The crypts were open, and a festive crowd was crammed inside. Squeezing through, P’an Tsiang-kuei spotted a platoon of soldiers prying open Rousseau’s sarcophagus with gigantic iron pickaxes. The sarcophagus refused to budge, as though nailed to the ground.
“One more time! All together! On-n-n-ne!”
Not an inch.
P’an Tsiang-kuei shoved aside the nearest soldier and leaned on the pickaxe with his whole stomach.
“Now! On my command! On-n-n-ne!”
Not an inch.
“On-n-n-ne!”
Again, nothing.
“On-n-n-ne!”
Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.
The image vanished. For a long moment P’an Tsiang-kuei could not figure out what was happening, where he was, smothered in an impenetrable darkness. The first sensation, thrashing like a fish upon the glassy surface of his consciousness, was a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach. Wait a minute… What was that? Ah yes! He’d been leaning on the pickaxe with his stomach. When had that been, and where?
The pain was getting more unbearable with every passing moment; it helped to ground his thoughts in space. Darkness. Night. The bed. The institute. Pains. Could it be??…
The pain became inhuman. P’an Tsiang-kuei jumped barefoot onto the cool floor, groped for the light switch and flipped it. The light burst on, carving out a green tablecloth covered in papers, high-back armchairs, a ceiling, the night.
The savage pain in his stomach would not give. P’an Tsiang-kuei staggered to the window where he’d left a bottle of cognac, and he drained its burning contents in one swig. The cognac swished in his gut in a fiery stream, killing the pain for a second.
P’an Tsiang-kuei went back to bed with slow, hesitant steps. His thoughts took shortcuts, interrupted themselves, like images in an old, damaged film. The sharp pain in his stomach declared itself once more.
P’an Tsiang-kuei stretched out stiffly and tried to rein in his thoughts. The cognac frothed under his skull, warmly splashing in rhythmical waves. His belly, a sack full of pain, dropped out somewhere, as if his whole body had been pulled past all limits, the space between his head and his hips stretching several yards. Cool waves of pain undulated rhythmically upward, one after another. His tired brain projected images dissolving and laboriously reconstructed onto the screen of his shut eyelids. For a moment he dozed off.
Half asleep, the real contours of objects seemed to blur and arch, creating fluctuating landscapes from new combinations of the same lines.
Where just moments before burned a chandelier of a thousand flames, there is now a gigantic, scorching ball-shaped sun, heavy as a drop of molten metal, ready to fall to Earth at any moment, burning it to cinders. Moments ago there was a row of benches, now the furrows of a thousand fields languidly sprawl in the sunshine, peeking out from the murky enamel of the water. Up to their knees in the water, small, shriveled, Chinese in rags plant rice. As far as the eye can see, nothing but water, fields, and hunchbacked people stunted by centuries of labor, under the molten drop of sun, on the verge of collapse.
An enormous, painful wave of all-consuming love crawls slowly from the stomach to the larynx, a flush of warm, clustered tears. P’an Tsiang-kuei feels that in a moment he will throw himself face first into the drenched clay of the fields to kiss the white, sweat-stained grains of life-giving rice with burning, bitter lips, he will grasp the tiny, wrinkled face of a stooped female villager and press it to his heart with a sob.
Suddenly the image starts to glisten and fade, as if seen through tears. In the foreground a pair of monstrous feet flash by, looming in the air, the whirl of spokes on a wagon nearby.
Sharp, searing pain, and darkness. The red-hot sundrop has fallen. Gray, biting smoke coats everything with a soft, predatory caress. White grimacing human faces dangle in the lines of smoke, as though in nooses.
Whose is that swollen female face, her eyes wide with childlike fear? Such precious, familiar features. Chen! My dear! The words are inaudible, but a phrase he’s heard somewhere perceptibly quivers in the sketch of her mouth: “I am so afraid to die!”
The smoke slowly dissipates, unveiling the red skeletons of buildings.
Nanjing!
A flame devours the Chinese district and stops as though enchanted before the iron grille guarding the British Concession. From behind the grille the puffy white face of a pockmarked foreman gives a revolting grimace and lolls out its tongue over the smoking maw of a machine gun.
“Follow me!” cries P’an Tsiang-kuei to the crowd crushing behind him, crossing the square between him and the grille with gigantic leaps.
Suddenly he looks around. The square is empty, no one is standing behind him. The pockmarked face behind the grille bares its teeth to jeer over the whitish viper of smoke slithering from the barrel of the machine gun. The hideous pain in his belly is snapping his gut strings.
“Right in the stomach!” whispers P’an Tsiang-kuei, vainly struggling to break into a run.
The pain twisted in his stomach like a worm. The smoke had fallen. The chandelier burned bright on the ceiling. The green tablecloth. The telephone. A groan was heard squirming in the corners of the large, well-lit room.
“Who’s that groaning in here?”
P’an Tsiang-kuei sat up on the cot. He noticed the groan was coming from him. The gnawing pain in his belly thrashed like a wounded bird.
“Ah, so this is the end?”
P’an Tsiang-kuei repeated the word twice out loud, unable to nail its significance. He began mechanically to dress, hissing from pain. He took a long time getting dressed, pausing to catch his breath after particularly sharp paroxysms. His clothes were still moist. P’an Tsiang-kuei suddenly froze in mid-movement. A vivid thought rewound itself, gathering up the scattered beads of the facts on a string. The stains from the corrosive sublimate. The broken beaker. The small Japanese assistant. Those taunting sparks. On his hand – the strange touch of dry, trembling lips…
P’an Tsiang-kuei buttoned his coat. He automatically pulled on his gray gloves and wrapped his scarf around his neck (to ensure that only the smallest surface area of skin came in direct contact with the pestilential air).
Now dressed, P’an Tsiang-kuei dragged himself to the table and searched for a pen and paper. The pain crawled through his gullet. It had already filled his whole mouth, and his chattering teeth helplessly sounded the alarm. He had to hold his jaw in place with his left hand to write straight. He composed two letters, slid them carefully into an envelope, and addressed it.
Only when he had finished did he pull a large revolver from the drawer, a comrade from his red days in Nanjing, and sat himself in the armchair. The telephone rang on the table.
P’an Tsiang-kuei put down the revolver and picked up the receiver. For a moment he couldn’t recognize the terrified voice on the other end of the line. It was the assistant who ran the professor’s workshop.
“Tonight – unexpectedly – there were no symptoms – the professor – died. He hadn’t slept – in the evening. – The nightshift assistants – found…”
P’an Tsiang-kuei hung up. A thin smile fought to the surface of his pale, chewed lips. P’an Tsiang-kuei put the black revolver back into the drawer and took a small, polished six-shooter from another drawer. He put the barrel in his mouth, his smile still fixed in place. His teeth vibrated like a tuning fork, rattling against the cool steel. The gun was locked firmly between his teeth, and the viewfinder found a place in his mouth that seemed specially carved for it.
The shot reverberated against the astonished, solemn walls of the empty, well-lit room, producing a hollow, uneasy echo.