Messonier’s face creased with anxiety. “I tell you, Maria is also a weight on my mind.”
“It’s a blessing that you found each other.”
“Is it? I’m wrenched between joy and fear. I’ve never experienced such intensity.” He shyly studied his hands. “It’s difficult to embrace the two simultaneously. When we can be together, we stay in bed under fur blankets. She talks about Warsaw. The plum trees in her family’s garden. The color of the stones in the garden wall. We talk about Paris. Touring the gardens at Monceau. I serve tea.” His smile was lopsided. “I asked Maria to join me in Paris. Imagine the freedom. The warmth. To love someone without fearing their death. She said yes. But not until work here is finished.” He bit his lip, close to tears. “I’m afraid to continually risk my life. I dream of carelessness. To touch a patient—anyone—without fear. Am I a coward?” He turned to the Baron, an expression of shame on his face. “In this crisis, nothing seems to have any value. Except companionship.” He moved away and began to silently rummage in the cupboard for drinking glasses.
The Baron watched him. “We’ll stay and trust one another. We’ll tell stories to survivors.” Messonier didn’t answer and the Baron sensed he was weeping. “There’s some comfort that our battle is an exalted one. The plague is a thing of genius.”
“More lethal than any weapon of war. If the goal is to rid the earth of human life.”
The Baron raised an eyebrow at this statement.
“The infected have few symptoms—fever, racing pulse, blue lips, bloody expectoration—until shortly before death. So the infection swiftly passes from person to person like a secret.” Messonier held up the glasses. “How does it spread? Contact with blood? Is it in the air? On the skin? Here, let me pour.”
“That’s the puzzle. One thing is certain. There’s no point at which the infection can be stopped. Except for it not to start.” The Baron made a gesture of benediction. “It’s a diabolical maze. We can only quarantine the infected from the uninfected.”
“If you can find them in time. At first cough.” Messonier stared into the sharp clear liquid in his glass. “If there’s no successful vaccine or treatment, what do we have to work with? Nothing but fever and blood and bodies. Where’s our crutch, our staff? We’re outwitted and outmaneuvered.” He swallowed the vodka in a single gulp, then loudly exhaled. “There’s little protection for us if the situation spirals out of control. Maybe it’s the end of the world.”
“No. That isn’t true. According to Wu, the plague cure has been delivered by Haffkine.”
“I admire that you can challenge Wu.”
The Baron frowned. “He’s young enough to be my son. But that doesn’t matter. I’ve watched him with patients. Arrogance is his flaw. We’re expected to blindly obey him when there’s nothing solid, no real information behind his decisions. It’s all false hope. Wu has authority only from the Chinese. It’s certainly not from his experience. Or his fine English tweed suits.”
Messonier’s usual caution was jagged from drinking. “Still, our positions depend on Wu’s favor.” He poured two fresh shots of vodka.
“Everyone’s at risk in the hospital. I speak up only because I still have General Khorvat’s support. If I become less valuable as a translator and an inspector of inns, he could send me into exile. His soldiers would deliver me straight to the train without a hearing.”
“They could do worse.”
The Baron fixed him with a quizzical look.
“He could throw you in quarantine.”
“If that should happen, swear you won’t search for me.”
“I swear.” Messonier’s promise wasn’t made in good faith.
The Baron embraced Messonier and left the office. At the end of the corridor, a young nurse crouched on the floor by the supply closet, her back shaking with sobs.
“What’s wrong?”
The nurse didn’t respond. The Baron stooped to comfort her but first peered at the cloth in her hand to see if she was coughing blood. He recognized his transformation. Fear had become automatic.
“Wang Xiang’an is dead.” Her face was wet, splotched red from crying.
“Mother of God.”
She hiccuped violently. He helped her stand, half-carried her to a chair, and shouted for someone to bring water. Or vodka.
It was fifteen below zero when the Baron left the hospital. As soon as he took one step out the door, cold was a pressure against the two exposed inches of his face; the moisture in his skin stiffened like sap, the inside of his nostrils stuck together, his hair crackled. Skin turned white when it was frostbitten. Once bitten, it eventually blackened. But the dark areas of skin could be cut away and the body would heal.
Wang’s death was a blackness that couldn’t be excised. Only calligraphy, the writing of characters, was a refuge, blank tunnel, the infinite edge of a line made by his hand.
That night, the Baron sat facing a blank paper spread on the table. The hard carved chair was a knot at his back, the brush a pressure in his hand. The paper was a waiting white abyss. Grinding the dry ink stick into the water on the stone released a faint scent of soot.
Now.
He struggled not to direct the brush but continued its movement, stroking characters on the paper. It was a paradox, this disengaging. For a brief instant, he didn’t question or interpret what he’d written. He felt suspended above the four corners of the paper, and the black characters became a floating pattern below him. Exhilaration filled him like breath. He knew the brush and his hand held the entire work that would follow.
He had kept vigil in the Russian hospital’s quarantine ward most of the night, arriving home at daybreak. A messenger came to the house, handed the Baron a summons from General Khorvat. It was eight o’clock in the morning. He dressed quickly and returned to the hospital.
He crossed the lobby, recognized by the char lady as chumore, a plague doctor. The woman moved away, shifting even her gaze to avoid him. As he passed, she muttered and crossed herself, invoking the holy against harm, against the death figure who walked the corridor, carrying sickness, stinking of disinfectant.
General Khorvat, Wu, Zabolotny, Messonier, Haffkine, and Lebedev were seated around the conference table and barely looked up when he entered the room. Tension was woven around them. The doctors’ protective masks, wrinkled strips of white cotton, lay on the table like surrendered weapons. How had it fallen to these six men and one woman to stop a catastrophic epidemic? Their knowledge was nothing but theories and guesswork propelled by fear. Their efforts were so puny. A fist against a wave, a wall of brick.
The group at the table were the most dangerous people in Kharbin. Was someone among them already infected with plague, their symptoms hidden? Could a single unprotected breath, a cough, infect everyone around them, cause their deaths? The Baron imagined one of them coughing, a droplet of infected blood spattering on the table, bubbling as if heated, magically condensing into infected smoke that rose and forced itself into the others’ bodies, entering their throats, their moist lungs.
He was relieved when a young Chinese nurse carried around a tray with small folded towels, and they each cleaned their hands with one of the formalin-soaked cloths while she waited behind their chairs. The strong smell revived him.
Khorvat impatiently tapped the table and the nurse bowed her head, scurried from the room with the crumpled towels. “Good morning. Dr. Wu, will you kindly start the meeting.”
“Thank you, General Khorvat. First, I regret to announce that all the Chinese doctors in the Fuchiatien hospital died with their patients. Every one of them.”