The Middle Kingdom. Andrea Barrett

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СКАЧАТЬ un-allowed,’ the short one said, and then they politely, firmly, escorted me back. We had a small scene in the hotel lobby, where an embarrassed Lou vouched for me, and then I slunk off to bed in a storm of frustration.

      Walter was furious. ‘I can’t believe you went out there alone,’ he said. ‘Are you trying to get hurt?’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but I wasn’t and he knew it. I thought I remembered a time when he might have made the same journey himself. He probably thought he remembered a time when I would have clung closer to him. We lay in our separate beds, the sheets drawn tight as skin, and when I said into the dark silence, ‘You hate me because I’m fat,’ he sniffed and said, ‘I dislike the way you act.’ Which may have been true – we hadn’t made love in months, not since my last day tracking birds in the swamp back home, and in the absence of that connection we’d grown as strange to each other as a raven and a cat.

      Our windows opened out to a dark garden arranged in stylized shapes: Pavilion Amidst Spring Greenery, Hibiscus on a Misty Hill, Azure Cloudless Sky. Somewhere a fountain murmured. The smells of trees and bark and wet stones drifted into our room, and in the silence I unwrapped a Hershey bar and fed my heart. By morning we’d decided we weren’t speaking to each other, and we passed burnt toast across the table without a word.

      The next night, we marched in silence through the halls of a university on the outskirts of the city, past guards who checked our invitations and into a large, worn lecture room which the science students had hastily decorated. The room had the feel of a high-school gym set up for a senior prom: folding chairs set in uneven rows around the edges, banners draped over tables, streamers and posters tacked to the walls, a piano and some sturdier chain and a few microphones at the front. We were part of a small parade – Walter and me first, ignoring each other, and the others coupled behind us as if heading for an ark. Distinguished scientist, decorative wife, pair after pair; a few unmarried women linked for safety; one anomalous distinguished wife on the arm of her toymaker husband. Almost immediately Walter, guest of honor, was swept toward the front of the improvised banquet hall to be introduced to the Chinese scientists. I was funneled off with the rest of the parade. Chairs had been set for us amidst the sea of our Chinese hosts, all of whom seemed to be talking at once. A forest full of tree frogs, a classroom packed with cats; I couldn’t make out anything and the hot smoky air set me coughing again.

      ‘Ni hau, ni hau!’ said the people as we passed. Hello, hello. I ni-haued back as I had all week and managed a dui bu qi when I stepped on someone’s foot – excuse me. From the man’s startled expression I knew I’d mangled his language again.

      Half of Beijing seemed crowded into that room, all of us ricocheting off each other. Feet trod feet, elbows bumped elbows, shoulders and hips and thighs mashed together, glasses crushed noses, jewelry caught sleeves. My sleeves, especially – I was wearing blue, a soft, heavy-weave cotton shift with dolman sleeves and a slit neck that set off my blue eyes and pale hair but could not conceal my size. I was the biggest woman there, and my vast, rippling bulk formed a dam in the river of guests. Chinese men bumped against me like reeds, stood puzzled in the eddy behind my mass, murmured apologies, moved away. I willed myself to stop streaming sweat and found a seat near the edge of our foreigners’ island.

      There were three rows of people behind me and one in front. To my left, thirty or forty Chinese scientists whispered together. To my right, Walter sat on a raised seat, his shoulders high above a sea of dark heads. The scientists with whom we traveled were well-enough known, but Walter was the acknowledged leader of the acid-rain world and so the Chinese, sensitive to status, shunned everyone else in his favor. Walter was who they crowded around during coffee breaks; Walter who they introduced to their students and families. On the first day of the meeting they’d fallen silent when Walter stood at the podium in the lecture hall and explained, in his soft voice, how the sulfur dioxide from the coal-burning power plants was killing their lakes.

      The Chinese scientists had murmured among themselves then as if Walter were prophesying. I knew how they felt – we’d been married for six years and I’d felt that power before. When Walter explained how the acid rain altered the lakes’ pH, killing first the snails, then the tadpoles, then the bacteria, then the fish, hands shot up and questions flew in frantic, fractured English. Something in Walter’s presentations had always made the possible probable, the probable certain, the future cataclysmic, and I could understand his listeners’ concerns. Walter’s predictions were often right.

      Walter stroked his nose as a small man with an overbite introduced him in Mandarin. I heard the name of the university where we were; I heard Hoff-er-meierr; I heard some astonishing polysyllabic that may have been the Chinese rendering of Quabbin Reservoir, where Walter had done his first, best work. That was all I could catch – despite my best efforts with my great-uncle Owen’s old language books and the new ones I’d bought, I’d learned hardly any Mandarin. All week long, listening to the crowds, I’d heard only a rising, falling, yowling sound, like a river tumbling over broken glass. When I’d struggled to respond with a few words, everyone had laughed.

      As the small man rattled on I scanned the room. Food, great lovely heaps of it; I’d been starving all week. The table to my left was crowded with bottles of sweet pink wine, which women in homemade jumpers were pouring into glasses for a toast. The table to my right was dotted with large green bottles of beer and smaller ones of orange soda. The table directly in front of me was spread with food, dish after dish, and behind a whole fish drenched in brown sauce I saw a chocolate layer cake on which my name was written in icing. How had they known? I looked again – the icing said ‘Greetings,’ not ‘Grace.’ Across the room, the small man sat down and a pretty young woman moved to the microphone and clapped her hands twice. The shrieking and laughing and chattering stopped as if she’d thrown a switch.

      ‘I would like to make a toast, please,’ said the woman in her careful English. She rolled her Rs with a Beijing buzz, almost a Scottish burr. ‘To our var-ry distinguished guest of honor, var-ry far-murz Doctor Professor Wal-ter Hoff-er-meierr.’

      Everyone stood and clapped and cheered. Walter bowed and gave a speech, while I sat on my folding chair and felt my thighs overrunning the seat like a river. The head of the university spoke, some government official spoke, a visitor from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology spoke – all spoke and offered toasts, while I kept my eye on the chocolate cake. Someone kept filling my glass with sweet pink wine, and I didn’t notice until the third or fourth toast that I was the only one draining my glass each time. I think I already had the fever then.

      ‘Doctor Professor Hoff-er-meierr has agreed to allow pictures,’ the young woman said. A tidal wave of students and scientists flowed around and between the tables, leaving me more or less to myself. The German couple behind me mumbled; the Belgians talked to the Swiss. A young man with a bushy gold moustache was nattering on about some limnological problem. Katherine Olmand, a British ichthyologist I’d come to dislike for her prim aloofness, spoke to one of the waitresses in Mandarin and watched to make sure the rest of us had noticed. One Chinese woman sat alone, a few feet to my left; she exchanged a few phrases with Katherine and then with another woman scientist, but didn’t seem able to strike up a lasting conversation with either of them. When she saw me watching her, she slid across the folding chairs and smiled nervously.

      ‘Good evening,’ she said, with a heavy accent. ‘I may practice my English with you?’

      ‘Of course,’ I said, wondering if this was how she’d approached the other women. I was lonely enough to want a conversation with anyone, and I was also flattered. At the meeting, the Chinese usually shunned me in favor of Walter.

      ‘Dr Yu Xiaomin,’ she said, tapping her chest. She had a small, sweet, delicate face, finely creased about the eyes. Her blouse was dove-colored silk, figured with СКАЧАТЬ