The Bear and the Dragon jrao-11 Read online

  “May the Lord Jesus bless you for this, Renato,” Yu said, with no small emotion.

  “We both serve Him as best we can. I thought of it, and it seemed something you might wish to have,” DiMilo replied, as he might to a good parish priest in Rome, for that was what Yu was, wasn’t it? Close enough, certainly.

  For his part, Barry Wise cursed that he hadn’t quite gotten his camera running for that moment. “We don’t often see Catholics and Baptists this friendly,” the reporter observed.

  Yu handled the answer, and this time the camera was rolling. “We are allowed to be friends. We work for the same boss, as you say in America.” He took DiMilo’s hand again and shook it warmly. He rarely received so sincere a gift, and it was so strange to get it here in Beijing from what some of his American colleagues called papists, and an Italian one at that. Life really did have purpose after all. Reverend Yu had sufficient faith that he rarely doubted that, but to have it confirmed from time to time was a blessing.

  The contractions came too fast, and too hard. Lien-Hua withstood it as long as she could, but after an hour, it felt as though someone had fired a rifle into her belly. Her knees buckled. She did her best to control it, to remain standing, but it was just too much. Her face turned pasty-white, and she collapsed to the cement floor. A co-worker was there at once. A mother herself, she knew what she beheld.

  “It is your time?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Delivered with a gasp and a painful nod.

  “Let me run and get Quon.” And she was off at once. That bit of help was when things went bad for Lotus Flower.

  Her supervisor noted one running employee, and then turned his head to see another prostrate one. He walked over, as one might to see what had happened after an automobile accident, more with curiosity than any particular desire to intervene. He’d rarely taken note of Yang Lien-Hua. She performed her function reliably, with little need for chiding or shouting, and was popular with her co-workers, and that was all he knew about her, really, and all that he figured he needed to know. There was no blood about. She hadn’t fallen from some sort of accident or mechanical malfunction. How strange. He stood over her for a few seconds, seeing that she was in some discomfort and wondering what the problem was, but he wasn’t a doctor or a medic, and didn’t want to interfere. Oh, if she’d been bleeding he might have tried to slap a bandage over the wound or something, but this wasn’t such a situation and so he just stood there, as he figured a manager should, showing that he was there, but not making things worse. There was a medical orderly in the first-aid room two hundred meters away. The other girl had probably run that way to fetch her, he thought.

  Lien-Hua’s face contorted after a few minutes’ relative peace, as another contraction began. He saw her eyes screw closed and her face go pale, and her breathing change to a rapid pant. Oh, he realized, that’s it. How odd. He was supposed to know about such things, so that he could schedule substitutions on the line. Then he realized something else. This was not an authorized pregnancy. Lien-Hua had broken the rules, and that wasn’t supposed to happen, and it could reflect badly on his department, and on him as a supervisor … and he wanted to own an automobile someday.

  “What is happening here?” he asked her.

  But Yang Lien-Hua was in no shape to reply at the moment. The contractions were accelerating much faster than they’d done with Ju-Long. Why couldn’t this have waited until Saturday? she demanded of Destiny. Why does God wish my child to die aborning? She did her best to pray through the pain, doing her utmost to concentrate, to entreat God for mercy and help in this time of pain and trial and terror, but all she saw around her was more cause for fear. There was no help in the face of her shop supervisor. Then she heard running feet again and looked to see Quon approaching, but before he got to her, the supervisor intercepted him.

  “What goes on here?” the man demanded, with all the harshness of petty authority. “Your woman makes a baby here? An unauthorized baby?” the most minor of officials asked and accused in the same breath. “Ju hai,” he added: Bitch!

  For his part, Quon wanted this baby as well. He hadn’t told his wife of the fears that he’d shared with her, because he felt that it would have been unmanly, but that last statement from the shop supervisor was a little much for a man under two kinds of simultaneous stress. Recalling his army training, Quon struck out with his fist, following his hand with an imprecation of his own:

  “Pok gai,” literally, fall down in the street, but in context, Get the fuck out of my way! The shop supervisor gashed his head when he went down, giving Quon the satisfaction of seeing an injury to avenge the insult to his wife. But he had other things to do.

  With the words said, and the blow struck, he lifted Lien-Hua to her feet and supported her as best he could on the way to where their bicycles were parked. But, now what to do? Like his wife, Quon had wanted this all to happen at home, where at the worst she could call in sick. But he had no more power to stop this process than he did to stop the world from turning on its axis. He didn’t even have time or energy to curse fate. He had to deal with reality as it came, one shaky second at a time, and help his beloved wife as best he could.

  You were educated in America?" Wise asked, in front of the rolling camera.

  “Yes,” Yu replied over tea. “At Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. My first degree was in electrical engineering, then my divinity degree and my ordination came later.”

  “I see you are married,” the reporter observed, pointing to a picture on the wall.

  “My wife is away in Taiwan, looking after her mother, who is sick at the moment,” he explained.

  “So, how did you two meet?” Wise asked, meaning Yu and the Cardinal.

  “That was Fa An’s doing,” the Cardinal explained. “It was he who came to us to extend a greeting to a newcomer in the same-same line of work, one could say.” DiMilo was tempted to say that they enjoyed drinks together, but refrained for fear of demeaning the man before his fellow Baptists, some of whom objected to alcohol in any form. “As you might imagine, there are not so many Christians in this city, and what few there are need to stick together.”

  “Do you find it odd, a Catholic and a Baptist to be so friendly?”

  “Not at all,” Yu replied at once. “Why should it be odd? Are we not united by faith?” DiMilo nodded agreement at this perfect, if unanticipated, statement of belief.

  “And what of your congregation?” Wise asked the Chinese minister next.

  The bicycle lot outside was a confused mass of metal and rubber, for few of the Chinese workers owned automobiles, but as Quon helped Lien-Hua to the far corner, the two of them were spotted by someone who did have access to one. He was a factory security guard who drove about the perimeter of the plant very importantly in his three-wheel motorized cart, an accessory more important to his sense of status than his uniform and badge. Like Quon, a former sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army, he’d never lost his feeling of personal authority, and this communicated itself in the way he spoke to people.

  “Stop!” he called from the driver’s seat in his cart. “What goes on here?”

  Quon turned. Lien-Hua had just been hit with another contraction, with buckled knees and gasping breath, and he was almost dragging her to their bikes. Suddenly, he knew that this wasn’t going to work. There was just no way that she could pedal her own bike. It was eleven blocks to their apartment. He could probably drag her up the three flights of steps, but how the hell was he going to get her to the front door?

  “My wife is … she’s hurt,” Quon said, unwilling-afraid-to explain what the problem really was. He knew this guard-his name was Zhou Jingjin-and he seemed a decent enough chap. “I’m trying to get her home.”

  “Where do you live, Comrade?” Zhou asked.

  “Great Long March Apartments, number seventy-four,” Quon replied. “Can you help us?”

  Zhou looked them over. The woman seemed to be in some distress. His was not a country
which placed great value on personal initiative, but she was a comrade in difficulty, and there was supposed to be solidarity among the people, and their apartment was only ten or eleven blocks, hardly fifteen minutes even in this slow and awkward cart. He made his decision, based on socialist worker solidarity.

  “Load her on the back, Comrade.”

  “Thank you, Comrade.” And Quon got his wife there, lifted her bottom up, and set her on the rusted steel deck behind the driver’s compartment. With a wave, he signaled Zhou to head west. This contraction proved a difficult one. Lien-Hua gasped and then cried out, to the distress of her husband, and worse, the distress of the driver, who turned and saw what ought to have been a healthy woman grasping her abdomen in great pain. It was not a pretty thing to see by any stretch of the imagination, and Zhou, having taken one leap of initiative, decided that maybe he ought to take another. The path to Great Long March Apartments led down Meishuguan Street, past the Longfu Hospital, and like most Beijing teaching hospitals, this one had a proper emergency-receiving room. This woman was in distress, and she was a comrade, like himself a member of the working class, and she deserved his help. He looked back. Quon was doing his best to comfort his woman as a man should, far too busy to do much of anything as the security cart bumped along the uneven streets at twenty kilometers per hour.

  Yes, Zhou decided, he had to do it. He turned the steering tiller gently, pulled up to the loading dock designed more for delivery trucks than ambulances, and stopped.

  It took Quon a few seconds to realize that they’d stopped. He looked around, ready to help his wife off the cart, until he saw that they weren’t at the apartment complex. Disoriented by the previous thirty minutes of unexpected emergency and chaos, he didn’t understand, didn’t grasp where they were, until he saw someone in a uniform emerge from the door. She wore a white bandanna-hat on her head-a nurse? Were they at the hospital? No, he couldn’t allow that.

  Yang Quon stood off the cart and turned to Zhou. He started to object that they’d come to the wrong place, that he didn’t want to be here, but the hospital workers had an unaccustomed sense of industry at the moment-the emergency room was perversely idle at the moment-and a wheeled gurney emerged from the door with two men in attendance. Yang Quon tried to object, but he was merely pushed aside by the burly attendants as Lien-Hua was loaded on the gurney and wheeled inside before he could do much more than flap his mouth open and closed. He took a breath and rushed in, only to be intercepted by a pair of clerks asking for the information they needed to fill out their admitting forms, stopping him dead in his tracks as surely as a man with a loaded rifle, but far more ignominiously.

  In the emergency room itself, a physician and a nurse watched as the orderlies loaded Lien-Hua onto an examining table. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for their trained eyes to make the first guess, which they shared with a look. Only a few seconds more and her work clothes had been removed, and the pregnant belly was as obvious as a sunrise. It was similarly obvious that Yang Lien-Hua was in frank labor, and that this was no emergency. She could be wheeled to the elevator and taken to the second floor, where there was a sizable obstetrics staff. The physician, a woman, beckoned to the orderlies and told them where to move the patient. Then she walked to the phone to call upstairs and tell them that a delivery was on the way up. With that “work” done, the doctor went back to the physicians’ lounge for a smoke and a magazine.

  ComradeYang?" another clerk, a more senior one, said. ”Yes?" the worried husband replied, still stuck in the waiting room, held prisoner by clerks.

  “Your wife is being taken upstairs to obstetrics. But,” the clerk added, “there’s one problem.”

  “What is that?” Quon asked, knowing the answer, but hoping for a miracle, and utterly trapped by the bureaucratic necessities of the moment.

  “We have no record of your wife’s pregnancy in our files. You are in our health district-we show you at Number Seventy-two Great Long March Flats. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, that’s where we live,” Quon sputtered out, trying to find a way out of this trap, but not seeing one anywhere.

  “Ah.” The clerk nodded. “I see. Thank you. I must now make a telephone call.”

  It was the way the last statement was delivered that frightened Quon: Ah, yes, I have to see that the trash is removed properly. Ah, yes, the glass is broken, and I’ll try to find a repairman. Ah, yes, an unauthorized pregnancy, I’ll call upstairs so that they’ll know to kill the baby when it crowns.

  Upstairs, Lien-Hua could see the difference in their eyes. When Ju-Long had been on his way, there’d been joy and anticipation in the eyes of the nurses who oversaw her labor. You could see their eyes crinkle with smiles at the corners of their masks … but not this time. Someone had come over to where she was in labor room #3 and said something to the nurse, and her head had turned rapidly to where Lien-Hua lay, and her eyes had turned from compassionate to … something else, and while Mrs. Yang didn’t know what other thing it was, she knew the import. It might not be something the nurse particularly liked, but it was something she would assist in doing, because she had to. China was a place where people did the things they had to do, whether they approved it or liked it or not. Lien-Hua felt the next contraction. The baby in her uterus was trying to be born, not knowing that it was racing to its own destruction at the hands of the State. But the hospital staffers knew. Before, with Ju-Long, they’d been close by, not quite hovering, but close enough to watch and see that things were going well. Not now. Now they withdrew, desiring not to hear the sounds of a mother struggling to bring forth death in a small package.

  On the first floor, it was equally plain to Yang Quon. What came back to him now was his firstborn son, Ju-Long, the feel of his small body in his arms, the little noises he made, the first smile, sitting up, crawling, the first step in their small apartment, the first words he’d spoken … but their little Large Dragon was dead now, never to be seen again, crushed by the wheel of a passenger bus. An uncaring fate had ripped that child from his arms and cast him aside like a piece of blowing trash on the street-and now the State was going to slay his second child. And it would all happen upstairs, less than ten meters away, and he couldn’t do a thing about it…. It was a feeling not unknown to citizens of the People’s Republic, where rule from above was the rule, but opposed to it now was the most fundamental of human drives. The two forces battled within the mind of factory worker Yang Quon. His hands shook at his sides as his mind struggled with the dilemma. His eyes strained, staring at nothing closer than the room’s wall, but straining even so … something, there had to be something …

  There was a pay telephone, and he did have the proper coins, and he did remember the number, and so Yang Quon lifted the receiver and dialed the number, unable to find the ability within himself to change fate, but hoping to find that ability in another.

  I’ll get it," Reverend Yu said in English, rising and walking to where it was ringing.

  “A remarkable guy, isn’t he?” Wise asked the two Catholics.

  “A fine man,” Cardinal DiMilo agreed. “A good shepherd for his flock, and that is all a man can hope to be.”

  Monsignor’s Schepke’s head turned when he caught the tone of Yu’s voice. Something was wrong here, and by the sound, something serious. When the minister returned to the sitting room, his face told the tale.

  “What is amiss?” Schepke asked in his perfect Mandarin. Perhaps this was not something for the American reporters.

  “One of my congregation,” Yu replied, as he reached for his jacket. “She is pregnant, in labor even now-but her pregnancy is unauthorized, and her husband fears the hospital will try to kill it. I must go to help.”

  “Franz, was gibt’s hier?” DiMilo asked in German. The Jesuit then replied in Attic Greek to make damned sure the Americans wouldn’t get it.

  “You’ve been told about this, Eminence,” Monsignor Schepke explained in the language of Aristotle. “The aborti
onists here commit what is virtually murder in any civilized country in the world, and the decision to do so, in this case, is purely political and ideological. Yu wishes to go and help the parents prevent this vile act.”

  DiMilo needed less than a second. He stood, and turned his head. “Fa An?”

  “Yes, Renato?”

  “May we come with you and assist? Perhaps our diplomatic status will have practical value,” His Eminence said, in badly accented but comprehensible Mandarin.

  It didn’t take long for Reverend Yu either: “Yes, a fine idea! Renato, I cannot allow this child to die!”

  If the desire to procreate is the most fundamental known to mankind, then there are few more powerful calls to action for an adult than child-in-danger. For this, men race into burning buildings and jump into rivers. For this now, three clergymen would go to a community hospital to challenge the power of the world’s most populous nation.

  “What’s happening?” Wise asked, surprised by the sudden shifts in language and the way the three churchmen had leapt to their feet.

  “A pastoral emergency. A member of Yu’s congregation is in the hospital. She needs him, and we will go with our friend to assist in his pastoral duties,” DiMilo said. The cameras were still running, but this was the sort of thing that got edited out. But what the hell, Wise thought.

  “Is it far? Can we help? Want us to run you over?”

  Yu thought it over and quickly decided that he couldn’t make his bike go as fast as the American news van. “That is very kind. Yes.”

  “Well, let’s go, then.” Wise stood and motioned to the door. His crew broke down their gear in a matter of seconds and beat them all out the door.