by Jody Shields
At the Baron’s knock, a maid swiftly admitted him, asked his name, and vanished. Inside, weak September light was blocked by heavy drapes at the windows and across the doors as insulation, and he moved slowly, as if disconnected in a dream, to enter the shadowy parlor.
His footsteps were loud and clumsy across the floor, which was curiously uncarpeted, and the dark, heavy furniture seemed out of place on the bare boards. His feet cramped with the effort to quiet his boots. He stopped to peer into a glass-fronted cabinet, surprised it was cluttered with Chinese jade and porcelain figurines. Small carved jade and hard-stone decorative objects were also arranged on a side table.
“Please.” The dark figure of a young woman silently materialized in the doorway. She introduced herself as Sonya Vasilevna and indicated two chairs near the tile stove. She sat down first and he settled into another chair, close enough to notice that her eyes were tender from weeping. He introduced himself as the city’s chief medical officer, expressed sympathy for her father’s death.
Sonya looked away and whispered a line from a prayer.
He bowed his head. As a doctor, he had created a series of sentences that were serviceable in a crisis. Unfortunate news was delivered in a neutral tone, as if held at an angle that prevented emotion seeping into it. “I apologize for disturbing you at this time. Your mother is not at home?”
She nervously smoothed her long blond braid. “My stepmother, Sinotchka, left Kharbin immediately after Papa’s funeral. She hated this place.”
“Where has she gone?”
“She didn’t tell me. She left in a hurry but packed very well. Many things are missing from the house. My jewelry and an embroidered shawl. But it is a small price to be rid of her.”
“I see. So I will rely on your memory and impressions for information.”
“Information about what?”
“Your father’s unfortunate death has been questioned by certain officials.”
Sonya blinked. “I can’t help you. I wasn’t here when Papa died. Stepmother buried him against my wishes. I went to his gravesite alone.” Her body straightened, indicating she imagined herself there again.
Sympathy would not make an ally of this young woman. He asked for an account of her father’s last day.
“My father and stepmother took the train from Mukden to Kharbin. On business. September twentieth. First-class compartment.”
“Was everything as usual on the train?”
“I remember Stepmother said Papa wasn’t feeling well and didn’t cross himself when they passed St. Nikolas Cathedral on the way home. I knew something was wrong. His belief in God was strong. The most important thing in his life. Stepmother left Papa at the Metropole Hotel. He came home late. The servants said Papa staggered in, coughing blood. Blood everywhere. Even in this room.” Her hands flapped, mimed the chaos.
“May God rest his soul.”
“Who dies that quickly? Tell me. How could he die just like that?” Sonya snapped her fingers. Her grief and anger had infected each other.
He shook his head. “Certainly his death was unusual. Hemorrhage, perhaps. I apologize for this painful question, but was his bloody clothing or bedding saved?”
Her expression was disdainful. “Your question is repugnant.”
“I’m sorry. I’m a doctor. My questions can be uncomfortable but I make a diagnosis by asking questions. I believe an answer is a kind of salvation.”
She laced her fingers tightly together and didn’t respond.
He waited. Half the room was warm from the stove in the corner but the air was chill at the back of his neck.
“Some of his clothing was given to the servants. They stole the rest, even though it was bloodstained.”
Clothing, any type of clothing, was valuable even in poor condition. “Are the servants here? May I speak to them?”
She laughed. “My stepmother dismissed all the servants. I don’t know where they live. Some of them slept in the kitchen. They shopped and cleaned and cooked. It wasn’t my concern to know anything about them.”
“Even their names?”
“Their names? They’re Chinese.” After a moment, she said they were called Sasha. Azek. Boychick. Her manner was slightly apologetic.
So her family had followed the custom of giving Russian names to the Chinese servants. A lost thread. But he wrote down the false names.
“Thank you. Tell me, was the furniture taken from this room after your father died?”
Sonya said no, only the carpet had been removed, but her attention wasn’t fastened on him. She appeared to be listening to something else. She abruptly hurried across the parlor and jerked open the door. The corridor was empty. She left the room.
He pulled a handkerchief from his vest pocket, spat into it, leaned over, and rubbed it over the two front legs of his chair. The handkerchief was clean. He quickly moved to investigate if there was a stain on the sofa legs. Nothing. But when he checked the underside of the seat on a second chair, there was a faint brown smear on the white cotton. “Blood,” he whispered.
Sonya entered the room carrying a small glass jar. “Here. I kept the evidence. Before he died, Papa couldn’t eat. He only drank tea she made for him. Stepmother put jam from this jar in his tea. She told me this herself.” She sat down, flicking her long skirt around her legs. “She poisoned him.”
Sonya slowly transferred her braid from shoulder to shoulder. “My father was a very important person. One of the wealthiest men in Kharbin. General Khorvat was his friend. You’re obliged to investigate his death, although I know my stepmother is guilty.”
She reminded him of a childhood playmate, a cruel, spoiled child who once tied his greyhound to a tree and threw stones at it. But that was another life. Sonya was the daughter of a rich man, but now that he was dead, she would lose her special privileges. She was simply a young woman without a family. She should marry quickly. Still, the passions were unpredictable. He slowly exhaled. “The truth, mademoiselle, can bring security. There is a line from a Chinese poem: ‘A grain of sand contains all land and sea.’” He spoke the words again, translated back into Chinese.
“You speak Chinese?” Her face was creased with uncertainty.
“I do. Not with any ease.”
She picked up one of the small carved objects, the figure of a scholar, from the table and handed it to him. “What do you think of this? Is it valuable?”
The stone was cold in his hand. He stroked its smooth surface and wanted to say that it should be admired for itself. “I’m no expert. But it is beautifully carved. I believe it has some age.”
“You may take it with you.”
He was startled by her generosity. “Thank you for this gift. But I—”
She interrupted. “When I’m alone, I like to study the objects. I placed them here so I could see them. Stepmother mocked me for collecting these Chinese pieces.”
He was certain Sonya would marry a wealthy Russian and her home would be furnished according to his taste. Her Chinese objects would be put away. He nodded and thanked her again. “Tell me, how is your health? No fever? Cough?”
She faltered. “Nothing is wrong with me.” The girl’s arms were tightly folded across her chest.
The Baron waited, hoping she wouldn’t weep. He wanted to unbend her arms, hold her hand in consolation, but he could only soften his voice. “Please contact me if there is anything you wish to tell me.” He tried to radiate the energy of his smile, to bless her. He hoped General Khorvat’s guards would be kind to Sonya.
So Dmitry Vasilevich’s widow had fled. Evidence of guilt. Or despair. Her first choice for escape was probably the CER train. East, she could go to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. Or travel toward Beijing on the CER and the Japanese South Manchuria Railway. It was several weeks’ journey by train between Kharbin, Europe, and St. Petersburg across Manchuria and Russia, a landscape that became impassable in the winter. Snow buried the tracks, swallowed up armies. There were boats and ferrie
s down the Sungari River although the route was rapidly becoming icebound at this time of year. Pursuit of Sinotchka Vasilevna was tardy and would be haphazard, compounded by vast distances, undependable communication, untrained and unsupervised soldiers working in isolation to locate the woman. It was a fool’s errand.
The Baron stirred the fire in the corner stove to warm the small laboratory in his office. On winter mornings, glass jars and metal implements had to be carefully handled, usually with gloves, as they became so cold overnight in the unheated room that they could injure the skin. Many mornings, the shallow water in the basin was skinned with ice. After half an hour, the room was warm enough for him to remove his gloves and work. His laboratory had minimal equipment: a British Beck microscope, an autoclave for sterilizing, platinum loops, glass slides and covers, test tubes of agar media, alcohols, needles, tweezers, syringes, swabs, surgical instruments, cotton, dark brown and transparent bottles that held morphine, chloroform, ether, oil of cloves, and other liquids for soothing or numbing pain.
If accurately described by Sonya Vasilevna, who had received the information secondhand, her father’s symptoms were inconsistent with the most common forms of poisoning. Generally, the symptoms of poisoning were wide-ranging: vomiting, diarrhea, chills, fever, respiratory and heart failure, paralysis, cyanosis, hallucinations, unconsciousness. Cyanide caused the skin to flush deep pink. But vomiting blood was rare. The only citation he found that matched Dmitry Vasilevich’s symptoms was the bite of an adder, which caused bloody vomiting.
Earlier, he had dissolved a little of the jam Sonya had given to him in a chloroform and sodium carbonate mixture and allowed it to dry in a small watch-glass container. A brownish deposit formed. A drop of Mayer’s reagent was added with a capillary pipette. He waited for the drop to transform the deposit, create a ring around it to reveal the presence of poison. A chemical pointing finger. Negative. No telltale white or yellowish ring appeared.
He cautiously opened Sonya’s jar and sniffed the contents. The still-fresh scent of strawberry. He swiped his finger around the rim of the jar, sucked it, instantly rinsed his mouth, spat, and waited. He figured this minute sample of jam wasn’t enough to harm him. A tingling, numbed tongue would indicate aconitine. An intense bitterness was the signature of strychnine. Nothing. Saliva and a sweet taste of fruit.
Vegetable poisons, alkaloids, were difficult to identify in the body. For example, within hours of being ingested, opium left no trace. A spectroscopic analysis of alkaloids required special equipment, and they could also be identified under the microscope. However, his microscope wasn’t powerful enough to break down the material into distinct crystals. Metallic poisons (mercury, arsenic, antimony) were detected by electric currents or spectrum lights.
He had performed each test with deliberate caution and attention to detail. All results were negative or inconclusive. His simple laboratory was not equipped for the challenge of more complicated tests of the evidence.
It was unfortunate that Dmitry Vasilevich had been buried without an autopsy. An accurate cause of death was impossible to establish since the dead man’s viscera, urine, blood, vomit, hair, nails, and teeth weren’t tested. No autopsy had ever been performed in Kharbin, and there would be outrage if his body was exhumed from the St. Nikolas cemetery.
His simple tests on the contents of Sonya Vasilevna’s jar held no authority. No proof of poison. But it was important to respect the process. His time as an imperial army medic had taught him to answer the desires of officials.
He labeled the jar with the man’s name, the date, and the tests performed, then sealed it with wax and a strip of rice paper and shoved it to the back of a shelf.
He wrote a letter to General Khorvat, praising his determination to uncover the truth about the death of Dmitry Vasilevich. Citizens owed him their gratitude. He detailed the conversation in which Sonya Vasilevna claimed her father had been poisoned by his wife. He believed the girl’s suspicions were unfounded, caused by her wild grief. The inconclusive tests with the evidence were described. The envelope for the letter was stamped with a carved seal, numbered, and entered in the chit book used for messages. Tomorrow, a Russian boy would deliver it to General Khorvat.
There were voices outside and the first patient of the day entered the office. The Baron politely questioned the laborer in Chinese. The man winced as the Baron unwound the dirty cloth, a strip of shirt, that bound his fingers together. They were bent as a brushstroke. Bruised black.
“I’ll make a splint. Try to keep it clean. You should rest your hand for a time.” The Baron recognized this was unlikely, as the laborer worked for the railroad. The man’s expression confirmed the situation. Perhaps someone could cover for him so that he wouldn’t lose his job?
“There is always work. I’m lucky.” The man managed to smile. “I have friends here from my village in Kuanchengzi.”
He wanted to touch the man’s arm to comfort him, but this would be disrespectful. There was no money or prestige in treating the poor and they were mostly charity cases. But the Baron didn’t seek their gratitude. With his first Chinese patients, he’d quickly learned the words for “pain,” “broken,” “sharp,” “help,” “cold,” and “hot.” He tested himself by trying to translate what was said to him without watching his patients’ faces. Expressions were grasped more quickly and fluidly than vocabulary. The language of suffering was simple to decipher. He always asked the patients to explain their past treatments to better understand the Chinese system of medicine, to discover a link, something potentially useful. If they shared information, he recorded their words in a notebook after they’d left his office. To write or be distracted in front of a patient aroused suspicion. Wang er zhi, to gaze and to know things, was the gift of the most skillful doctors.
The next patient, Chow Li, a man in his thirties, suffered from a lung infection that the Baron treated with applications of warm oil and camphor. As Chow Li dressed behind a screen, he described how people had been treated for smallpox in his village. A metal jar of small loose sticks was passed from hand to hand, and everyone selected one as a talisman to guard their health. Later, the villagers were actually inoculated against smallpox, mandated by the emperor, after which they prayed to the goddess Niang for twelve days to ensure its effectiveness.
Once, the Baron had observed an elderly Chinese doctor, skilled in traditional medicine, treat a young man suffering from chungjing shanghan, one of the most complicated diseases. The patient had chills, a fever, dry throat, dull eyes, a cold pain in his abdomen.
At that point, the Baron’s grasp of the language was rudimentary, so the doctor slowly explained the process of diagnosis for his benefit, as if speaking to a child. The Baron was tense, alert to every word and gesture of the Chinese doctor.
The Chinese doctor quietly held the young man’s hand, his delicate fingers pressed lightly against the inside of his wrist, and explained that it wasn’t the pulse of blood in the vessels that he was monitoring. He registered mo, a flow that connected every part of the body and indicated the source of illness. The Chinese did not believe that the heart ruled the body but that the circulation of blood began in and returned to a small space at the wrist, streaming horizontally under the skin with a smooth or rough, faltering course. It wasn’t Chinese medical practice to dissect a body. Diagnosis was based on the study of living people, not the dead.
The Baron quietly asked the doctor how he diagnosed the patient from the mo at his wrist.
“Each finger has a place on the wrist that corresponds to a part of the body. I use minimal pressure to diagnose the fu, the soft organs in the body. A harder pressure is for the solid yin, the viscera.” He demonstrated. “Press the fingertips lightly, the weight of three beans, to diagnose skin and the lungs. Deepen pressure to six beans to read the blood vessels and heart; the third level is flesh and spleen. Fourth level is for the tendons and liver. The most intense pressure, fifteen beans, reveals the condition of the bones and kidney
s.”
While palpating the wrist with his fingertips, the doctor distinguished what he sensed at each pressure to make a diagnosis. Twenty-four qualities of mo were recorded in an early volume of Mojing, a revered ancient medical text. The descriptions of mo were poetic, mysterious, vague, allusive, built on metaphors that had been used for centuries. One type of mo was “a smooth succession of rolling pearls.” Another mo was “rain-soaked sand.” Faint mo was “extremely thin and soft as if about to disappear. It appears both to be there and not to be there.”
Doubt and unease possessed him. The Baron didn’t dare touch the patient’s wrist, certain that he’d feel only a pulse, the common thunder of blood. The mysterious, elegant subtleties of mo were unintelligible to his fingers. An unknown language of sensation. Even the doctor’s account of the symptoms of illness, the feel of the mo, the odors and colors of the body, its very solidity, were unrecognizable. He was humbled, realizing he would never comprehend the Chinese system of medicine. Even learning the language wouldn’t enlighten him.
He had been blind to these perceptions and was shocked, as if the body suddenly possessed wholly unfamiliar characteristics. Some men looked at the sky and saw random stars while others deciphered a pattern, figures of men and beasts.
Sometimes he wondered if this new awareness had contaminated him. He kept his own counsel, didn’t share this knowledge with other doctors or nurses. The idea that such fantastical concepts were worth consideration would have seemed ridiculous if someone had described it to him years ago, but in this place, with age and experience, the physical body had been newly revealed as miraculous.
The Baron shared his fascination with Chinese medicine with Li Ju. Occasionally, she sat beside him to interview traditional healers about their treatments and remedies. He marveled at her skill. When she was in the presence of these honored elders, her entire body became poised in alert but docile surrender. She made herself absent. It was admirable but he was also unnerved by her transformation. Once, after a lengthy conversation with a healer, it took a moment for her to respond when he spoke her name. Where were you, Li Ju? he wanted to ask.