Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

I opened my mouth again but closed it quickly.

‘So,’ Dr Zhang said. ‘You stay here for six or eight days — likely your fever will fall in about four days and you’ll begin to feel better. No talking. No walking. Penicillin twice each day, plenty of fluids. And sleep. Sleep all you can.’

‘Waa …,’ I croaked.

Dr Yu stepped forward and sat down on the empty bed next to me. ‘Walter leaves for Xian tomorrow,’ she said. ‘With Dr Katherine Olmand and another scientist. Very early — too early for him to come here first. But we have made all arrangements with him. He says he will call my husband each day to check on you, and he asked me to convey to you his love.’

I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. I knew she’d added that last part herself.

‘It’s all right,’ she said softly. ‘Everything will be fine. I will sleep here in the bed beside you each night, and I will take care of all your food. See?’

She opened her wicker basket and took out a huge thermos, some delicate cups, two pairs of chopsticks, a rice bowl, a porcelain spoon, and several lidded tins. ‘Hospital food is very expensive,’ she said. ‘Also very bad. No one eats it unless they are alone in the world. All these people here’ — she gestured around the room — ‘all these people, their families care for them, bring their meals each day, leave someone sleeping by the sick person each night. Is this like you do at home?’

I shook my head no, unable to explain that this was better.

She tapped the book on my bedside table. ‘Point out the line for “no food” when the nurse asks,’ she said. ‘We will take care of you. We are your family this week — me, Meng, Zaofan. Also, Zaofan sends his regards to you.’

Rocky , I thought, and I felt my face grow hot. For an instant I saw him, felt him, smelled him. His hair had smelled slightly musty, slightly damp. Dr Yu laid her cool hand on my head.

‘Such fever you have,’ she said. ‘I brought you weak tea for tonight, and soup with special Chinese herbs. Please — you drink what you can.’ She took off her black shoes, stretched out on the empty bed near me, and opened the book she’d brought with her. ‘You let me know when you want liquids,’ she said. ‘I am right here.’

‘I will leave, then,’ said Dr Zhang, who’d been watching us silently. ‘I will return in the morning. The nurse will check you in the night.’

Zillah’s voice moved in for good that night, burrowing through my head and rendering me deaf and helpless. No one had been on the street that morning, asking me why I lived as I did and offering to explain the world — that voice had been Zillah’s and now it settled in, strong and persuasive but blended somehow with Dr Yu’s gentle accents. Or maybe Dr Yu spoke to me as well.

‘My youngest sister worked at the Ministry of Culture,’ Dr Yu said — that first night? Another? The room expanded, the walls drifted away, the other patients vanished; my body lay still and hot and heavy, just beyond my reach. On the table a red flower appeared and disappeared.

‘The Ministry of Culture,’ Dr Yu said with a gentle laugh. ‘Mao named it Ministry of Ghosts. My sister, before she was sent away, called it Ministry of Truth, after your writer Orwell. You remember this? In each office is a slot called the memory hole, where all old things no longer wanted are made to vanish. My sister made people vanish from photographs.’

Did she tell me that? Did she tell me the stories I thought I heard, while the white curtains lifted and swelled and fell back again, moving like sails in the night? ‘My grandmother had hair like swan’s down,’ she said. The black rubber stopper fell out of the IV bottle hanging above my bed. ‘The lines,’ she said. ‘Those lines — I rose at three to wait to buy some fish, and when I got to market I found a row of tiles and stones and chairs, marking the places of those who’d come earlier.’ Someone turned my pillow for me, over and over again, and in the background, fading in and out, Dr Yu spoke of her childhood and the lives of her parents and the fates of her sisters and brothers. I tried to listen to her, but more often I heard Zillah.

Shy Zillah, strange Zillah. What was she doing here? Hanging behind my right temple, just above my ear, her voice came bearing everything I preferred to forget. Watch this , her voice said, and behind my closed eyes I saw a picture of my thyroid, nested under the skin of my throat like a small warm bird. My thyroid was a place like Mumu’s bookcase and the image Zillah sent to sit there was a shu. A shoe. A white sneaker, I saw, with a rubber-tipped toe and green stains. Along with that picture came everything I remembered of Zillah and hadn’t thought about in years. Her thin, spiky hair, hacked off in the pixie cut her mother preferred; her pale-blue glasses with the upswept corners; her broken front tooth. At the base of the gravel pit we’d huddled together, glad to be out of our strange homes and caught completely by the games we played.

We had pranced like horses through the dry gray pebbles, whinnying through our teeth and holding imaginary reins. We had named the rocks, befriended the trees, woven tales in which our families were transformed into goblins and came to the ends we believed they deserved. We had made villages out of leaves and twigs and had always known that we were different, that when we grew up we’d be nothing like the adults surrounding us. We had a wild hunger in us, to merge, blend, connect, and although we couldn’t have put it into words we knew what we felt. We glued the feathers we found on the ground to our arms and meant to live like birds, and the broken arm I suffered the day we jumped from the crumbling cliff, our hands spread and holding our shirts like wings, did nothing to dissuade us. Later we fastened cotton wings to our clothes, as if our bones would hollow out in sympathy.

Zillah hadn’t grown up at all. I had grown into something I despised. The darkness came and went, a cool sponge passed over my arms and legs, a trickle of warm, aromatic soup flowed down my throat. ‘At the university,’ Dr Yu said, ‘they pulled the foreign-language books from the shelves and burnt them in the courtyard.’

I tried to listen, but Zillah’s voice took over. She walked me through my body and gave me a guided tour of my life — the skin stripped off, the deep and superficial fascia pushed aside, the muscles reflected gently until the cavities lay open. Then the brain wrapped in its meninges; lungs and bronchi tucked in the pleura; trachea, esophagus, and heart confined in the mediastinum. Below the diaphragm, the abdominal organs hid modestly behind the fatty omentum. I found that I knew my way around, that it was no great leap from the animals I’d once studied to me.

Pay attention , Zillah said. These are the rest of your places.

‘The place where they sent us was like another country,’ Dr Yu said.

My organs lit up one by one, as they had in the film strip I’d seen in college before our first dissection. Stomach, esophagus, small intestine: smooth, pink, slick. Spleen, gall-bladder, liver : softer, darker. Uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes : tangled, twisted; kidneys and bladder firm like fists; lungs and trachea hollow.

‘The pigs had parasites,’ Dr Yu said. ‘We had no grain to feed them.’

Can you see the places? Zillah asked.

I could. I could see my body as if it lay below a hanging cold light, each organ well lit and clearly defined.

You are a palace , Zillah said. Rocky had called me a temple.

‘These people here,’ said Dr Yu, ‘the ones here side by side with my husband, they are the same who stood against us in struggle sessions. The same who broke our things, destroyed our papers, labeled us bad elements. When we were rehabilitated we returned to them, to our danwei , and now we all must act as though the lost years never happened.’