by Ge Fei
Upon returning to the estate, Magpie first locked herself in the kitchen to catch her breath. She was too nervous to see Xiumi yet; her heart was beating uncontrollably. She hadn’t spoken to her in years, after all, including during Xiumi’s time with the academy, when she rarely deigned to even look at Magpie.
At dinnertime, Magpie made a bowl of noodles and carried it up to the studio. Pausing at the head of the stairs, she clenched her teeth and screwed up her face in grotesque expressions to give herself the courage to go inside. She found Xiumi deep asleep, lying on her side with her face toward the wall, her clothes and shoes still on. Magpie set the bowl of noodles down gently on the chest of drawers, then held her breath as she backed slowly out of the room, closed the door, and went downstairs.
Magpie spent the entire night in the kitchen heating and reheating water, expecting her mistress to come downstairs for a bath. Yet the lamp in the studio stayed dark. When she tiptoed back upstairs the next morning, she was surprised to discover Xiumi still asleep, her body turned away from her. She had at some point eaten the bowl of noodles. Lifting the bowl and chopsticks, Magpie found a scrap of paper with writing on it hidden underneath. After she returned downstairs, she examined the writing every which way until her vision blurred, but she could make no sense of it. Her spirits fell as she thought, Did she forget that I can’t read? That means her sickness hasn’t gotten any better. But Magpie worried that the note might include an urgent errand her mistress wanted her to accomplish immediately. She deliberated for a moment, then took the note to Mr. Ding’s house.
Ding Shuze had been bedridden for six months. Word around the village was that he had reached the end of his days and wouldn’t live to see the harvest. Yet by the time the year’s harvest passed and Ding Shuze ate noodles made with the fresh flour, his condition hadn’t changed. And of course he wouldn’t get better. He lay curled on his bamboo mat like a giant shrimp, constantly wetting one end of it with drool.
Having read the note Magpie passed to him, he slurped back a mouthful of saliva and raised three fingers.
“There are three sentences.” Ding Shuze had lost almost all of his teeth, and his breath whistled as he talked. “The first one says, ‘I am no longer able to speak.’ That means she’s gone mute, she can’t talk. That’s number one.”
“Why can’t she talk anymore?” Magpie asked.
“That’s hard to say,” Ding Shuze replied. “It’s clear enough here on the paper: ‘I am no longer able to speak.’ She’s gone mute. As the saying goes, ‘The halls of the courthouse run deeper than the ocean.’ She’s lucky enough just to have come out alive.”
“That’s the truth,” interjected his wife. “People who go to prison always endure all sorts of punishment. Turning you mute is one of them. They must have fed her a special serum to do that, maybe her own earwax, and then she couldn’t talk anymore. It’s an easy thing to do. If you’re not careful and you accidentally eat your own earwax, it can turn you into a mute, too.”
“What else did she write?” Magpie asked.
“The second sentence says, ‘The front courtyard is yours, the rear is mine.’ That means she’s splitting the family estate with you: The front half is yours, the back half is hers, and never shall they overlap. The third sentence . . . She wants you to tear down the duck boxes in the bamboo grove.”
“She must hate me for turning the house into a pigsty and letting all those animals run around.” Magpie’s expression turned disconsolate.
“She can’t blame you for that,” Mrs. Ding replied. “After she sold every last inch of the family land, and with no savings left to support you, how’s a girl like you going to feed herself without a few animals? And besides, all that time in prison has made her useless, and if she can’t work, she’s going to have to rely on you, won’t she? So no need to worry about that. Since she’s given you the whole front courtyard, you should do what you want with it and keep what you want in it. Say nothing of chickens and ducks, you could keep a man there and she’d never say anything.”
Magpie blushed all the way down to her neck.
In the days that followed, Magpie visited the Ding household so many times that, in Mrs. Ding’s words, “you’re going to walk our doorstep right into the ground.”
Most of the notes were lists of things Xiumi wanted Magpie to buy for her on market day, like writing brushes, ink, and paper. Other notes involved simple household issues: “Chamber pot leaking, should fix immediately,” “Last night’s soup too salty, can you make it milder?” “No need to dust the studio every day, once every two weeks suitable,” and “Chickens crowing at sunup, very very annoying, why not kill them all?”
This last note elicited a condescending snort from Ding Shuze. “Truly an addle-headed child. Only roosters crow at dawn, the hens don’t crow at all, why slaughter all of them? Looks like her old revolutionary habits die hard. Keep the hens alive to lay eggs; if you kill the rooster, send me a bowl of broth.”
When Magpie brought over chicken soup the next day, Mr. Ding said, “If she could hear the rooster crowing, it means her ears aren’t deaf, she’s just mute. So if you have to tell her something, just say it to her directly. No need to have me write everything down for you. These old bones can’t take so much bother anyway.”
The most peculiar note read: “Please gather the following items as soon as possible for later use: outhouse liquid from last year, powdered sulfur, pond mud, tofu dregs, several freshwater crabs.”
Ding Shuze snorted, then shook his head. “What could she want all this random stuff for?”
Mrs. Ding read the list with the same confusion. “If you keep giving her what she wants, she might ask you to pick stars from the sky tomorrow. If you want my opinion, I think you should just ignore her completely.”
But Magpie had already decided to do what she asked.
When she went to the fishpond for mud, she leaned too far over the bank and fell in, almost drowning. Once she finally clambered out, she didn’t dare go near it again, and so dug up some of the harder mud from the drainage ditch in front of the house, mixing in water as if she were making dough until she achieved the exact stickiness and appearance of mud from the pond. Tofu dregs were easy to acquire—the tofu maker on the west side of the village had a plentiful supply. As for last year’s outhouse liquid, she figured she could just as well take a few fresh scoops right from the basin, since Xiumi could never smell the difference between last year’s and this year’s. Freshwater crabs were common enough in the ditches and rice paddies, so she sent the village children off to collect them for her until she had a whole basketful. The hardest thing to track down was the powdered sulfur, whatever that meant; she asked around the entire village, but not even the assistant at the herbalist’s knew what that was exactly. In the end, she bought a string of firecrackers, unwound their twisted caps and poured out the gunpowder inside, mixing it with yellow sand until she thought it looked like “sulfur powder.”
Once Magpie had gathered everything on the list, she set out the items in a neat line along one edge of the studio’s stone foundation, then retreated behind the door of the front courtyard to watch what happened, her curiosity overpowering. A little after noontime, she saw Xiumi sleepily descend the studio stairs; she watched her sniff each of the containers, then roll up her sleeves and spring into action with a childlike excitement.
It turned out that she wanted to grow lotuses.
The family had always kept lotus plants, raising them in two tall, widemouthed basins of blue-and-white Ming porcelain. The plants had been Baoshen’s responsibility, and they bloomed at the height of summer every year. The late mistress had often used the wide, fleshy leaves to wrap meats and sticky-rice cakes for steaming. Xiumi could almost remember the sweet, green smell of the leaves as they cooked. As the first of the winter snows drew near, she would watch Baoshen cover the basins with a wooden frame that he filled with
a thick layer of straw to protect the submerged roots.
The basins had stood neglected ever since Baoshen left Puji, and Magpie had assumed the lotus plants inside had long since dried up. When she had gone to tidy up the studio for Xiumi’s return, though, she was amazed to find a single scrawny red flower blooming in one basin. It floated over the black water amid a handful of stunted leaves that had either dried up and curled or had decayed and rotted. The water smelled foul, and stink bugs crowded around the edge of the basins; the bugs flew off in a cloud of armor and wings that peppered the face of anyone who passed by. Magpie snipped the lone flower and brought it upstairs to the studio, where she had placed it in a white vase with water.
So Xiumi had decided to play with the two lotus basins. She mixed the tofu dregs, mud, and sulfur powder together in a wooden bowl, then added the outhouse liquid and mixed some more until she got an even texture. She let this concoction sit in full sunlight while she moved on to the basins, pulling out the weeds, cleaning out the insects, removing the stale water with a wooden ladle. Soon she dripped with sweat, her breath quickened, dots of mud spattered her face.
By sunset, Magpie could no longer restrain herself, and she emerged from her hiding place and barged into the rear courtyard to help. Xiumi was packing the new mud from the wooden bowl around the roots of the lotus plants; seeing Magpie approach, she kicked a wooden bucket next to her and gave Magpie a look. Magpie understood immediately: Xiumi wanted her to fetch clean water from the pond. Magpie hustled outside and returned with a full bucket of water. As she watched Xiumi pour it slowly and deliberately into the basins, she blurted out, “Why do it that way?”
She received no response to her question.
Passing by the basins a month or so later, Magpie was astonished to find them choked with fleshy, bluish-green leaves the size of her hand. Flowers of pale white and deep red had pushed through the crowded borders, and gave off a faint fragrance. Magpie stood by the flower basins until nightfall, unwilling to take her eyes off them. She remembered hearing Baoshen say that the master’s lotuses were all rare strains he had cultivated for decades, and she had to admit that they were easy to fall in love with. The freshwater crabs climbed above and below the leaves, making the stems quiver in the water. When the breeze blew through the flowers, they rustled gently.
The next morning, Magpie found another note while she was upstairs cleaning. When she gave it to Ding Shuze, he laughed and patted her head. “Silly child, she wrote this for herself, it’s not related to you at all.”
When Magpie asked what she had written, Mr. Ding replied, “These words here—‘pond rose,’ ‘Indian bean,’ ‘sacred lily,’ ‘water lily,’ and the rest—are all types of water flowers, while these here—‘Gilded Edge,’ ‘Silverpink,’ ‘Peach Dew,’ ‘Snowskin,’ ‘Winegold,’ et cetera—are names of other flowers. It’s a word game educated people play by themselves to free their heart and clarify their thinking. It has nothing to do with you.”
Ding Shuze rubbed his beard for a moment and mused, “The seasonal flowers and fragrant grasses have long been compared to beauties of the fairer sex, as they can improve one’s nature and understand speech. The orchid resides in the tranquil valley, the chrysanthemum hides in fields and hedges; the winter plum piles fragrant snow on the mountainside, while bamboo fans its green airs across the scholar’s window. Only the lotus endures the shame of life in filth and bottomless mud, yet it emerges from there without stain. Its moral character is pure and restrained, its nature warm and gentle. Perhaps the tribulations of an ill-starred life have drawn Xiumi to the fair lotus as a symbol? Nevertheless, one observes in her ambitions a hermetic tendency toward seclusion. Such a pity, such a pity . . .”
Magpie haltingly replied, “Mr. Ding, I didn’t understand a single word of what you just said.”
A hungry glimmer flashed in Ding Shuze’s dirty eyes. He stared at Magpie and said slowly, “If you want to understand what I said, I can help you with that.”
Magpie couldn’t quite tell what he was suggesting, so turned to look at his wife. Mrs. Ding explained, “We see you running in and out of here, carrying scraps of paper with crazy scribbles on them as if they were imperial edicts, and you’re frightened of every word. This won’t work out for the long term—it’s exhausting for you, and even more so for us. I shouldn’t say this, but if the teacher passes away one day, are you going to dig him up from his grave and ask him to help you write back? The teacher and I talked it over yesterday evening, and we decided he might as well teach you to read and write a little. With his experience and learning, it shouldn’t take you much longer than a few months before you can read everything she writes. What do you think?”
Magpie glanced over at the skeletal old man on the bed and the spit stains on the walls and floor and felt deeply uneasy. With the teacher’s wife staring at her from under arched eyebrows, waiting for a reply, she grimaced and started to say, “If you could just give me time to consider it . . .”
“What’s to consider?” Mrs. Ding asked bluntly. “Mr. Ding is one of the great minds of his age. Had luck been with him, he would have become a general or a first minister in the imperial court. That he should be willing to lower himself this far is your own good fortune. You couldn’t find an opportunity this good if you went hunting at night with a lantern. And if you don’t want to accept, there’s no need for you to come to this house for help anymore.”
The mistress’s strident tone flustered Magpie into giving her nervous consent. As the phlegm all over the floor made the full kowtow ritual inconvenient, Mrs. Ding put a hand on her head and pushed her into three ceremonial bows toward her new tutor. Once Magpie had officially become his student, a new ferocity seized Mr. Ding’s spirit. He raised himself up from the bamboo mat until he could sit with his back against the wall and proclaimed, “By convention, I should charge money to teach you to read. But since you have no savings, I won’t ask you for my standard tuition. Every day, once your hens have laid eggs, I want you to bring one of the big eggs with you whenever you come by. One or two a day should be plenty.”
With a troubled heart, Magpie left the Ding family household and went straight to her neighbor Hua Erniang to discuss the situation with her. Hua Erniang was spinning thread beneath a window, and she pedaled her wheel and worked as she listened to Magpie. She replied with a laugh, “One egg every single day? The old devil has some nerve just thinking of it. You know, the proverb says that ‘Reading is the mother of all confusion.’ Nothing’s more important in this life than clothing and feeding yourself. And you’re a woman. It’s not like you’re about to go sit for the civil service exam—why waste your energy on learning to read? My opinion is that you should ignore all this business of his.”
Magpie left Hua Erniang’s place and went to see Grandma Meng. As the latter was an old acquaintance and the closest thing she had to family, plus could read a little herself, her opinion was naturally quite different. She said, “Learning a few words isn’t a bad idea. You could use them to organize your accounts or whatever when you sell the piglets. He doesn’t want tuition from you, and thirty eggs a month isn’t really that many. Ding Shuze never had any children, and he’s surely eaten up all his savings by now—he’s really in a sad state. I expect he can’t even remember what an egg tastes like.”
Grandma Meng’s reply assured Magpie, and she went every day thereafter, rain or shine, to Ding Shuze’s house for reading lessons. The first two months passed uneventfully, but as time wore on, a new concern arose. Ding Shuze had a habit of touching her head with his dirty fingers, or of leaning or pressing against her as if by chance. At first, Magpie held her tongue in the interest of saving face for her elder, but Ding Shuze’s behavior grew more appalling as time progressed, and he began dropping suggestive comments into their conversation. While Magpie couldn’t always grasp the meaning of the embarrassing things he said to her, the look in his eyes told her everything she ne
eded to know. The mistress was an infamous virago; if Magpie told her it would inevitably start some kind of trouble, which could turn into a public embarrassment. So she repressed her revulsion and pretended not to understand him. Once, Ding Shuze started talking about Madame Lu and Zhang Jiyuan; when he got to the racy part, he grabbed Magpie’s hand and massaged it, calling her “Mama” in a low whisper.
Magpie had no choice but to complain to the mistress. She didn’t expect Mrs. Ding to giggle and laugh. “Your teacher’s halfway underground already. If he squeezes you a few times or says some dirty things, as long as it’s not too outrageous, you might as well let him.”
3
THE STUDIO was built above a pile of boulders collected from Lake Tai. A hexagonal gazebo with a stone railing stood on the slightly lower western side of the property. Besides a stone table and stools, the gazebo contained no other furniture. Two pillars displayed a couplet engraved in Father’s handwriting:
Sit facing the trees beyond the window
Watch shadows turn across three sides
After her release from prison, when she wasn’t tending her lotuses, Xiumi spent most of her time reading inside the pavilion. The uncommitted life of the recluse provided the peace she had always dreamed of. When her eyes tired, she would lie down on the table and nap for a stretch. In the afternoon, she watched the shadows slowly traverse the western face of the courtyard wall; as the weeks passed, she learned to tell the time based on their movement.
As with a sundial, using shadows to tell time requires one to account for the vicissitudes of each season and its transitions, as well as for the balance of day and night. Father once created a shadow calendar for the courtyard that incorporated such considerations. As with all of Father’s writings, it had been carefully bound with a cover by Baoshen.