Sheng Keyi - Death Fugue

‘Looks to me like you asked for it. Our job is to take you back to the nursing home. The hospital there is better for you than conditions on the outside. Everyone out here is terribly envious. I’ve never seen anyone willing to leave the nursing home…It’s too bad we have to wait twenty years before we’ll be eligible to enjoy it.’

‘To go in…to go there is to die, little brother. It’s a big scam…they take sick and elderly people and throw them into the furnace alive.’

‘God, all you old people ever do is complain. It would be better for you to cooperate. Let’s get moving.’

‘Let me relieve myself…I’ll go to the side of that tree there.’

‘All right. Let him go. He’s limping. He can’t run.’

There was the sound of dead wood breaking underfoot and the person who wanted to relieve himself walked close to where Mengliu was, then back after a moment, taking up his long-winded pleas with the pair once again. When he was rudely interrupted by the younger men, he finally closed his mouth. They quickly left the scene.

Staring at the quiet path shut in by the forest, Mengliu thought what he witnessed must have been an illusion, but a white envelope under the tree where they had stopped was proof that someone had come this way and had deliberately left a clue. He picked up the envelope and saw it was just a neatly folded piece of paper. When he opened it and started reading, his expression changed completely.

15

With great difficulty, Mengliu made his way out of the woods. The sun fell as lightly as silk at his feet. He had long ago begun to feel weak in his legs and knees. Resting on a bench, he saw the young nurse Yuyue. Though she wore no makeup, her lips were rosy, and her bobbed hair was shiny and smooth. Her black overcoat was unbuttoned. She wore a pink turtleneck sweater inside, her curves obvious, with a black A-line skirt and boots, topped off by the natural black of her eyes. She looked very fashionable. Mengliu’s heart was swayed. If it were not for the critical matter at hand, he would find a way to be with Nurse Yuyue at least once, he was sure of that. The night he had gone to her office and found her on duty, she had hinted that he could manipulate her. She dared to defy the world’s opinions for the sake of love. This girl’s temperament was very different from Juli’s. She was always ready to get cosy with a man, as if sex were her only joy in life. Mengliu had known women like this, but they couldn’t compare with Yuyue. She was not the sort who would burn out too quickly. She possessed a kind of faith that was beyond doubt, and would act like a closed clam, but when her heart was touched…Mengliu’s mind became clouded, and he momentarily forgot the mission that was driving him.

Yuyue had come especially to bring a message from the hospital. Michael, the director, wanted to talk with him. She had her hands in her coat pockets, and was standing before him in a relaxed pose with a compelling look on her face. He hesitated, then stood up and followed her. She walked quickly, but this did not affect the pace of her speech. She said the hospital had had several patients die with similar symptoms, and they suspected it might be the outbreak of an infectious disease. He said a surgeon wouldn’t be any help against an infectious disease. She retorted that he should never underestimate the power of the human spirit. A poet could have a positive impact on a patient’s mood. Sometimes poetry was medicine. ‘Do you need a doctor or a poet?’ Mengliu asked.

Yuyue answered, ‘There’s no real difference between the two.’

He laughed. ‘If a poet was to wield a scalpel and a doctor treat sickness with a sonnet, then the world would really be perfect. Money may be no problem in treating the sick in Swan Valley, but in some places, the poor can’t even get through the door of a hospital. They ignore their minor illnesses, and cannot afford to treat their major illnesses, so many people lie on their beds and just wait to die. In any case, I’m no longer a doctor, and I’m certainly no poet. I am just a foreigner who got lost.’ He went on to ask Yuyue to get him out of this maze he was in and point the way home.

No ripples appeared on the two deep cold pools of Yuyue’s eyes. She was a perfect inflatable doll. There was no response to his words. Her eyes narrowed, like curtains falling over a window. The wind fluttered the curtains as she mused. She said that they had just received a lame patient who was dressed in black. He had a high fever that would not subside and was uttering nonsense, saying that the nursing home was a slaughterhouse. It sounded horrible, and they had to give him a sedative to shut him up. She thought for a moment, then noticing that Mengliu seemed distracted, continued cautiously, ‘Hey, it’s not the plague, is it? You know how the medieval plague was carried by the fleas on rats, and the rats carried the fleas across the English Channel and spread them all over England, and there were countless deaths in rural areas? The city garbage and sewage were handled by ignorant sanitation workers who didn’t understand what was happening, and so the illness was passed along even faster. Doctors exhausted all of their options — bloodletting, smoking, burning of the lymph nodes — but still people died. Some Christians thought the plague was the result of human depravity, and a form of divine punishment. They paraded through the towns and cities of Europe, using whips lined with metal barbs to scourge confessions out of one another. In Germany Jews were treated as plague-spreaders and were burned alive. A lot of Jews were massacred. But there also awakened in their minds the possibility that it was being spread by animals, so they killed their livestock too…’

As soon as Yuyue started speaking she became long-winded, but it was not just useless rambling. She was intelligent, well-read and well-mannered. Sometimes she came up with a smile that seemed to indicate she didn’t care how many people had died. She was calm. She spoke as if the rhythm of her speech was guided by punctuation. Commas would make her pause, but it was a half-beat shorter than the pause for a full stop. When she met an ellipsis, she would look at the distant landscape attentively before going on.

When she came to the next ellipsis, Mengliu suddenly quickened his steps, and walked in front of her.

‘Miss Yuyue, lives are at stake. We must go to the hospital as soon as possible.’

Soft chuckling came from behind him, as if leaves were rustling down. ‘Didn’t you say you were neither a doctor nor a poet? What can you do if you go there?’

He turned back, stunned. He saw that she had draped her coat over her arm. As she stood there in her charming pink sweater, her face suddenly looked as if it was covered in rouge. Her dark eyes were watery above a graceful smile, dark as night, with a solitary star shining in each one.

‘Are you joking?’ He felt that this was a game of cat and mouse, and he was annoyed. ‘How can you joke about a thing like that?’

‘Of course it’s true.’ Her face perked up, restoring the look of the inflatable doll. ‘I was just wondering what you would do?’

‘There is nothing I can do.’ He suddenly felt his tone had been too harsh, and was sorry.

‘Michael, our director, must have been indoctrinated, to put so much hope in a washed-up poet.’

‘I will say it again. I am really not a poet. Definitely not a great poet.’

The hospital loomed before them, its door framed by a pair of trees, all their leaves fallen. A blackbird flew out from its nest in the branches of one, and sounded strange.

Michael’s office was at the end of a corridor. Mengliu walked in to see his fluffy white head bent over the desk, and a magnifying glass sweeping back and forth over a book, as if he was making a careful examination of an antique. The bent head raised itself, revealing the flushed face of one who had had too much to drink. Mengliu had seen him before, but had not known he was the head of the hospital. In the Dayang National Hospital the director rarely went to the wards, being too busy with meetings, overseas study tours, dining with his wife, sleeping with his mistress…and, most importantly, maintaining a decent, dignified image. This old man seemed to have long ago passed the age for entering the nursing home, but in reality he had just turned fifty. The Swanese were all like this. They didn’t exactly age prematurely, but they were a special breed.