Death Fugue

by Sheng Keyi

  In the dark room Rania’s face looked paler under the lights. She couldn’t eat anything. Even drinking water was a struggle. At seven or eight o’clock, Nurse Yuyue, lips shiny, returned to check on her, apparently satiated with dinner and complacent, as if she was doing everything on autopilot.

  ‘If you don’t eat, how will you have strength to carry on? You’ve got to force something down,’ she said to Mengliu in a professional, authoritative manner. She paused for a moment, then putting on a pair of rubber gloves, she told Rania to lie flat and began poking around inside her body with her fingertips. She wrinkled her brow and grumbled, ‘What’s this? You’re still not dilated.’ She took off the gloves and threw them into the rubbish bin, then went to consult the chief physician.

  Before long, some people came in, led by an elderly man with fluffy white hair. It seemed he had been drinking excessively, for his face was flushed. Without a word he put on a pair of gloves and began his investigation. His face grew tense. A young intern clumsily repeated the same procedure. No more than five minutes after they had come in, they all left the ward. Rania was like a pile of refuse discarded there. Her convulsions continued. Sometimes she opened her mouth like a fish, but she didn’t cry out.

  Yuyue told Mengliu that in order to maintain a peaceful cosy atmosphere in the hospital, they often needed to inject patients with sedatives. Howling was detrimental to human dignity, and the hospital would be turned into a place of terror. She wrote something on Rania’s chart, slotting it back into the clipboard when she was finished and returning her pen to her breast pocket. She said there were complications with Rania’s situation, but that he should rest assured she would be fine by the next morning. Yuyue sat down on a rotating stool and turned a full circle. Then she spread her legs and planted them firmly on the ground. Evidently she wanted to have a heart-to-heart chat with Mengliu. She took a small book out of a pocket in the side of her uniform. In it were the poems she had written over the past couple of years, more than a hundred of them. She had never let anyone see them before, but because he was a poet, she wanted him to be her first reader. She didn’t use words such as ‘ask’ or ‘edit’, assuming the pleasure would be all his.

  He opened to the title page and saw a photo of her there. She was pure as jade, only eighteen years old. She wore faded jeans and a tank top. She was like a giraffe. He handed back the little book and said that he didn’t understand poetry, nor was he interested in it. He stood up and looked at Rania, and asked if there was any way to alleviate her pain more quickly. Yuyue put the poetry book back into her pocket, and explained that when it was really time to give birth to the child, the cervix would dilate to the width of five fingers. Her current pain was nothing, he shouldn’t worry, the foetus would certainly come out the next morning.

  Mengliu said, ‘You mean she will has to suffer like this the whole night?’

  Rania replied, ‘Everything is normal. You can go home and sleep. The nurses will take good care of her.’

  Rania reached out for Mengliu, as if she was on her deathbed. Understanding her meaning, he nodded to indicate that he would stay, but he didn’t take her pale hand.

  Rania’s continuing contractions grew dull and monotonous throughout the night. The hospital was lonely and silent, and there was a romantic orange light glowing outside the window. Mengliu read, but he felt drowsy and could not help dozing off. When he did finally sleep, he slept like a dead man, not even waking when Nurse Yuyue came in to check on the patient in the morning. Rania’s contractions continued. Her forehead was sweating and her mouth was open, as if she were dying.

  When she came in again, Yuyue donned her gloves and checked Rania. This time, she looked puzzled. Rania’s cervix was still not dilated. She checked the time, and said the patient needed to eat something. Mengliu immediately got up and went to the hospital cafeteria to get breakfast. Breakfast was served buffet style, and there was a huge variety of options available – bread, cheese, smoked fish, porridge, steamed buns, dumplings, noodles, fruit, milk, coffee…A card on the buffet table read, Please do not waste food.

  Mengliu ate hurriedly, then carried some steamed buns and porridge back to the ward. The white-haired old man led a team of doctors around Rania’s bed. Their expressions and gestures were the same as the previous day. Before they left, the white-haired man said, ‘We’ll observe her for another three hours. If there is no change, we will have to crush the foetus and then do a D&C.’

  Mengliu helped Rania up and tried to give her some food. She was only able to take a couple of bites between the bouts of pain. Even chewing was difficult. When Mengliu had been through a similar situation with Qizi long ago, she would playfully bite the spoon and chopsticks, giggling. Lost in thought, he asked Rania if she was in great pain. She closed her eyes, waiting for the contraction to pass, then nodded slowly. Feeling she needed all her strength to wrestle with the pain, he didn’t speak again, but fell instead into the steady rhythm of feeding her. After half an hour, she had only finished half a bowl of porridge and half a bun. She could not eat any more, and needed to lie down in order to deal with the attacks of pain. But before long she started to vomit and her stomach was emptied of its contents. Her body drooped over the edge of the bed, like a wilted vegetable robbed of all its moisture. Mengliu lay her back on the bed, covered her with the quilt, and wiped the sweat and tears from her face. She experienced another violent contraction, then calm was restored. She was very tired, and slept finally. He looked at her childlike face, recalling her unruly manner of speech, her sharp arrogant words, her bike speeding away, her unbridled state as she strutted around…and now she was just a helpless infant, manipulated by others. She had never been master of her own body. He sighed. Her face was drained of its colour. He felt time was frozen in her face. Gradually a creamy layer formed on her lips, and turned to a dry crust. He realised that she needed water. He took a glass and went out to find it. There was a dispenser at the end of the corridor. There was mineral water, fruit juice and instant hot tea. He took a cup of mineral water.

  When he returned, he found Rania sleeping soundly and could not bear to wake her, so he stood holding the cup of water as he looked down at her. At this moment, he inexplicably felt a sense of responsibility toward her. No matter what, she was a fragile little girl with a high IQ and a good heart, and had done her duty towards him. He, on the other hand, was cold and often cynical, bickering with her for any reason – or even without reason. He never trusted her, and always thought of her simply as an agent of Swan Valley who was trying to get him to write poetry. When she endured suffering he was insensitive, and didn’t offer any comfort. Thinking of this, he felt some remorse. He sat down on her bed and clutched her hand. It was very cold, like the hand of a patient who had died on the operating table. An ominous feeling came over him, and he pressed her hand harder. She did not respond. At the same time he felt that he was sitting on something sticky. He stood up and discovered blood. Pulling the blanket back, he saw that the lower part of Rania’s body was lying in a pool of blood.

  She was dead. He was almost pushed out of the door by this realisation. His chest felt cold, as if his own heart had stopped beating. He stared at Rania as if he had murdered her.

  14

  Grief is like a perennial frost in the heart, but no amount of grieving could cause an avalanche in Mengliu. He still maintained a doctor’s cold rationality, and his regret and self-condemnation remained buried under the ice, though to alleviate his conscience he continued to blame Rania’s death on the government. The media and the public all thought it was an accident, and there were even some reporters who wrote euphemistically about the couple’s dereliction of duty, saying that they had been immersed in reading erotic Japanese novels at the time of her death, highlighting the apathy between them. This united front of gossip made Mengliu anxious. They had concluded, ridiculously, that it was the marriage, not medical malpractice, that was the cause. The more gossipy magazines began to exaggerate even mo
re, expounding on men and their family responsibilities, and then the moral arrows really started to fly at Yuan Mengliu. For a time, he was a very hot topic.

  Swan Valley gave Rania one final glorious moment. Her funeral was carried out to the highest specifications in the most prestigious church. She was laid out among fresh white flowers, her cheeks rouged, her body covered with the Swan Valley flag. A high-ranking government official delivered the eulogy, during which his voice choked several times. People wept silently with a controlled sadness, passing by her coffin to place flowers and say their farewells in an orderly fashion. Then they went out of the church and on with their lives. After a couple of weeks had passed, people mentioned Rania from time to time, saying what a pity it was to have lost such superior genes, and such a talent from Swan Valley, but no one bothered to trace the loss back to its source. When he thought of Rania’s corpse amongst the fresh flowers, there was a dull pain in Mengliu’s mind. Guilt and anger wrapped themselves around his heart. He resigned from his post as Head of a Thousand Households. He wanted to move back in with Juli.

  He imagined that he would be released from his old shackles and allowed to put on new ones, but everything was different now from what it had been before. Rania’s death gave him a fresh start. He was polite to people, but behind it there was a quiet kind of alienation. He thought that if he lived with Juli again it wouldn’t be like the last time. Back then fantasies of temptation flew about the house like butterflies, and the atmosphere was one of quiet joy for both of them. His mind then had been like a notched arrow, waiting to fly at the first sight of a suitable girl. But now it was as if he and Juli were coming together again after decades of separation.

  They often didn’t have much to say to each other as they went about their business. Even Shanlai didn’t disrupt this scenario, as he came in the door without a sound, sometimes carrying a few books, sometimes turning out his pocketfuls of wild berries and leaving them on the table. They no longer discussed the soul or art. The two of them gave off an air of religious detachment. Esteban came to visit on his own initiative, occasionally looking in on Mengliu as he passed by. When he visited, he was often with Darae or another young person, and they always talked about Rania with regret. Her memorial inscription was an elegiac couplet that Esteban had written, wrought with distress and pain. They did not criticise Mengliu. He tried to avoid them at such times, sometimes going out to check on Rania’s grave to see if the grass had grown on it, sometimes to visit the mountains. Once he looked for the waste disposal site, but he did not find it. He could never quite figure out the state of the roads, and could find no trace of the places in his memory, like the place where the robot had spoken to him or the slopes covered with wild lilies. The weather was as temperamental as a menopausal woman. When it was about to rain the sky would be unusually bright, and sometimes covered with a layer of haze.

  On this day, a heavy rainstorm had just passed and the company was again talking of Rania’s death, about what might have been if she were still alive. Mengliu walked quietly away, not wanting to recall the sight of her dying right there before his eyes. The air was fresh and damp in the mountains, the valleys quiet and the narrow path he walked on empty. A scattering of black fungus grew on the side of the path. The leaves on the trees appeared disordered by the storm. Dark thin clouds floated high above, and the vegetation on the hillside changed at intervals, sometimes grass, sometimes bamboo, and whole patches of azalea bushes. There was not a breath of wind. Mengliu’s shoes were soon soaked and the sweat was flowing off him. He didn’t know where he was going. Everything around him seemed desolate. The wind ripped into the warmth of his body. His lips started to quiver violently, and his teeth were knocking together. He wrapped his arms around himself and began to run in this awkward posture. Sweat ran down his face, and his feet exploded the puddles and snapped the twigs beneath them. He was running through the Wisdom Bureau’s sporting grounds. The cries of the girls were ear-splitting as they cheered Hei Chun on. He wore a blue and white sweatshirt, and looked supple as a stallion. He galloped along, stirring up waves and clouds of sand, leaving Mengliu in his wake. He always lost to Hei Chun. This was an indisputable fact. He just didn’t possess Hei Chun’s desperate passion. They had fought once for the sake of a poem, and he had suffered a hard blow from his friend. Hei Chun told him why he had hit him – he believed that fists could make fools a little cleverer, at least for a while. Mengliu had never questioned his own intelligence. His proof lay in the fact that he had been admitted to the nation’s top schools and finally to the Wisdom Bureau itself because he was a champion of the arts. Hei Chun said it was just a silly exam that propelled a stupid fellow like Mengliu to a high position, but he couldn’t change his fate and become just a useless mediocrity. For some time afterwards Mengliu drank alone in crowded bars, not talking and not thinking, just listening to the complicated strains of jazz that wove through the contorting bodies that surrounded him, like the sound of a stream flowing past. He sat there, indifferent. Then the sun would come up and the people dispersed. They had their work, their health, and their sobriety. Their eyes were bright, and they lived contented lives, while his heart was cramped with a sense of loss. Sometimes he thought Hei Chun might be right. A high IQ was nothing in some circumstances, and could lead one to live an impotent life.

  But obviously Hei Chun was mistaken, and Swan Valley was proof of that. Not long ago, he had risen to the position of Head of a Thousand Households. Those who prepared the spiritual briefing materials wrote them in a more interesting way than he was used to. They knew he was a poet and were happy to rack their brains and modify their style to try to find an interesting way to express themselves. In the meetings they read the reports as if they were reading poetry, intentionally breaking long sentences into manageable lines, carefully pausing at the right spots and for the right length of time. They put a lot of effort into getting the emphasis right, and they were studious in displaying rich emotions. Some used body language or exaggerated expressions, raising the government work conference to an unprecedented level of literary and poetic showmanship. People loved this format, and some started writing poems themselves, furtively showing them to Mengliu and asking him to ‘feel free’ in his criticisms. He quickly drew every kind of poetry fanatic to himself, and the meetings were transformed into poetry readings. Darae was especially affected. Both his temperament and his talent were like a replica of Bai Qiu’s.

  Mengliu recalled an unpleasant confrontation with Darae. Like Bai Qiu, Darae believed that revolutionaries were the greatest poets. Mengliu said that revolution was not something to toy with. From ancient times until the present, many people had gone crazy for revolution, but even after their sacrifice, nothing had changed. ‘You’d be better off going for a Nobel Prize for Literature like Rabindranath Tagore, Neruda, Miłosz…’

  Darae smiled quietly. ‘You’re right. When the fascists undertook a war of aggression, Tagore was outraged, ready to sound the battle cry for the fight against the beast in human skin. When the Spanish War broke out against the fascist dictator, it was the outcast Neruda who said, “I must take to the streets, shouting until the last moment.” And as for Miłosz, when the Second World War broke out, he chose not to flee but stayed to take part in the resistance movement.’

  Rania had interrupted at this point, saying that a poet could not just sit as a silent observer of life.

  Mengliu felt a little ashamed. He thought they were setting an ambush for him. Then Darae said, ‘Some poets are trees, rooted in their own land. Others are birds, flying all over the earth. I wish I could be a bird, living everywhere in exile.’ Against his own conscience, Mengliu said his comments reflected the thinking of a naive student, an expansive fantasy, pure and ignorant idealism. Not being able to return to one’s home was not romantic. Nobody wanted to taste that sort of bitterness.

  Streaks of fog were creeping over the hilltop, like the bent backs of a stealthily invading enemy, slowly passing over the
weeds and through the dead trees. Mengliu made his way down from Rania’s grave, his face wet and his hair knotted in mist. Thinking of taking a shortcut, he made his way east. He was sure there was a way out there. He was now more determined than ever to leave Swan Valley. He became more and more convinced of its urgency, and grew desperate, scratching and scrambling where there was no way through, rolling and crawling, and when the path was clear, hurrying to push ahead. He did not believe in the secret passage Rania has spoken of, but he needed to find the way by which he had come in. He saw a grey wall in the distance and the glow of the meandering river, with white flowering branches from the bushes dangling over it. The familiar scenery encouraged him. But he couldn’t get any closer to the wall and seemed further from it the more he circled the place. Eventually, he couldn’t see the other elements either, as if they had all been a hallucination. He continued walking through the woods, but he had lost his way.

  Just as he was about to look for a place to rest, he heard a strange sound echoing through the forest. Suspecting it was a wild beast, he hid amongst the trees. The continued rustling sound brought three dark figures into Mengliu’s view. One was in front and two behind, as if they were transporting a prisoner. The person in front looked like a nun, wrapped in a black gown that brushed the ground and was caked in mud.