by Ge Fei
“Good. I don’t want to get married!”
Lilypad laughed. “Men who don’t want whores and women who don’t want husbands are the biggest liars in the world, they say.”
Xiumi replied that she wasn’t getting married in any case, not to anyone. At this, Zhang Jiyuan pulled his pipe out of his mouth and interrupted, “In the future, you may not have to marry at all.”
Lilypad reacted to this first with surprise, then with laughter. “That sounds easy enough, Uncle, but what’s a girl to do who doesn’t marry? Are Mom and Dad going to cook her for dinner?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Zhang Jiyuan replied dismissively.
“We’re all country bumpkins out here, and we haven’t seen the world like you have,” Lilypad teased. “But if all the women in this world stopped marrying and having children, everyone would be dead eventually.”
“Who said anything about not having children? Of course you’d have children, you just wouldn’t need to get married,” was Zhang Jiyuan’s officious response.
“Without marriage, where will you get the kids from? Under rocks?”
“Whenever you see someone you like, you visit them and have children, and that’s it,” Zhang Jiyuan replied.
“You’re saying that whenever a man sees a girl he likes, he can just go over to her house and be with her?”
“Exactly.”
“Without matchmakers and dowries? Or talking it over with her parents first?”
“Exactly.”
“And what would you do if the parents don’t agree? If they lock the door and don’t let you in?”
“Well, that’s easy; you just kill them.”
Lilypad couldn’t believe her ears. Zhang Jiyuan said crazy things all the time, but Lilypad couldn’t tell if he was being serious or just having fun with her.
“What if the girl doesn’t agree?”
“Kill them anyway,” Zhang Jiyuan replied without hesitation.
“What if . . . what if three guys all want the same woman? What will you do then?”
“Simple: You draw straws to see who gets her,” Zhang Jiyuan replied with a mischievous giggle. He got up from his chair to leave. “In the society of the future, everyone will be equal, and everyone will be free. Anyone will be able to get together with anyone else. As long as you’re willing to, you could even marry your own sister.”
“If that’s how it goes, it’ll turn Puji into one big whorehouse, won’t it?”
“Sounds about right,” Zhang Jiyuan said. “With only one difference: Nobody will ever need to pay.”
“You’re quite the pistol, Uncle. Sounds like you men would have a grand time then,” Lilypad needled him.
“Wouldn’t you too?” Zhang Jiyuan laughed out loud, laughed so hard he made himself gasp. Then he ran his fingers through his hair, turned on his heels, and left.
“What a load of bullshit,” Lilypad spat after he had gone. “The bearded little troll doesn’t have an honest thought in his head. He lies around all day with nothing to do, so he makes fun of us.”
•
Lilypad washed Xiumi’s hair for her beside the stove.
The tofu slurry she used had come from the seller’s that morning and was already turning a little sour. Xiumi complained that it was sticky and smelled like moldy beans, and it didn’t get rid of itching as well as wolfberry leaves. “And where am I going to get wolfberry leaves for you?” Lilypad asked her. The two were going back and forth when the sound of urgent speech and hurried footsteps came from outside the estate walls, sounding like crowds of people running through the alleys, past the pond, and through the trees. The commotion intensified until it whirled around them on all sides, then faded again.
“Uh-oh. Sounds like something bad has happened.” Lilypad left Xiumi to peer out the window.
Xiumi’s hair was heavy with water and slurry. She could hear it dripping from her hair into the basin below. Minutes later, Magpie appeared by the kitchen door, agitated and short of breath. “Something’s happened!”
Lilypad asked her what it was:
“She’s dead!”
Lilypad asked who “she” was:
“Miss Sun! Miss Sun is dead!”
“How can she be dead?! She was here just this afternoon borrowing a sieve, as bubbly as ever.” Lilypad flicked the water from her fingers and ran out the door with Magpie.
The estate fell totally silent. The chunks of tofu in Xiumi’s hair plopped into the basin below, where they floated on the surface for a moment before bursting with a soft pop. She closed her eyes and felt around on the stovetop for the ladle so she could scoop some water to rinse with. She heard the regular beat of approaching footsteps, and someone entering the kitchen. Her heart sank.
“What happened outside?” Zhang Jiyuan asked, leaning on the door frame.
Son of a bitch, of course it had to be him. Xiumi didn’t dare look directly at him, and stammered, “They said . . . they said Miss Sun is dead.”
Zhang Jiyuan replied with a faint “Oh,” as if nothing could have been less interesting. He continued to stand there.
Go away, go away, go away now! Xiumi screamed at him with her mind’s voice. Not only did he not leave, he stepped into the kitchen toward her. “Washing your hair?” he asked.
Xiumi managed a “Mm-hmm” through her anger. Catching hold of the ladle, she took a full scoop of cold water and poured it directly over her head and neck.
“Do you want some help?”
“No, no, that’s fine.” Hearing him say things like this made her heart beat even harder. It was the first time she had spoken to him alone.
“Don’t you want some hot water?” he asked in a dry, rasping voice.
Xiumi paid no attention to him. She knew he was standing right behind her because she could see his white socks and cloth shoes. Son of a bitch, he’s watching me wash my hair. Disgusting! What’s he hanging around here for?
Xiumi finished rinsing, and began to cast around for her towel. Zhang Jiyuan reached out to pass it to her, but she wouldn’t take it from him. Spying a dirty dishrag by the stove, she snatched it and rubbed it over her head a few times, ignoring the grease, and curled her hair into a bun. She did all this with her back to Zhang Jiyuan, as if expressly waiting for him to leave.
At long last, Zhang Jiyuan laughed derisively, shook his head, and walked off.
Xiumi breathed out a long sigh. She watched the thin figure pass through the skywell, waver in the shadows of the eaves, and disappear. Still standing by the stove, she shook her hair back out to let the southern breeze blow through it. Her cheeks still burned. Ripples on the water shivered the thin sickle of a new moon reflected in the basin.
•
Lilypad and Magpie came home with Mother, who said she had just finished a round of mahjong at Grandma Meng’s place when she heard the news about Miss Sun. She noted, “Baoshen even had the nerve to cry out loud in front of all those people.”
“How did Miss Sun die?” Xiumi asked her.
But Mother wouldn’t give her a straight answer; she said she was dead, and that was all there was to it. Xiumi asked Magpie the same question, but Magpie wasn’t about to say more than her mistress, and all she would do was mumble incoherently and exclaim, “It’s horrible. Just horrible.” Eventually, Lilypad pulled Xiumi into her boudoir, and whispered, “You and I have to be more careful in the future, there’s a criminal on the loose in Puji.”
“Didn’t she just stop by this morning to borrow a sieve?” Xiumi asked. “How can she be dead now?”
“She came for the sieve to collect rapeseeds. If she hadn’t gone out later, she wouldn’t have died.”
Lilypad told her that Miss Sun had ventured into her family’s fields behind the village to harvest rapeseed and hadn’t come home by nightfall. When Baoshen went out to look for her, he ran int
o her father, who had already gone out with a carriage lantern to try to find his daughter. The two of them searched the fields together, where they discovered the corpse—stripped naked, her mouth stuffed full of weeds, presumably to keep her from screaming. The weeds were pushed far into her mouth, to the back of her throat, and Baoshen couldn’t clear everything out with his fingers. No knife wounds could be found on her body; her hands were tied behind her back. One foot still had a shoe on it, while the other was bare. She wasn’t breathing—her body had long gone cold. She had gouged out a shallow hole in the earth with her heels. Blood covered her thighs. Doctor Tang performed an autopsy, and also found no lacerations on her body. Grandma Meng swore the killer wasn’t local. Everyone in the village knew she took in any interested parties; anyone who wanted to top her could just give her father a few strings of cash at the door, and even if you didn’t have money, he would let you in on credit.
“A local wouldn’t go to so much trouble,” she said. Hearing this, another onlooker—the local butcher, nicknamed Yellowtooth—blurted out rather simplemindedly, “Well, I’m not so sure about that.”
“Unless you were the one who did it,” Grandma Meng snapped at him.
“You never know, maybe I was . . .” Yellowtooth giggled, until his blind mother slapped him across the face. “Somebody’s just died, and you’re making jokes?”
“Maybe it was Yellowtooth who did it, don’t you think?” Xiumi asked.
“Would you really believe a stupid joke like that?” Lilypad replied.
Xiumi asked why Baoshen hadn’t come home yet. “He’s helping Old Man Sun put up the funeral tent. Cockeye’s spent a pretty penny on Miss Sun over the years. And now his kitten’s dead, and he just can’t stop crying.” Xiumi asked why they needed to put up a tent. “That’s the custom in Puji,” Lilypad replied. When somebody dies outdoors, they don’t bring the body into the house, so you have to set up a tent outside to shelter it. With the hot weather, I’m sure they’re going to have to wake the carpenter up to make the coffin as soon as possible. It’ll keep the cockeyed bastard busy for a while. It’s just a pity the poor tramp had to die like that, her naked body tossed in the field. Old Man Sun nearly went insane, screaming about his daughter still being unmarried and that men shouldn’t be gawking at her naked body. He kept trying to push them away from the crime scene, but there was no way around it, so he just sat down by the pond and cried.”
Xiumi remembered standing beside the pond the day Father left, and how the honeysuckle dangled above the water like a curtain. She remembered Miss Sun’s timid smile after Lilypad scolded her and Baoshen that afternoon, when she had come for the sieve.
“You and I need to keep a careful eye out in the future. They say a band of robbers have shown up not far from here. They kidnapped a couple of kids just a few days ago.”
7
XIUMI brought up the rear of Miss Sun’s funeral procession. Grandma Meng was handing out yellow flowers made of cloth from a basket for guests to pin onto their clothing. She gave out her last flower just before she got to Xiumi. “What bad luck!” Grandma Meng laughed. “I’m just short the one.”
Xiumi caught sight of a regiment of imperial troops marching on the far side of the river. The soldiers looked exhausted and half-asleep, moving sluggishly under the noonday sun. Hooves kicked up huge clouds of dust, and the riders’ red tassels bounced with the horses’ gait. Their column slid past the low hills in the distance like a snake through water. Yet she couldn’t hear the sound of the horses.
She looked around for Magpie and Lilypad to no avail. Miss Sun’s coffin looked like the overnight job it was: unpainted white pine boards with a simple silk brocade shawl draped over the top. She could see the monks carrying the large ceremonial flowers, hammering cymbals, and playing other instruments, but no sounds reached her ears.
Strange. Why couldn’t she hear anything?
The funeral procession passed through fields of cotton and headed east. As they left the village, dark clouds rolled in, a strong wind picked up, and the heavens opened. Raindrops falling on the thick dust of the roads made no sound; raindrops on the river transformed the water into a current of white flowers like chipped jade. The rain intensified, finally becoming so heavy Xiumi could barely open her eyes.
What was going on? How could such a downpour fall so silently?
Murmurs of unrest spread through the crowd. She saw the pallbearers set down the coffin atop a stone bridge and scurry underneath the bridge to get out of the rain. The rest of the crowd dispersed like a retreating tidal wave. Baoshen and Old Man Sun in their hempen funeral robes and white hats tried to herd the crowd back together, their faces masks of bitter pain.
Xiumi began to run toward the old temple at the eastern end of the village, looking back several times as she ran. At first, she was among a group of people running in the same direction, but she soon realized that the others had disappeared, leaving her alone. By the time she arrived, gasping for breath, at the gate of Black Dragon Temple, she could see only the coffin still lying on top of the bridge. All the people, Baoshen and Old Man Sun included, had vanished.
Strange! How come no one else retreated to the temple?
Hurrying around to the rear gate, she found Zhang Jiyuan standing under the eaves, clutching a coil of rope and smiling at her.
“What are you doing here?” Xiumi started, covering her shirt with both hands. Her breasts hurt, and she felt slippery and exposed, as the rain on her new summer outfit had plastered the cloth right to her skin.
“I came to hear the abbot lecture on the sutras,” Zhang Jiyuan replied in a low voice. Water had matted his hair into soaking locks.
“Why don’t the funeral attendants come here to get out of the rain?” Xiumi asked.
“They can’t come in.”
“Why not?”
“The abbot won’t allow them.” Zhang Jiyuan peered outside, then bent down until he was right by her ear. “Because this temple was built especially for you.”
“Who’s the abbot?” Xiumi looked over at the Heavenly King pavilion: its roof tiles clattered in the storm, and a layer of fog already enveloped the exposed timbers.
“He’s reciting sutras in the lecture hall,” Zhang Jiyuan told her.
“This ramshackle temple hasn’t had monks in it for years. How could there be an abbot now?”
“Come with me.”
Xiumi obediently followed Zhang Jiyuan along a covered walkway toward the lecture hall. On the way, she passed broken and empty structures: the Heavenly King pavilion, the monks’ dormitories, the ancestral garden pavilion, the Medicine Buddha pavilion, the Kuanyin pavilion, the kitchen and administration offices—everything was deserted, while the roof of the Kuanyin temple had already collapsed, walls tilted precariously, and what tiled roofs remained were covered in weeds. Moss, too, had conquered the walls, and yellow flowers bloomed from cracks in the stone. Xiumi caught the scent of snowbell resin and African arrowroot mixed with the heavy odor of earth and rainwater, and, of course, the air of tobacco smoke that floated around Zhang Jiyuan.
To her surprise, the lecture hall and the library were clean and in good condition. Arriving inside, they found the abbot, dressed in a red-and-yellow kasya robe, sitting in the lotus position and reciting sutras. Seeing them enter, he put his hands together in a gesture of welcome, then stood up. Xiumi, confused, wasn’t sure how to reply to his greeting, and heard him ask, “Is this her?”
Zhang Jiyuan nodded. “It is.”
“Amitabha!”
Xiumi felt like she had seen this abbot before somewhere, but she couldn’t remember where. Slowly he clicked his heavy wooden prayer beads and chanted, occasionally raising his eyes to examine her. Completely at a loss, Xiumi simply stood and stared back at him. Then she noticed something—a pink and flaccid appendage that hung like a small sausage by the abbot’s left hand. Fear followed
recognition, and she opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. So the six-fingered man her uncle was looking for had been hiding in the temple all along!
The abbot gave a barking laugh that made his face swell. “Jiyuan, since you’ve brought her here, what are we waiting for?”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Don’t be afraid, my pet,” the abbot said. “No one comes into this life for no reason. We each have our own important mission to fulfill.”
“What’s my mission?”
“You will understand presently.” The abbot’s face creased with a brief but sinister smile.
Xiumi’s entire body tightened as she came to realize the danger of her situation. She ran around the lecture hall searching for a door, knocking over the oil lamp on the incense table as she did so, but there was no way out. The two men merely watched her and laughed.
“Tell me where the door is!” Xiumi shouted at her uncle with imploring eyes.
Zhang Jiyuan grabbed her with one hand and pulled her close. His hand ran up her thigh, and he put his lips to her ear: “Little sister, the door is right here.” As he spoke, he wrapped his rope around her wrists. When she felt her uncle tighten the rope, Xiumi gathered all her energy and screamed, “Don’t tie me up!”
This time, she heard her own voice, followed immediately by a reply.
“Who’s tying you up?”
•
Xiumi opened her eyes. Sunlight poured silently through the skylight above her. The parted mosquito netting around her bed smelled faintly of incense. An upset oil lamp lay on the floor by her bedside. She heard a sharp tinkling sound: Magpie was sweeping up broken glass. It had all been a dream.
“So who’s tying you up?” Magpie giggled. “I came to call you for breakfast; you knocked the lamp right off the table.”
Still breathing hard, Xiumi turned to the table. A stick of snowbell incense had almost burned out.
“How could I have dreamed all that?” she asked herself, still unsettled. “Nearly frightened me to death.”