Yellow Emperor's Cure (9781590208823)

by Basu, Kanal

  “How did you find out?”

  She held her breath for a long time, then sighed. “I knew something had gone wrong from the smell.”

  “Smell?”

  “The smell of burning wood that woke the neighborhood up. I ran to the press. It was covered under a dark cloud. There was no one on the streets, and the residents had kept their doors locked.”

  “What did you see?”

  “The room was dark, and I had to hold my nose to keep out the burning smell. The floor was flooded with ink, and bits of paper floated on it. Things had been tossed around, and …”

  “Where was Jacob?”

  Fumi made the gesture of slouching down while she held her head with both hands.

  “Was he on the floor?”

  “No. I found him sitting at this desk. Just like every day. He’d been shot through the head, and his body was covered in black ink.”

  Antonio and Fumi sat holding each other, unmindful of the hot desert wind that blew in through the open window. Shadows had lengthened over the courtyard, and it was time for the lamps to be lit. The temple gong silenced the birds, but Antonio didn’t hear the pattering feet of his attendants coming to a nervous halt outside the door. It was getting late for their fat tea, and he wondered if the eunuchs had left them to attend a palace ceremony. Stirring in his arms, Fumi whispered, “When I met you, I thought Jacob had returned to me.”

  He looked at her surprised. “You saw the Dutchman in me?”

  She nodded. “The same urge to know everything, and arguing everything to death. Getting to the heart of the matter like a real scientist. The two of you are like twins, just as obstinate, just as foolish when it comes to telling enemies from friends.” She patted Antonio’s chin and spoke like a wise teacher. “I knew you wouldn’t like your Peking friends. Jacob didn’t like them either, he thought them silly and cruel, too busy with themselves to care about what really matters.” She gave him a teasing smile. “I knew you’d come back to me.”

  “Was he just as good a lover as I?” Antonio traced her neck with his finger.

  “No …” She sighed. “He didn’t know what it meant to love; cared for nothing but the smell of fresh ink on paper. He took everything I did for him as nothing more than kindness.”

  Antonio rose and paced the lodge, looking out of the window at the fading twilight. “Was it kindness that made you bring me your poison?”

  “Poison?” She laughed. “If it was poison, how could it have cured your rotten liver?”

  He spoke as if he hadn’t heard her. “Was it simply the kindness of a Nei ching master, keeping her patient alive?”

  She rose too and came up to him, lifting herself up on her toes to fold her arms around him. “I came because I was afraid of losing you.”

  With Fumi he no longer felt like a prisoner. In the days following his visit to the Legation, they left the pavilion for the palace gardens, ignoring the attendants who kept a close watch on them from under their hats. Boatmen raised their oars in greeting. The marble bridge glowed like a rainbow with its crown of arches. Suzhou Street was empty of visitors, the shopkeepers dozing behind closed doors. They walked up the hill, and rested under the ancient evergreens of the Temple of Clouds. Then they sneaked into the empress’s private nursery, blooming with her favorite yellow rose, and the narcissus called the fairy for its magical powers. Fumi played the empress and Antonio her loyal attendant. She pointed at the blood red plum flower, ordering him to pluck a bunch for her hair. He remembered the whores who dressed up for festas, offering to pluck for their clients flowers from their shining braids. Playing the part of a disobedient servant, he ignored the plum but delighted her with the dainty juniper.

  She took him to all the forbidden parts, even once to the teahouse at the Garden of Eternal Harmony, where the empress came to taste the first flush of the tea harvest. Like the empress, she had brought a jade bowl filled with dried peonies and jasmine to sweeten the tea with the flowers’ honey. She stirred their porcelain cups with a pair of cherry sticks and circled the rims for good luck with the tips of her fingers.

  Then she asked him to teach her how to dance like the foreigners. Jacob had taken her once to the Legation, to collect old clothes donated by the members of the European Club for the Charity Ball. Her curiosity had got the better of her and she had peeked into the hall to catch a glimpse of dancers gliding over the floor, twirling like butterflies and clutching each other like crabs.

  “In China one pays others to dance for them, like singing girls and acrobats.” She stood in the tea garden and waited for Antonio to hold her like a crab and twirl.

  Antonio smiled, remembering his days at the dance halls. Then he told her to stand perfectly still facing him.

  “I’ll show you my steps, and then yours. You must follow me.” He danced the leader’s steps, starting slowly then going a little faster. “You mustn’t mix up the right and the left,” he cautioned her, taking her through the follower’s moves. “Step back on your left foot, take a turn then step forward on your right.”

  She stood like a wooden doll, eyes fixed to the ground.

  “Come, hurry!” He held her arm and pulled her forward, hoping she’d fall into rhythm. “It’s the waltz, the dance of lovers.” Then he started to laugh seeing how clumsy she was, quite unlike the Nei ching teacher performing the dance of the twelve channels.

  “You must give me one more chance,” Fumi said with a serious face, like a student who has disappointed her teacher. Clearing a space before her, she tried to rehearse the follower’s steps, watching Antonio from the corner of her eye to catch his nod of approval.

  “You must learn to waltz properly. It marks the celebration for newlyweds. If a couple dances well it shows they’re suited for each other.”

  She laid her hand on his arm and started to move, mixing up the leader’s steps with the follower’s, tangling up their legs and falling down together in a heap. Rolling on the wet grass, she landed on top of him with tears of laughter on her cheeks.

  “I must tell you a secret,” he whispered to her after they had returned to his lodge and finished with late rice. A cool evening breeze swayed the plum tree and spread the smell of the ripening fruit. With the attendants gone, they sat on the lodge’s steps, gazing up at the stars lighting up the summer sky. Fumi had started to hum a tune she’d learned as a child, and laid her head on Antonio’s arm.

  “I didn’t want to tell you before as it might upset you.”

  “You couldn’t tell me earlier that you were married? That it’ll be time soon to return to your wife?”

  He shook his head. “I have no wife.”

  “That your friends are concerned for your safety and have asked you to move to the Legation; that this will be our last night together?”

  “No.” He rose and paced the courtyard. “My secret has nothing to do with you, but with why I’ve come to China. And I haven’t told anyone, not even Xu.” He paused to take a quick look at Fumi. “It’s the secret I’ve brought from home, the secret of my father.”

  “He’s sick, isn’t he?” Fumi spoke quietly, following him with her eyes. “Your father has Canton rash. That’s why you dream of death, that’s why you have nightmares. You’ve come to China to find a way to cure him.”

  He stopped at Fumi’s words. His mind went back to the day she had checked his pulse. … You’re dreaming of someone who’s suffering … someone you love. … Back on the steps, his eyes shone in the dark and he held her hand to his heart. “Do you know the way to treat …?”

  She shook her head even before he could finish. “You must ask Xu, he’s the one who’d know.”

  “I thought a Chinese doctor knows about these things …”

  “Only a Nei ching master can teach you that. I’m just an assistant.” She hushed him with a finger before he could ask more questions, then led him back into the lodge and lit the lamps that surrounded their bed like a ring of stars.

  Wangsheng brought him a let
ter the next day as he settled down to eat his early rice. Sitting cross-legged on a silk cushion, he held up the envelope against the sun, expecting to see the scrawl of Rosa Escobar’s hand. Cedric Hart had made arrangements to have his letters delivered to the Summer Palace, leaving it to the eunuchs to hand them over to Antonio.

  He expected Rosa Escobar’s monthly letter to bring the sad news of his father’s falling health. He has turned blue! She had written not long ago. Blue from the little blue pills of mercury, ground and applied as a salve on the suffering skin. He cries all night as the devil bloats up his stomach to the size of a hill. … His father had made his nurse write to him about “floating on the wings of madness” when he had left his cottage for a walk in the meadows, overcome suddenly by the urge to throw his arms around the neck of a galloping horse. It had dragged him for a mile before he dropped down on the ground, saved miraculously from the hooves.

  Stories of his syphilitic father would be all over Lisbon by now, rivals gorging themselves with the details. Every one of them would claim to know the deep secrets of a fallen Dr. Maria. His friends must’ve disclaimed their friendship, or offered feeble and unlikely explanations at best: perhaps the noble doctor had infected himself with the poison to test the miracle vaccine he had discovered, sparing monkeys and rabbits to take on the ultimate risk. It was a sickness without sin, a brave sacrifice – they’d have argued, then given up as the gossip redoubled.

  They’d be blaming me for running away, leaving him all alone to die his horrible death – the ungrateful son, the coward, who couldn’t face up to the shameful truth about his father.

  There were Chinese characters and red chop marks on the envelope along with the sender’s name. He wondered what the gypsy might have to say to him, as he skimmed Ferguson’s letter written in a careless hand that betrayed the flair of the writer. Like an old friend, he hadn’t bothered with greetings, assuming that Antonio knew everything about everyone at the Legation, airing freely his opinions about them. It didn’t take him long to grasp the running theme: the stupidity of the foreigner trapped within the walls of Peking’s Little Europe. I know why they come … He had written. To sell to the Chinese what they don’t want; to teach them about a god they hate; to spy on other Europeans; to steal precious items from the empress’s palace by bribing the eunuchs; to bed the Legation ladies who’d rather die than sleep with their husbands; to smoke the best Indian opium that a pipe can hold for a fraction of the cost in Europe.

  Within the span of a few paragraphs he revealed the most intimate secret of the stiff, tight-lipped and old-maidish Mr. Pinchback, of his ongoing liaisons with a pair of nubile twins who worked in his household, along with the latest scandal at the Legation. The Austrians had gone on a little river party on the Yangtze, a dozen officers and their wives. They had got rid of the boatmen to steer the junk themselves, but caught in murderous currents their Viennese Ball on the Danube had met with closely averted disaster, only to be saved miraculously by fishermen. The near tragedy proved what he had been saying all along about the foolish Europeans, that they owed their existence to Fu-Hsing, the Chinese god of good fortune, who kept a special eye on the bumbling residents of Little Europe.

  You are most welcome to my home, Ferguson wrote, and promised to show him something to interest your curiosity.

  On his way over to the gypsy’s villa next morning, Antonio made an effort to recall everything Polly had told him about her best friend to prepare himself for the visit. “Thank God for Ferguson!” Polly had muttered under her breath as they saw him speak to a stooping Mr. Pinchback at the Dutch minister’s farewell party, making the grave banker blush. “He makes us all look pretty pious and sane by comparison!”

  Following his first visit, Antonio had become a regular at the Legation, a frequent guest at Polly Hart’s “at homes,” choosing to escape from his pavilion whenever Fumi was away tending to the royals. The prospect of fat tea in Polly’s garden watered his tongue. He accepted invitations from the other mansions as well, delighting his hosts with riding tips and tales of gory bullfights. The only Portuguese among foreigners, he was pressed to confirm the Goa gossip that reached them regularly. Was it true that married Konkani women left their windows ajar for the roving Portuguese men to watch them make love to their husbands at night? Was it true that they shaved their private hair on the first day of the lunar moon? His ignorance about Goa or Macau didn’t worry his hosts too much, who were quick to discover his talents as a doctor. To one and all the verdict was clear: Dr. Maria was the best thing that had happened to the Legation since Lord Elgin raised its walls to keep out the Pékin-lesodeurs after winning the opium wars. The fat tea had turned into his hour of consultations. With the resident medical officers of the missions hiding behind the bushes, he heard a litany of complaints, ranging from innocent sunstroke to Helga’s swelling ankles as she neared childbirth. Troubled residents flocked around him if there was a rumor of cholera doing the rounds in the bazaars, or if a gardener had gone down to typhus. Polly Hart looked on proudly and demanded due gratitude as each complaint received a thorough hearing followed by Antonio’s unwavering diagnosis, with just a few escaping her eagle eye – the anxious young officers who ambushed the Portuguese doctor, deathly scared of infections they might’ve picked up at the infamous Turkish hamams.

  “They only send quacks and flunkies to the East!” Sally Hollinger pointed her accusing finger at the resident doctors, seeing the way Antonio was with his patients. “Even the Americans don’t care about their own stock,” she added, meaning the Locke Mission doctors who visited the deep interiors to treat the heathen Chinese while neglecting their god-fearing brethren.

  His crowning glory had come with Patty, Mrs. Harris’s niece, who was visiting from Pennsylvania. She had come out to meet Doug Walters, her fiancé–“tucking in some sightseeing”–and to add an Eastern touch to her trousseau. At the gate of the Tartar city a beggar’s pet dog had bitten her as she stopped to drop a few coins into the poor man’s bowl. “It was frightened by her white skin,” Polly Hart said, “which is a common problem in China, plaguing bird, beast and man.” The poor girl had waited for Douglas to return from his snipe shoot and treat her, waited for her fiancé’s healing touch, but he was beyond the reach of Roger McKinsey’s magic telegraph machine.

  He wasn’t fussed about her fever but her headache, Antonio said, as he took charge of the patient. If it was rabies, it’d last for days then turn into acute dysfunction.

  “What sort of dysfunction?” John Harris hid his nervousness behind the usual diplomatic mask. The China trip was his suggestion and he hadn’t slept a wink since Patty’s fateful trip to the Tartar city.

  “Anxiety, confusion and delirium.” Antonio replied, bathing Patty’s head with drops of eau-de-cologne in freezing cold water.

  “How long could she hold out till medicines arrived?” Blunt mental calculations gave John Harris little comfort, knowing that even the power of steam wasn’t enough to bridge the gulf from Kobe to Tientsin in under a week.

  “If rabies, there’d be no medicine.” Antonio told the American minister in private. It was too early to tell if the French chemist Pasteur’s vaccine could indeed control the rabies poison, although in Europe it was already being heralded as the miracle of the century.

  “All dogs in China have rabies,” Ferguson had announced, drowning the Legation in sorrow, then proceeded to crown Antonio as the new Pasteur after the young woman recovered, her fever and headache turning out to be nothing more sinister than a case of prenuptial exhaustion.

  “He exaggerates,” Polly had told Antonio after the episode. “He lives by stretching the truth to suit his pocket.”

  He was struck by the depth and breadth of Ferguson’s pocket when he arrived at Ferguson’s garden house in the middle of busy native quarters, guarded from street noise and gutter smell by lovely casuarinas that served as a natural wall. From outside, the house resembled a palace pavilion with an arched green roof, lacq
uered pillars, and imperial dragons perched on the cornices. At first sight it seemed like the private residence of a minor royal or an important minister at the court, even a distant Manchu relative of the empress herself.

  “It’s a museum of treasures,” Polly had said, “full of jade and ivory, rare scrolls and old silk.”

  “A gypsy with a house full of treasure!” He looked at Polly, dis believing. Pressed for details, Polly recited a pocketbook biography of her friend, starting in the middle and shuttling back and forth, confusing Antonio.

  “He deals in manuscripts, precious ones that none can lay their hands on but him. He buys them cheap or forces their owners to give them to him as gifts under a variety of threats, then sells them to the highest bidder.”

  “Who buys?”

  Polly rolled her eyes. “Rich men with money to burn, I suppose. Japanese aristocrats and English opium merchants, Oxford and Cambridge – eager to flaunt their Eastern holdings – even the odd mandarin ready to take Ferguson’s word that they were autographed by the empress herself.”

  “A gypsy with a merchant’s knack!”

  “Wait, there’s more! Every time he buys a manuscript, he claims it’d cause a sensation in London when published, under his superior translation, of course!”

  “His translation?” Antonio stopped Polly and asked for the full story, starting from the beginning, inviting a caustic remark: “You doctors are all the same, fiendish for facts and sorry for imagination.”

  Ferguson, Polly said, came from an English family of soldiers and admirals, but had rebelled in his youth to go against family tradition. Unlike gentlemen soldiers, he didn’t believe in good manners and his oriental affectations might have come down from his mother, who was raised in Malaya by a widowed planter. A grammar school boy, he read Classics in Oxford and Chinese in private, and had picked up several European languages as easily as a summer hobby. Fluency in Chinese along with a touch of Japanese and Mongolian made him the greatest Western linguist to the east of the Himalayas. But unlike traveling missionaries turned linguists for survival, he bore the curse of a perfectionist. “He isn’t your Joaquim Saldanha, master of the gutters, but a real scholar.” Antonio had resented Polly’s unflattering view of his friend. It was easy for a foreigner with a grasp of Chinese to find work in Peking, but he had chosen the life of a gentleman adventurer over that of a highly paid hack. “He leads an interesting life behind the scenes.” Polly had sounded envious. “He has more Chinese friends than American or European, and entertains himself with local affairs. He holds a high standing at the Legation too, not for his malicious tongue, but for his precious links with the imperial higher-ups.”