Sheng Keyi - Death Fugue

He tried to stay calm, and downed another glass of wine. It had begun to snow again. The snowflakes floated lazily. He told Yuyue that the biggest benefit of snow was that it allowed one to stay indoors with old friends, chatting and drinking languorously before the fire, heedless of everything else. As she listened to his insincere talk, Yuyue smiled as brightly as a peach blossom, in a merciless accusation that his mind had already left the fireside. ‘If I were you, I would not be hiding here. I would have flown straight to the hospital.’

Hearing this, Mengliu stood up and adjusted his clothes as if preparing himself to leave, but Yuyue mocked him again, saying that the hospital was completely off limits. Outsiders couldn’t come and go as they pleased, unless they wanted to be quarantined for at least two weeks. Quarantine was not something amusing, sharing toilets and bathing facilities, crowded into a room with other people with only the roughest of provisions. More importantly, he would not be able to see Suitang. ‘But if you can tell me the most exciting thing that happened between you and her, I’ll take you to see her.’

Her teasing was all quite serious. Unembarrassed, Mengliu returned to his seat. In fact a number of times, as he sat in front of the fire and with the spirits working their way through his belly, he had wanted to talk about the women in his past, Suitang or Qizi, and those whose names he had forgotten, though they had each left an impression on him. He would gladly open the baggage of his past in this cold weather, sharing it with a beautiful girl, but really, what was the most exciting part? Did sex count? If he took the secrets between him and Suitang and told them to her, what would Yuyue think?

‘Perhaps we will all die of the plague, even those who are sweetly in love. Why don’t you discard your sense of shame and tell me all about it.’ Yuyue seemed to have read his mind, for her words were hitting the mark. ‘Sometimes love can turn a devil into an angel.’

Mengliu laughed. ‘You’re amazing. I’m becoming more and more convinced that no one can compete with you, in science or the emotions.’ He was suddenly in no hurry to see Suitang.

Yuyue winked at him as she sipped her drink.

‘If I tell you that I killed someone for Suitang, don’t be surprised.’ He came straight to the point.

‘The murderer was not you,’ she said dismissively. ‘It was love.’

He ignored her irony, watching the flames dance in the fireplace as he slowly told her everything.

‘I never thought I would speak of these things, but perhaps I really was a murderer. I may be a wanted criminal. Until this day, I don’t know how Suitang feels about me. She looked like my first love Qizi. Deep down I took her as Qizi, not caring whether or not she loved me. I’ve told you about my affair with Qizi before. She disappeared, and might still be alive. Maybe she changed her name and got a fresh start. Suitang was my assistant. She had been swindled by a sick old poet called Jia Wan with whom she was deeply involved. One day Suitang told me her plan, and it frightened me. There was no way I could do what she had in mind, but when I saw her turn away in disappointment, I promised her. You know, for a surgeon it was really not that difficult. What Suitang wanted was quite easily accomplished during a heart bypass operation. She wanted me to destroy an artery near his heart while mending another, cutting it as if that were as common a thing as snipping a thread.’

Yuyue refilled his glass and tossed another log on the fire.

‘No one knows how Suitang got Jia Wan to change his will before the surgery, leaving her two million yuan whether she aborted his child or not. Suitang told me that she wasn’t going to have Jia Wan’s child. She was only twenty-three years old and there were things she wanted to do in life. She would use the money to start a foundation dedicated to poetry and poets. She said that if I didn’t hold anything against her, and if I wasn’t merely trying to get her into bed, we could officially date and be loyal to one another. She thought that with the two million, we could accomplish our ideals. If I could not accept her greedy and broken heart, then we should keep a distance like that between siblings, and she would deposit five hundred thousand in cash into my account. To tell you the truth, I calculated at the time that this dirty money, not being taxed and all, was equal to several years of salary for me. But even someone who is poor at maths knows that two million plus Suitang was worth much more than five-hundred thousand alone — moreover, I liked Suitang. She looked like Qizi. Of course, I also knew that even for women one did not like, one’s feelings could change when two million yuan was involved. A man might easily feel he couldn’t extricate himself from a situation like that, and the woman would think it was her charm that had captivated him. But there’s nothing like cash to make a person understand himself less and less. You can always feel you are upright and aloof, then one day you find that isn’t the case, and you’re no better than a monkey rushing headlong for the prize, or a dog eager to grasp a bone. You take all the values you’ve built up over the years and smash them — though at least, for someone like me, those values had fallen to pieces long ago.’

‘That’s true. A poet who doesn’t write poems anymore can’t do much, nor can he really talk about values.’ Yuyue’s voice showed she was satisfied with his story. She was like a judge issuing expert opinions on the work of a performer. It was these words that pierced Mengliu’s heart. When a person is as self-deprecating as he had just been, he is really after praise from others, but Yuyue had knocked him down a notch, and made him feel lower than a dog. Still, he had to admit the truth of what she said. She was the only person he had ever met who was completely devoid of bullshit. Her comments were better than empty hypocritical words of comfort, and they brought a quick end to his self-pity, preserving the vital resources he needed to pull himself together. He knew what she meant — to act in the name of love was better than any of those things done by the authorities.

‘After Jia Wan died, what happened to you and Suitang?’ Yuyue wanted to know the outcome.

‘She didn’t get a thing. She was set up by Jia Wan and his wife.’

‘Poet, doctor, murderer. Yuan Mengliu, you are living in comfortable exile!’ Yuyue laughed heartily again. Her nose was perspiring. She was like a spring. ‘Honestly. This place suits you. You are so free here. If only you were still writing, your status would be of the highest rank.’

‘That’s a joke. Really — a big joke,’ he said, bored.

‘Those who have suffered for a long time have even more right than others to express themselves. It’s like the tortured having a need to cry out, so the argument that after this or that difficulty you cannot write anymore must be wrong.’

He seemed to have drunk too much. He felt awful as he stood up again. ‘I have to go look for Suitang.’

So he made his way through the wind and snow to the hospital. He accomplished nothing other than to get a whiff of the hospital’s smell. It was a wasted errand. Yuyue brought news that Suitang would only get to have some rest after a few days. It was a ray of hope, but after a couple of days the ray of hope faded away. Suitang was infected and confined to a ward. She sprayed germs about when she talked, and was running a high fever. With life and death hanging in the balance, no one could see her.

20

Cold temperatures seemed to stop the spread of the infectious disease. Of course this was an illusion, but even more false was the impression that the whole thing had never happened. After a brief panic, people’s emotions stabilised and they waited instead for some new, curious turn of events. The sun was still round, and it still came up in the east, and it still hung in the sky without falling. Those who craned their necks waiting grew tired after a while, and so withdrew their necks, and slowly themselves. Yuyue said that the hospital’s morgues were full, and the incinerators were so overworked each day that the ashes of the dead were immediately flushed down the drain. When those in angelic white garments visited the families of the dead, fake ashes were handed over, along with false records and false compassion. But the flowers were genuine. The government was doing everything humanly possible.