by Ge Fei
•
On the first day of winter, horse carts and shoulder poles crowded into the courtyard. Grandma Meng came with her husband to help out. Wang Qidan and Wang Badan each held one end of a wooden pole that passed through the center of an iron scale, which Hua Erniang held at the center as she called out pounds and ounces. Baoshen worked furiously, writing in the ledger with one hand and working the abacus with the other. Mother beamed as she oversaw the whole affair, now running to the kitchen or checking the rear courtyard, now sending snacks out to the tenant farmers, many of whom had walked for miles to line up at her door. Lilypad and Magpie spent the day in the kitchen chopping meat and cooking rice, and the hammering of cleavers on cutting boards continued throughout the morning.
A line of farmers squatted timidly by the courtyard wall, their shoulder poles in their arms. Once a name was called, the farmer would hurry over to check the markings on the scale. Hua Erniang would smile at him and say, “Look carefully and tell me how much.” The farmer deferentially reported a number to her that she would then repeat at a shout so that Baoshen, sitting at his desk in the skywell, could hear it over the clicking of his abacus. Once he repeated the number back to her, it was entered in the ledger and the tithe was paid. Hemp sacks full of grain were carried one by one into the rear courtyard. Grandma Meng skittered back and forth on her tiny feet between front and rear courtyards on some strange business Xiumi couldn’t comprehend.
One of their tenant farmers, Wang Aliu, was almost forty pounds short of his share. “Every year it’s always the same with you,” Hua Erniang scolded, and turned to Mother for advice. “He’s been a problem year after year, even with a harvest as good as this one he’s still short. I think you should just take his three acres back and be done with him.”
Hearing this, Wang Aliu dragged his wife and young son before Mother to bow and smile imploringly. “To tell the truth, ma’am, my wife got sick twice this year, and we had the new baby, and half of those three acres were barren this harvest. I promise I’ll make up this year’s debt next harvest, just please don’t take my lease away.” He pushed his son’s head and shoulders down, forcing him to kowtow. The boy stubbornly refused to kneel, for which Wang Aliu slapped him across the face. The child howled as blood oozed from his lips, and ran to the far side of the courtyard. He wore only a thin shirt and a pair of heavily patched pants; Xiumi could see his butt through the gaping holes in the back. Wang Aliu’s wife really did look like an invalid, her face wan and yellowed. She wore a man’s cotton coat with no buttons, secured across her waist by a makeshift cotton cord. She stood holding her baby and crying silently.
The sight of the family moved Mother to sympathy. “Just log their share,” she told Hua Erniang. “Let them make it up next year.” Wang Aliu thanked her effusively, kowtowing several times before calling his wife back over to pay respect to Baoshen. “Enough, enough,” Baoshen stopped him. “This year’s debt, plus last year and the year before, that comes to one hundred and sixty-eight pounds. I won’t charge you any interest. Tighten your belt and work hard enough next year to bring it all in at once, so I can clear your account for you.” Wang Aliu smiled, nodded, and repeatedly promised that he would as he backed away.
Grandma Meng was heading to the well with a basketful of arrowhead tubers to wash and trim; Xiumi, seeing there was nothing else for her to do, joined the old lady to work and chat.
“Wang Aliu really is a sad story,” Grandma Meng said. “None of his land went barren this year, he just likes his liquor; once he opens a bottle, he can’t stop himself. He’s already pawned everything in his house not nailed down, and has tormented his wife terribly. Six children, and they’ve already lost three.” The old lady sighed.
Xiumi suddenly asked, “How come these people have to bring the grain they harvested to us?”
Grandma Meng stared at her blankly for a second, then laughed out loud. Instead of replying to her, she turned to Baoshen and said, “Hey Cockeye, did you hear what this girl just asked me?” Baoshen appeared to have heard the question, and cracked a wry smile. As Mother happened to be passing by, Grandma Meng called to her, “Guess what your little daughter just asked me?”
“What did she say?” Mother inquired. Grandma Meng repeated Xiumi’s question for the entire courtyard to hear. Hua Erniang laughed so heartily the counterweight slid off her scales and nearly fell onto her toes. Xiumi saw all the tenant farmers standing by the wall smiling at her. “Don’t be fooled by how big my daughter’s grown,” Mother replied aloud. “She hasn’t grown much sense yet. I’ve been feeding her all these years and she still doesn’t know anything.”
After Mother left, Grandma Meng turned seriously to Xiumi and said, “Silly girl, all of them are farming your family’s land. Who are they going to bring their harvest to if not to you? Certainly not to me.”
“Well then, why don’t they farm their own land?”
“That’s an even sillier question. Those beggars are so poor, they barely have a pair of sewing needles between them, to say nothing about land.”
“Then how did we get our land?”
“Some of it you inherited, some you bought, and some you took when people couldn’t pay what they owed you,” Grandma Meng explained. “Silly girl. It’s as if you’ve lived your whole life in the Peach Blossom Paradise—you don’t know anything. And they say you can read?”
Xiumi wanted to respond, but Grandma Meng had already stood up, slapped the dust from her dress, and walked to the well to draw the water for her vegetables.
The tenant farmers were served lunch at a grand table set up in the skywell, as Mother feared they would soil her dining room. When sixteen or seventeen working farmers saw the table brought out, they quickly gathered around and sat down as the chairs appeared. Wang Aliu scooped himself a full bowl of rice, then piled portion after portion of meat and vegetables on top until he had made a large dome of food. Then he left the table in search of his son. The child lay asleep against his mother’s knee amid the long grass at the foot of the courtyard wall. Wang Aliu hunted all around until he found the pair, and squatted down by his wife to offer her some food. She refused it, shaking her head as she woke her son up. When the boy opened his eyes and saw the food, he ignored the proffered chopsticks and dove in with his hands. A clear strand of snot reaching from his nose to the edge of the bowl got swept up and eaten with the mouthfuls of food.
Magpie and Xiumi watched the scene through the kitchen window and giggled. Lilypad laughed with them for a moment, then suddenly lost her smile and started to cry. Xiumi assumed she was thinking of her old home in Huzhou, or her dead parents, and felt pained for her. She did not expect that, after crying for a while, Lilypad would draw her into her arms and say, “Sister, if I come begging at your door one day, you’ll give me a bowl of rice, won’t you?”
“Why would you say something like that?” Magpie asked. “You have a good life here already, why would you need to beg?”
Lilypad ignored the question at first as she wiped away her tears. After a long pause, she said, “When I was in the deep southwest, I saw a fortune-teller walking down the street with a starving child. I felt so bad looking at them that I gave them a couple steamed buns; as I left, the fortune-teller stopped me. He said that a gift of food should be repaid as if it were the gift of life itself. He said he wasn’t good at much, but the fortunes he told mostly came true, and so he asked me for the year, day, and hour of my birth. Of course I didn’t know any of this information; I’d never even seen my parents’ faces before, how could I know the hour I was born? So he read my face. In the end he said I would spend the latter half of my life on the street, that I’d starve by the roadside and dogs would eat my flesh. I asked if there were any way to avoid such a fate, and he said only if I married someone born in the year of the pig. But I’m only getting older every day—how can I possibly afford to be so picky?”
“The guy was probably ju
st saying anything, why take him seriously?” Xiumi said. “It could even be that he was a pig himself, and wanted to scare you into marrying him.”
Magpie added, “Now that I think of it, Baoshen’s son Tiger was born in the year of the pig.”
This interjection finally turned Lilypad’s sadness into laughter. “Oh, so I have to marry him, now?” Eventually, her dark mood passed and she said to Magpie, “Where are you from originally? And how did you end up in Puji? Grandma Meng told us that we weren’t supposed to mention arsenic around you. Why is that?”
Magpie began to shiver violently, her eyes staring straight ahead. Her lips pursed and turned purple; she shook until finally she closed her eyes and tears fell. She said that when she was five, her father had gotten into a dispute with a neighbor over farmland; the quarrel eventually went to court. The hearing went smoothly, but just as they were on the verge of winning, their neighbor managed to sneak arsenic into the family’s soup one evening. Both her parents and her two brothers died. She didn’t eat as much as they did, and her neighbors held her nose and force-fed her a spoonful of human shit until she vomited her guts out and held on to her worthless life. Afraid her presence would incite more retribution from someone they knew to be a killer, her relatives didn’t dare take her in, so she ended up with Grandma Meng in Puji.
“No wonder I’ve seen you wash your bowl over and over before every meal,” Xiumi noted. “Are you afraid someone’s going to poison you?”
“A childhood habit; I know it won’t happen but I can’t help feeling suspicious anyway.”
“Just another hopeless soul.” Lilypad sighed before peering down at Xiumi. “How can we ever compare with you, all that good karma from a past life getting you reborn into a house like this one, everything seen to, everything done for you so you can go without a care in the world?”
Xiumi said nothing out loud. Her heart replied, How could you all know my worries? I might scare you to death if I told you. Even at that moment, however, she had no intimation of the disaster that moved steadily in her direction.
•
More than two weeks passed since Zhang Jiyuan disappeared, and few ever mentioned his name. Xiumi was woken in the late hours of a cold December night by the memory of the satin-embroidered box he had given her before he left. She had tucked it into her dresser without opening it. But what did it contain? The question danced through her head like the snowflakes on the roof. By daybreak, she could no longer contain her curiosity. She jumped out of bed, took the box from her dresser, and opened it.
Inside was a golden cicada.
•
Around that time, Zhang Jiyuan’s body floated down the Yangtze River, skirted a sandbank, and turned into a narrow outlet that flowed under a dyke. A hunter from Puji found him. The river had long since iced over, and his naked corpse had frozen among a cluster of reeds. Baoshen had no choice but to hire people to chisel it out and drag it onto the land. Xiumi stared at the body from a distance; it was the first time she had ever seen a man’s naked body. His brow was still furrowed, his body wrapped completely in ice like a candy apple imprisoned in sugar.
Mother ran down to the river and threw herself onto the body, completely oblivious to the cocoon of ice around his body and the growing crowd of onlookers. She wept loudly over him.
“I shouldn’t have let you go. And even if I did, I shouldn’t have wished you dead,” Mother sobbed.
Part Two
HUAJIASHE
1
JULY 18, 1901
STILL clear. Met Xue Zuyan once more in Xia village. He claims the eighty-seven Mauser rifles are already on their way from the Germans. Zhang Lianjia announced his intention to quit the society, claiming he had to stay home after his mother’s death. The real reason is simply terror in the face of the great moment. Zuyan pleaded with Lianjia unsuccessfully; his mood darkened and he became quite angry. Then he unsheathed his sword and pointed it at Lianjia, saying, “All this about quitting, quitting, quitting . . . I’ll give you something to fucking quit for.” One swing of his sword and the pear tree in Zuyan’s courtyard fell. Zhang shut his mouth.
Noon: Xue’s valet brought Xiumi and a fair-haired boy into the courtyard. They carried a letter from Ding Shuze. Xiumi noticed me and got scared; her face turned pale and she became too uncomfortable to speak. She stood under the covered walkway, playing with her clothing and grinding her teeth. When I put a hand on her shoulder she didn’t withdraw, just trembled fiercely. Those eyes like autumn waters, hands like flower petals, along with her pitiable state gave her a coldly brilliant, intoxicating look. I wanted to pull her to me and squeeze her until her joints popped. Ahhh, well . . .
• • •
Three years later, as Xiumi reread this passage from Zhang Jiyuan’s diary, she was only one night away from traveling to Changzhou to be married.
Magpie had discovered the diary hidden beneath a pillow as she stripped Zhang Jiyuan’s bed. For the first time, she displayed the quiet cleverness that lay below her honest exterior: she neither said anything when she found it, nor reported it to Mother, but passed it secretly to Xiumi. Of course, the events that transpired in the diary’s account far exceeded her expectations.
Xiumi had long suspected that while the world beyond held innumerable secrets, it consistently refused to reveal any of them to her. She felt as if she were trapped in a windowless room, and could barely make out the contours of the walls by the faint light that managed to sneak inside. But reading Zhang Jiyuan’s diary ripped the ceiling off this room in one stroke, flooding it with such bright sunlight she could hardly open her eyes.
She spent three whole days reading it. Everything came too fast, and too unexpectedly. It caught her heart the way a river current catches a leaf, sending it now up and over the white crests of rapids and now into the depths. She thought she would go insane. She lay on her bed through the night without sleeping, discovering in the process that a human could survive four straight nights without a wink of sleep. Two weeks later, she made a new discovery, namely that a person could also sleep for six straight days without waking.
She finally opened her eyes to find Magpie, Lilypad, and Mother standing by her bedside looking at her, while Doctor Tang sat at her desk, writing a prescription. She looked at the people in the room as if she didn’t recognize them, then spoke at great length in a way no one understood. In the month that followed, she hardly said a word to anyone.
Afraid that Xiumi would get pulled down the same path as Father, Mother once again hired monks and adepts to perform divinations and exorcisms. One day Xiumi wandered downstairs naked, and Tiger started calling her “the crazy girl.” She began to talk more, and babbled without end whenever she bumped into someone. Mother didn’t want to hear about Zhang Jiyuan in any case—the repetition of his name exhausted her patience. She had already thought up an excuse for Xiumi’s descent into insanity: “The girl has always been a little off.” Once she herself accepted this as fact, she let it slip out in conversation.
Only Magpie understood the real cause of everything. For a diary to have driven someone crazy meant its contents could not have been trivial. Clearly the scribblings of intellectuals had to be taken seriously. Knowing that vain regret and silent tears would be of no use to anyone, she decided to tell the truth. Yet the day she planned to spill everything to Mother was the same day Xiumi suddenly recovered her faculties.
That morning, Lilypad was carrying a bowl of medicinal broth to Xiumi’s room when she happened upon a horrifying scene: Xiumi had inserted one tender thumb into the doorjamb and was slowly closing the door on it. The pressure of the heavy wooden door had already squashed the pad of her thumb; a trickle of blood ran down the frame. Xiumi turned to Lilypad and smiled. “Look. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
Lilypad was stunned. Instead of running over to stop Xiumi she raised the bowl of medicine to her own lips and drank it dry. The intense bitter
ness brought her back to her senses, and she muttered, “Good heavens, am I going crazy too?” She whipped out a handkerchief from the sash at her waist in order to tend to Xiumi’s wound. The end of her thumb had been flattened completely, and beneath the broken nail was a mess of blood and flesh. Lilypad heard Xiumi repeat, “Now it hurts a little . . . I know it hurts now . . . Really, now it hurts really bad.” Sharp physical pain lifted the cloud from her mind and miraculously restored her mental clarity.
One side effect of her recovery, however, was that she could no longer remember what Zhang Jiyuan looked like. His visage faded from her mind, and even the scene of his frozen body by the river began to blur. Forgetting is an irreversible action; a face melts from memory more quickly than ice, as if it were the most delicate thing on earth.
The first time she ever saw Zhang Jiyuan, she felt like that face must have been an abstract figure, something that didn’t belong to the human world. Gradually, the face transformed into the green woolen cushion on the back of a chair, into the glittering stars over the empty courtyard at night, or the heavy scales of clouds on an overcast day; it became the peach trees in full bloom, with petals and stamens all soaked in dew. As the wind rose, the branches waved and the flowers trembled, and a bottomless grief opened in the deepest recesses of her heart.
Xiumi had been well for only a few days before Mother set to work on finding her a husband. Xiumi had zero interest in getting married, but she put up no resistance. When Mother sent Lilypad to test her feelings about it, Xiumi responded offhandedly, “Anyone is fine, I couldn’t care less.”
A match was quickly found. When Lilypad spoke to Xiumi about arranging a visit, she replied, “Any day is fine. It’s all the same to me.”
When that day arrived, Xiumi locked herself in her room. Magpie and Lilypad banged on her door until their hands swelled, but she wouldn’t open it. Finally, Mother marched upstairs and pleaded with Xiumi through the door as tears rolled down her cheeks. “The matchmaker’s brought the young man over,” she told her. “He’s standing in the courtyard. Just go and have a look at him, say a word or two. You don’t want to reach the Hou family house in Changzhou and then regret it.”