The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  I turned my face away. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ I muttered, staring out the window at the low, blank buildings. ‘Our marriages are different than yours.’

  ‘Not so different,’ Rocky said blandly. ‘I have two friends who work at the Great Wall Hotel – have you been there?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You ought to see it,’ he said. ‘It’s very elegant – chrome columns, deep carpet, health club, glass elevators. Hot water at all hours. I have not been inside, but my friends say it is much nicer than this place where you’re staying. Yours is owned by the government.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I said. My attention had drifted; I was trying to imagine a place more luxurious, more cut off, than mine.

  ‘State-run,’ Rocky said patiently. ‘The Great Wall Hotel is a joint Chinese-American project. My friends who work there, they are paid very well and have excellent uniforms, and they learn proper business attitudes from American bosses. It’s a very good opportunity for them – they meet many people. One of my friends is trying to get me a job there, so I can make some contacts. The benefits are very good – my friends pick up many things the foreigners throw away. Pens, paper, cosmetics half-used, clothes with one small spot or rip, plastic bags; also books. I read the American novels they give me – you have divorce, adultery, many problems with couples. Us too. It is harder for us to get divorced, but the situations are the same.’

  I sighed. ‘We’re not getting divorced,’ I said. ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘No?’ he said. ‘What’s it like?’

  He was six years younger than me, hardly more than a boy, and yet somehow I wanted to tell him everything. His was the face I’d been looking for in the crowds I’d seen through the minibus windows. His was the sympathetic ear. I imagined my story unrolling before him, stunted and stilted and common and sad; insignificant compared to his father’s; the same old story. Except that he wouldn’t have heard it before. I raised my hand and then let it fall onto his cardboard folder. Rocky looked down.

  ‘You want to see these?’ he said.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘My drawings.’

  He lifted a flap and pulled out a sheaf of papers, which he held up before me. The inside of the cab was so dark that I couldn’t make out anything. ‘Wait,’ he said. From his shirt pocket he pulled a pair of Bic lighters and lit one with each hand. His face lit up, the dark hollows below his cheekbones echoing his dark eyes, dark hair. His hands looked almost transparent. In the yellow glow his drawings sprang to life. Birds, bees, fish, plants, grain, farm implements. A moth’s antennae grown huge, the mouth parts of a bee; the convolutions of a hummingbird’s tongue. No people, not a single portrait. No landscapes. Meticulous renderings of tiny things, beautiful as well as accurate and displaying a naturalist’s fascination with detail and form. I pointed to the most mysterious one, of a jar filled with bubbling liquid and shreds. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Something my mother discovered,’ he said. ‘She found this new strain of yeast that digests ground-up cornstalks and straw and sorghum stems so the pigs can eat it – she said it is like giving the pigs a rumen, as with cows or goats or sheep. I call it rumen-in-a-jar. It saved the production team lots of grain, but she got no credit for it.’

  He sighed. ‘I want to be a scientific illustrator,’ he said. ‘Do you think I have a chance?’

  He drew like Darwin; he might have done the Galápagos finches justice. ‘You’re very good,’ I said. ‘I used to do some work like this for my husband, but you’re much better. These are as good as any illustrations I’ve ever seen.’

  He sighed and let his lighters go out. ‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘Last year, in the spring, I took the examinations for industrial art college. My modeling, painting, and drawing were better than anyone’s and still they wouldn’t let me in. Still, I am selling radios, and saving money that does me no good. Even if I could arrange to go abroad, my money would be worth nothing outside.’

  He pressed three of his drawings into my left hand. ‘Would you give these to your husband?’ he said. ‘Maybe he can hire me for work where you live.’

  I took the drawings and tucked them into my purse, not wanting to tell him how unlikely that was. We were out in the country by then, long past the city limits but not in any place I’d ever seen. I reminded myself that it was dark and that I didn’t know the landscape well, but still I was almost sure this wasn’t the way to the Fragrant Hills. As if to confirm my fears, the driver pulled over and held a whispered consultation with a lone bicycle rider on the side of the road.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Rocky.

  He shook his head and smiled. ‘Lost,’ he said. ‘I should have known.’ He got out of the car and joined the conversation. When he got back in, the driver turned the car around and headed off in a new direction.

  ‘How bad?’ I asked.

  ‘Hard to say,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been here before – we are far north of the city.’ He picked up his cardboard folder and set it on the floor, then moved over until his thigh brushed mine. ‘Tell me about your life,’ he said. ‘Your life at home. You have shopping malls? Art supplies? Unrationed pork?’

  We drove deeper into the night, and as we did I tried to paint for him a picture of life in a college town. He listened happily, asking me questions now and then and trying to square my words with his own imaginings. A sharp noise punctured the night and then the car tilted left and stopped.

  ‘Flat tire,’ Rocky said. ‘What luck.’

  He got out to help the driver, but the spare in the trunk was flat as well. The two men argued for a bit, and then Rocky turned to me and said, ‘He will go for help. I will stay here and guard you.’

  The driver left, rolling the spare before him and leaving me and Rocky alone in the warm, yeasty-smelling night. Rocky got back in the car and locked the doors.

  ‘This is our luck,’ he said softly. ‘I wanted so much to be alone with you.’

  ‘The driver will be back any minute,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said serenely. ‘He has to walk all the way to Yiheyuan Road for help. It’s at least one hour.’ And then he turned to me and touched my jaw with one warm finger. That was all I needed; I bent and kissed him. And when, after the first moment’s hesitation, he kissed me back, I closed my eyes and let what I’d wanted to happen happen. His slim strong legs, the delicate skin of his forearms, his mouth moving from my ear to my throat, his hand slipping up my thigh. It was a dream, that unreal – this man I didn’t know, this country I didn’t understand, the corn hissing softly in the sweet breeze, the utter darkness, the occasional bat. Hands as gentle as birds alighting on the peaks and valleys of me. Lucky you, Zillah said again.

  ‘You’re like a temple,’ Rocky said. He was a ghost, a spirit, an angel. He weighed nothing at all. ‘You are beautiful.’ The willow trees lining the road moaned, announcing a gust of wind. ‘You are my luck,’ he said, when we were done. ‘My luck.’ I heard Zillah laugh.

  A sudden band of fire ringed my chest and set my heart stuttering. My breath came fast and shallow, each breath a stab, and the sweat that had filmed my palms now bloomed from all of me. I felt a sharp pain lower down on my side, separate from the pain in my chest and as precise as if a needle had pierced me. A click and a drop, like a quarter falling into a slot machine; mittelschmerz, middle pain, another egg dropping wasted from my ovary. Outside, a bird called mournfully.

  ‘You are sick!’ Rocky said. He touched his palm to my forehead and pulled away as if he’d been burned. ‘You have fever,’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ I whispered, and then I curled against the cool window and passed out.

  THE CLINIC FOR FOREIGN VISITORS

  New things always have to experience difficulties and setbacks as they grow.

  —Mao

  I WAS WORSE when I woke the next morning. The night had passed in a black swirling dream, leaving me with no memory of how Rocky had finally found the hotel or what Walter
had said when he’d seen us; no idea how Rocky had returned to his home. And by the time I woke I was too sick to worry about anything more than what was happening inside my chest. The pain was astonishing.

  ‘Jesus,’ Walter said. He sat across the room from me, his face so drawn and tired that I suspected he’d been watching me for hours. ‘Why did you go out last night if you felt this bad? You know we’re traveling tomorrow.’

  ‘I thought I was all right,’ I said. ‘Then on the way home I got so much worse so quickly …’ I paused, struck by a sudden vision of me and Rocky in the back seat of a cab. Had that really happened? Our limbs sprawled in strange directions, our feet against the windows, my skirt rucked up and my pantyhose torn in the rush? I lifted the sheet and found I was wearing a sweat-soaked pink nightgown, which might have meant that Walter had undressed me. On the floor near my bed I saw my clothes piled untidily and knew he hadn’t; he would have folded everything. Casually, trying to look innocent, I leaned over and snagged my pantyhose from the pile. There was a fist-sized hole near the top of one thigh.

  I buried the pantyhose under the pile and looked at the rest of the room, but I wasn’t reassured by what I saw. The walls were vibrating in the sun and the pink peonies and golden birds in the prints had turned mean. The curtains framing the glass doors moved as if they were breathing. I closed my eyes and felt the pulse pounding at my temples and the base of my neck, and when I sat up the room began to waltz. Slowly, carefully, I said, ‘Did you meet Dr Yu’s son? Zaofan? She sent him along with me because she was afraid the driver might get lost.’

  ‘I met him,’ Walter said shortly. ‘So did everyone who was still in the lobby. He and the driver carried you up the steps. How could you let everyone see you like that?’

  ‘It’s not like I had a choice,’ I said.

  He shook his head and tore a tissue into long, thin shreds, every line in his face declaring his anger. Alien germs are nature’s secret agents, he’d told me a few days earlier, when I had tried to eat a pomegranate. They’re like kudzu in a temperate climate. You don’t have any resistance to the organisms here. I knew he was going to blame me for what I’d caught.

  He waved a strip of tissue at me. ‘I suppose I should be grateful,’ he said. ‘I was. I am. They got you back here in one piece, and that boy – what’s his name? – speaks decent English. Enough to get me down to the lobby, at least. Enough to tell me you’d passed out in the cab. But how you could agree to ride with him in the middle of the night, with a driver who can’t speak English and doesn’t know his way here …’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘It’s not like there were cabs hanging around everywhere. This was all Dr Yu and her husband could find.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said wearily. ‘I don’t understand.’

  He was tense beneath his coldness and I knew why: we were supposed to leave Beijing the next day so he could lecture in Xian and Shanghai and Chongqing and Guangzhou. He’d made the plans months before – he and Katherine Olmand and another scientist I didn’t know were to give lectures in the major eastern cities. He’d looked forward to this as much as he had to the conference itself, and here I lay in bed, grunting with each painful breath and not even packed. My clothes were strewn all over the room – dresses, skirts with elastic waists, billowy blouses, queen-sized bras. I had brought entirely too many things, liking myself in none of them. Six pairs of shoes because I had nice feet; a dozen scarves to draw attention away from my body and toward my face and neck. For years, I’d rested my hopes on good shoe leather and interesting neckline treatments.

  Walter sat in one of the gray chairs near the lemon-colored table, sipping green tea and regarding me in my sweat-soaked bed as if I were a plague sent to ruin his life. He didn’t touch me, didn’t rest his palm on my brow, didn’t hold a glass of cool water to my dry lips. I could hardly blame him – I’d been impossible for months.

  I made myself as small and helpless as I could. ‘Dr Yu’s husband gave me the address of a clinic,’ I said. ‘He told me to go there if I wasn’t better today, and I’m not. Will you take me?’

  Walter sighed and folded his arms around his narrow legs. ‘If you’d just stayed in last night,’ he said. ‘If you’d just been more careful …’ He sighed again. ‘Get dressed. I’ll call a cab.’

  We hardly spoke during the long ride into the city. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said once or twice. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, and he patted my hand, but I knew he’d added another entry to that long ledger of wrongs he carried in his mind. I added an entry to my own ledger; he was acting like a prick. I was streaming sweat, delirious, my head swarming with words and visions not mine. I saw an old man, Dr Yu’s father, staggering inside a circle of vengeful children. Books burning, manuscripts torn, paintings slashed; a sea of schoolboys waving their little red books and quoting Chairman Mao. I had read that book before we left home; anyone could buy a copy in the university bookstore. And I had browsed through my great-uncle Owen’s maps and letters and dictionaries and books, as well as a few more recent accounts that detailed the glory of the socialist transformation.

  I had a phrasebook I took with me everywhere and studied each night, and all that half-knowledge was rattling around inside my head, bumping up against Dr Yu’s stories and her husband’s mad strategy. I saw the house Dr Zhang had grown up in, and then the cramped version of it he’d fixed in his imagination, the corridors littered with bones and joints and muscles and nerves, the walls dotted with chemical elements, the rooms crammed with French and English verbs. As if a mind could stand to remember all it ever learned, as if the art of forgetting weren’t just as important as the art of memory. I knew that, if anyone did. I was a master of forgetting.

  Walter said something to me, but I couldn’t hear him. I drifted away again and imagined myself foot-bound, willowy, with lacquered hair, swaying above a stream like an apple blossom. My fingernails four inches long, my robe brocaded and stiff, alone in an ornate room like the Dowager Empress Cixi. We had something in common, Cixi and I – she had stolen the money meant to rebuild China’s navy and had used it to redecorate the Summer Palace and to restore a marble boat. I had done something almost as strange with my great-uncle Owen’s legacy.

  Why did you do that? someone said. Zillah? Maybe not. When I opened my eyes I was out of the cab and Walter was leading me down Dongdan Street in search of the clinic. Whoever had spoken wouldn’t acknowledge it. I peered into the faces I passed, looking for my interrogator, but the people cut their eyes away and then slid them back and looked furtively at my sweat-drenched clothes and the hair knotted down my back in a ratty tangle. Why do you live this way? I heard. I spun around, wrenching myself from Walter’s grasp, but behind us was only a mass of black-haired people, eyes cast down.

  I’d given Walter the scrap of paper Dr Zhang had given me, on which he’d written the clinic address in both English and Chinese characters. Walter kept stopping people and waving this paper under their eyes, and those who had any English told us to go down the road and then take a right. We walked to the intersection and turned right: no clinic. Walter showed the address to another man, who told us to go back where we’d come from and turn left. We found nothing but a bookstore, a small restaurant with a window full of roasted ducks, and a shop selling radios. By then Walter was half carrying and half dragging me. Each face I passed seemed to speak to me and I wanted to stop, to ask what they meant. Why were they looking at me? They got up in the morning, dressed, ate, worked, shopped, talked, came home to their families or to bare walls, narrow beds, nights that stretched on forever and a world full of things they couldn’t have, that we were all reaching for: light, beauty, connection, hope. And still they got up, dressed, ate, worked. As if they knew why.

  I could tell you, I heard; Zillah. It had to be. I coughed so hard my ribs ached. More people, more directions: turn right, turn left, turn right. The bells of the bicycles rang and rang, chiming off-key. At last we ran into an old man who sen
t us back down the road to the hutong we’d disregarded. The hutong: the alley. Beijing alleys run like veins, piercing the blocks of tall new buildings lining the avenues and leading to the blocks’ secret cores, the remains of the old city. This alley was dark and narrow and cobblestoned, lined with crumbling old houses and littered with paper and broken boxes and leaves and bones. But at its end was a courtyard surrounded by stately brick buildings – the hospital, at last. One wing bore a small sign in English, announcing the foreigners’ clinic.

  The door to the clinic was open, but we saw no one inside at first. A high white ceiling, glossy yellow walls, a splintered wooden floor. The rooms off the corridor were empty, inhabited only by metal cots and wooden desks and chairs, everything scrubbed and worn. At the end of the hall, at the reception desk, two women sat cackling and sipping tea from a battered metal thermos. Their broad faces shone beneath white paper caps.

  Walter was trembling with the anxiety that always overcame him in strange places. ‘Doctor,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘My wife needs a doctor.’

  The two women looked at each other. ‘Meiguo ren,’ said the shorter one. She reached behind her and brought up a tattered, paperbound book, which she held in front of me. I looked at it dully, not knowing how often I was to see it. A Dialogue in the Hospitals, I read, beneath a set of Chinese characters. English-Chinese. The woman opened the book to the third page and pointed out an English phrase. Do you want to see a doctor?

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and looked at her closely. She had a mole below her mouth and three creases on her neck.

  She blinked at me. ‘Hello?’ I said.

  She smiled but didn’t say anything. I pointed to the next line in the dialogue, the line assigned to ‘Patient.’ Yes, where shall I register?

  She nodded approvingly and pointed to the next line, marked ‘Nurse.’ Have you been here before?