Peach Blossom Paradise

by Ge Fei

  She noticed my frequent glances back at Xiumi and asked if I were more interested in the one behind us. I gave a noncommittal response. The harlot shoved me gently and teased, “They say ‘new shoes are nice, but they pinch the toes; sharp thorns hide beneath the garden rose.’ ” Her words made me momentarily dizzy with arousal, and I nearly lost control of my body and desires. I came very close to pushing her into the reeds and going at it tooth and claw.

  At the base of the river wall, we turned onto a narrow path that wound through tree groves and tall reeds. With no one in sight, the harlot redoubled her assault of suggestion, constantly probing me for a response. Seeing I no longer paid her any attention, she abruptly asked, “What year were you born in?” When I told her I was born in the year of the pig, she clasped her hands together and cried out, making me jump. When I asked her what was the matter, she said that many years ago, a fortune-teller she had given food to told her that she would face disaster at middle age, and her only means of escaping it was to marry someone born in the year of the pig. Thus this woman’s self-deluded cleverness reveals itself, that she might think to hoodwink me with such a patently ridiculous story. With her previous efforts thwarted, she resorted to her most dangerous trick: she plastered herself up against my shoulder and quietly giggled, “But I’m getting all wet under there.”

  Truly a vicious stratagem. Had I been a callow young man, or a superficial, soulless playboy, I would surely have sunk into the mud with her past all hope of escape.

  Her shamelessness was so thorough I had no choice but to bark, “Wet, wet, wet, to hell with your goddamn wet!” Now frightened, she shrieked and scampered away, hiding her face in her hands.

  Xiumi caught up with us at the ferry crossing. She wore a green floral-print shirt, navy-blue pants, and floral embroidered shoes. Even at a distance, the river breeze carried her remarkable scent to me. She had only to appear in my field of vision and I couldn’t take my eyes from her.

  In that moment, both Lilypad and Xiumi stood before me, and I examined each of them in turn. One seemed an apricot flower laden with fresh dew, the other an autumn lotus touched by frost; one a young deer, bleating by the brook, the other a mare bent over the grain trough; one a pine bough, replete with green needles and oozing scented sap, the other heavy timber cut into a door, and smelling only of varnish. The very picture of refinement and vulgarity in immediate contrast. Oh, Little Sister, Little Sister!

  Soon the sail was raised and the ferryman bid us all aboard. A stiff southeast wind raised a heavy chop on the water, making the boat pitch hard. When I saw Xiumi sway unsteadily on the gangplank, I reached out to support her. I didn’t expect her to slap my hand away angrily and snap, “I don’t need your help!”

  The rest of the party turned to look at her in surprise. Though my help had been rebuffed, my heart was filled with a wild elation.

  Little Sister, ah, Little Sister!

  After eating a hasty dinner at Chen’s Rice Market, I walked back to our residence alone. Why did my mind feel so clouded, my feet so clumsy? Why could I not take my eyes off her for a second? Why did I see her shadow everywhere?

  On the way back, I approached a rocky cliffside where a stream poured into a pool and an owl hooted. As my eyes and ears took in the scattered dots of lantern light and the low murmur of voices in conversation, the evening’s drink hit me, twisting my stomach and throwing my mind into chaos. I sat down on a cold stone and breathed in the pine-sweet air of the mountain valley. If heaven cares for me, I thought, it will bring her to my side right now. Amazingly, just as I was thinking this she appeared.

  I watched her emerge from the shop and dawdle on the road, apparently distracted or lost in thought. She spent a moment looking down into the valley, then turned down the path to where I sat. She was alone. Oh, Little Sister. My heart beat so fast it felt like it was about to jump out of my throat.

  Ugh, Zhang Jiyuan, are you really so pathetic, is your spirit so paper thin that you would dissolve into jelly over a country girl? Remember how you once crossed hundreds of miles with a dagger in your belt before you slid it into that imperial overseer’s breast; how you hopped a boat in Danyang and fled to Japan, surviving trials and traps that brought you to death’s edge, and you were never so nervous? Remember when . . . I could remember nothing, because the beauty had approached.

  Had I said nothing, she would have slipped right past me, and my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity would have vanished. Had I reached out directly to embrace her and she screamed, what would I have done? Desperate, I suddenly had an idea. I waited until she neared me, then sighed and said, “It seems that death has just visited this family.”

  What was I saying? It was absolutely ludicrous. Xiumi could have ignored me entirely, yet she stopped, and asked me, “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody told me.”

  “Then how do you know?” She was full of curiosity.

  I got up from the stone and said with a smile, “It’s plain as day. And it wasn’t just one person, either.”

  And then I exerted my powers of invention to the utmost, manufacturing a story about a dead child and Chen Xiuji’s suicidal wife, and Xiumi actually bought it. We found ourselves walking side by side down the path through the bamboo grove. The path was only wide enough for one, yet she didn’t avoid walking next to me. I stopped and turned to her, and she turned to look at me, a faintly bashful look in her eye. Suddenly the whole world was pristine, and the Milky Way glowed above us as bamboo shadows played in the dark hush of nature. Her breathing quickened, as if in anticipation. I’d be mad to take her in both arms and squeeze her until her joints popped, or eat her in a single bite like a sweet clementine, to quench many days of painful thirst. Good heavens, do you really think it possible? As I hesitated, Xiumi turned and continued on ahead. We were almost out of the bamboo grove. Zhang Jiyuan, when will you have a better time to act than now?

  “Are you afraid?” I asked, stopping once more. It felt like something was stuck in my throat.

  “I am.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder, on the smooth silk shirt now chilly with dew. I felt her sharp shoulder underneath. Suddenly, a vision of Meiyun’s flat face rose before my eyes, sneering at me from the shadows as if to say: If you lay one finger on her, I will boil your bones to make soup . . .

  “Don’t be afraid.” I finally patted her shoulder and took my hand away.

  Back at the residence, we sat down on the doorstep and continued to talk. Xiumi told me that the day she carried a letter to Zuyan’s estate, she saw a hunchbacked old man in a black cloth robe spying on her from the other side of the fishpond. I broke out into a cold sweat.

  Could it really be him?

  Many know him as “Steelback Li,” a seasoned spy for the imperial court. Heaven knows how many ambitious young men have lost their lives because of him. In that case, Xia village is in grave danger.

  I spent much of the night tossing and turning in bed. I rose at midnight and sat by the table, watching the moon filtering through the screen, listening to the sound of wind in the trees and the continuous roar of Baoshen’s snoring. How can she have taken over my heart so completely that I am powerless to do anything else? That a country girl should cripple me like this. Just thinking of her face as she looked up at me makes all else feel utterly meaningless. Here on the eve of a great project—truly this autumn has become a season of life or death—how could I allow private desires to bury the fruit of over ten years of struggle? Have you forgotten the oath you took in Yokohama, Jiyuan? No, this will not do. I must reclaim my spirit.

  • • •

  Han Liu walked into the room. Her footsteps were always so light as to be inaudible; she could walk right up to someone without the person knowing, as if she had appeared out of thin air. She told Xiumi that Number Four, Qingshou, had sent men in a boat for her; they had been waiting for some time.

  Xiumi
closed Zhang Jiyuan’s diary, wrapped it back up in its square of multicolored cloth, and stuffed it back under her pillow before standing up to brush her hair. As she looked at herself in the mirror, one lip curled in a wry smile. Why should I brush my hair, she thought, as if I have some reason to make myself look pretty? She tossed her comb aside and went to the basin to splash her face with water, then shook her head again. Why wash my face? She returned to her seat at the table. Body and mind were still absorbed in the world of the diary. She thought of the inexorable movement of time and felt the ache of loss.

  A letter sat beside her on the table. Qingshou had sent it to her yesterday through a courier. The calligraphy was delicately styled, and its message simple, consisting of these few lines:

  The magical herb weeps dew; the rare flower drops its petals. Your servant sighs with regret at what he has heard. Will prepare a cup of tea the following day with the hope of sweet conversation. Please do us the great honor of accepting. May an easy current carry you, and a straight path see you home. Many thanks! The Wasted Man, Qingshou

  Wang Guancheng had called himself “Dead Man Walking,” and was regrettably already a dead man lying down; now here was “the Wasted Man.” It seemed the robber kings at Huajiashe each liked to think up his own fancy epithet. Yet who knows what kind of man Qingshou was. Upon reading the letter, Xiumi didn’t know how to react. She and Han Liu went back and forth about it without coming to a clear resolution. In the end, Han Liu said, “Since I’ve never met Qingshou, I don’t dare speak to his character. The letter is certainly polite enough. ‘May an easy current carry you and a straight path see you home’ looks like an assurance that he’s not going to harm you, and ‘the magical herb weeps dew, the rare flower drops its petals’ sounds like sympathy for the abuse you faced. If he’s planning something bad for you and trying to lure you over, then even if you don’t go, he’ll just come here. To put it bluntly, he could just send men over here to tie you up and carry you off, and you still couldn’t do anything about it.”

  It was Xiumi’s first visit to Huajiashe. Though she had stared at it innumerable times from across the lake, it never looked like anything more than a pile of trees and a pile of houses with a pile of white clouds overhead. As the boat left the island and sped toward the village, she felt a deep rush of shame.

  The boat drew gently up to what looked like a massive covered walkway constructed of stripped tree trunks supporting a thatched roof. Rudely built and in obvious decay, the walkway extended in both directions in an endless, meandering line. The tree trunks were warped and varied in thickness. Some of the willow trunks had absorbed so much moisture in the shade that they had sprouted tufts of new green. The roof was thatched with reeds and wheat husks, and scattered with rotten patches, some of which had fallen through to expose the blue sky above. Sun and rain had blackened much of it with mold, and every gust of wind raised black dust from its surface. Underneath the roof, a stream of cobwebs festooned swallow nests and beehives. A railing made of slender tree trunks lined both sides of the walkway, though several sections of it had already broken off.

  Gazebos, positioned every hundred feet or so, were much more artfully constructed. Clearly designed as resting places for the villagers, they featured ornate carvings throughout their interiors. Depictions of the Twenty-Four Legends of Filial Piety (famous figures from opera), as well as auspicious animals like carp, dragons, and phoenixes adorned every pillar and ceiling. Some had stone tables and four stone stools, others had benches built into the walls. Each structure was paved with square black bricks, not a few of which had begun to loosen, mud squelching up through the cracks when stepped on. As she followed the two servants, Xiumi tried to step carefully, though she couldn’t tell which bricks would sink into the mud and stain her embroidered shoes.

  The sound of running water accompanied them the whole way. A current of clear water flowed along an aqueduct beside the walkway, cooling the air noticeably. Xiumi quickly realized that the walkway had actually been built to follow the aqueduct, and not the other way around. She recalled Han Liu telling her that Wang Guancheng had diverted the mountain springs to let water flow into every kitchen in the village so that every housewife could always have fresh water for washing and cooking.

  Xiumi thought of a heated argument Mother and Father had had around the time Father fell sick. Father had impulsively decided to hire workmen to build a covered walkway in Puji, with the intention of connecting every home in the village, and even stretching into the fields. Mother exploded immediately: “Have you gone crazy?! Why do want to waste money on some worthless walkway?” Father rolled his eyes, paying no attention to Mother’s anger, and smiled. “Because that way the villagers can be shielded from the sun and rain.”

  Father’s absurd idea became one of Mother’s favorite anecdotes in idle conversations for years afterward, and she always ended it with a hysterical laugh.

  Yet when she was small, Xiumi couldn’t figure out why the idea so wrong. When she asked Baoshen, he frowned for a moment, then replied, “Some things seem fine to imagine but idiotic to fulfill in real life.” Xiumi still didn’t understand. When she asked Ding Shuze, he told her that while a Peach Blossom Paradise might exist in heaven, you would never find one on earth: “Only a complete fool like your father would drive himself crazy imagining such a ridiculous thing. That southern nutcase in the imperial court, Kang Youwei, was even crazier than your father, fooling the emperor and misleading the court with his talk of ‘Great Unity’ and legal reform. Did he think that thousands of years of traditional law and order could be flipped around and changed whenever he felt like it?”

  Yet here she was, finding Father’s crazy idea manifested in a nest of robbers. The walkway seemed to reach out in all directions, linking every courtyard like an enormous, sprawling spiderweb. Beds of flowers and lotus ponds fed by the aqueduct adorned the walkway on both sides. Water lilies and Indian lotuses bloomed in the pond, their fleshy petals curling slightly under the intense summer sun as swarms of red damselflies dotted the water. Every household looked exactly alike, with the same quaint courtyard featuring a well and two vegetable patches. Every window pointed toward the lake, and even the hanging baskets blooming with flowers looked identical.

  The landscape became more disorienting the farther they went. Xiumi felt as if she had walked a long way only to find herself back where she started. In one courtyard, she saw a girl in a red hemstitched robe drawing water from a well, while only a little farther onward, she saw another young girl of the same age, dressed in the same attire, her hair pulled into the same high braids, knocking cicadas from a tree with a bamboo pole. It seemed that “In Huajiashe, even bees would lose their way” was not just an empty boast.

  After nearly an hour, they arrived at a clean and well-kept courtyard. It looked exactly the same as every other courtyard in the village, save for the two spear-wielding guards who stood outside the door.

  “Here we are,” one servant said to Xiumi. “Come with me, please.”

  The courtyard door was wide open. A path paved with crumbling bricks covered with thick moss led to the inner hallway. The two servants bowed, asking her to “please wait a moment,” and retreated backwards from her.

  The courtyard was narrow and dark, and so close to the main hall that it seemed a part of it. A straight row of thick pillars supported a sharply sloped roof. A wooden ladder poked out of the wall on the left-hand side, possibly leading into an attic, while a small door in the rear, shaded by bamboo, opened into another courtyard, from which could be heard the sound of flowing water.

  A man in a long robe sat in the center of the hall with his back to Xiumi. His age was not obvious at first glance. He was playing go with a woman in white. She looked around forty years old, her hair tied in a high bun. One hand rested at her chin, while the long fingers of her other hand gently played with a stone on the table. It appeared that neither had taken any notice of
Xiumi standing behind them.

  A collapsed panel screen, painted in black lacquer and gold leaf, leaned against the far wall. Bamboo hooks hanging from the rafters above held bunches of red chili peppers as well as a birdcage with a parrot inside it, which carefully scrutinized Xiumi. Fresh bird droppings dotted the floor. A statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin and a terra-cotta incense burner molded in the shape of a toad with an open mouth were displayed on an altar. The incense had long burned to ash, but Xiumi could still catch a whiff of arrowroot and snowbell resin.

  Late-afternoon sunlight rose from the geraniums onto the western wall and from there into the canopy of a grove, saturating the leaves with red. Xiumi heard the woman say, “No need to count stones, you’ve definitely lost.” The man didn’t respond, but continued counting though it was indeed clear he had lost. When he demanded a rematch, the woman said, “We can play again in the evening. The poor girl’s been waiting forever.”

  The man turned to look at Xiumi, then immediately stood up and said to the woman, “Why didn’t you say anything when she arrived?” Turning back to Xiumi, he cupped his fist in greeting. “Welcome. Many, many apologies for the wait.” Hurrying over to her, he looked Xiumi up and down a few times and mused, “No wonder. No wonder.”

  The woman in white laughed. “What do you think? I guessed right, didn’t I?”

  “Absolutely,” the man replied. “The kid Qingsheng has good taste.”

  The man must be Number Four, Qingshou, but who is the woman? Xiumi wondered. Not quite understanding what they were talking about, she stood with her eyes trained on the ground, the fingers of her clasped hands rubbing against each other. Perhaps it was the presence of another woman that made her feel slightly less nervous. The woman approached her too, and took her arm in her hands, saying sweetly, “No need to be afraid, my love. Come with me.”