazed at a scrawny man of middle age, who nodded. A woman moved to pour water, and brought it to Burnham in an earthen bowl. He drank it off. It was pure and sweet. “Thank you,” he said. She took the bowl and withdrew.

  “Our visitor is a gentleman,” a scratchy voice intoned.

  The speaker stood beside a large table concocted of planks and bricks. Burnham rose and stepped toward him. On the table lay stacks of documents and heaps of currency, and a couple of ballpoint pens, still rare in China; this was a modern enterprise. There was a lamp too, the old-fashioned standard oil-for-the-lamps-of-China lamp. It cast a trembling light on Head Beggar.

  The kai-t’ou was a rooster of a man, in padded trousers and a short padded jacket. He sported a rooster’s sharp beak and bright eyes, and instead of a comb, a monstrous growth on the left side of his scrawny neck, a reddish-purple tumor or goiter like an external liver, running from the ear down the jaw and neck. Having noticed it, Burnham could not look away; the growth could not be ignored. He made the best of a sickening moment, and examined it frankly. His stomach yawed.

  The rooster approved. “So you are not too busy to look.”

  “How could that be? My business is with you.”

  “So I have been told. And how do you know who I am?”

  “One divines the quality of a man,” Burnham said. “One senses leadership.”

  The rooster crowed briefly. “Also, you saw them look to me for permission.”

  “That too is true.” Burnham tried a friendly smile. “A blindfold would have sufficed. There was no need to slug me.”

  Head Beggar showed palm. “But what is life without dependable rituals? Who are you, after all? And what are you?”

  “I ask myself often.”

  “A cigarette?” From some recess of his gown, Head Beggar whisked a pack of Antelopes.

  “Thank you.” For a special occasion one made sacrifices. He accepted fire from Head Beggar, who then lit his own cigarette. They blew smoke companionably. “I have not much experience of beggars. If there are special forms and courtesies, you must forgive my ignorance.”

  “Nonsense,” said the kai-t’ou. “It is a trade like any other.”

  “That would surprise me. Truly like any other? Not colder, not hungrier? You eat no more bitterness?”

  The kai-t’ou spat on the floor. “And what would you know of it?”

  “Nothing,” Burnham said. “I have never even been poor. That is why I asked.”

  “Never had to beg, hey?”

  “Never.”

  Now the kai-t’ou shrugged. “Then what can pass between us? Who can discuss ice with the summer insects?”

  “Yet I know that poor men’s bones bend.”

  “Tell us what you want,” Head Beggar said impatiently. “Women? You have come to the wrong place. Are you perhaps a journalist? A tourist? Do you find us fascinating? Will you return with a camera? Are you pleased to feel superior?”

  “I feel only luckier,” Burnham said, “and I am not a seeker of curiosities.”

  “Well, then? Speak, speak. Do not be a guest. You need a hundred beggars, perhaps, for a funeral procession? Or to swell a riot? This is a new thing, a rich foreigner importuning beggars. You must forgive my rude questions.”

  Burnham said, “I believe we have a common enemy—”

  “Nothing else in common,” the kai-t’ou muttered.

  “—and I need your help.”

  “And when we need you?”

  Burnham experienced an odd flare of simple annoyance. Why was he held personally responsible for all evil? Gloomily he contemplated Head Beggar: bright eyes, scanty white hair, skin glossy and little lined. “I have done what life asked of me without whining or kissing feet,” Burnham said. “I have tried to do no harm to the weak. I have fought side by side with Chinese for China. More than that I cannot claim.”

  “It is something,” the old man allowed.

  “Listen one listen,” Burnham said. “This is no foreigner’s prank. It is a question of the rice bowl, the larger rice bowl and not the smaller. Wolves and tigers guzzle our blood, yours and mine alike. There are foxes in the city walls and rats upon the altars.”

  From across the room a voice rose: “Yi! His speech is clear water.”

  Another spoke, a woman: “In clear water there are no dead fish.”

  Burnham scanned his audience in the lamplight. They seemed more whole than most beggars, less deformed. The stench of sickness, decay and neglected bodies was less strong. But one, he saw, lacked a nose; he had only two cavernous, scarred holes.

  “Three years ago,” Burnham began, “here in Peking, a beggar called One Foot One Hand went to the police station off Lantern Street. He had recognized a fellow beggar as a former Japanese officer, a killer and a rapist, by name Kanamori Shoichi, wanted by the authorities of China; Japan and the United States. The police beat him and threw him into the gutter.

  “Kanamori has been tried for his crimes and convicted, and sentenced to death. I have been sent here to find him and take him back. I cannot find him without help.”

  “And why should we help?”

  “Were the Japanese kind to you?”

  “No less so than the Chinese.” The others murmured, “True, true,” “The insults were perhaps milder: to the Japanese we were proof of Chinese inferiority, and they humored us. We are not often humored. To the other foreigners we are of course picturesque but morally deplorable. And what do you believe?”

  “I believe that my head aches,” Burnham said wearily.

  Head Beggar cackled, stepped forward with a dancer’s grace and slapped Burnham hard.

  Burnham jerked his head back, and restrained himself. Thoughtfully he puffed at his corrosive cigarette.

  “Explain,” Head Beggar instructed him.

  “Is there an ashtray?”

  Impatiently the rooster said, “Yü! On the floor. This is not the Six Nations Hotel.”

  Burnham tossed away the butt. A beggar darted forward, squealing in mock delight, snatched it up and marched across the room puffing vigorously. Head Beggar and his tattered chorus laughed heartily.

  “Explain,” Head Beggar repeated.

  Burnham reflected. “You did that not because you hate me; you are beyond hate. And not because I am a foreigner,” he said slowly, “because all men but beggars are foreigners here. So you did that because it gave you pleasure; or to remind me that I am not in the world of ordinary men and women; or to see if I possess understanding.”

  “Not bad. Go on.”

  “To see if I would respond to the blow, which was real but transitory, or to the insult, which may be a delusion. Or perhaps you struck me to remind me that there are causes without effects and effects without causes: that not everything follows. Or that my headache—I had just complained of a headache—was without significance.”

  “Ah. Better. Yes. Between you and a Japanese criminal there is not a hair’s difference to us. Your quarrels out there”—his gesture encompassed the world—“are meaningless.”

  “And the world we try to make?”

  “Pah! A world without beggars, you mean. It is not our work to move the world. It is our work to survive this day. We are specialists in survival. We exaggerate limps. We exacerbate running sores. We make stinks. What your world has not mutilated in us, we mutilate. We use filth as those who wrap the head—you know who they are?”

  “Yes. Men who play female roles in the theater.”

  “Yes. We use filth as they use makeup. We are nothing!” The rooster was screeching. “For many centuries, nothing! No work, no home, no family! Only what we build among ourselves. Even the collectors of dung despise us! Do you understand? For the others we do not exist. We are what real people walk on, piss on, shit on!” More calmly he continued: “We prey on all who are not beggars. On all who hope. If we ourselves begin to hope, then we begin to show affection and mercy, and we
do not survive.”

  “But soon your world will change. Surely you know that.”

  Head Beggar said, “Yes. These are new times.” He squinted: “Are you a Communist?”

  “No.”

  “We tend to prefer the political right,” the rooster said almost whimsically.

  Burnham showed puzzlement.

  The rooster crowed again. “With the right”—he was impish now—“we are not only tolerated but inevitable, perhaps essential. The left has a deplorable tendency to do away with us.”

  “Then you love what you are?”

  “No one else loves what we are.”

  “That is true. I do not love the beggar folk,” Burnham said. “Or running sores. Or washed babies.”

  The sudden silence was absolute; Head Beggar’s eyes flashed. Again Burnham was bewildered: what had he said?

  Head Beggar seemed to consult his cohorts.

  “Survival is your business,” Burnham said. “If I offered money?”

  “To sell one of our own?”

  “Then he is one of your own?” The question was too direct, the tone too eager, and Burnham cursed himself. He fought to recover ground: “One Foot One Hand tried to sell him.”

  Head Beggar replied dryly, “One Foot One Hand is not.”

  “Ah. Is not. So.” He tried once more: “If I offered money to the hospital?”

  That silence again. The kai-t’ou seemed to freeze; his trapped eyes sought help, and his friends murmured.

  Burnham plunged ahead. “Tell me this, then. Why did you … send for me?”

  Head Beggar laughed. “How gently put! And how I distrust elegance of speech!”

  Burnham waited. Again Head Beggar consulted the others.

  “Why not?” a voice asked. “He is after all our prisoner. We are three-legged dogs, but we have bayed this stag.” The others approved. Burnham took heart. They were curious about this bizarre foreigner.

  “Kanamori entered Nanking on the first day,” he began, and he told them all he knew of the man. He told them also about Nanking. And he let Kanamori stand for the Japanese army; he heaped it all on Kanamori. The women. Twenty thousand women raped. The number was unmanageable. Better to have shown them, shown them even one. He told them of the forty-three technicians at the power plant. Of beggars shot on sight, and for sport. Of ordinary men roped hundred by hundred and doused with gasoline and burned alive. Of fathers ordered to rape their daughters. Of families drowned, under compulsion and sometimes by choice. Of hundreds more lined up on the banks of canals and machine-gunned. Of thousands upon thousands executed and buried with their wrists wired together in violation of all spiritual instinct and religious precept. Of a woman of eighty raped and her throat slit. Of babies bayoneted because their cries annoyed their mothers’ rapists. Of two hundred thousand men, women and children, officials, teachers, laborers, soldiers, beggars and shopkeepers murdered in six weeks and buried by numbed survivors.