by Basu, Kanal
They arrived at the village of insects. The lotus lake was dry and coated with a layer of dead algae. Wangsheng led him quickly away from the huts to a communal cow shed at the back. “There’s been a death,” he whispered, pointing to a flag that fluttered over the headman’s home, and quickened his stride. Maybe the villagers had left for the funeral. White mourning streamers hung from the doors. “The flag will fly until a child is born, when there’s once again cause to celebrate.” The Hungry Ghost would be inside the shed, Wangsheng said, suckling the dry teats of old cows and sharing their fodder to keep alive. The villagers hated her but were afraid to throw her out for fear of a curse.
Antonio had come prepared with his surgical box, knowing full well that the poor woman might not be a pox victim but suffering from a common disease made worse by neglect and her neighbors’ fears. “Ignorance is the most glorious of all diseases,” Dr. Martin would tell his students during their hospital visits, reminding them that there were hardly any new diseases left to discover, simply novel descriptions of common maladies.
They found the shed empty, swept clean as if waiting to be filled with grain. The cattle had vanished, the pigsties deserted; the dark room animated only by bats’ breathing. The eunuch made a low gurgling sound as if calling an animal to a trough, then raised his voice to make an owl’s hoot, stirring a tiny heap with the tip of his stick. After a moment or two, Antonio heard him speak, urging her to come out and meet the miracle doctor who’d cure her of her sickness. He heard a scream and couldn’t tell if it was Wangsheng or the Hungry Ghost that had knocked the other over and made a dash toward him. Sharp fangs pierced his arm and he recoiled from the pain. Wangsheng tried in vain to grab her and pin her down. Antonio wrestled with the ghostlike form, stung by her ice-cold touch, and heard her pant like a stock animal. How could such a great force come from someone so frail? He held her back with his bleeding arm and tried to catch a glimpse of her. A syphilitic would give herself away by the lifeless eyes. Even if the sores had healed and the pus dried, she’d show blue rings around the cornea marking the tertiary stage. If bald and toothless there’d be further proof; a leper’s stench would give away the rotting skin eaten down to the bones.
Like a ghost she wafted around him, stabbing at him with her nails. Then she wrenched the stick away from Wangsheng to strike his head. Roused by their tussle, the bats flew madly around, flapping their wings and letting out pathetic screeches. Breaking free, he fled from the shed with the eunuch following him. They ran pell-mell toward the lake, where his bearers were resting. Seeing Antonio and the eunuch, they too howled in fear of the Hungry Ghost, and rose quickly to carry him away.
Putting his surgical box to good use, he bandaged his arm, his doctor’s instinct advising him to return later and treat his assailant, if indeed she could be persuaded to leave the shed and face him in daylight. He heard Wangsheng’s teeth chatter. A bat flew in and out of his coupe like a straight arrow. From his sedan he could see a line of peasants returning to the village of insects with their cattle. He told his bearers to set him down. I must ask them about the Hungry Ghost. He stopped the village elder at the head of the train, but he waved his stick and ignored Antonio’s question. It was the same with the rest, walking past him with eyes lowered, taking no notice of his presence as if he were a ghost himself.
“Stay with me.” He begged Fumi.
She slipped on her robe and looked at him surprised. “Stay here?”
He nodded. The night had warmed just enough for them to leave the windows open, and they heard the rustling trees. “Why leave now when you’d be back in the morning?”
“Because I am not your wife. Only married couples can stay together in the palace. I’ll be back, you know that, don’t you?”
“We could be married if you want.” He caught her hand. “Marry the Chinese way if you like before we’re married in a church.”
“A foreigner marrying the empress’s servant?” She smiled sadly. “How can you think like that? It can’t happen in China, not in a thousand years!” She tried to free her hand. “Also it’s dangerous.”
Antonio sat up on the bed and spoke angrily. “Everything is dangerous in China, and everyone. The Boxers, the empress, the foreigners, even the Hungry Ghost. Polly doesn’t think it’s safe for me to be here. Xu thinks I’d be safer at the Legation. Half the foreigners think the whole of China is dangerous. I’d rather be in danger with you.”
The smell of the lake drifted in with the breeze, mixed with the scent of sap and spring buds. He wondered if Fumi was surprised by his proposal. She seemed withdrawn, her face averted while she tidied up her things.
“We can leave China if you want.” He rose from the bed, determined to hear her answer before she could slip away.
“Leave?” She looked surprised. “What will happen to Canton rash? Don’t you want to wait and learn the cure?”
Antonio looked exasperated. “I don’t know what you think of Xu, but he’s been fooling me with his promises. Almost a year has passed and I haven’t seen a single patient yet. I think he just wants to keep me here and use me as he pleases. Maybe he’s waiting to deliver me on a platter to the Boxers, to sacrifice a ‘devil’s doctor’ to their gods. Maybe he wants me to spy on the foreigners to help the empress.” He spoke urgently. “We can leave now and go to Macau, wait there till the troubles are over then come back.”
She shook her head and left the lodge, but Antonio followed her to the courtyard. “We can leave by train from Peking and catch a steamer at Tientsin port. Cedric will be only too happy to arrange everything for us. We can leave any day we want.” She kept walking toward the arched gate.
“Why, Fumi?” He shouted. He banged his fist on the kitchen door, opening the wound on his arm again. “I thought you didn’t want to lose me.”
“I can’t leave,” she whispered, and disappeared into the mist.
Striding back to his lodge he picked up the empty bottle of plum wine and hurled it through the window then dropped down onto the bed.
Joachim Saldanha greeted Antonio with a smile when he woke next morning, eating porridge and gently stroking a battered statue of Jesus in his arms. Antonio was surprised to see the padre’s sedan bearers chatting with his attendants in the courtyard.
“Since when have you adopted such an exalted mode of travel?” He asked Joachim Saldanha, then tumbled out of bed holding his aching head. His friend scraped the bottom of his porridge bowl with a spoon, and called out to Wangsheng for a refill.
“The sedan is a must now, for all foreigners. No one must see us as we pass through the streets. Least of all Boxers. Traveling on the shoulders of men, they might take us for mandarins, minor royals of the court, even the dowager! Unless, of course, you were coming to the Summer Palace, where you could be mistaken for the head eunuch!”
“But how will you carry your trophies without the mule cart?” Antonio yawned.
“I won’t be needing the cart anymore.” Joachim Saldanha spoke in a matter-of-fact way. “I’ve come to take you back to Macau.”
Antonio remained silent, pretending he hadn’t heard the padre.
“It’s an order from no other than Dom Afonso de Oliveira.” The news of the Boxers had traveled all the way down to Macau, and troubled the governor. “The Macanese are too busy robbing foreigners and selling opium from their fast crabs to English ships to worry about rebels. But Dom Afonso’s geographer’s nose has picked up the storm brewing northwest. He has sent word to the guardians of São Paulo Church to track their prodigal son down.” Word of the governor’s order had reached Joachim Saldanha while he was in Hebei, escorting a group of five hundred Chinese Christians to Peking after their church compound was burned down by Boxers and several of their compatriots thrown into the flames.
“We’ve been fighting with the Chinese for centuries over God and opium, but this time it’s different. Now they are the aggressors and we the target. It’s their turn to spread lies about us. This time it’ll ge
t a lot worse than the opium wars, and the Legation will be under siege, not the Summer Palace.”
Antonio grimaced, rubbing the back of his head. “I can’t leave without my answer.”
“You can leave now and return later.” Joachim Saldanha smiled kindly. “A few months won’t make a difference to the treatment of Canton rash. If fighting breaks out, your teacher might not be able to visit you. Chinese hospitals will be too busy with the wounded to care for pox victims, turning them away and spoiling your chances of observing the Yellow Emperor’s treatment,” he argued. “A war postpones everything, even syphilis! Dona Elvira has asked me to bring you back on Captain Jacque’s Warrior Queen. It’ll leave Tientsin in two weeks for Macau. That way we can avoid taking a rice boat on the Yangtze. Her Tino shouldn’t be spotted in the open countryside, she has warned me, just in case a Boxer or two were lurking nearby. Her friend Captain Jacque can be trusted with the most dangerous of tasks, having earned his stripes smuggling opium from Calcutta to Canton.
“Is it Fumi you’re thinking about?” Joachim Saldanha then asked him quietly. Antonio wasn’t surprised by the question. The padre was fond of her, he knew. He had heard the two chatting every morning when Fumi nursed his burn wounds. Like a kind uncle, he’d ask her about her family, about her dead mother, avoiding any mention of her husband. It wouldn’t be a secret to Joachim Saldanha how he felt about Fumi, from the way he followed her with his eyes. He’d know how she felt too, from the way she sneaked away to the courtyard to meet Antonio alone.
“You are, of course, free to bring her with you. But …” Joachim Saldanha paused.
“But what?”
“The empress mustn’t know. She wouldn’t want her personal attendant to elope with a foreigner, would she? Perhaps you could ask her to come to Tientsin on her own and meet you?”
He took Antonio’s silence for doubt. “You’re worried about you two being together, aren’t you? You’re thinking about others, about what they might say?” He turned his “kind uncle” eyes on Antonio, “I’d say you ought to worry less and do what your heart tells you to do. In the end there’s always a way around the trickiest of problems.” He wiped his mouth on his gown soiled with porridge. “I’d just leave with her, if I were you.”
“She doesn’t want to leave.” Antonio threw up his hands in despair, and turned his back on Joachim Saldanha. For once he wished his padre friend would leave him to return to Hebei, or fall asleep after the generous helpings of porridge.
“Then you must convince her to come with you, or convince yourself to leave without her.” Joachim Saldanha spoke with a rare intensity. “We can’t afford to wait, Antonio. If the empress throws in her might behind the rebels, it’d be too late to escape. China might yet witness the first massacre of the century.”
He thought he’d ask Joachim Saldanha about Xu. Instead he decided to ask him about Oscar Franklin and the Locke Mission.
“James Locke was a doctor from San Francisco who came to China in the early 1890s and died of cholera. But his friends kept him alive through a medical corps named after him that spread its wings all over this country. Bright and shining youngsters come every year with their wives to show the Chinese ‘how to do things the American way.’ Some older ones come too, disillusioned at home and searching for a new Eden.”
Joachim Saldanha hadn’t heard much about Oscar Franklin except rumors.
“What rumors?”
“People say he’s James Locke reincarnated, fearless and foulmouthed. The officials are as afraid of him as his patients.” The Locke Mission was the butt of jokes among Peking foreigners for their missionary zeal tending to poor Chinese, but he could vouch for the courage of the American doctors, “a blind courage that comes with innocence, not unlike the Boxers.”
“We doctors can’t seem to have enough of China!” Antonio mused.
“Yes, but not all are after the same thing.” Joachim Saldanha paused then he said quietly, “They come to give to China while you’ve come to take from her.” He started to scold Wangsheng for skimping on the porridge, then beamed at the sight of Tian bringing him his early rice. Crossing his chopsticks like a pair of scissors, he asked Antonio, “What do the American doctors have to do with you anyway? They wouldn’t know much about syphilis, couldn’t care less about the medicine of the ‘savages’!”
“Not syphilis …”
His friend shrugged. “Whatever it is, you don’t have more than two weeks in which to leave. Captain Jacque will have your cabin ready for you, and whoever else you might want to bring along.”
He dreamed he was on a ship with his father. They arrived at a port, teeming with locals on their sampans, crowding the ship’s hull like a bunch of crabs. Haggling buyers and sellers filled the air, along with tooting vessels, announcing their passage to those on shore. His father examined a bag of cowries sent up to the deck in a rope basket, then led him down the gangplank with a hand on his back. A set of bronze pelicans caught his eye at the market, but his father moved on to the stalls that sold live birds with phosphorescent plumes, singing songs like humans. Their owners poked them in their cages and made them dance, but he was struck most by the cormorants, taught by fishermen to return their catch in their beaks to their masters. He didn’t remember if his father had bought the dancing birds or the fan-tailed pigeons, even the fighting cock that had sliced the neck of its rival and won the wager. All he remembered after he woke was his father arguing with the owner of the flower girls, pointing at a face under a wicker hat, the most shy of them all, the most beautiful. The owner was reluctant but his father insisted, then left triumphant with his catch. Antonio remembered dashing past the throngs and rescuing Fumi from his father, wrenching her free from his arms.
“Come quickly …” Polly had written, and from the note he could imagine her urgency. It wasn’t the danger of Boxers, he knew, but a medical matter. She had asked him to come prepared with his surgical box. Antonio looked for his sedan chair but it wasn’t there. Her messenger had come on a mule cart and motioned him to get in. They wouldn’t have to go far, he said, not to the Legation, but to the British minister’s retreat in the Fragrant Hills near the palace. Antonio knew about the Fragrant Hills from what Joachim Saldanha had told him the day he arrived in Peking, that it was once the garden of immortals, laid to waste in the opium wars.
As he traveled on the mule cart, Antonio remembered his padre friend telling him how the Fragrant Hills had got their name not from the fragrance of the apricot groves or the thousands of almond trees in white blossom but from their highest peak, which resembled a three-legged incense burner on a misty day. In autumn the gardens stun the visitor with the boundless red of the smoke trees, their dense cover delaying spring and hastening the end of summer. He expected to find a replica of the Summer Palace among the gardens, built centuries ago to serve as a traveling lodge for emperors, full of pagodas, archways and pavilions. Joachim Saldanha had warned him to look out for their burnt remains, the torched pavilions sticking out of the sloping hills like an armada of shipwrecks.
“A villa in the hills is what you get for dying early in the East, and to escape the envy of friends!” Polly had joked about the sumptuous retreats of the Legation ministers in the Fragrant Hills. The British had built their own “summer palace” to escape the sizzling heat of Peking, while the Americans and Russians leased temples from priests and converted them into luxurious bungalows. A visit to the Fragrant Hills was certain to cure Antonio of his pox fever, Polly promised, and soothe the tragedy of his father’s death.
“Fleshpots!” Mr. Pinchback had overheard Polly and confided in him later. “They’re nothing more than private plum cottages for foreigners. The French have their orgies there, and our Italian friends hold grand balls where guests turn up in their birthday suits; the Germans too play a curious game with muzzles and whips.”
The British retreat in the Fragrant Hills hid behind tall maples and resembled a hunting lodge. It was built of local stone, an
d the care of Polly’s meticulous hand showed in the interiors: richly paneled walls were lined with six-point buck heads, the mantel gleamed with hunting trophies and a bearskin rug lay before the fireplace. It felt a touch cold from the morning mist. Chris Campbell received him and hurried him indoors. Polly stood at the top of the stairs. “It’s Norma,” she told him. Walking him down the corridor, she whispered to Antonio about the dead reverend’s wife. “She should’ve returned home long ago, but stayed back to visit the gutted church in Shanxi and see with her own eyes where her husband had been martyred and to recover his meager belongings from the vicarage. Cedric wouldn’t have allowed her to risk it, but the stupid Americans didn’t know any better.” Polly snorted. “Linda Harris encouraged her on her sentimental and foolhardy pilgrimage. As luck would have it, Chris had decided to go along with Norma, just to report for his paper on the aftermath of the murder.” Stopping before a door, she spoke in a serious voice.
