Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

I dreamed of her and her husband and children, exiled to the countryside; I dreamed of famine; I dreamed of war. The war against the Japanese, the civil war, and then the smaller battles Dr Yu and her family had survived. I dreamed of peasants planting millet on small strips of land, and then I dreamed the land gathered up and bound into communes, hoes and rakes replaced by tractors, houses carved up into rooms, backyard gardens replaced by common fields and the sun overturned in the sky by the Cultural Revolution. Without understanding why, I dreamed Dr Yu and her family spinning like pollen on a river, every motion of their lives determined by the current.

When I woke for the second time, I felt well but very confused. Dr Yu told me what day it was. ‘A week,’ she said. ‘You’ve been here for a week. Unusual vacation.’ She guided my feet into my shoes, my arms into my blouse. My limbs felt airy and weightless. I looked down at the rest of me and marveled that there was anything left. The fever had pruned me but my body was still mine, and I stroked my hips with new affection.

‘How do you feel?’ Dr Yu asked.

‘I feel good,’ I said. ‘I feel fine.’

I was as weak as a newly hatched chick, but I knew that my body was healed. Beneath my slack skin and softened muscles I could feel my body rebuilding itself, although my heart was puzzled by what Zillah had brought me: the chunks of my past I’d ignored for years as I tried, each time I changed my life abruptly, to forget who I’d been before. Zillah had made me look at my life as if it belonged to someone else, and when I looked at it clearly, I was ashamed.

‘My husband has arranged for your discharge,’ Dr Yu said. ‘And Walter arrives from Canton today. We are to meet him at your hotel.’

‘Today?’ I said. ‘He’s coming today?’ Suddenly I wanted very much to see him.

‘So he says — he, two others he travels with …’

She dressed me carefully and gathered up the food and utensils and bedding she’d brought. I concentrated on moving myself. My blouse was loose. My skirt was baggy. Even my shoes felt too big. I wondered if I would have simply vanished, had I gone into this illness thin.

‘You can walk?’ Dr Yu said. She took my elbow and raised me and then, after I’d stood for a minute, she let me go. I took a few tentative steps across the polished wooden floor. The grain swirled mysteriously through the layers of wax and varnish, forming faces and landscapes and words. The sunlight fell in a wide wedge that solidified part of the air.

‘I can walk,’ I told Dr Yu. ‘Absolutely. I feel almost like myself.’

‘We took good care of you,’ she said. ‘But it is nothing. It is of no consequence. You are our guest.’

When she spoke I remembered something else from my lost week. ‘You were talking to me,’ I said hesitantly. Another voice besides Zillah’s had been whispering in my ear, feeding me the material that had powered my last dreams. ‘You were telling me things,’ I said. ‘Weren’t you?’

The nurse moved to the end of the room and began changing some dressings on a patient’s chest. ‘I maybe said a few things,’ Dr Yu said quietly. ‘Just to tie your mind here while you dream. You remember this?’

I closed my eyes and concentrated. What had she said? Her sister, her father, her mother’s work, a time when she’d gone to school — there was nothing I could hold onto. Nothing concrete.

I’d listened so hard to my own life that I’d lost hers. ‘It’s gone,’ I said. ‘Whatever it was. What was it?’

‘All in good time,’ she said. ‘Perhaps some will return to you.’

I reached back to straighten my collar, and as I did I touched my hair. Dr Yu winced when I pulled the tangled rope over my shoulders. Knots, mats, nests, snarls — I held the mass in front of me and examined it. A muddy tan, gold no more, lusterless and dry. My hair had been my chief vanity.

‘I’m sorry,’ Dr Yu said. ‘The nurses and I tried all week to keep it combed and washed. But your hair tangles so easily. It is nothing like ours.’

I smiled as best as I could — it was only my hair — and I let the ruined rope fall behind me. ‘We will cut it,’ Dr Yu said. ‘It is the only cure. We will give you a modern style, very short and light, like my daughter’s.’

I nodded docilely and followed her out of the ward. We stopped at a wooden desk downstairs, where I found that Walter had already taken care of the bill. I signed a few forms and Dr Yu signed a few others, and then we stepped outside into the cool, smoggy air. A clean white Datsun waited for us.

‘I arranged for a cab,’ Dr Yu said. ‘Walter sent some extra money for your care, along with payment for the bill. We’ll go to your hotel and make you comfortable. One quick stop on the way.’

So Walter hadn’t forgotten me. Somewhere in Canton, in a room I couldn’t imagine in a city I’d never seen, he had taken the trouble to wire money, make arrangements, think of me. This, after all I’d done to him. An image of Hank, which I’d buried for months, floated by. I pushed it away. I leaned back against the slipcovered seat and rested my head on the antimacassar while Dr Yu talked to the driver. The driver smiled in the mirror at me. The image of Hank floated back.

‘We’ll stop at the market on Wangfujing,’ said Dr Yu. ‘For one minute only.’

‘Fine,’ I said. The sidewalks were covered with peddlers: boys selling freshly popped corn and rice, an old woman squatting over a tray of roots and herbs, a young man selling tapes of Taiwanese pop singers. When the cab stopped, Dr Yu darted into the covered market and I rested and watched the crowd. The driver turned around and spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand him.

‘I’ve been sick,’ I told him, patting my chest with my palm. ‘I had pneumonia.’

He wore a gray tunic, crisp and starched, and a flat blue cap. He patted his own chest in response. ‘Ner-mone-ee-yar?’ he said, and then he laughed at the alien syllables. I laughed with him and then tried to mime a cough, a sore chest, a fever. By the time Dr Yu returned, we were gesturing like monkeys.

‘Success!’ she said. She brandished a pair of scissors and then spoke briefly to the driver, who tried to repeat the strange word I’d taught him. Dr Yu nodded. ‘ Shi ,’ she said. Yes. ‘ Ta hao le .’ I think she told him I’d be all right; I recognized hao : good. Dr Yu turned back to me as the driver wove his way through the crowded streets. ‘You rest,’ she said. ‘We will be there in one hour.’

I fell asleep, completely secure in her care.

At the hotel, the manager greeted us as if I’d been gone for a year instead of a week.

‘You are well?’ he said anxiously. ‘You are cured?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

‘We have greatly apologize for your disease,’ he said. He led me up to the room Walter and I had left the week before. ‘We cleanse everything, very completeness, for death to all germs. Hoping you are not blaming this inadequate guest house.’

He was visibly nervous, as if he feared his job hung in the balance. I told him his hotel was fine, and that it had nothing to do with my illness. He relaxed a bit.

‘Hot water here,’ he said, pointing out a large flowered thermos. ‘Tea, drinking cups, boiled cool water …’

‘Laundry?’ I said. ‘Do you think I could get some clothes washed?’ My clothes lay where I’d left them, but they’d been folded in my absence: picked up carefully, shaken out, the surfaces beneath them cleaned; then replaced with the arms and legs bent and crossed. A blouse on a chair, a skirt on the floor, dresses marching down one bed and shoes neatly upright here and there across the rug, reproaching me. My mother had always said to leave strange rooms just the way I found them, as if each time I closed the door behind me might be my last. For once I wished I’d followed her advice.