The Winter Station
Page 18
“What did the fortune-teller say? I hope there were no predictions of illness.”
“No,” Li Ju said quietly.
“Did she predict happiness, long life? A child?”
“First the woman offered the choices. She could tell my fortune by a coin toss, casting lots, or chopsticks in a bowl of water. Or cards and two shaped blocks of wood, buguo. She could read my face and head or the joints of my fingers. In spring, she interprets the cries of birds.”
“What was your choice?” He was relieved Li Ju so easily shared the information with him. She kept no secrets. Still, he disliked himself in the role of questioner.
“The I-Ching. The woman threw the forty-nine yarrow sticks on the table. She studied the sticks for a long time. I waited and tried to be still. Chang almost made me laugh; he kept making faces. Then she read a hexagram from the I-Ching. I remember one, nine in the second place.”
“Tell me.”
Li Ju was straightforward, a good child reciting lessons:
One kills three foxes in the field
And receives a yellow arrow.
Perseverance brings good fortune.
Kill three foxes? the Baron thought. The fox was associated with the supernatural. He had an old man’s nervousness, the bitter awareness of his own mortality. Had Li Ju carried his fear to the fortune-teller? “How did she interpret the hexagram?”
“The foxes are sly. She said I must battle the power that they hold and kill them. The yellow arrow’s a weapon to use in the future. It’s my reward. The color is harmonizing. Its message is to avoid the tangle of extreme passion.”
“Passion? She said avoid passion?” He was bewildered. He’d been secretly convinced the fortune-teller would praise him to his wife, celebrate their union, how well suited they were to each other.
“I think so. A warning of excess.”
He didn’t trust Li Ju’s answer; she seemed evasive. Perhaps she didn’t believe the prediction, although she’d heard nothing about death. Any future threats seemed conquerable.
“But what was the fortune-teller’s expression when she spoke to you? Do you believe she was truthful?” He continued to question her although she backed away from his pursuit.
“I’ve told you everything I can remember.” She frowned, struggling to describe the encounter. “The fortune-teller was tired. Many people were waiting. It was a small crowded room.” Uneasy, she twisted her fingers together.
“Nothing else?”
“No.”
“Was Chang pleased with his future?”
“Yes. He gave me a gift. See.” Chang had brought a colorful printed paper titled “The Chart of Disappearing Cold” with nine rows of nine circles to mark eighty-one days from the winter solstice until spring. A count to carry them through the bitter season.
“Very pretty. What did the fortune-teller say to Chang?”
“‘There is no escape from the unchangeableness of change.’ Xuanxue is the dark law of mysterious things.”
That was no comfort. He carried the words like a closed book to bed. His body slowly eased into a familiar position and in the moment before sleep, Li Ju slipped in beside him and found his cold hand under the quilt. Her fingertips playfully pressed the inside of his wrist, pretending to read his mo. She wasn’t trained but had memorized the twenty-four descriptions in the ancient lexicon for him. The loving connection of mo was part of their intimate play. He hoped this didn’t mock or betray the tradition that he regarded as profound. To her, the mo was poetry, direction, joy. What he desired. A touch and an incantation, mysterious and strange, linked to pleasure.
She communicated her desire to him in the language of the mo. Sometimes she instructed him to be rough with her, like “rain-soaked sand.” At other times, she desired “a smooth succession of rolling pearls.” He was certain their imaginations never matched but arousal was mutual.
When she was younger and he first took her to bed, he was uncertain, afraid that something in her education or background would make her reject his tenderness. He exposed his nakedness to her only gradually, wearing a loose robe, understanding that his large hairy body with loose fatty flesh was totally foreign to her. The mo was their game, a coaxing seduction.
“Sand over water,” she whispered in his ear.
A line of ink on paper was irreversible. Skin was more forgiving. Skin changed with the touch of a finger. He dedicated his calligraphy to his wife. Her body was the paper; the brush traced a pattern of intimacy. Pressing memory into a line with the ink. If he had explained this to her, she would have smiled, made a gesture of dismissal.
Xiansheng, his teacher, didn’t recognize this tribute, his secret state of mind. The Baron felt himself a deceiver. But his teacher had once stated that the cao shu, the delicate, lively grass-style calligraphy, could be successfully learned only against a background of quietly rippling water or by witnessing snakes as they writhed and fought.
* * *
The Russo-Chinese Bank was a palatial building with chandeliers and marble floors. The serenity of the main room was interrupted by an echoing click-click-click, steady as the noise of insects, as each clerk at a desk worked with an abacus. Overhead, ceiling fans delicately vibrated in the hot air radiating up from the blue-and-white porcelain stoves in the corners. The Baron stamped snow from his boots on the threshold mat and noticed Andreev across the room, finishing a transaction with a clerk. The Baron handed a chit to the teller behind the window and was issued a stack of rubles and a few heavy silver pesos. He decided to wait for Andreev on the upholstered settee and savor the pleasure of a warm room.
Andreev bundled up his papers, bowed to the clerk, and greeted the Baron. “A cold day for business. My shoulders ache from walking outside in this frigid temperature. Like a clenched fist.” He shrugged his shoulders, stretched his arms, and nestled into the plush cushions next to the Baron.
“December weather.” The Baron had just started relaxing in the heat.
“I don’t need reminding. You’ve probably already started preparing for the Great Lent.”
“Not yet.” The Baron wondered if Andreev should be invited to dinner before the fast started. Was he hinting at this? He peered at the man’s face but sensed he was already distracted.
“I heard the gold is stored upstairs.” Andreev glanced up at the open gallery circling the dome of the building.
“Gold?”
“Prince Kugusev persuaded the Upper Amur River Gold Mining Company to deposit their ingots here. See the guard?” His eyes followed the dim figure of a man pacing with a rifle on the open gallery above them. “The guard marched around the gallery until the prince complained his boots were too noisy. Maybe the soldier is barefoot now.” Andreev’s face wrinkled into a grin.
“All quiet today. But how do you have information about this gold?”
“Talk drifts downriver.”
“Seems very innocent.”
“I recently supplied two men who went north as far as Manchouli in Manchuria. They hunted birds, strange fierce animals. I saw the skins they brought back. I introduced Alexiovich, the Russian hunter, to his Jesuit guide. Alexiovich came back with a collection of dead animals, swore he’d never return.”
“Jesuits were the first explorers allowed in Manchuria by the Imperial Throne, over two hundred years ago.”
“Manchuria is barely settled but it has dangers that make Kharbin seem like a cradle. Hutzul bandits swoop in on horseback, kill entire villages. The Russian said they’d walked into a village where everyone had died of a sickness.”
The Baron’s attention flared like a match. “A sickness?”
Andreev was startled by the Baron’s interest. “All I know is they found one man who was still alive. Blood everywhere. They thought it was a Hutzul massacre. The Jesuit priest was too late to save his soul.”
“What was this sickness?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where can I find this Russian, Alexiovich?”
“But you must know how to contact him, since you delivered supplies for his expedition.”
“My men made the delivery to him. I don’t drive goods around Kharbin.”
Their exchange became jagged, stressful, as both men recognized it had decayed into evasion and falsehood. The superior man is master of his demeanor. The Baron relaxed his mouth. “I see. You might recollect the information later.”
“Yes. I might.”
“And the Jesuit priest, Alexiovich’s guide? Who is he? Where is he?”
“Lost in Manchuria. Never returned.”
There was some reason for Andreev to withhold information about the Russian hunter and his guide. Alexiovich was probably a prominent businessman or official who could afford a lengthy expedition. Andreev might know about a scandal, potential blackmail that involved this man. Alexiovich. A common name. A hare’s chase. But he couldn’t afford to dismiss Andreev for keeping this secret. Friends, anyone, could die within a day. A lapse of judgment could be forgiven. Even an insult could be forgotten.
Andreev returned his attention to the Baron. “There’s something you should see. Follow me.”
Outside the bank, the wind caught them and they doubled back on Konnaya Street. Andreev turned into a narrow alley and grabbed the Baron’s arm.
“There. See,” Andreev hissed softly, pointing at two shadowy figures standing so still they seemed embedded in the courtyard wall. One of them had something draped over his arm, perhaps a cloth or net, and they both held stout sticks.
“Don’t move,” Andreev whispered.
One of the silent figures stepped cautiously forward, then stopped. Another step and a pause. Then he leaped forward and smashed his stick into the ground several times.
The Baron turned for an explanation, but Andreev’s hand gestured for quiet. The two figures edged along the wall, waiting motionless for twenty breaths, then chased something back and forth, furiously slamming their sticks down again and again, churning up the snow. Then they slowly searched the ground, stabbing their sticks to impale small dark objects, dropping them into a sack. Finished, they stopped and pulled back their fur hoods. Two women.
“Rat hunters. Each dead rat gets a bounty from the Kharbin government,” Andreev said. “Thousands of rats are killed every day. People are desperate. There’s no work. The railroad dismissed all the Chinese workers, thousands of men, fearing they’d spread infection. But the Russians are still employed.”
So Dr. Mesny’s rat-collecting program had survived his dismissal.
A man pushed a cart over to the women rat catchers and they swung their heavy sacks into it.
“Rats are saviors of the starving. Some hunters boast they can strangle rats with their bare hands.”
“You’re well informed about rat hunters, Andreev.”
“I’m always interested in new markets.”
“You’re considering work as a rat catcher?”
“Broker and importer.” Andreev made an expansive gesture. “I have wagons and carts loaded with dead rats moving from Kirin, Hulan, and Shitaochengtzu to Kharbin. The rats are packed frozen. Flattened. Easy to transport here for the bounty payment. There’s no proof of origin.”
The Baron felt something like admiration and the absurdity of the situation bubbled inside and erupted. His laughter was a white cloud between them.
They walked past the opera house and the Standard Oil office, Andreev waving at patches of dirty snow and bright red ice patterned with spatters of blood from the clubbed rats.
Andreev hailed a droshky and they drove past the sites haunted by rat hunters stalking their prey in alleys, garbage dumps, cesspools, wells, burned-out buildings, warehouses stacked with timber, and flour mills. By the tanneries, footsteps marred the snow around foul black pools, the waste from skinned goats, lambs, and horses, scummed over, crusted, never frozen.
“A tour of hell.” The Baron pulled the fur collar up under his nose as the smell penetrated even inside the droshky.
At a collection point, the driver stopped and they watched a steady stream of men, women, and children line up with bulky sacks and baskets balanced on poles across their shoulders. The dead rats were dumped out, counted. The hunters were paid. A row of wagons, guarded by soldiers, transported the dead vermin to a warehouse in Staryi Kharbin, about five miles from the Sungari River.
Next, the droshky driver took them to the stock exchange building, where three soldiers loitered near the door. One of them lifted his rifle and slowly swung around, tracking something moving on the ground along a stone wall. He fired once, triggering a faint high-pitched squeal, and then he ran forward and thumped his rifle butt into the snow, finishing off the animal.
Andreev grimaced. “They kill cats and dogs since they also carry plague fleas. I begin to think everything that moves is infected. There’s one last place to show you.”
Daylight was fading. Snow hid a vast mesh of train tracks around a warehouse so it appeared stranded in a field of smooth snow. The droshky driver refused to go farther. The two men jumped from the vehicle, moved unsteadily toward the warehouse, their legs plunging deep into the snow, unable to judge its depth. At the warehouse, the guard acknowledged Andreev’s salute and the Baron followed him through a low door. Inside, a terrible stench, and he clapped his cold glove over his nose, shaken by the howling and barking of dogs. He stepped back from the hundreds of dogs locked in cages, row upon row stacked above his head.
Andreev had blocked his nose with a cloth and gestured toward the door. Outside, they fell back against the wall, gasping, gulping fresh air. The Baron wanted to throw himself in the snow, roll and roll to suffocate the memory, the smell of the place.
“Why did you bring me here?”
Andreev’s eyes were fixed in calculation. “The men who raise the animals for skins and meat smuggle in food for the dogs. They buy scraps to feed the animals from several sources to avoid raising suspicion. If this place was discovered, all the dogs would be slaughtered, since they have fleas that might carry plague.”
The Baron staggered upright, waded through snow in the direction of the droshky, moving so slowly he felt it was the suspension of a dream. Then Andreev helped him stand up although he didn’t remember falling. “I want you to report this place. For the sake of the dogs.”
“But the animals will be killed.” The Baron was bewildered.
“It will be a mercy. The poor beasts suffer.”
CHAPTER TEN
Wu fiddled impatiently with his spectacles while a boy moved around the hospital conference table, deftly serving everyone hot tea from the samovar. The Baron recognized this was not an empty moment and prepared himself during the wait, correcting his posture, settling calm into his breath. Stilling the heart, as his teacher had described. It was a relief to be free of the bulky protective clothing, the white mask, and sit face-to-face with the others. But the smooth wood table, the metal chairs, shelves, the scattered papers, offered no defense against the bacilli that haunted them. He imagined the hospital empty, the soft bodies of the doctors and patients vanished. Was anyone else uneasy? Zabolotny, Iasienski, Lebedev, Haffkine, Wu?
Wu wished them good morning, called for their attention. “A few points of business to begin. After Dr. Mesny’s untimely death at the Metropole, the hotel was fumigated and temporarily closed. Unfortunately, his death also prompted a neighboring hotel, the Grand, to evict all the doctors and medical workers who were guests. Until there’s an alternative, we’ll rent private homes or rooms for the displaced. Never discuss this with anyone outside the hospital. Certainly never speak to newspapers or representatives from foreign countries. Rumors harm us.”
Messonier raised a hand. “Dr. Wu, with all respect, Dr. Mesny’s death touched everyone.”
“His death was a tragic warning.”
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“I’d like to offer silent prayer in honor of Dr. Mesny.” Messonier lowered his head over his folded hands and the rest of the doctors followed his example.
After Messonier had finished, the Baron broke the silence. “Glory to God. Thank you, Dr. Messonier. You spoke for our hearts.”
Only the slightest flicker betrayed Wu’s relief that the prayer had ended, as if he’d somehow been excluded, and he immediately filled this space with words. “The Red Cross has organized insurance. In the unlikely event of death, they’ll provide for the families of all the doctors.” He paused, interrupting the glance between the Baron and Messonier. “Now Dr. Haffkine will brief us about his anti-plague serum.”
“A supply of the serum to treat the disease was just delivered here from Fort Alexander in Kronstadt. The shipping expense was considerable.”
The Baron had questions. “My Chinese contacts said Japan ships two thousand doses of Dr. Kitasato’s plague vaccine to Manchuria every day. Anyone—Chinese, Russian, Japanese, German, Slav—can be vaccinated immediately without charge. So why are citizens not being inoculated when a free supply is at hand, Dr. Wu?”
Wu was serene. “The viceroy of Manchuria is aware of Dr. Kitasato’s plague vaccine. But to inject Chinese citizens with a Japanese vaccine? Never. The Japanese are not trusted. The viceroy has forbidden Kitasato’s vaccine. It is too risky. Japanese, Russians, and everyone else may make their own choice about this vaccine.”
“Dr. Kitasato is a recognized expert at the Tokio Institute for the Study of Infectious Diseases. He’s studied plague for years. But I believe I understand your position.” The Baron’s words were drawn out, calculated as a brush on paper. “The viceroy of Manchuria cannot allow the Japanese vaccine to succeed.”
“I’m not authorized to discuss the viceroy’s decision with you.”