The odor of disinfectant clung to his skin. His wife wouldn’t share the k’ang bed until she’d first walked around him several times holding a stick of burning incense like a wand trailing a cloud.
The cavernous room in the department store was always dim, a purposeful twilight believed to soothe patients. The large display windows on the ground floor along the sidewalk were blocked by immense stacks of coffins to shield pedestrians from a view of the sick in their beds.
The Baron bent over the bed of a new patient, a man swaddled in a coat against the cold, and gently straightened his blanket. The man turned his head, and Xiansheng’s eyes found the Baron’s face. He whispered his teacher’s name: “Elder Born.” His eyes fluttered. The barest acknowledgment.
The Baron ignored the explosion of grief in his chest. He pulled at his mask to reveal his face, stripped off a glove, sought his teacher’s hand under the blanket. His beautiful dexterous hand, shaped by skill with a brush, ivory skin a fragile wrap for his fine bones.
He couldn’t speak words of comfort or promise but prayed for a miracle, an intervention from Saint Nikolas or Guanyin, the goddess of mercy. He called the fox spirit. He visualized the black structure of calligraphy, horizontal and vertical lines, as if Teacher could escape, slip between these marks and escape.
When his teacher coughed, he wiped the red spittle from his face with a cloth. There was a cold compress for fever. He never released Xiansheng’s hand, solid with cold and unchanged by warmth from his own hand. He focused on the gentle contact of his fingertips against Xiansheng’s wrist and fixed his eyes on the distance, copying the Chinese doctors he’d observed. The evidence of mo at his wrist was the key to diagnosis. What did he sense? Confinement. He was confined in a liquid black tunnel that trembled with a pulse. He blindly followed it without a measure of distance, gradually aware of a tightening of space that led to the throbbing chambers of the heart.
Words came to him and he recited, “‘In writing one sees the hanging needle, the dropping dew, crashing thunder, falling rock, flying bird, startled beast: it is heavy as breaking clouds, light as a cicada’s wings, graceful as the new moon and dependent stars—it equals the exquisiteness of nature.’” Naming the things of this world. He recited the words again and again, making it a lullaby with the fullness of prayer.
Xiansheng met his eyes and his fingers stirred. He was gripped by rasping coughs, and blood covered the bedclothes. The Baron left his side to find another ampoule of morphine. When he returned, Xiansheng had died, his face now mute and unchangeable. The Baron carefully cleaned his face and hands.
Sorrow spread fire-fast inside his body. He stood up, swaying a little, pulled the blanket over Xiansheng. He stepped back for two men who appeared at the bedside, tightened the blanket around the body, and slid it onto a stretcher. The Baron numbly followed them from the building. Outside, the men eased the body into a flimsy coffin, their actions unusually gentle, since they were being watched. He wedged his glove under the coffin lid as a marker so he could find it again.
A man who revered words, his teacher would have hated to be buried without his name.
The next morning, the Baron was unable to locate Xiansheng’s coffin outside the hospital. Identical coffins of weather-beaten gray wood were stacked higher than his head along the length of the building. He stopped the three corpse carriers shoving coffins into a waiting wagon.
“Did you take coffins away from here yesterday?”
“Yes. We took a wagonload to the field past the barracks.”
Two men roped a canvas over the coffins to secure them in the wagon. The Baron waited until all the men were seated to hoist himself up next to the driver. One of the corpse carriers aimed his foot to kick him down from the wagon.
“Let him pay!” the driver shouted.
Another bribe. The driver shrugged. A fool’s errand, but to honor his teacher, the Baron would accompany the corpses to the burial ground. He sat in front with the driver, ignoring the men’s hostility. He snugged the hood tighter around his head, wrapped the fur blankets tighter around his body.
They headed north of Kharbin past the barracks into a wild unsettled area. The coffins slid and shifted noisily in back as the wagon navigated the icy tracks in the road, the snow unstable as water. The Baron huddled, as did the corpse carriers, the cold stripping their hands of sensation. Periodically, they checked one another for frostbite, telltale patches of white. The nose was especially vulnerable.
A long line of vehicles were stopped at a barricade near a railroad depot. They inched forward as several soldiers searched for plague-infected travelers and contaminated goods.
Other vehicles gave their wagon a wide berth, moved from the line to avoid them and the stack of coffins visible under the flapping canvas. Their cursed cargo.
Near the barricade, two masked soldiers slammed their bayonets against a fine carriage until the passengers, a bewildered man, three women, and several young children, slowly climbed down. A soldier herded the women and children together. He seized the smallest boy and, holding his coat, stuck a thermometer in his mouth. The father lunged forward but was held back by the soldier. He argued furiously until a bayonet was leveled at his chest. The children shrieked. The family was ordered back into the carriage but the boy squirmed from the soldier’s grip and ran away, foundering in the deep snow. His mother followed him, slowed by her long skirt and coat. A soldier overtook the woman, grabbed her shoulder, and she tumbled into the snow. It seemed the soldier was ordering her to leave the child.
The Baron twisted around to jump from the wagon and bribe the soldiers, rescue the family.
The driver put out his arm to stop him. “The soldiers won’t leave the child in the snow. There are too many witnesses. But before the family is locked in quarantine, the soldiers will rob them of everything. All their furs and clothing will be stolen. Surely the man has a gold pocket watch that’s worth their trouble.”
The most dangerous acts are those undertaken without consideration. Now the Baron was aware of his foolishness. The family could have been infected, and he would have perished if he’d left the wagon. The corpse carriers wouldn’t have waited for him.
The family clambered back into their carriage. Driven by a soldier, it quickly sped away from the barricade in the opposite direction. When the corpse wagon reached the barricade, the soldiers waved it through without inspection. Death was always accommodated.
The road curved along the railroad tracks, overlapping them in places. The wagon shook, jolted over an intersection, the hard metal tracks uncushioned by snow. Irregular shapes were scattered along the train tracks. Corpses. The bodies of travelers who couldn’t afford the train and died following the tracks as an escape route from Kharbin.
It was suddenly clear that the arrangement of the arms and legs of the sprawled bodies depicted the Chinese characters for peace and tranquillity. Excited, the Baron almost pointed out this extraordinary message to the men on the wagon but realized they were illiterate.
They stopped in an open field divided by a high irregular wall a distance from the road, extending for miles. The corpse carriers quickly shoved coffins from the wagon. The Baron slowly made his way to the wall through the snow, flattened and rutted by wheel tracks and the dragging of heavy objects.