The Last Mandarin (12 page)

“Good evening,” Burnham whispered.

The woman touched her surgical mask, and her forefinger said No. Burnham was annoyed; he had only whispered. But she pointed again to her own mouth, and he understood: she was dumb.

The sleeping woman woke. Her chair creaked. Burnham turned to see, and caught his breath. The woman might or might not be beautiful, but in the dreamlike wash of dim and friendly light her round face and soft features emerged from centuries of night, dynasties, millennia: symmetrical, almond-eyed, a face from a scroll or sculpture. With that face she should be tall and her body willowy.

She rose, peering, and he saw that glasses hung on a chain about her neck. She put them on. The woman was nearsighted and short. She might be willowy but that would be hard to say: she wore padded trousers and a short padded jacket buttoned in man's fashion. Yet she was lovely, and he smiled.

She was also sleepy, and still short-tempered. “What is it?”

“Good evening,” Burnham said, only slightly offended, “and forgive me. I came some hours ago, and I am looking for Dr. Nien Hao-lan.”

“Yes, I remember. And what do you want with Dr. Nien Hao-lan?”

Again Burnham was stung. “‘Little ceremony and less grace.'”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” she said in queerly reminiscent English. “You must be American. Where did you learn a phrase like that?”

“Aw, hell,” Burnham said. “Everybody talks English here.”

“And why is that wonderful? You speak Chinese.”

“True. Will you tell me where I can find Dr. Nien?”

“I am Dr. Nien Hao-lan,” she said. “Why don't you sit down and tell me where it hurts.”

So he introduced himself, and they shook hands. Immediately there was much asking and telling, in a salty stew of Chinese and English, strangely intense talk, nervous, as if they had been introduced at a party where everyone else was handsome and rich and only they were uninteresting and homely. “I went west with the universities, I was just out of middle school,” she said. “You know about the great migration? The great trek west?”

“Yes, of course. I went back to the States after … after Nanking, but I kept in touch.” Then did-you-know-this-one-and-that, and he had once met Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yatsen, and she remembered May 1938, when Chinese planes actually flew over western Japan and dropped leaflets, a moment of exaltation, like a great victory. She said wryly in Chinese that she was of good family—both parents dead now—and a brilliant student, and had proceeded from Chengtu to medical school in London. Burnham said, “Of course. That lovely accent.”

“If you flatter,” she said, “I will confine myself to Chinese,” and he repeated what he had said to Tun the bicycle man—“He who lives by flattery works harder than the peasant”—at which she laughed a full, rich laugh and opened a box of Players to offer him one. He accepted the unaccustomed cigarette for companionship and because yes was more natural than no and refusal would chill the moment. He smoked and told her of his parents and his days in college and his war with and against the United States army, and how he had met the White Mikado and discovered in himself a disputatious tendency. She laughed again, a good round laugh and booming, almost a man's laugh, but his mind saw her in silks, that liquefaction of her clothes, though at the moment she was a shapeless and nearsighted bundle, and bad-tempered to boot, as he now knew at first hand. He remembered also the vigorous and colorful language of her rebuke to the police, and the bull of a cranky sawbones he had imagined. He could not say why this dowdy doctor called to mind princesses, canopied boats on the Yangtze and tinkling cymbals.

“Why do you look at me so?” she asked.

“‘The flowers blush, and the moon hides her face.'”

“Oh no,” she warned. “That is dangerous. Besides, you have said it before.”

“Two hours ago,” he boasted, “the proprietor of a bicycle shop said it to me.”

“An admirer,” she said. “That is social success indeed.”

“I rebuked him. This isn't an ordinary hospital, is it?”

“It is scarcely a hospital at all. Officially, the Children's Clinic. Unofficially …” She shrugged.

“Unofficially, the Beggars' Hospital.”

“You know that?”

“I have heard.”

“Then we come back to my question. What do you want with Dr. Nien Hao-lan?”

“I want to invite her to dinner,” he said.

“Of course. Then a walk on the moon bridge, and a recitation of ancient poetry.”

“Don't be difficult. Have you eaten?”

“No. I fell asleep.”

“Then come to dinner.”

“I'll have to change.”

“Change? Is this the Nien Hao-lan who curses police?”

“You know that too. How do you know it?”

“Come to dinner,” he said.

“I have no choice. Mother!” she called. “Mother!”

Burnham was alarmed. He had not intended to meet the family. The mute woman entered. “I must go out,” the doctor told her. “Send Dr. Shen to me.” The mute woman departed. “And now I will change,” Dr. Nien said to Burnham. “Wait here, please.” Her walk was brisk, not willowy. Not a princess but a doctor who knew more of him than he knew of himself: where his spleen was, for example, and possibly even why he wanted to smile like a child.

Dr. Shen shambled in, muttering, and stopped short. He was a skinny young man and made white eyes. Burnham rose, and they introduced themselves and exchanged small talk, until a stunning, bosomy young woman, in a red-and-silver brocade dress slit well up both thighs, joined them, peered myopically at Burnham and said, “Claridge's or the Ritz?”

At which Dr. Shen gaped, and Mr. Burnham swallowed his astonishment and with difficulty subdued a savage pang of pure desire.

Outside he said, “No, no. This way. I have my own vehicle.”

“A rich Yankee.” She took his arm, and they walked to Feng, who scrambled to his feet and bowed.

“This cart here,” Feng said.

Burnham glanced at it. A tarpaulin covered it. “Yes?”

“Perhaps the gentleman should look.”

“Perhaps the gentleman should not,” Dr. Nien said, but made no move to stop him. “Perhaps not before dinner.”

Burnham flung back the tarp.

He did not understand. Piglets, perhaps.

He peered closer. By the light of the full moon he saw the cold, naked corpses of perhaps thirty newborn babies.

At the Black Duck he set his package on the table and ordered strong drink. Dr. Nien smoked with weary, ironic sympathy. “They cannot be left in the streets.”

“You collect them?”

“Mother collects them. It is her career.”

“She is not your mother. Your mother is dead.”

“True. This one is only a mute with no home. The beggars also bring us babies. Mother takes them to the burial ground, pushing her little cart. Picturesque Peking.”

They spoke Chinese now, in public, in a pleasant, dim restaurant of many tables and no chairs, only benches. The walls and ceiling were smoked black. The waiter was expeditious; Burnham poured two cups of hot wine and dried his own at once.

“It is worse in Shanghai,” she said. “Here we expect winter. In Shanghai winter seems to be a surprise every year, and the city is full of former country people who cannot cope.”

“The war drove them in.”

“As well starve in one place as another. But there are hundreds of thousands homeless.”

“Well,” Burnham said awkwardly, “drink up.” What more could he say? Words failed: what words bore on death-in-life? Statistics, yes: in forty years the flower of civilization. East and West, had murdered sixty million men, women and children, and allowed to die how many hundreds of millions? And allowed to live in hopeless squalor and chronic hunger how many hundreds of millions more? What were thirty dead babies? Here diners laughed; dice rattled. A warm, subdued room, the smoky comfort of old wood, the lapping gleam of an open fire, the mellow odor of roast duck, the reassuring sight of fat birds on a turning spit. Burnham felt grossly foreign, and wondered who he really was.

“Please.” She touched his hand. “It must be lived with.”

His impulse was to cover her hand with his own, but he refrained. “There are simply no degrees,” he said. “I have seen more dead men than I could count, as you have, but …”

“I know. Babies. Think of them as the lucky ones.”

“In the house of the long night there is always room.”

“You invent proverbs. You went to a Chinese school?”

“Yes. My father insisted. Age six to age twelve.” He poured again and sipped. “Standing with Full Nose and Fat Ass—we all had nicknames—and shouting the classics. Then I would go home and my mother would teach me geography and English and Christianity and arithmetic.”

“That was good luck. I learned English in middle school and college, from Americans, and then when I went to London I had to learn it all over again. Bung-ho, Burnham. Mud in your eye.”

He raised his cup. “There's more old drunkards than old doctors.”

“That's the stuff.” They caromed from language to language. Her eyes were bright, her gaze clear and affectionate; she was enjoying herself. Burnham felt gallant and unselfish; he patted her hand, and let his own lie on hers for a moment.

“Before we go to hand-holding,” she said, “you must tell me what you want with Dr. Nien Hao-lan.”

“Oh yes.” He sighed. “I was forgetting.” And he told her.

“It's all such nonsense,” she said. “In the first place, it's none of your business. Americans, I mean. You want revenge for Nanking? You had Hiroshima. And Nanking is not yours to avenge.”

The duck lay sliced, and a platter of pao-ping, little crêpes that the foreigners called “doilies,” to Burnham's disgust; and leeks, and two sauces. Elegantly, with chopsticks, Burnham plucked up a pao-ping, laid it flat, dipped a slice of duck in plum sauce, set it on the pao-ping, added a leek, and then, still with chopsticks and frankly showing off, rolled up the pao-ping, picked it off the plate, and bit it in two. The taste had not changed; he made animal sounds. The pleasures of Chinese cookery were always mitigated by the ironies—famine, malnutrition, dead babies—but apparently some gustatory life-force was unquenchable. In the midst of death there is duck. Dumplings thou art and to dumplings shall return.

With clinical precision, Hao-lan outdid him.

He admired: “You surgeon!”

“Pediatrician.”

The waiter hovered, a slim, aged man with a cobwebbed face. Burnham tapped the cruet and he glided off.

“Who did what to whom is not my concern,” Burnham told her. “Some rough justice is being done. I'm only a hunter.”

“The hunters are always foreigners,” she grumbled. “We Chinese could find the man.”

“But we Chinese have not, and three years have passed.” He made the flat face of empty courtesy.

“Now we have it,” she said. “The corrupt Chinese, hiding this monster.”

“Or only indifferent, or busy with other matters. All things are possible,” he said. “Things have their root and their branches. Listen one listen, Doctor. I myself may be no more than bait for this fish. I may already be impaled on Fate's hook. Lecture me no lectures.” In English: “Honest folks like you and me don't know nuthin'.” And back to Chinese: “Only tell me about the hospital.”

“Well, there is more to you than flirtation,” she said, and stabbed moodily at the platter. She constructed another duck roll, ate it in silence, and drank three full cups of wine with it.

“We are almost six hundred million here,” she began then. “Just after the war there were fifteen thousand doctors. That is about one for every forty thousand people. There were also six thousand certified nurses and as many mid wives. One nurse or midwife for every fifty thousand people. Do you know how many trained modern dentists we had? Licensed to practice? Three hundred and fifty.”

She had begun a long story, but Burnham made no objection. He had started this day in another country, hung over, and life had improved by the hour: Yen's car, the Willow Wine Shop, tea in a defunct whorehouse with the last of the red-hot Manchus and an apprentice pimp. Wonders, freaks and prodigies. And here he sat, luckiest of men, at table in the Black Duck, the food and wine hot, and across from him shone the Lady Chrysanthemum, or Princess Snowdrop, who had journeyed around the world, performed wondrous feats and passed taxing tests, and returned to the Middle Kingdom bearing the magical caduceus. “It is, professionally speaking, a great balls-up,” she was saying. In the firelight her cheeks glowed ruddy, her black hair lay soft and threw off auburn sparks; her eyes were deep and sad, and the line of her jaw was so graceful, the pout of her lips so lush, that he ached. Not with desire—not yet, not now—but with foolish bliss. He would not exchange Peking for any other city, or Nien Hao-lan for any other woman, or, he thought, champing happily at his leek, the Black Duck for any other beanery.

“So I came back from England in 1946,” she was saying, “with my degree from the Royal Free Hospital and five years of Western civilization behind me. Rationing and the V–2s, but my own flat and a young man who was actually called the Honourable, and you know what chaos I came back to.”

“A young man called the Honourable,” Burnham repeated in stuffy and offended tones.

“It is the best way to learn a foreign tongue,” she murmured. Burnham began to wonder if this woman was more than he could handle; her face was all innocence. “My accent is upper-class in both languages, as you have surely noticed. Anyway, I came back full of lore and idealism and applied for government certification, endless questionnaires and examinations and paper work, endless insults from clerks—there was some error, women were not doctors, perhaps ‘nurse' was meant, or ‘midwife' or ‘dispenser.' That was in the winter of 1946, and three years later I am still not certified. God damn them!” she blurted in English, then reverted to Mandarin for an extended blast: “Defile their fathers, uncles, brothers, and in time of need their younger sons. Also their kitchen gods, lap dogs and goldfish.”