Peach Blossom Paradise

by Ge Fei

  3

  TIGER woke to find the sun high in the sky. He heard Little Thing calling to him from downstairs; the boy was chewing on a meat-stuffed bun while peeing against the wall. Magpie was washing bed-curtains by the well, stepping on the fabric as it soaked in a basin. Her feet were bare and her pants rolled up to her knees.

  “You don’t have to take the horse out today,” she told him as he came downstairs. “Lilypad just stopped by to tell us you don’t have to go.”

  “Again? How come?”

  “The grass on the hillside has dried up, and it’s getting colder,” Magpie replied.

  “What’s the horse going to eat?”

  “Give him bean meal, I guess.” The bed-curtains ballooned under her feet. “Besides, even if that horse starved to death, what would you care? Always sticking your nose into everything.”

  Her calves were so white they looked almost blue; Tiger couldn’t look away.

  After breakfast, Tiger asked Little Thing what he wanted to do. “I’ll go wherever you go,” Little Thing told him. But Tiger didn’t know where to go. The adults were occupied with their own business: his dad clicked his abacus in the office, while Madame Lu and Hua Erniang sat in the skywell, basking in the sun and talking absentmindedly as they cleaned cotton bolls, separating the white boll from the husk and picking out the black seeds, which already lay in a mound on the table. Little Thing leaned up against Madame Lu’s hip as he played with a wisp of cotton with his fingers; Madame Lu put down her work and pulled him into an embrace.

  “Once all this cotton is clean, I might as well have a last dress made.” Tears welled up in her eyes.

  “Now why would you go and say something unlucky like that?” Hua Erniang replied.

  Madame Lu simply sighed.

  •

  “What’s a last dress?” Little Thing asked as he and Tiger circled the pond outside the house.

  “It means grave clothes.”

  “Well, what are grave clothes?”

  “Clothes dead people wear,” Tiger explained.

  “Who died?”

  “Nobody.” Tiger looked up at the sky. “Your grandma’s just saying that, anyway.”

  The wind last night had swept the sky clean of clouds, leaving behind a pure, limitless blue. Little Thing said he wanted to go to the river to see the boats. In the fall, the waterways in the delta flowed shallow and narrow. White spikes of river reeds poked out of the exposed mud, as did the rust-red sheaths of sweet flag with its long, fuzzy leaves.

  They reached the ford and found the ferryman, Tan Shuijin, mending sails. The river was calm, the sun warm. Gao Caixia sat in a wooden chair by the door of their house, wrapped in a heavy cotton quilt. Though her face was wan and sickly, a forceful stream of mumbled curses emerged from her mouth. She called the Principal a vicious slut and a witch, who had cast a spell that kept Tan Si by her side. Word in the village was that Gao Caixia’s anger about her son had made her sick. Tan Si stammered when he spoke. For many months now, he had been spending his days at the academy; like his father, he was a good go player.

  The father and son were the only two in Puji who really knew how to play go. Those who boarded the ferry to play already knew the pair by reputation. It was said the district magistrate in Meicheng once sent over a palanquin to pick them up so that they could stay and play at his office for a few days. But now the stammering son played go only with Xiumi. He lived at Black Dragon Temple, and wouldn’t visit the boat for months on end. His mother said that just looking at Xiumi sent him into a stupor.

  Gao Caixia and Tan Shuijin paid little attention to the two boys. Though Little Thing clambered all over the boat, and intentionally splashed water onto Shuijin’s back, the old man ignored him. Even when Little Thing started to throw clods of mud at him, he only smiled faintly. He looked so feminine as he worked his needle and thread. Tan Shuijin didn’t say much, but he was as bright as could be. His memory had as many rooms as there were holes in his net. When the Principal tried to divert water from the Yangtze into the fields and almost destroyed the embankment and flooded the town in the process, the entire village simply stood and watched, wailing in despair. The Principal was scared speechless. Tan Shuijin calmly rowed a boat to the damaged dike and knocked the bottom out. The craft sank across the hole and stopped the outgoing flow of water.

  The boys eventually got bored of playing by the river. Little Thing blinked his big eyes at Tiger and said, “Let’s go play at Black Dragon Temple!”

  Tiger knew that he was thinking of his mom.

  Viewed from the front, the temple looked deserted. Grass and reeds covered the earthen opera stage out front, where clouds of dragonflies hovered in the air. The front door was shut, but peering through the doorway they could see a whole company of people busily engaged. Tiger watched a group of unfamiliar, shirtless men drilling with swords and spears. Another group of people practiced throwing a rope into a tree and climbing up it as fast as they could. Little Thing lay motionless on the ground and watched through the crack beneath the door.

  “Do you see her?”

  “Who?”

  “Your mom!”

  “I wasn’t looking for her,” Little Thing replied.

  Despite saying this, he became too embarrassed to keep watching. He walked over to one of the stone lions at the gate and climbed up so he could slide back down. But the game got old quickly. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Okay, but where?” Tiger asked him, turning his head upward. His heart felt as vast and empty and anchorless as the sky.

  They could hear the springing-thumping sounds of the cotton fluffers working in the village. Tiger suddenly remembered the traveler he had seen the previous evening. “Let’s go watch them fluff cotton.”

  “But we don’t know which house they’re in.”

  “Dummy, if we follow the noise we’ll find it sooner or later, won’t we?”

  Tiger first thought the sound was coming from Grandma Meng’s house, but that turned out to be untrue. Grandma Meng was sitting under her courtyard eaves in a well-polished black leather coat, playing mahjong with three others. When she saw the boys approach, she put down her tiles, stood up, and waved them over.

  “Come here, Little Thing, over here,” she called out cheerily.

  As they walked through the door, she greeted them with a handful of sugar-coated fried dough twists, which she had Little Thing put in his shirt pocket. “Poor thing, poor thing,” she muttered as she sat back down to her tiles.

  “Poor thing, poor thing,” the other three chimed in. “Such a sad life for a child.”

  “I get one, and you get one,” Little Thing said as he passed a dough twist to Tiger.

  “What about the extra two?”

  “We’ll bring them home so Grandma and Magpie can have some.”

  The two stood at the head of the alley and gobbled up their fried dough twists. Tiger then realized that the sound of the cotton fluffing was coming from Miss Sun’s house. Miss Sun had been killed by outlaws before Tiger moved to Puji. Her old man had a stroke shortly after, and was bedridden for six months before following her to the grave. The house remained abandoned for year, the front door hanging open. Tinkers and carpenters passing through the village sometimes worked and slept there.

  As the boys rounded the fishpond by the front door, the sound of the fluffer suddenly ceased.

  “I’m sure I heard the noise coming from inside the house. Why is everything so quiet now?”

  “Let’s just go have a look. But, but, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  Little Thing’s gaze shifted between the two remaining dough twists, then veered upward as if he were doing some difficult calculation. “If I have two more left, and I give one to Grandma, that leaves one more. Do I give it to Magpie, or to your father?”

  “What do you think?”
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  “If I give it to Magpie, Baoshen will be mad; if I give it to him, Magpie will be mad.”

  “So what’ll you do?”

  “I think the best way is to not give it to anybody, and I’ll eat it myself.”

  “Then eat it.”

  “I’m really going to eat it.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Little Thing munched away without hesitation.

  •

  The weed-choked courtyard was empty and quiet. The eastern chamber, where the kitchen had once been, featured a slowly collapsing roof and a door that hung off its hinges next to the threshold covered in grass. The guest room stood at the farther end of the courtyard. Its door was open, but the bright sunlight in the courtyard made it look murky inside. Bedrooms stood on either side of the guest room. Each had a small, inward-facing window covered by red paper, which was badly torn and fading to gray. A derelict wooden plough and milling frame slowly decayed in the long grass.

  Tiger found a table made of two doors laid across a pair of benches in the guest room. It was piled high with cotton. The fluffer’s wooden bow leaned upright against a wall. Threads of cotton covered every surface of the room: from the rafters to the tiles and pillars, and all over the walls and the face of the oil lamp. How long the fluffer had been gone was a mystery.

  “Weird,” Tiger said. “I heard that bang-bang-bang sound just a second ago, how could he disappear so fast?” He plucked the string of the bow; its metallic boing made Little Thing flinch in alarm.

  “He just went out for lunch,” Little Thing said.

  The door to one of the bedrooms was wide open, a spiderweb bridging the gap to the doorjamb. The door to the other room was closed. Tiger pushed gently against it; it felt like the crossbar was down. The cotton fluffer might well be in that bedroom, he thought. But what was he doing in there? Tiger beat on the door a few times and called “Hello? Hello?” but no one stirred.

  “I have an idea,” Little Thing announced.

  “What is it?”

  “I should eat this last one, too!” He was still thinking about the fried dough twists.

  “Didn’t you say you were saving it for Grandma?”

  “If she asks about it, I’ll just say Grandma Meng never gave us any. What do you think?”

  Tiger laughed. “Dummy, if you don’t tell her, why would she ask you?”

  “Then I’m gonna eat this one.” Little Thing stared intently at the dough twist.

  “Eat it, eat it.” Tiger waved an impatient hand at him.

  Tiger noticed a small table in one corner of the guest room. A metal water pipe, a tight roll of paper to hold an ember, a mask, a bowl of cold tea, and a wooden cudgel were spread out on the table. Beside the cudgel Tiger found a green bandanna and a fine-toothed bamboo comb, the kind that women used for parting their hair. His heart sank; he picked up the bandanna and comb and held them to his nose—a faint trace of perfume still lingered. He had seen the bandanna before but couldn’t remember where. He looked back at the closed door, and his heart began to race as the thought occurred to him: What if there were a woman in there? And if the cotton fluffer was in there too, what were they doing at this time of day?

  “Let’s go.” Little Thing had finished his dough twist and was licking grains of crystallized sugar off his palm with an air of sublime satisfaction.

  They left the house, one behind the other, Tiger glancing behind him as they walked. By the time they reached the street Grandma Meng lived on, Tiger heard the boing-boing thud-thud of the fluffer’s bow ring out again.

  “That is so creepy.” Tiger stood still and turned to Little Thing. “Right after we left, the fluffer started up again. So why did he lock himself in the bedroom?” Nobody lived in that house, so where did the woman’s bandanna and comb come from? Whom did it belong to? And why did it look so familiar? Tiger brooded over these questions as he followed Little Thing home. Of course, he was mostly inventing fantasies of men and women alone together. A host of women’s faces floated in his mind’s eye. He even thought of quickly going back to check for sure.

  “Hey! What do you think . . .” Tiger caught up with Little Thing, grabbed his shoulder, and asked in a low yet breathless voice, “What do you think a guy and a girl would be doing, locked up in a room together in the middle of the day?”

  “What else would they be doing? Fucking,” Little Thing replied.

  •

  Approaching their front door, they encountered a stooped old woman who held hands with a child on each side of her as she peered into their courtyard. “Yeah, this is it,” they heard her say.

  “Who are you looking for?” Little Thing asked, walking closer to the old woman.

  She turned and looked at Little Thing for a brief second, then walked straight into the courtyard without replying. Once the three of them passed the outer door into the skywell, they fell to their knees and started moaning so loudly they frightened Magpie into a near panic as she was putting up the curtains she had just washed.

  The woman was in her sixties or seventies, her hair mostly gray; the children kneeling on each side of her looked five or six years old. They met Baoshen’s insistent questioning with more wailing. Then the three of them started to sing. The old lady beat time on the bricks with one open palm as she wiped the snot from her nose onto her shoe with her other hand. Seeing that neighbors and passersby had begun to poke their heads around her doorway in curiosity, Madame Lu hastily sent Baoshen out to close the door, while she addressed the old lady: “Please rise, Grandmother, and come talk inside. How can we help you if we don’t know what the problem is?”

  Madame Lu’s exhortation made the woman wail even louder. The children both looked at her, as if confused. Baoshen’s sensitive ears had already picked up enough clues from the old lady’s song to form a rough idea of what happened.

  “Tell me, who defiled your daughter?”

  The woman stopped crying and looked up at Baoshen. “These poor children haven’t had a grain of rice in their bellies for three days . . .”

  So that was it. They had come for a meal.

  Madame Lu, finding an opening in the conversation, immediately sent Magpie off to the kitchen for rice. The three guests, with Baoshen leading them, went into the kitchen and were seated around the table.

  As the guests ate, Madame Lu asked, “So someone defiled your daughter? What happened?”

  The old woman continued shoveling food into her mouth and said nothing. Finally, she managed a mumbled reply. “I just know he’s from Puji, has a gold tooth in his mouth, kills pigs for a living. I don’t know what his name is.”

  Mother looked at Baoshen and mumbled, “Yellowtooth?”

  Baoshen nodded, let out a long sigh, and said with a smile, “Grandmother, if it’s Yellowtooth you’re looking for, you have the wrong house.”

  “I know it,” the old lady replied. “Let me have a few more bites, and I’ll tell you the whole story, from beginning to end.”

  •

  The old woman said she was from Changzhou, and lived on the far bank of the Yangtze. Her son had been a medicinal herb harvester until last summer, when he fell over a mountain cliff and died, leaving behind a young wife and two children. The wife was fair skinned and healthy, with an appealing countenance. They managed to scrape by on a few acres of land until the following spring.

  “On Tomb-Sweeping Day, my daughter-in-law went to tend to my dead boy’s grave. It started to get dark on her way back, and just as she passed the old pottery kiln, a group of men jumped out of the woods and attacked her. The poor girl went hysterical. They dragged her into the old kiln and raped her until dawn. Half-dead, she miraculously dragged herself back home that morning. When I saw her clothing torn so badly it couldn’t even cover her tits, I knew what had happened. I brought her some water, but she wouldn’t drink; she held on to me and cried from morning until night.<
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  “Then she shook her head and said, ‘Mother, I don’t want to live anymore.’ I asked her who had done it. She said they were from Puji. The one with the gold tooth in his mouth was a butcher, and she had never seen the other two before. Then she started crying again.

  “When she had cried herself to exhaustion, I said, ‘Child, if you really have your heart set on dying, I can’t stop you. It’s the only road for us women who have been through something like this. But like the ancients say, “If an ant can survive, why can’t a human?” Somebody breaks your teeth, all you can do is swallow the blood; not only that, if you leave the three of us behind, with me so old and your children so young, what are we going to do?’ I begged and pleaded with her until she stopped talking about it.

  “She stayed in bed for a month or so, and then she got up and started to work again. And if that had been the end of it, well, so much the better. But then that worthless son-of-a-bitch Yellowtooth has to run his mouth about what he did; he has to get drunk, has to throw a fit at his uncle’s house, has to boast in public about screwing some guy’s widow. He said that three of them did it together, and really tickled the little whore good. Well, the news spread in the village, and reached her parents’ ears, and then there was nothing else the poor dear could do but die. She visited her family, and neither her father nor brother would see her; they obviously wanted her dead.

  “Three days ago she walked into my room, dressed up in her finest clothes, and asked me, ‘Should I jump down the well or hang myself?’ I couldn’t argue with her anymore, so I said, ‘It’s all the same in the end.’ She had no way out. The tears dripped down her cheeks like pearls from a string.

  “She said, ‘Mother, I can’t bear to leave my children, but I have no choice but to close my eyes and do it.’ I told her that death is just the last of a thousand troubles: ‘Grit your teeth and you’ll endure it. But better to hang yourself because if you ruin our well, where are an old woman and two toddlers going to get water?’ Her son was sound asleep next to me. She peeled off the blanket and kissed his bottom several times; then she left. She didn’t hang herself or jump down the well—she jumped off a cliff.”