by Jody Shields
“Your mother mentioned that you’d stayed with a native tribe?”
“The Buryat. They treated me very well. I’ve never felt so safe. Slept like a child.”
The Baron ignored this and moved toward his target. “I heard there was an illness among the Buryat.”
Nestorov’s hesitation spanned a blink. “Father Jartoux, who spoke their language, was told about an illness that periodically returns.” He was sweating profusely and the high collar of his jacket was ringed with a dark irregular line. He rubbed a handkerchief over his face and neck, studying the Baron in calculation. “You’re a doctor at the Russian hospital?”
The Baron felt a prickle of fear, as if he were responding to a threat. He was surrounded by an aura of disinfectant, a warning to others. A death stink.
Nestorov fumbled in the drawer of his desk. “I met no one who was ill. No one.”
“You lie.”
A dry mechanical click and Nestorov’s hand swept up holding a gun. “I knew I’d be tracked here. Did you come to arrest me, Doctor? I’m not sick. I won’t be quarantined. Don’t worry, I won’t shoot you. The pistol is for my head.”
The Baron sprang at the desk, knocked Nestorov’s arm sideways. The gun thudded onto the floor.
Nestorov began to weep noisily, cheeks scarlet with tears.
Moving slowly, the Baron slid open the drawer in Nestorov’s desk. It was filled with rows of neatly rolled gauze bandages, disinfectant, liquid morphine, carbolic acid.
“You’re still alive, weeks after exposure to the sickness. The plague. You’re not contagious. Trust me.” The Baron waited for gratitude, as he’d delivered the man from a death sentence.
Nestorov was dazed. “All this time I was afraid. I waited.” His voice a whisper. “Waited for the cough. Fever. Blood on my tongue.” His broad fingers rubbed his jaw. “Then Andreev came here. Knew about the sickness, the Buryat tribe. Jartoux had told him everything. Andreev confronted me and I paid him. Otherwise, he said, the plague wagons would come for my family. Later, I realized that Andreev didn’t believe I was sick. He stood here without a mask or anything to protect himself from infection. I was a fool.”
“You’re safe now.”
Nestorov’s bluster returned. “I wonder if the plague is a Chinese plot.” Then he sighed and leaned over his desk. “We found one Buryat man who was sick. He vomited blood. Father Jartoux started to treat the man in his tent but then refused to touch him. Even Jartoux’s boots were bloody. He performed last rites outside while the man coughed and coughed in the tent.” He grimaced. “What do you think the savages did next?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “They sewed the sick man inside the tent. Then they packed up camp and left him. Jartoux and I traveled back together, keeping a distance from each other. I was afraid of him, afraid he’d caught the sickness and would infect me. I wanted to leave but had no other guide. We shared no foodstuffs or water, slept in separate tents. All our equipment, the Kabul tent and supplies, was burned when we arrived in Manchouli. Others would gladly have paid for the stuff but I swear we destroyed everything. You believe me?”
The Baron nodded.
“I returned alone on the train. After a week, isolated at home, I was certain that I wasn’t infected. I would die before exposing my family to any sickness. Then I heard about the deaths, the bodies in the Hailar, Chalainor, and Manchouli train stations. And bodies near Central Station here in Kharbin. I cautioned my family about crowds, forced them to stay in the house. Now I fear that this thing is among us in the city. But I’m not the carrier. I didn’t bring plague death.”
“I need a list of train passengers and staff on the day you traveled back to Kharbin.”
“What will you do with the names?”
“Check the obituaries. One match spreads fire.” But the Baron suspected this was a dead end. It was probably impossible to discover who had brought plague to Kharbin. He imagined the dim interior of the Buryat tent, walls wet with blood, hot, close, and stinking, the Jesuit priest leaning over the sick man, listening to his rasping cough, crawling backward out of the narrow space. A man of God despite his refusal, his turning away.
The Baron wished Nestorov good day and caught a droshky outside Central Station. He woke abruptly, thrown forward when it stopped at the Russian hospital. In the lobby, a messenger caught his attention before he’d even removed his hat.
“From General Khorvat, Baron. Sir.” The messenger was a young boy and he stood at a distance, obviously nervous about physical contact with a hospital doctor, a chumore. Still wearing gloves, he handed over the envelope.
“A meeting at the general’s office?”
“I—I don’t know. Sir.” The boy stuttered. “I didn’t read it.” His face, reddened from the cold, blossomed scarlet. He took the Baron’s coin and quickly left the building.
General Khorvat’s letter ordered the Baron to negotiate with Father Bourles, a Catholic priest, at his church compound. The priest and his followers had amassed a store of food and barricaded themselves in the church to wait out the plague. They anticipated that faith and prayer would save their lives.
He found the droshky outside and wearily pulled the weight of a fur rug over his legs, its pungent odor sharpened by the cold air. At the church, a ragtag group of medics, a nurse, two soldiers, and Father Androvich were waiting for him by the high stone wall surrounding the compound. A soldier angrily kicked a clod of ice at the door in the wall.
“How long will we stand here?” The second soldier impatiently pulled the bell rope by the door. He leaned over, squinting into a crack above the door latch. “I see snow in the courtyard. No footprints. Nothing moves.” He straightened up and studied the thick door. His ax splintered the wood around the latch and the door swung open.
The group crowded into a wide courtyard, a square of undisturbed snow surrounded by gray stone walls.
“Hello? Hello?”
Across the courtyard, a small figure appeared, so still that it seemed to have emerged from the wall of the building.
“Who is it? A child?”
The nurse took two steps forward but the Baron roughly pulled her back.
“Wait.”
The child made a helpless gesture and collapsed. They struggled through the snow across the courtyard and gathered around the body of a small girl. Her face was lilac and her lips were blue. Her white garment was stained with blood.
“Don’t touch the child.”
Father Androvich pushed a medic aside and fell to his knees by to the body. “Where is thy mother, little one?” he whispered. He cleaned the child’s face with his sleeve. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the wide world, and they that dwell therein.” He made the sign of the cross.
Everyone crossed themselves, muttering, “God have mercy.”
Two bodies were found near the stone wall. They were facedown, both of them in fur coats and partially buried in snow. Impossible to tell if they had died of plague or cold. The soldiers tugged at the frozen arms and legs angled stiff as branches. They rocked the bodies back and forth, pried them from the snow’s grip, and turned them over. Two Chinese, a young woman and an older man, their faces speckled with bits of leaves, the skin blotched red-purple-green where blood had settled after death. With a gloved finger, the Baron gently touched the woman’s cheek, surprised by its solid hardness. Flesh like stone.
He noticed a tall stack of wooden boxes against the wall. Not everyone had shared Father Bourles’s belief in the curative power of prayer. The young woman and the man had attempted escape by climbing on the boxes to get over the wall.
“We should search the grounds. But there aren’t enough men to help,” the Baron said.
Father Androvich shook his head. “Wait until the snow melts.”
A soldier responded, “If there’s anyone left alive in Kharbin by springtime.”
The Baron separated the group into four parties to search for survivors.
Inside th
e first building, their breath billowed around them, and the sound of their boots was amplified by the bare floors as they moved warily through the freezing rooms. Dishes and utensils were marooned in pools of ice on the tables in the kitchen.
“The bedrooms must be on the second floor.”
The nurse and a medic followed the Baron upstairs. In the corridor, uncovered chamber pots were haphazardly set along the walls, and he angled his boots, careful not to tip them over, until he realized they were webbed with a scum of frozen crystals. There was no smell.
The Baron dreaded opening the door, the discovery of a suffering figure in bed, the frantic attempt to comfort or relieve pain. Or he’d find the dead, although there was no odor of decay. He tied on a mask, hampered by his gloves, and indicated that everyone else should do the same. He felt lopsided, the sense of his body blunted by the mask over his face.
He knocked on the bedroom door. He felt the fear of the others waiting behind him, and it was a struggle to control his breath, the tight pressure of anticipation in his gut. He was trapped inside a bell, a blind, suffocating place. Fear pulsed through his hand, and without waiting for an answer, he shoved the door open with a bang.
They’d expected to be welcomed as saviors, rescuers, but there was only a strange flatness, a sense of waiting, not peace. The silence, and the lack of greeting, was a momentary relief.
A dead woman lay in the first bed, a prayer book open on her lap, the linens stained black in the dim light. Her face had been cleaned, perhaps a caretaker’s last gesture.
The Baron hesitated, sensing another presence. A cradle holding a still white figure was wedged next to the bed, the wall pinpointed with spots, blood from the infant’s coughing.
Another room with rows of beds. A man’s dark silhouette in the corner bed, dirty linens bunched up around his neck as if to hold him upright. Two men lay on the floor. Other beds held the rounded shapes of bodies covered with blankets. Better to die here, among familiar things, preserved by the cold, than locked in a train car for quarantine. “Nothing we can do here.”
The nurse and the medic who had followed him into the room stepped back into the corridor. They decided to check the church for survivors. Their voices stilted and very loud in the quiet space.
The church door was unlocked and they entered the climate of familiar odors, incense, wax, cold stone. The echoing noise of their movements stopped as the medic fumbled with a lantern, filling the height of the center space with frail light above lines of empty pews. In front of the altar, coffins were stacked on long tables, fit together like a raft waiting to be launched.
“Mother of God.”
The trespassers crossed themselves. The dead in the coffins must have been the first plague victims, their bodies stored here in the church for burial when the ground had thawed. Something caught the Baron’s eye, and he crouched to examine the legs of a table. “Bring the light here.”
Each table leg was wrapped with a large inverted metal cone to stop rats climbing up to reach the corpses inside the coffins. The lettering on the side of the coffins was barely legible and he leaned closer, reading several names aloud, his voice solemnly rising into the dim height of the church, a courtesy owed to the dead. He feared finding the name of a friend or acquaintance.
No one had an appetite for a meal, but they found tea and the samovar in the kitchen, heated snow until it boiled, and drank the hot liquid. Two bottles of vodka were discovered in a cupboard and a glass quickly poured for everyone.
When their share of the vodka was finished, the two soldiers left to continue searching the church and the outbuildings. The Baron and Father Androvich slumped at the kitchen table, waiting. Conversation was impossible.
Someone shouted that they’d found a closed room. The Baron and the priest hurriedly followed the voices to the door of the church cellar. The excited soldiers stood aside on the steps to let them pass, lanterns swinging in their hands.
The door at the bottom of the steps was sealed with metal strips and a thick plate was secured along the floor. Giddy from nerves and vodka, the soldiers joked about the gold and valuables inside the room.
The priest wearily leaned against the wall. “There’s nothing precious behind the door. You’ll see.”
The Baron gestured for a lantern. “Here’s a puzzle. The door is heavily secured but the key’s in plain sight. Look.” A key hung next to a crucifix on the wall.
The key fit the lock.
The door opened to a foul odor and a faint bitter smell of carbolic acid. Inside, the light from the lantern was a harsh eye on a disorder of heaped coffins, the tumbled long shapes of corpses wrapped in shrouds, blankets, rags. A catacombs. The suffocating air invaded the Baron’s nose and throat, and his face was damp with sweat. He silently backed out of the room, the images unwillingly fastened in memory as if burned in place.
The medic and the nurse were dismissed after all the buildings were searched. Two hundred and forty-three bodies were counted and left in place. The door in the stone wall around the church was repaired and barred against looters.
The Baron joined Father Androvich and the two soldiers in the church. They replaced the candles in the holders on the altar and set a kerosene lantern on the front pew, sharpening shadows on the rows of coffins. The plague dead were a tainted burden.
The priest recited an epistle from Thessalonians: “Rest with the saints, O Christ, thy servant’s soul, where there is no pain, nor grief, nor sighing, but life that endeth not.”
The Baron hoped the presence of other believers had brought peace to the dying and that they had been tended and mourned. Perhaps, mercifully, many of them were unaware that Father Bourles and everyone else had died. The place would be cleaned and someday no trace would remain of the many who had perished here.
He didn’t remember falling asleep in the church but woke in a wagon jolting back to the hospital. The streets were deserted. Was it morning or late afternoon? He could barely see his hand in the dimness.
He blinked, rubbed his eyes, needing the contact, the pressure of his fingertips as a connection to wakefulness, to convince himself that the events in the church hadn’t been a dream. He was awake.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The plague’s hunger had carved up the city. A layer had been stripped away, revealing hidden bones, barbed wire, metal, and wood that became barricades. Every road into Kharbin was blocked by men with bayonets against an invisible enemy. A cordon radiated out over the quarters—Novy Gorod, Pristan, Fuchiatien, Staryi Kharbin—dividing the city into four, then eight and finally sixteen guarded sections. Some Kharbinskiis felt more secure, as if plague could be held inside certain boundaries.
The center of Kharbin was deserted. The furriers on Kitayskaya and Mostovaya Streets were shut down first, as fur was suspected of harboring plague-carrying fleas. All the foreign-owned companies and the Chinese and Russian banks closed. Hotels refused guests who worked in hospitals or gave dubious answers when queried about their visit to Kharbin. Public worship was forbidden, and churches, synagogues, and temples closed. Schools closed. Libraries closed. The opera, ballet, and other theaters locked their doors. Restaurants and most chaynaya closed. The lumberyards, the Soskin grain mill, and Borodin’s vodka distillery closed.
Pawnshops drew their curtains but secretly continued a flourishing business in certain goods, solid durable valuables that could be disinfected—jewelry, silverware, icons, jade and ivory objects, precious metals.
Pleasure was accessible for the brave or foolhardy. Opium dens and nightclubs defied the ban on public gatherings and remained open. As a dark joke, the young women selling cigarettes and cigars added a few thermometers to the offerings on their trays.
* * *
The Baron stared down the dim alley at the plague wagon next to the inn. Three reflected points of light indicated the bayonets held by the soldiers seated in the front of the wagon. The Baron spoke to the men’s silhouettes. “Wait here. Let me enter the inn alon
e. I’ll shout if I need help.”
“Be quick with your inspection.”
Lanterns illuminated the center of the low, overheated inn, and the faces of the laborers massed around the tables shone with sweat. It was like being confined in the belly of a ship.
He addressed them in Chinese about the sickness. “If one person becomes sick, everyone around him will become sick. Then you’ll give the sickness to your families. In the hospital, you’ll be made comfortable.” His words were unconvincing.
A bottle was tossed from the back of the room. It missed his shoulder and struck the wall. Shouting, boiling movement as men rushed forward, but he didn’t flinch. He’d suffered worse blows. The innkeeper waved his arms, and the men withdrew.
The Baron held up a thermometer, a brilliant white line of glass reflecting the lantern light. He allowed a few men to gingerly inspect the thing. No one would touch it. He slipped a clean thermometer into his own mouth to demonstrate its safety. After a moment, he removed the thermometer and tied a mask over his face. He stood still, waiting for them to accept his transformation, his retreat into a disguise. He was an object of fear and wished Wang were present to ease the situation. He moved very slowly through the room as if to diminish the threat of his grim task, examining each man in turn for signs of ill health. The laborers sullenly cooperated. Two men were found to be symptomatic, with high temperatures and rapid pulses.
He accompanied them outside, their few possessions bundled in a cloth, to the waiting plague wagon. A soldier leveled a gun at the frightened Chinese men and they drew protectively together. The other soldiers stood atop the wagon and fastened masks around their faces. It was a show of business, dressing before a performance. A soldier leaped from the wagon, seized one of the Chinese men, and dragged him, struggling, to the cage in the back of the wagon.
The inn door slammed open and a crowd of laborers streamed out. Shouting, they attacked the two men wrestling in the snow, kicking and punching the soldier.