Death Fugue

by Sheng Keyi

  Yuyue ridiculed the childish ways of the government, but she was only voicing her opinion on the matter. She wasn’t hopeful. The situation was the government’s baby, and she didn’t care about its life or death. Drinking strong spirits was a sign of bad character, but this didn’t affect her attempts to find pleasure. Whether there were problems or not, she always had a couple of drinks. When the day shift was over, she secretly procured wine prepared with dates and other ingredients. It would cause diarrhoea and vomiting in those who were not accustomed to it, but once you got used to the strong drink, it kept you fit. Mengliu was completely adjusted to the habit, and they enjoyed peanuts, tofu slices and dried beef as they drank and chatted in front of the fire until they were red in the face and lit up from within.

  Yuyue constantly spoke of the deaths at the hospital, how the drugs were ineffective and the patients would die slowly and excruciatingly. One had stopped breathing under her care. She had not rested for three days and three nights, and she was weary to the bone. Just as she thought she would collapse, the medical experts arrived. There were eight of them in all, six men and two women, dressed like astronauts ready to visit the moon, each carrying a toolbox. They looked stern. Walking uniformly and resolutely across the lawn, they blew into the hospital entrance like a cold wind.

  Yuyue enthusiastically described one of the women on the team, how young she was and how pretty. As Mengliu listened, his heart thumped. When Yuyue said Suitang’s name, he stood up from his chair. He only feebly expressed his doubts, because he had known that eventually she would be brought here. He believed without reservation that she had come. He could not refute that reality. This was followed by a feeling of pleasant surprise, and an urgent need to see her, which sobered him up completely.

  He tried to stay calm, and downed another glass of wine. It had begun to snow again. The snowflakes floated lazily. He told Yuyue that the biggest benefit of snow was that it allowed one to stay indoors with old friends, chatting and drinking languorously before the fire, heedless of everything else. As she listened to his insincere talk, Yuyue smiled as brightly as a peach blossom, in a merciless accusation that his mind had already left the fireside. ‘If I were you, I would not be hiding here. I would have flown straight to the hospital.’

  Hearing this, Mengliu stood up and adjusted his clothes as if preparing himself to leave, but Yuyue mocked him again, saying that the hospital was completely off limits. Outsiders couldn’t come and go as they pleased, unless they wanted to be quarantined for at least two weeks. Quarantine was not something amusing, sharing toilets and bathing facilities, crowded into a room with other people with only the roughest of provisions. More importantly, he would not be able to see Suitang. ‘But if you can tell me the most exciting thing that happened between you and her, I’ll take you to see her.’

  Her teasing was all quite serious. Unembarrassed, Mengliu returned to his seat. In fact a number of times, as he sat in front of the fire and with the spirits working their way through his belly, he had wanted to talk about the women in his past, Suitang or Qizi, and those whose names he had forgotten, though they had each left an impression on him. He would gladly open the baggage of his past in this cold weather, sharing it with a beautiful girl, but really, what was the most exciting part? Did sex count? If he took the secrets between him and Suitang and told them to her, what would Yuyue think?

  ‘Perhaps we will all die of the plague, even those who are sweetly in love. Why don’t you discard your sense of shame and tell me all about it.’ Yuyue seemed to have read his mind, for her words were hitting the mark. ‘Sometimes love can turn a devil into an angel.’

  Mengliu laughed. ‘You’re amazing. I’m becoming more and more convinced that no one can compete with you, in science or the emotions.’ He was suddenly in no hurry to see Suitang.

  Yuyue winked at him as she sipped her drink.

  ‘If I tell you that I killed someone for Suitang, don’t be surprised.’ He came straight to the point.

  ‘The murderer was not you,’ she said dismissively. ‘It was love.’

  He ignored her irony, watching the flames dance in the fireplace as he slowly told her everything.

  ‘I never thought I would speak of these things, but perhaps I really was a murderer. I may be a wanted criminal. Until this day, I don’t know how Suitang feels about me. She looked like my first love Qizi. Deep down I took her as Qizi, not caring whether or not she loved me. I’ve told you about my affair with Qizi before. She disappeared, and might still be alive. Maybe she changed her name and got a fresh start. Suitang was my assistant. She had been swindled by a sick old poet called Jia Wan with whom she was deeply involved. One day Suitang told me her plan, and it frightened me. There was no way I could do what she had in mind, but when I saw her turn away in disappointment, I promised her. You know, for a surgeon it was really not that difficult. What Suitang wanted was quite easily accomplished during a heart bypass operation. She wanted me to destroy an artery near his heart while mending another, cutting it as if that were as common a thing as snipping a thread.’

  Yuyue refilled his glass and tossed another log on the fire.

  ‘No one knows how Suitang got Jia Wan to change his will before the surgery, leaving her two million yuan whether she aborted his child or not. Suitang told me that she wasn’t going to have Jia Wan’s child. She was only twenty-three years old and there were things she wanted to do in life. She would use the money to start a foundation dedicated to poetry and poets. She said that if I didn’t hold anything against her, and if I wasn’t merely trying to get her into bed, we could officially date and be loyal to one another. She thought that with the two million, we could accomplish our ideals. If I could not accept her greedy and broken heart, then we should keep a distance like that between siblings, and she would deposit five hundred thousand in cash into my account. To tell you the truth, I calculated at the time that this dirty money, not being taxed and all, was equal to several years of salary for me. But even someone who is poor at maths knows that two million plus Suitang was worth much more than five-hundred thousand alone – moreover, I liked Suitang. She looked like Qizi. Of course, I also knew that even for women one did not like, one’s feelings could change when two million yuan was involved. A man might easily feel he couldn’t extricate himself from a situation like that, and the woman would think it was her charm that had captivated him. But there’s nothing like cash to make a person understand himself less and less. You can always feel you are upright and aloof, then one day you find that isn’t the case, and you’re no better than a monkey rushing headlong for the prize, or a dog eager to grasp a bone. You take all the values you’ve built up over the years and smash them – though at least, for someone like me, those values had fallen to pieces long ago.’

  ‘That’s true. A poet who doesn’t write poems anymore can’t do much, nor can he really talk about values.’ Yuyue’s voice showed she was satisfied with his story. She was like a judge issuing expert opinions on the work of a performer. It was these words that pierced Mengliu’s heart. When a person is as self-deprecating as he had just been, he is really after praise from others, but Yuyue had knocked him down a notch, and made him feel lower than a dog. Still, he had to admit the truth of what she said. She was the only person he had ever met who was completely devoid of bullshit. Her comments were better than empty hypocritical words of comfort, and they brought a quick end to his self-pity, preserving the vital resources he needed to pull himself together. He knew what she meant – to act in the name of love was better than any of those things done by the authorities.

  ‘After Jia Wan died, what happened to you and Suitang?’ Yuyue wanted to know the outcome.

  ‘She didn’t get a thing. She was set up by Jia Wan and his wife.’

  ‘Poet, doctor, murderer. Yuan Mengliu, you are living in comfortable exile!’ Yuyue laughed heartily again. Her nose was perspiring. She was like a spring. ‘Honestly. This place suits you. You are so free here. If on
ly you were still writing, your status would be of the highest rank.’

  ‘That’s a joke. Really – a big joke,’ he said, bored.

  ‘Those who have suffered for a long time have even more right than others to express themselves. It’s like the tortured having a need to cry out, so the argument that after this or that difficulty you cannot write anymore must be wrong.’

  He seemed to have drunk too much. He felt awful as he stood up again. ‘I have to go look for Suitang.’

  So he made his way through the wind and snow to the hospital. He accomplished nothing other than to get a whiff of the hospital’s smell. It was a wasted errand. Yuyue brought news that Suitang would only get to have some rest after a few days. It was a ray of hope, but after a couple of days the ray of hope faded away. Suitang was infected and confined to a ward. She sprayed germs about when she talked, and was running a high fever. With life and death hanging in the balance, no one could see her.

  20

  Cold temperatures seemed to stop the spread of the infectious disease. Of course this was an illusion, but even more false was the impression that the whole thing had never happened. After a brief panic, people’s emotions stabilised and they waited instead for some new, curious turn of events. The sun was still round, and it still came up in the east, and it still hung in the sky without falling. Those who craned their necks waiting grew tired after a while, and so withdrew their necks, and slowly themselves. Yuyue said that the hospital’s morgues were full, and the incinerators were so overworked each day that the ashes of the dead were immediately flushed down the drain. When those in angelic white garments visited the families of the dead, fake ashes were handed over, along with false records and false compassion. But the flowers were genuine. The government was doing everything humanly possible.

  Yuyue was the only one in the hospital not dressed in a hazmat suit. Unafraid of death, she spoke to the patients just like she always had. She patted Suitang’s head, telling her not to worry, it was important to believe that she would not die. There was a man waiting for her. This sort of talk did nothing for Suitang, who said with a hint of hatred in her words that she had not thought Yuan Mengliu was still alive. A week later she recovered miraculously, and received a red pacesetter medal as a result. She was given two days’ leave of absence from the hospital and after promising not to disclose any information, was allowed to go outside.

  Mengliu waited for her in the beech grove. He felt as if they knew each other from another life. She wore a black down jacket and her hair was pulled back in a very high bun, revealing her full forehead. Her brown plaid scarf covered her sexy white neck. She did not wear a hat, unwilling to hide her pretty hair. Her mouth chomped constantly on chewing gum.

  When he asked her why she had come to Swan Valley, she said that her plane had been hijacked. The other hostages were dead. She was the only one who had been rescued, but she had been brought against her will to the hospital to help deal with the epidemic. She said the hostages could have all been rescued, but neither the police nor the hijackers had any intention of leaving witnesses behind. She did not consider herself rescued, since the police and hijackers were in it together, and she was the person they wanted.

  ‘But you’re just an anaesthetist…Damn those human traffickers!’ Mengliu, unable to explain the complex emotion he felt in a few words, swore bitterly. He had already reawakened to her unique charms, and recovered his feelings from the past. It felt like he had been apart from Suitang for less than a year, but she seemed to stand decades away, blurring the concept of time for him. ‘Suitang, don’t go back to the hospital. You’ll die in vain…’

  ‘I’m immune. I won’t die. It seems you have been very happy here,’ she said, looking at him contemptuously. ‘It seems that what you are best at is playing hide-and-seek. Actually, you needn’t hide. You know I won’t cling to you. You know I don’t like to beg.’

  ‘You…it’s not that I wanted to stay here. I mean…I don’t know how to explain it. I was knocked out by a huge wave while on a boat, then when I woke up I was in Swan Valley.’ Even as he said it, Mengliu found his own words unbelievable. He laughed ruefully. ‘I’m telling you the truth…What happened after the incident with Jia Wan? Did you get into any trouble?’

  ‘Nothing happened. The insurance company investigated, and that was it. The funeral for that scumbag was very grand, with writers and poets coming from all over the country to attend the memorial service. There was an awards ceremony, and the deceased was granted the nation’s highest poetry prize.’ She looked out at the sky above the woods, then spat silently. ‘No one was more qualified for this award than Hei Chun and Bai Qiu. And you – if you had continued to write poetry.’

  Mengliu thought that if the poetry prize was being devalued like this, poets didn’t really matter. He wasn’t concerned with poetry but with the Jia Wan affair. It had ended. He suddenly felt very light. He turned a gracious eye on the landscape around him.

  The forest after a snowfall. A girl in black. A bough covered with ice on its north side. A pristine blue sky. A refreshing wind. Yes, he could remain calm. During his conversation with Suitang he kept recalling that the time he and Yuyue had decided on for their raid on the nursing home was only three days away, and he wasn’t going to spend those days talking about poetry or the dead, he would have to focus on perfecting their plan. Of course, if he wanted to arrange a reliable network of agents, he would need to recruit Esteban, Juli or Darae. There was no way to reveal all the ins and outs of it to Suitang now. He could only warn her that the place was not what it seemed.

  ‘I know you have already obtained Swan Valley’s certificate of citizenship.’ Suitang spat out her chewing gum, and took a small bit of ice from the tree and sucked on it like it was candy. ‘How could you escape without letting me know? I want to ask you a question. If you don’t want to answer, that’s fine, but only tell the truth if you do. To you, am I really just a shadow of Qizi?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Mengliu knew this was the moment for some hypocrisy, for sweet, kind words. Just like when a girl asked him in bed whether he would marry her, and he would always say that if he were not still waiting for his first love, he would marry. These sorts of words were useful for maintaining a girl’s self-respect and confidence. ‘You are you. You are not like her,’ he said.

  Suitang’s mouth melted into a smile, and she quickly asked him about his relationship with Yuyue, and how many women he had been with in Swan Valley. Finally she asked whether he had written any poems for them.

  ‘There were no women, and no poems.’

  He felt her voice piercing his defences, every word was a confrontation. She thought that when she had failed to get the large amount of money from Jia Wan’s will he had abandoned her, and so she had every right to criticise him.

  He kept an apologetic tone. ‘I often thought of you, but I could not get back. This damned place!’

  It seemed that his story was full of holes. She wouldn’t stop bickering with him, interrogating him. She didn’t want anything from him, but she didn’t want to be played for a fool either. She had felt like slapping him the moment she saw him, but instead she had acted indifferent. It was not because they were in the same boat again and she had to put away her personal grudges. It was more because when Yuyue had first told her he was here, she really was overjoyed, and when she saw him, her heart was filled with warmth and happiness. But she was afraid of losing face, so she had pretended to be cold, hoping to win back a little self-respect in his eyes.

  It was as if she were reciting a tongue-twister, drawing out the minute details of her rich emotions.

  Of course, he understood, so he kept speaking in low tones, allowing her plenty of space to vent her feelings, wanting nothing more than to play his role once her performance was complete. At last, in good time, he caught hold of three fingers on one of her hands and pulled her to him saying, ‘If you keep crying out here, your face will turn to ice. If you want to come back to
my fireside and continue crying, that would be fine.’

  So they returned to his house to continue their conversation.

  She was surprised to find him living alone in such a large house. As she looked around, she said that only a wealthy man could live this way, a normal surgeon’s salary wouldn’t pay for more than the bathroom. If men did not sell their souls for their professions and women did not sell their bodies, what would become of the world? She rambled on. Who would dig out a three-room underground house, who would turn a scrapped vehicle into a mobile camper, who would fake a divorce for the sake of a house. She talked a lot, and energetically, and quickly forgot her tears. She said, ‘You must have had a windfall, or you’re being kept by a rich woman. You’re living in such luxury, no wonder you don’t want to leave.’

  ‘My material comforts were not less there than here. At first, I didn’t want to go back. I was attracted by the freedom they enjoyed here. In our art back home we wouldn’t be allowed to paint a moustache on our leaders. Their art allowed them to strip their dead leader naked. But I know now that their freedom is only superficial.’

  The house was nice and warm. They sat cross-legged on the carpet. For a while, they almost forgot that they were living abroad. Her wounded feelings over Jia Wan had apparently healed, and her recent illness had had almost no effect on her. She was healthy and young, like fresh fruit on a tree. He could see that she was excited, that everything in Swan Valley seemed fresh and lovely, and that she did not intend to leave. He unceremoniously poured cold water on that prospect, telling her truthfully all that had happened to him, including Rania’s death, the letter from the person in black, his conversation with the robot, and his doubts about the nursing home. He also summarised his own temptations when faced with beautiful women, but he didn’t think that terribly important right now.

  Artificial insemination and the prohibitions on sex surprised her, but hearing about the squid that nearly ate him and the waste disposal site turned her insides to ice. She moved closer to Mengliu, and felt a little better. She asked him why he had not sneaked back to the site. He said he had tried many times. Once he became lost, and once he was nearly killed. He hid the additional factor of the woman, especially the more captivating moments with Juli. There was no need to complicate the issue.