Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  They stared at each other. Paul’s fingers fumbled absently at the pocket of his weskit. His broad shoulders curled inward. He made no move to stand, and yet she felt he was poised to leave. And she was grateful.

  “It’s not my fault,” she said getting up. “I’ve given Jin nothing but friendship.” But her defense sounded like accusation. So did his reply.

  “I do not know what you do when I am gone,” Paul said. “And yet I trust you.”

  She froze for a split second, then yanked open the study door. The crown of Yen’s derby was just appearing at the top of the stairs, and his tread had the firm, hurried thud of news. She raced to her room before he could see her, and fell on the bed with her face in her hands.

  Barely an hour later, she descended to find Paul whirling about the parlor, collecting his extra spectacles, today’s Shen Pao, the notepad on which he’d been scratching out suggestions for Sun Yat-sen’s memoirs. As he located each item he tossed it into his black satchel, on top of his hastily packed clothes. From snatches of his instructions to Yen, who was to escort him to the station and then proceed with the news to William Tan and Li Yüan-hung, Hope deciphered that Sun’s bodyguard and naval minister had been murdered. It was time to close ranks again.

  Paul did not kiss her as she stood waiting, dry-eyed, to bid him goodbye, but he instructed her to kiss the older children for him, gave the roaming Jasmine a perfunctory hug. He straightened his hat, checked his gold pocket watch, and told her not to worry. His gaze was alert, impatient, impenetrable. He made no further mention of Jin, or of trust, or the bottomless hole widening between them.

  Now Hope lay her head back against the door, listening lest he return. But the gate had shut, his rickshaw gone. Slowly her hands, which had somehow come to rest in a cross at her throat, began to creep downward, following the curves of her breasts, the straight decline of her rib cage, the indentation of her waist to the abrupt widening of her hips and thighs beneath the gathers of her skirt. She had not emptied her pocket. Had he come to her, run his hands over her body even as she did now, he would have discovered the letter that had arrived that morning. But he had trusted her.

  Hong Kong

  March 10, 1919

  Dear Hope,

  I have been a wretched friend. Halfway around Asia and not a word. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, I think you will also understand. Have been in contact with your friend Anna Van Zyl, who reports that your baby arrived safely and that you and all your children are well. I am so happy for you and your husband.

  After too many aimless months, I have decided to return to a hospital I visited some years ago in Chungking. Hope, my return will bring me through Shanghai. If there is a chance of seeing you, I would like nothing more.

  I arrive on the seventeenth and will be staying at the Metropole. If you telephone me there, we can arrange to meet. However, if you do not ring, I will understand.

  Yours,

  Stephen

  6

  They arranged, in a terse, falsely cordial telephone call, to meet at a coffee shop in Chapei. It was not an assignation, Hope instructed herself firmly as she rung off, just a place and a time. But she told Yen she was going to meet Sarah, told Sarah she was going out by herself to photograph the Lunghua Pagoda. She arranged for Pearl and Morris to go home after school with Pearl’s friend Iona McDonald, while Jasmine stayed with Ah-nie. She put on a new hyacinth blue linen suit with knife-pleated skirt and matching slouch fedora and chewed Sen-Sen with unconscious fervor as she set off by tramcar to Thibet Road. She felt light and nervous and oddly transparent, as if anyone who saw her must read her thoughts, though she herself could not.

  The instant she saw him, at a table in the window of that shabby cafe, she caught her breath in the same way she had at her first anonymous sighting on the river—only now there was no mistaking him. His narrow patrician nose and cleft chin, the earnest profile and back-swept hair—his face was more drawn than when she’d last seen him, his hair a little thinner and grayer, but as he leaned forward, lighting his pipe, she saw that he had the same full lips, the same expression of solemn, heartrending intensity.

  At last he raised his eyes. She shook her head as he started to rise, pushed inside to join him, and he took her gloved hands, smiling.

  “You’re the same.”

  “Hardly!” Her voice boomed in her ears.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

  “No,” she answered in the Chinese way.

  His smile faded. “I thought three years would be enough.”

  “It’s been a long three years.”

  “Hope …”

  Unwillingly, she reclaimed her hands and applied herself to the deliberate removal and pocketing of her gloves. They sat down and ordered coffee, which arrived so weak they could see the cracks at the bottom of the cups, but they would not drink it anyway.

  “You know,” he started again, frowning at the table, “or I think you know why I never wrote. I’ve tried everything to forget you. It’s stupid, my carrying on this way. But I finally gave in because nothing’s worked. No sense beating around it, I’ve never met a woman with your courage. Your strength.” He gave her a hard look. “I can’t stop thinking you’re the reason I came to China, Hope. To find you … and bring you home.”

  She swallowed. Every muscle in his body seemed to be straining toward her.

  “Of course,” he raced on, “you’re concerned about your children. But you know how I feel about those kids. I’d do anything for them. For you.” He stopped, biting his lips, and cradled his pipe between his palms.

  “Stephen …” But after a moment’s hesitation, she could not bring herself to speak.

  There seemed nothing further to say, and the impassive stares of the Japanese shopkeeper and his wife made their silence all the more uncomfortable. Finally they rose and moved into the street. They discussed no destination, but let the flow of traffic carry them past the barred black doors of the surrounding ironworks, mills, and machine shops. They kept close enough that the backs of their hands grazed each other as they walked, each union lingering just a fraction of a second longer, until their fingers caught and locked. At his touch, Hope became acutely aware of her vivid blue clothing, Mann’s hatless height. She looked up at him. “We stand out here.”

  “You would stand out anywhere,” he answered, without breaking stride.

  She was struck at once by the stilted flattery and the maudlin tone of this response. She didn’t doubt his sincerity. It wasn’t that. But something in his voice made her feel suddenly and miserably distant.

  The sky closed, dark and damp, and the pace of the throng immediately quickened against the coming rain. He took her elbow and guided her between two godowns along a short alley that ended at a locust tree and a muddy patch overlooking Soochow Creek. A low brick wall shielded the drop to the bank. Behind them rose the windowless flanks of warehouses and factories. Except for the boatloads of river people below and the miniature figures across the creek, they were alone.

  Stephen turned to her, his eyes gravely searching the edges of her face as if uncertain how to enter. He slipped his fingers under the brim of her hat and lifted it with a tentative movement, reached and set it carefully on the little wall. The jaunty shape of the thing, the soft texture, the sharp blue made an alien spot against the rumpled dusk, and Hope found herself gliding backward, distancing her body from the silent object as from a signature she disowned.

  She had not registered the locust tree’s nearness until its trunk found her back. Then, suddenly, she smelled its white flowers clustered above her head, felt its living warmth cradling her shoulders. He had to stoop to avoid the thorny branches as he came closer, whether following or pressing her against the tree she could not distinguish. His face was close and dark, his breath warm on her forehead. His fingertips played across her cheeks. She touched his skin where the collar of his shirt parted, felt the join of muscle to bone, the fibers of hair worki
ng up from his chest. These few discoveries mesmerized her. She felt she could pour herself into them and never emerge again, but before she knew what was happening he had found her with his mouth and all her hesitant wonder collapsed under the weight of his crude power, his haste, the ravenous pull of his kiss and the clumsy workings of his hands over her breasts and throat, his hips moving urgently against her waist. Now she flailed at these sensations, reaching with every nerve to hold and sharpen them until they marked her as plainly as the deep-grooved tree digging into her spine.

  When his lips moved to the side of her neck, she tried to say something, but the words garbled with her own desire. His hands closed on her shoulders. His soundless speech breathed into her ear, and the mingled scents of warm skin and cherry pipe tobacco and locust flowers pressed away the latrine stench of the creek. She brought one of his hands around to her lips, ran her tongue across the scalloped hardness of his knuckles. He continued to move against her and she shut her eyes as his fingers wormed inside her jacket, under the belt of her skirt. She found herself mirroring his movements, feeling down into the back of his trousers and up beneath his shirt, had just drawn a breath at the unfamiliar touch of this lean, furred back when the sensation of his hands traveling against her own skin shocked her into nervous laughter.

  “It’s the war you have to thank.”

  He drew back, dazed. “What?”

  “The corset drive. Three years ago you’d have been fighting your way through a cage of steel—now it’s all gone for the war.”

  “So much the better.” But his mouth was lost again somewhere below her ear, and she could hardly hear him. They held each other awkwardly, and now that her mind was functioning, however dimly, she realized their difference in height was an encumbrance that would vanish only if they could lie down. The mud here was sucking at their heels, and there was not a blade of grass.

  “I have a room,” he said.

  She started, simultaneously surprised that he had been paying such close attention to her thoughts and dismayed that their intimate fumblings had obscured rather than illuminated this closeness. “Where?” she said.

  “Here—just around the way.”

  Above, the sky had deepened to a bruised purple, and across the creek, though it was not yet four o’clock, the lights of the Settlement were blinking on. Here in this neglected corner, Hope could just barely see Stephen’s cheek twitching, but she could feel the ferocity with which he was looking at her, an expression so serious he seemed almost wounded. His hand tightened around her fingers. They began to walk. Suddenly, inadvertently, she glanced away and, though she at once looked back, he had followed her eyes. He left her, turned in the direction she had looked, and grabbed her hat from the low guard wall as if it were a burdensome child.

  “If only—” she started to say, but her words were blunted by the wind that now jumped and snapped with the nearing storm. Impatiently, heedlessly crumpling the fedora’s brim, he reclaimed her hand.

  The mist was thick and heavy now, but before she could think to ask for her hat, he had turned into a narrow doorway and was fumbling for his key. The building was unmarked except for a string of colored Christmas lights blinking intermittently above the entrance. The once red door was cracked and peeling, the threshold high and scuffed to bare wood. They stepped over it into a dark, steep stairwell reminiscent, Hope thought with a twinge, of the approach to Paul’s San Francisco newspaper office.

  “You all right?” Stephen regarded her with concern, the warmth of his hand radiating up the inside of her arm. She had never envisioned him in such a place, could not have conceived of being here with him, but she nodded. He was free. He could go anywhere. It was for her sake they had come here. Where no one would know them. No one would care.

  As they reached the third landing a woman appeared, her head wrapped in a loose gray shawl, her face averted. But her hands were bare and scarred and white, and a few blond hairs escaped the shawl. The sight of those telltale wisps started a tremor in Hope’s throat that did not stop after the woman had gone. She noticed now the greasy smudges, the rank smells of mildew and decaying wood, the moisture that seeped down the walls in dark patches. From within those walls she heard moaning and the scatterplay of vermin. The stairs were so steep, hardly more than a ladder …

  A roll of thunder broke outside, and she fell against his arm.

  “It’s all right.” It was no longer a question.

  But as he inserted the key, Hope suffered a vision of Yen firing lamps around the house, tidying the mantel, straightening the clock. She heard Lu-mei’s gentle chiding for Morris to emerge from his hiding place under the stairs, Ah-nie’s rough voice singing a lullabye to Jasmine, Pearl calling for Dahsoo to fix her tea. She watched Paul, unexpectedly hurrying home, glance from his rickshaw to a foreign couple furtively embracing across the creek.

  And now she saw, not in her mind’s eye, but a mere step away, the place where Stephen had brought her. A wrought iron bed with a sagging mattress, a stained water jug and basin, a bamboo table and two chairs, on the wall a mirror with a crack running through its blackened surface. It was not his fault. She could see the effort he had made to camouflage the room’s true nature. He had covered the table with a pale blue cloth and a bowl of oranges, shaded the bare bulb with a wicker hat. There were silk cushions on the rickety chairs. The bed was draped in an Indian print, and a crock beside it bloomed with purple asters. In another life, another time, the transformation he had wrought would have won her.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Hope, please.” He loomed in the doorway. “I won’t touch you. I won’t do anything you don’t want.”

  “I know that.” She met him with her fingertips as he moved toward her. She touched his lips and cheeks, not in invitation, but with the memorizing intensity of the blind. To her astonishment he began to cry.

  “If only—”

  “No, Stephen,” she begged. “Please, don’t.” Below them a door opened. Voices called out in Shanghai dialect, and there was the rasping, heavy sound of bundles being dragged.

  He cradled her head in his hands, but made no further attempt to draw her into the room, and when the sounds below had ceased he said, “I didn’t bring you here to seduce you. Please, Hope, you must believe that.”

  She glanced through the doorway at the muted light and flowers. She swallowed. “I have to go.”

  He nodded slowly, pinching his lips into a tight, pale line.

  Outside, her heel skidded on a patch of grease. He caught her, but let go as soon as he’d righted her, and the next thing she felt was the warm, flaring softness of his lips on her cheek. The rickshaw lurched into motion. And it rained.

  BOOK THREE

  Two or three grass huts,

  Rattan walls and a thousand willows,

  Meandering paths connect to deeper paths.

  Beyond the bridge, another bridge.

  A woman and a wise man gather herbs together,

  Their son will grow to be a woodcutter.

  The mountain calendar knows no new or old.

  When meeting an outsider, they ask what dynasty holds power.

  X

  SICKNESS AND HEALTH

  SHANGHAI

  (1919–1925)

  1

  On a cool, bright morning in April, three weeks after her meeting with Stephen, Hope was out on the verandah singing “Ride a Cocked Horse” with Jasmine on her knee when she heard Paul’s heavy step behind her. She finished the song without looking up.

  “Wi’ wings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she make music wherever she go!” Jasmine sang along, her black bob jumping as she twisted to command her mother to bounce her harder. Then, over Hope’s shoulder, she saw her father and froze. Hope tried to put her down.

  “No, no, no, no!” Jasmine screamed and hugged Hope to stop her turning.

  “Jazz,” said Hope sharply. “Don’t pull so. It’s time for your nap.”

  “No!” Jas
mine repeated, clamping her hands to Hope’s cheeks. But Ah-nie came now, her strong arms opening and closing, sleek head wagging in consternation. The toddler’s outraged bawls echoed through the house as Ah-nie carried her inside.

  Throughout this display Paul stood swaying slightly, valise in hand, hat askew. With her ears still ringing, Hope got up to face him.

  She started to apologize, but he cut her off. “Warlords overrun everything,” he said as if picking up in the middle of an argument. “William and Daisy back to Hupei. Sun here with me.”

  His skin was flushed, his voice breathless. He was squinting and seemed not even to have noticed Jasmine’s fit. Hope touched his forehead.

  “Paul, you’re burning!”

  As if in reply, he threw back his head and shoulders. His jaw locked as he simultaneously gasped for air and tried to swallow. Hope put her arms around him to help him onto the lounge and realized his jacket was soaked through the back. “Easy now. Here, can you drink a little water? It’s your throat, then? And your neck? The light hurts your eyes, doesn’t it…” She spoke in a low, diagnostic murmur. No sudden movement. No loud noise. But she could feel his fever rising by the second. He kept talking about betrayal, broken promises, traitors, rebellion. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Yen entering the yard, and summoned him.

  “Laoyeh is very ill,” she whispered. “Tell Dahsoo I need a bowl of ice and boiled water and cloths, and you go for—”

  Paul grabbed her hand. His eyelids fluttered, and out of his delirium he managed, “Yu Sutan. No foreign doctor.”

  Hope struggled to think. If only Stephen hadn’t left. And then the absurdity of this thought erased it.