Val remembered some of the racist comments she had heard her father make over the years, and frowned. “But he married you. He must have loved you once.”

“No.” Ha Suran shook her head. “I don’t think he ever did. You see, there was another woman he loved. One back in Russia whom he had been forced to leave behind. And to tell the truth, I don’t think he ever got over her.”

“What was her name?” Val asked. Her father’s words in the nursing home came back to her: “I didn’t want to kill her.” Had the woman he loved died? Had he been suspected of murdering her? Maybe that was why he left Russia, and that was what haunted him right at the end of his life.

Ha Suran closed her eyes. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I must rest now.”

* * *

While her mother slept, Val took Nicole for a walk around the neighborhood in sticky afternoon heat. There was a market where bedding and old clothes were sold alongside rice and vegetables. A toothless stallholder held out a roasted scorpion on a stick, and Nicole screamed and scurried behind Val’s back. Everywhere there was a smell of drains and rotting garbage. It was clearly the poor quarter of town.

When they returned, a Chinese doctor was crouched by Ha Suran’s bedside. They sat on the floor and waited quietly as he took her pulse and looked into her eyes and mouth. Nicole gasped when he began inserting long needles into her flesh, starting at her feet, between the big toe and the second toe.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” she whispered to Val.

Val replied that it was called acupuncture and it was often used to treat illness in Chinese medicine. She didn’t think it would hurt.

“Will it make Grandma better?” Nicole asked softly, and Val shrugged and said, “I hope so.”

After the doctor left, she asked Ha Suran what he had diagnosed.

“The illness is in my liver.” Ha Suran coughed, and winced in pain. “The doctor says it was caused by the misery of being separated from you all these years, but he hopes I might improve a little now we are reunited.”

“Have you consulted a Western doctor? Maybe they would have drugs that could help.” Val thought of all the medical advances of recent years: chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer; artificial hearts and prosthetic limbs: they could do wonders.

“There is a Western clinic in town but it would cost thousands of yuan. My doctor works on barter. We give him eggs,” Ha Suran explained.

Val only had another fifty dollars’ worth of yuan to last the remainder of her stay and knew it would not be enough to pay for medical treatment, but she resolved to redouble her efforts to get her father’s inheritance once she was back in Australia. He owed Ha Suran after what he had done to her.