Dreams of the Red Phoenix (13 page)

Captain Hsu appeared at her side and asked, as he often did,
if she needed anything. Shirley raised her eyes and stared into the
man's lined face. She considered that his pockmarks and the scar
over his right brow could have made him appear sinister and yet
didn't. Instead, he seemed serious but kind. That his eyes were
even with hers came as a relief after this long day. She was tired
of looking down into the faces of people she could not possibly
save. They had stared up at her with hope, even when there was
no reason for hope.

“I could use a smoke,” she said.

He reached into his jacket breast pocket and pulled out a tin
case of hand-rolled Chinese cigarettes.

“This will make me even dizzier than I already am.”

“Did you eat, Nurse Carson?”

She took a cigarette and wandered toward the screen door,
where a slight evening breeze seeped over the threshold. No one
waited in line any longer, but several families had bedded down
for the night on the wide verandah. She stepped outside, and
Captain Hsu followed. He lit her cigarette with a match struck
on the side of the brick house. Shirley stood on the top step and
smoked.

“You did well today,” he said.

“I did all right. But, luckily for me, the revolution is not about
a single person, but the whole.”

He smiled. “I think you have only a partial understanding of
what I've been saying to you.”

“I'm teasing,” she said and sent a stream of smoke into the
night.

“You are the one who continues to ask me questions,” he re
minded her. “I am happy to work alongside you without philos
ophizing.”

“I enjoy our conversations, Captain.”

Through the open windows came the moans of her patients.
The town itself was quiet now that the Japanese Imperial Army
had moved on to different parts. But far beyond the compound,
periodic mortar fire struck the earth. Several weeks before, Japa
nese aircraft had hummed loudly and low over the foothills. The
distant echo of their bombs had surprisingly caused the bottles of
medicine on the shelves to tremble. According to Captain Hsu,
the fighting had returned to the ground again soon after, as the
young warlord's troops confronted the enemy to the east, and
other factions fought to the north. The captain would mention
these areas of engagement casually, in passing, and never with
any explanation. Shirley's overall impression of the military ac
tions taking place in the province around her was like that of a
picnicker hearing the buzzing of bees in nearby flowerbeds but
never quite seeing them.

Still, although a dull sense of menace hung over her days and
a feeling of futility overwhelmed her at times, Shirley shook out
her arms now and was oddly grateful for the sensation that shot
through her with something like vitality. Though surrounded by
the dying, she felt inexorably alive.

“Now that you mention it, I am hungry,” she said and rose on
her toes and stretched. “How about you?”

“Famished.”

“Shall we go into the kitchen and make something?”

“Nurse Carson knows how to cook? I did not think American
women knew how.”

“We do. We just don't cook here in China.”

“And why is that?”

“It isn't done. We have cooks instead.”

Captain Hsu nodded.

“You don't happen to know my cook, do you? He disappeared
some weeks ago.”

“Yes, I know him.”

“Oh,” she said and wondered if there was anything—besides
modern germ theory and some Western notions—that Captain
Hsu did not know. “Will you tell me where he is?”

The captain took his cap from his pocket, ran his fingers over
the brim, and appeared ill at ease for the first time since they had
met. “I can tell you that he is all right,” he said.

“But you can't share with me where he is?”

“I think it is better this way.”

“What way?”

“For an American woman to make her own food for now,
since she is good at it.”

She took another puff and studied him. The red star on the
cap in his hands caught the light before he tucked it back into his
pocket. She would get nothing more from him this evening.

“I'm not sure how it got like this, foreigners having cooks,” she
said, “but that's the expectation. I couldn't exactly go to market and
haggle with farmers and the fishmonger myself, could I?”

He lifted an eyebrow.

“You would have me do that, wouldn't you? But we have ser
vants to do that for us. We employ the Chinese fairly here at the
mission. We pay well, and we don't take advantage of them.”

She thought the corners of his mouth rose slightly.

“If you didn't have the upper classes, whether foreign or Chi
nese, to employ people, the whole business would collapse,” she
said. “But I forgot, that's what you want, isn't it?”

He finally chuckled. “Nurse Carson, you think this?”

“Yes, I think this.”

“Then yes is my answer, too. The whole business would
collapse.”

Shirley flicked her cigarette over the side of the porch. She
didn't like being teased, but she realized she was naive about pol
itics and vulnerable to sounding foolish. It seemed such a hare
brained idea to upend everything, though in China there was no
question that the peasant class lived more wretchedly than any
people she had ever known. The Russian serfs had no doubt had
it bad, but who could say in 1937 if life was better for them un
der Communism? And now the poor Russians were dealing with
Hitler, so none of it mattered, anyway, as they tried to simply stay
alive. Still, Shirley had to guess that if Communism was ever to
work, it might work here in China, where poverty, ignorance,
and illiteracy kept the people in the Dark Ages—though now, in
this war with Japan, there were other, more pressing concerns.

“That's enough of that,” she said. “Let's have supper.” She
started toward the door.

“Thank you, but no.” Captain Hsu bowed. “I have my men to
attend to. You enjoy your meal.”

“But you haven't eaten all day, either, and they must be asleep
already, your men, whoever, and wherever, they are.”

“I have told you about my men, Nurse Carson. They are
country boys. You have met a few of them yourself. And they are
hungry, too. So I will go now. Please excuse me.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, are you suggesting that I feed them,
also?” She crossed her arms over her chest.

Captain Hsu did not reply.

“I haven't
mien
for them all.”

Again he did not answer.

“And my son, wherever he is, must be hungry, too. I'm sure
he'll be home any minute. I can't just give away the last of what's
in my larder. Who knows how long this siege or whatever it is
will go on?”

Her head was pounding, and whatever exhilaration and ca
maraderie she had felt before were now being extinguished by
exhaustion. She wished she could blink and have the whole lot of
them disappear. Blink and have Caleb at her side again. But the
best she could do was retreat inside and try to put out of her mind
the captain's stern and quizzical gaze.

“Good night, Captain Hsu,” she said and started in.

“Good night, Nurse Carson. I will be back again at dawn.”

Shirley let out a slight groan, stepped over the threshold, and
skirted around the Chinese asleep in her front hall. The kitch
en, located in a small dependency off the back of the house, was
dominated by a mud-encased brick
kang
that Cook normally kept
fired with logs or coal. It stood cold now, and the low-timbered
room remained dark. The truth was, Shirley hadn't cooked here,
not even once, and had only visited the kitchen a few times. That
seemed a sorry thing to admit, but there it was: she didn't know
the first thing about how to make a meal in China.

She lit a kerosene lantern that hung from a hook by the stove.
There appeared to be no electricity in this shadowy hut—quite
unfortunate, given that a kitchen was precisely where you need
ed the best light. She wished Caleb were here to correct the sit
uation but realized that now all such problems fell to her. Over
the past few weeks of running the clinic and making her home
function as efficiently as possible, she had started to sense that
her husband had neglected a great many things around the house
because of being occupied elsewhere. She had come to realize
there was much she didn't know about him—about his friends
like Captain Hsu, what he truly believed politically, and no doubt
other things as well. And wasn't it odd, she wondered now, that
she had been so little aware of the workings of the household
while her husband was alive? She had to wonder what else had
gone on under their roof without her knowing it.

With one hand, she held aloft the lantern, and with the other,
she searched around on an open shelf, shifting heavy bags of grain
in search of something to cook. She found several iron pots—or
rather one pot and one frying pan with edges that sloped up more
like a bowl, a Chinese invention, that wok thing she had heard
about. Then she reached for a parcel wrapped with string that
she hoped held noodles. She picked it up off the shelf, and a rat
scampered out. Shirley caught herself before the scream escaped
her mouth but trembled from head to toe.

“Dear Lord,” she said. “Vermin, too!”

She sensed someone behind her, lifted the large frying pan in
her hand, and turned. “Keep back!” she shouted.

Standing before her was the little Japanese grandfather who
ran the only fish market in town. He bowed low. Shirley let the
pan fall to her side as she, too, bowed low. He bowed even lower.
She bowed lower. He was starting to bow for a third time when
she banged the pan on the stove, and said, “Konnichiwa, grand
father.”

“Konbanwa,” he replied with a nod, correcting her with “good
evening,” not “good day,” in Japanese. Behind him appeared his
two grown daughters and several granddaughters, all in tradi
tional Japanese dress. Continuing in the local Chinese dialect, he
said, “My family is here to serve you.”

“Excuse me?” Shirley asked.

“My daughter and her daughters will serve you. You give us
roof, we serve you.”

“They will serve me what?”

“Supper. We cook food for you. Help with patients in medical
rooms, too,” he said and pointed toward the front of the house.

“Very kind of you to offer. I don't think the Chinese would
cotton to a Japanese nurse, but we can ask Captain Hsu in the
morning.”

“My family and I have been here thirty years,” the fishmonger
continued. “We do not approve of war.” He made a face. “Japa
nese soldiers behave very badly.”

“I'm very glad to hear that you are not like them and thank
you for offering to help in the clinic, but many of the wounded
Chinese are not from here. And even the ones who
do
come from
our own town may not like you very much—not because you are
a barbarian but because your prices were always too high.” She
added with a slight smile, “You can't deny it.”

The fishmonger studied her face for a long moment before
he got the joke and laughed. “Ah, yes,” he said, “prices too high!
Very good! Very true!”