Chenxi and the Foreigner (18 page)

Anna stared at Laurent. She nodded, unexpectedly touched by his concern, and he turned away, embarrassed.

A woman peered out from her sentry box at the entrance to the hospital. She was selling tickets to allow new arrivals access to the correct building. ‘
Ni yao bu yao
? Do you want it or not?' she said to Laurent and Anna.

‘She wants it,' Laurent replied.

The woman handed Anna a yellow ticket. ‘Want it. Number two building. That one over there. Go inside and line up at the first window to pay.'

Anna walked with Laurent past the bright peony bed to the stained grey building. The flowers were kept by an old man who hovered with a rake, guarding them from harm. He stared at the foreigners as they passed.

‘
Ni yao bu yao
? Want it or not?' the nurse behind the desk asked. She wore a grimy white coat and a blue plastic shower cap on her head. A white tin bowl with a few rice grains glued to the greasy bottom was staining the papers beneath it. The woman behind Anna in the queue strained to see over her shoulder, to look at the foreigners, to discover if they could speak Chinese and what they would say.

‘She wants it.'

‘How old is she?' the nurse barked at Laurent.

Laurent asked Anna.

She replied, ‘Eighteen.'

Laurent looked surprised.

‘
Aiya!
She's too young! She's just a baby herself!'

Laurent translated to Anna who retorted, ‘No I'm not! Plenty of people have them at my age.'

The nurse shook her head as she counted out the money and handed Anna a clear plastic ticket with red Chinese characters on it.

‘Go and wait in that room there. Keep your ticket and hand it to the doctor.'

There was no space left in the waiting room. Row upon row of wooden benches were filled; people were squatting in corners and one man lay on the floor asleep. It was more like a waiting room at the train station than at a hospital.

A woman cleared her throat and spat, another shouted at a restless child. A dozing man with his feet up on a seat grumbled and swung his legs to the floor to let Anna and Laurent sit down. The woman sitting in front muttered at him to be courteous to foreign guests. He snarled and slunk off to find another seat. Seeing her chance, the woman slipped in next to Anna, beaming.

‘Hello!' she said, turning to Anna. ‘Do you speak English?'

‘No,' Laurent replied, in Chinese, not wanting to be bothered with all of her questions.

She looked sceptical. ‘Where are you from?'

‘Albania,' Laurent snapped.

According to him, it was the only country worse off than China and sure not to house any of her relatives. It was his standard way of discouraging unwanted conversation.

‘Oh,' the woman said, smiling and nodding. ‘Your Chinese is very good!'

She continued smiling and nodding, but when she saw Laurent wasn't going to reply she turned to chat with her neighbour.

‘He speaks very well. They're from Albania.'

The two women slipped into dialect and discussed the terrible state of Albania, glancing at the foreigners and smiling in sympathy.

Anna felt sick again and remembered the three spots of blood she had discovered in her underpants the previous morning. Not exactly a period, but perhaps she wouldn't have to make a decision after all? Was she even entitled to make that decision without consulting Chenxi? She would have to find him. This was too important to heed Lao Li's warnings. Lao Li would have to tell her where he was. She needed to see him.

There were spots of blood on the wall in the waiting room at Shanghai Number One Women's Hospital. Not carmine red like those on Anna's underpants, but rust-coloured and smudged. She remembered an exhibition in Australia where the artist had painted an enormous canvas with pig's blood and beside his painting ran a video of the sacrifice. It was gory stuff, but the artist insisted from his video, over the squeals of the beast, that it was art. Sensual. A religious experience. The audience around her had gasped, offended. Did that artist know that all the walls of the Forbidden City were painted in pig's blood? She smiled: the Chinese government would probably have been less offended by the sacrifice of a pig than by Chenxi's haircut.

On wet days when she walked through the food market near the art college, the street flowed with blood. And at the Muslim restaurant where Chenxi had taken her to eat mutton dumplings, a sheep's head looked on from a corner, the blood dripping from its open neck. She thought about the delicious soup she had sipped, made from blocks of liver-coloured congealed blood, and the grinning butchers with blood-stained hands who shooed flies from the hunks of beef solidifying in the sun.

In such a short while she had become accustomed to the sight of blood. In China, it was just a part of life that in Australia people managed to avoid in their sanitised, clingwrapped supermarket existence. Yet now, the sight of those three spots of blood on her underpants could signify life and death so much more than any other blood she had seen.

Anna wished Chenxi was sitting beside her rather than Laurent. What would he think? Would he want to keep it? She had no idea. She hardly knew him.

25

After three or four minutes a nurse came out and called her name. Anna gave her the ticket. Everyone in the waiting room knew that, as a foreigner, Anna would be seen first. Nobody complained.

‘Would you come with me?' she asked Laurent. ‘To translate?' She didn't want to admit that she found his company reassuring.

Laurent asked the nurse if he could accompany Anna. She blushed and said she'd have to ask the doctor. Usually this was women's business. ‘I'll have to pretend I'm your husband,' Laurent explained to Anna.

The doctor came out and ushered Laurent and Anna into a small empty office. She sat down behind a glass-topped desk and motioned for them to take the two chairs in front.

‘Now', she began in excellent English, as she wrote some Chinese characters at the top of a form, ‘Do you want it or not?'

‘We want it,' Laurent said.

Anna blushed.

The nurse frowned, turning to Anna once again. ‘How old are you?'

‘Eighteen.'

‘Hmm…' She filled in the appropriate box and her pen moved to the next question. ‘When was your period due?'

‘Two weeks ago.'

‘Oh. Are your periods normally regular?'

‘Yes. Very,' Anna said.

The doctor continued. ‘Are you married?'

‘Yes,' she lied, not looking at Laurent. She knew this was a big deal in China.

‘Any problems? Pain?'

‘Not really. Though I did find some blood in my underpants yesterday.'

Laurent looked at Anna.

‘Mmm…It could have been a light period, although sometimes in pregnancy you can still have some spotting. You also want to be sure that it's not a threatened miscarriage.'

Anna didn't answer.

‘We'll have to examine you and run some tests. It's the room across the hall, but I'm afraid your husband can't go with you. It's a women only room.'

The doctor led Anna across the waiting room and pointed her in the right direction. Laurent sat down to wait.

The examining room had four narrow beds covered with dirty white sheets that were slipping off the green plastic mattresses. There were two desks in a corner and plenty of people milling around. Some wore white coats and rubber gloves; others were in ordinary clothes.

Anna was led to one of the middle beds and three Chinese women were taken to the remaining ones. She hoisted herself up and lay down.

A nurse came over and directed her to take off her jeans and underpants and to put her feet into the stirrups that hung above the bed.

She undressed self-consciously while the nurse waited. Then she slipped a paper towel under Anna's buttocks.

Everyone in the room seemed to be staring at her. She closed her eyes, trying to shut out her humiliation. The nurse touched Anna's head. ‘Very pretty hair.'

A doctor walked over with a swab and some tissues. She snapped on some gloves and inserted two fingers into Anna's vagina. Anna winced. She couldn't believe she had thought she'd only need to pee into a specimen jar.

The doctor then did the same with the swab. When she extracted the swab everyone in the room, except Anna, seemed fascinated by the little lump of pale pink on the end. The nurse gave Anna a tissue to wipe herself then signalled for her to get dressed; the next woman was already by the side of the bed, waiting to get up.

As she left the examining room Anna was handed a glass slide with a pinkish smear on it. Laurent hurried up to her.

‘Are you all right?' he asked. ‘You look very pale.'

‘I'm not used to being examined in a room full of strangers.'

‘The Chinese have no sense of privacy,' Laurent frowned. ‘What now?' he asked, looking at the glass in Anna's hand. Anna shrugged, so Laurent took her arm and led her down the stairs, where the other women from the examining room were heading.

On the lower floor, Anna followed a group of women with slides in their hands to a bustling crowd around a little desk.

She stood on the outside of the group to wait her turn. A woman from behind bumped her in the back and another tried to squeeze in front of her. Two women were arguing about who should go first. There were about twenty women with slides, all scrabbling for attention. The nurse behind the desk took her time filling out the stickers to label the slides while the crowd jostled to be the next in line.

When Anna was bumped again, she swore and almost dropped her precious slide. She squeezed the glass hoping it wouldn't crack. Anyone would think we were livestock, not people, she grumbled to herself.

‘And so?' Laurent asked when Anna eventually surfaced, slide deposited.

‘I don't know.'

‘What did the doctor say?'

‘I can't remember.' She felt close to tears.

‘What?'

‘I don't know what to do. I can't understand anything they say!' Anna blurted.

‘Come on. You're hopeless. We'll go and find that doctor again.'

Laurent strode back up the stairs and Anna followed, grateful again that he had taken control.

In the small office the doctor was eating her lunch and she wasn't pleased to see the foreigners. She glared out from behind the bowl while she scooped rice into her mouth.

‘What is it?'

‘Well, we don't know anything yet!' Laurent said.

‘Come back tomorrow.' She shooed them away with her chopsticks.

‘We want to find out today!'

‘It's not possible. Unless you have an ultrasound.'

‘She wants an ultrasound then!'

‘It's not possible.'

‘Why?'

‘It's very expensive.'

‘We'll pay.'

‘It's not possible! No, no! She needs to have drunk water all day and not gone to the toilet. She needs a full bladder to push it into view. Otherwise there's no use. You won't see anything.'

‘Can't we try?'

‘I told you it's no use. Come back after lunch. Four o'clock. OK? It's on the sixth floor. After lunch. Or tomorrow.' She returned to her rice bowl. Laurent led Anna out of the room. She knew already where they were headed.

In the corridor next to the ultrasound room was a large urn. Anna squatted beside it with a jar of boiling water, blowing to cool it before she swallowed its scalding contents.

Laurent paced the empty corridor as she drank. Anna could hear the clicking of chopsticks and the chatter of nurses behind the closed door. After five jars in a row he asked, ‘Are you full?'

‘I've burnt my mouth.'

‘Are you full?'

‘Yes.'

‘Come on then. One more.'

Anna scowled, but did as she was told. Laurent knocked on the door.

The nurse glared at the foreigners. ‘Where's your ticket, then?' she asked.

‘She lost it,' Laurent said.

‘Mmm…Has she been to the toilet today?'

‘No.'

‘Has she drunk lots of water?'

‘Yes.'

‘Mmm…Sorry. We can't see her without a ticket. Come back tomorrow.'

‘Please let her in,' Laurent pleaded. ‘My wife is sick. We can't come back tomorrow. It's too much for her to come out again. We live far away.'

‘Where are you from?' she asked, still not convinced.

‘Albania,' Laurent replied.

‘Oh,' she said. ‘Come in then.'

Laurent waited outside.

Anna was led to another bed. She lay down again. This room was empty except for two smiling nurses. One whispered to the other, ‘She's from Albania,' and stroked Anna's forehead with her cool hands. While the other went to get the equipment, she played with Anna's hair. Anna closed her eyes and imagined she was lying on a clean hospital bed in Melbourne.

The nurse returned with a tube of jelly which she squeezed onto Anna's abdomen and pushed the ultrasound baton across it.

‘There it is,' she said.

Anna opened her eyes in dread. She hadn't been able to wish it away after all. On the blurry screen a small white shape pulsed in a sea of grey.

‘What's that?' Anna asked.

‘The baby,' the nurse said.

Anna felt her heart surge.

26

The tea-house in the Yu Yuan gardens seemed to grow out of the waterlilies. Its ancient curving roof made from crumbling earth tiles was of the same swamp-green glaze as the water. The carved wooden window scenes were like the twisting stems of the lotuses. If it were not for the swarms of Chinese tourists posing on its bridges or haggling with the stall owners for soft drinks and film, you could sit drinking your green tea from the thimble-sized cups and be transported into another dynasty.

Laurent poured Anna some more tea. ‘The third infusion is the best, they say.'