by Ge Fei
If the sunlight passed through the vegetation—like the morning glories, Japanese banana trees, or loquat branches—the shadows made calculating time more difficult, as each plant grew differently and produced inconsistent sizes and numbers of flowers from year to year. Had Father merely wanted an accurate measurement of the passage of time, he could have ordered an hourglass, yet that wasn’t his solution. Only the truly solitary make a careful study of time; for those who have been driven to idleness by internal torment, the situation is not so different.
Overcast or rainy days irritated Father because they made a mess of his diurnal calculations. The darkness of early dawn closely resembled evening, while the warm sunlight of an autumn afternoon could be mistaken for the new brightness of April. This confusion happened especially when one woke, consciousness still unsteady, and the scene surrounding the gazebo lured one into an immediate judgment.
Father spent countless nights sitting in the gazebo, gazing at the field of stars above him, naming the ones with visible permanence. The names he gave the stars were adopted from various sources, such as animals, flowers, and even family members or people he knew. One excerpt from his journal read:
Baoshen and the Sow stare at each other across the Milky Way, with four stars between them: Jasmine, Ding Shuze, Ego [himself], and Goat. Ego doesn’t shine brightly early on and can be very hard to see. Jasmine, Goat, and Ding Shuze stand in a triangle. Baoshen and the Sow stand South and North; they sparkle more brightly than all the other stars in the sky.
Long passages of Father’s journal detailed his vibrant impressions of the passage of time. He believed that while the web of time woven by the many phases of the changing seasons, the life cycle of vegetation, and the succession of day and night appeared on its surface to be immutable, it was in fact completely reliant on the vastly different perceptions of each individual. For instance, although one hour barely exists for someone sleeping, it can feel endless to a woman in the middle of a difficult birth. Furthermore, if the sleeper has a dream within that same hour, the situation changes again. Father wrote:
Today’s dream felt almost without end. All that I saw within the dream was different from the present world. A past life? A future life? I woke feeling disturbed, this emotion turning into sadness, until I found myself crying.
When he quietly followed the movement of shadows across the wall, time appeared to freeze, and “an inch or so of difference felt like a hundred years.” But after a brief nap on the stone table, “I was hurled forward into evening, with darkness closing in on all sides, and my robes already damp with dew—I knew not the hour.”
Besides his observations of the night sky and his detailed records of time, his journal also included various accounts, poems, and songs, as well as fragmentary, nearly incomprehensible jottings. The final entry was dated the last day of the lunar year 1878. In very small characters, Father wrote:
Heavy snows tonight. Time thrown into tangled knots, like spiderwebs or hemp strands. Nothing, nothing to be done.
Between the gazebo and the courtyard wall lay a narrow strip of open ground where Father had first planted his flower garden. Magpie had recently hoed the soil and replaced the grass and weeds with patches of garlic and spring onion and a row of chives. Only the roseleaf raspberry trellis remained where it had been originally placed, still intact, though the roseleaf had dried up long ago. Brown creeper vines still hanging on the frame shivered when the wind touched them.
Magpie came out to the rear courtyard just about every day at noon to pull up scallions and garlic. Every time she crouched down, she would raise her eyes toward the gazebo; if Xiumi was watching her, she would flash a smile. Her cheeks were pink and she moved intently, blowing by like a gust of wind, or flickering in and out of sight like a shadow. She seemed to be in a hurry all the time. Besides harvesting scallions and garlic, she fetched wood from the shed, and also climbed the studio steps to help Xiumi clean her chambers, or to give her some seeds or bulbs she bought at the market.
In the evenings, when the setting sun turned the grasses and vines on the western wall a fiery orange, Xiumi would come down from her room and stand concealed among the roseleaf trellis, the woodshed, and the bamboo grove. If the courtyard had not been swept before the last rainfall, the heavy carpet of decaying leaves cushioning her feet and the bright green clumps of moss filling the spaces around her would enclose her in a verdant tranquility.
Once the lotus flowers withered, Xiumi thought of chrysanthemums; sadly, all she could find were a few wild clumps hiding in the corners of the courtyard wall. Their alternate leaves and tight clusters of buds bloomed pale white or yellow, like the color of jasmine, without fragrance. Xiumi very cautiously dug one up and transplanted it into a terra-cotta pot, which she placed in a shady spot beneath the studio. Though she cared for it faithfully, it died in a mere few days. Meanwhile, flowering plants like asters, nadina, shameplants, eupatorium, and others grew everywhere. Wang Shimao in On Learning to Garden called each of these plants chrysanthemums—“timber chrysanthemums,” “Bodhisattva chrysanthemums,” “brocade-ball chrysanthemums,” et cetera, though none actually belong to the chrysanthemum family. At the height of autumn, the petals of all these flowers fell. The red persimmon trees, the two sweet olive trees, and the yellow cockscombs seeded in late October, when the brightest spot in Xiumi’s vigilantly supervised courtyard was the impatiens along the courtyard wall.
After many years on their own, the row of impatiens seemed on the verge of disappearing, their red stems exposed and their leaves torn into sawtooth edges by the beaks of hungry chickens. Xiumi combined yellow earth with fine sand and packed the mixture around the roots, which she then nourished with the rinse water from rice, along with chicken manure and ground soybeans. She killed the earthworms with lime. After a month’s worth of work, when the autumn breezes turned cool and the first frosts approached, their leaves turned from yellow to green. After a cold shower of rain, they actually flowered—a spectacular panoply of purple shades interspersed with red. Single blossoms opened first, too spare to make an impression. Xiumi nipped off the withered buds at evening and tied the plants to bamboo stakes. The cluster of opened flowers gradually thickened, until new stamens and pistils crowded together in soft spheres and blooms raced up every stalk, their colors flagrantly alluring.
In those days, Xiumi would spend whole afternoons crouching among the impatiens, forgetting herself as she gazed at them, as if lost in deep thought. One night in late September, she drank a little too much tea in the evening, and lay awake long after dark. At midnight, she abandoned the pursuit of sleep and got up, throwing on some clothing and descending the stairs with a lantern in hand to check on her flowers. A night breeze gently stirred the petals and leaves, making the beads of dew on them glitter. Beneath the gleaming surface, the ground at the edge of the wall was the domain of insects. That world teemed with active life, as lacewing flies, crickets, ladybugs, spiders, and goldwing beetles flapped and clambered among the stalks, wings ruffling. These insects charmed Xiumi immediately, particularly one shiny Japanese beetle, which rode its partner’s back in a slow ascent up the stalk of a flower. Meanwhile, an innumerable party of ants carried a gigantic flower petal in a stop-and-start procession that reminded Xiumi of the flower-wreath bearers in a funeral.
Although this realm of insects was isolated, it was as wholly sufficient in every aspect as the world of humans. If a diving beetle were to find his path blocked by fallen flower petals, might he accidentally wander into a Peach Blossom Paradise, like the fisherman in the story?
Xiumi felt as if she herself were an ant lost among the flowers. Every facet of her life was inconsequential, quotidian, and without meaning, yet also permanently visible, and unforgettable.
She remembered how she often saw Lilypad collect impatiens petals in a clay bowl, add a pinch of potash alum, and mortar them into a paste. Then she would sit against the courtyard
wall with her legs crossed and paint her fingernails with the paste. As she painted, she would say to Magpie, “You’re washing the dishes tonight. I’m just doing my nails now, and they can’t get wet.”
She remembered Mother explaining that they were called impatiens because they were, in fact, impatient—once their seedpods filled out like green plums in early fall, they would explode when you touched them, the pod curling up like a fist while black seeds shot out everywhere. Mother once slid the burst pods onto her earlobes, one per ear, like a pair of earrings. “This is your wedding jewelry,” she said. Xiumi could even recall Mother’s warm breath tickling her ear as she said it.
She remembered how the village doctor, Tang Liushi, used to go around collecting flower petals and seeds when the fall mornings grew colder, to brew into medicinal tinctures. According to the doctor, the serum he made with impatiens could cure difficult pregnancies, white spots on the throat, and several other maladies. But Xiumi’s father didn’t put much stock in impatiens as an herbal cure; his opinion was that generations of quack doctors had been fooled by Li Shizhen’s Compendium of Materia Medica. After all, it was said that Tang Liushi’s first wife had died of complications during pregnancy.
She remembered that her teacher, Ding Shuze, also grew impatiens at home, only his were grown in pots, not along a wall. His cloudy eyes grew distant and distracted every time they flowered. He said that impatiens were pretty but fragile at heart; beautiful, and as bewitching as any peach or plum blossom, but could be content with a quiet birth and death in a secluded corner, uninterested in flaunting their colors or attracting bees, giving them an aura of virginal modesty.
I see, now I understand . . .
These past events, which Xiumi had not consciously brought forth, or even thought she had experienced, now tumbled one after another in her mind. She saw how poignant and incontrovertible even the most mundane details could be as constituents of her memory. Each one summoned another in an endless and unpredictable sequence. And what was more, she could never tell which memory particle would sting the soft places in her heart, make her cheeks scald and her eyes brim with tears, just as the gray embers of the winter hearth do not announce which one of them can still burn your fingers.
4
AS AUTUMN advanced, the number of visitors to the estate increased. Some arrived in traditional Manchu gowns and vests, and did a lot of bowing and scraping, while others strutted in wearing expensive Western suits and addressed everyone as “Miss” this or “Missus” that. Pistol-clad soldiers and cane-wielding scholars all dropped by, frequently with protective entourages; ragged beggars also showed up in torn clothes and wide straw hats to shield their faces. Xiumi refused to see anyone.
Magpie ran back and forth passing notes between the two sides. Most of the visitors, on reading Xiumi’s response, would shake their heads, sigh, and leave disappointed. Some stayed firm, demanding that Magpie pass several notes for them, yet they soon discovered that Xiumi would stop replying. Then they’d wait until their tea went cold and evening fell, and eventually would have no choice but to leave.
Magpie initially treated the visitors with the utmost politeness, offering a seat and a cup of tea; when they left, she would see them off and apologize on behalf of her mistress. But once she saw how each visitation wiped out Xiumi’s appetite for days and even invited fits of silent tears, Magpie began to view the guests with contempt and active disgust, her patience gradually wearing away. She stopped announcing new arrivals to Xiumi, and stonewalled each visitor with the announcement that “the mistress isn’t at home,” while pushing the guest physically out the door.
Where did all these people come from, anyway? Magpie wondered. Why did they want to see her mistress? And why did Xiumi refuse to see them without even asking who they were? She asked these questions directly to her teacher.
Ding Shuze replied, “Most of them are probably old acquaintances of Xiumi’s, people who kept close contact with her before the revolution. After the first two attempts failed, Yuan Shikai became the man of the hour, and the activists from the southern parties scattered—some to Beiping and some to other places. A few played their cards right and got reborn as military governors, chiefs of staff, or colonels. Others fell into the underworld, or hid in the ranks of commoners and beggars. Some are probably coming to ask her for help, some to flaunt their newfound power and strut their stuff on their home streets, and some are probably only here on personal business, for no other reason but to see an old friend. Of course, all these reasons might just be excuses. Doubtless, her beauty is the real reason so many of them have come from so far at such considerable expense.”
“Do you really think Xiumi is that beautiful?” Magpie asked curiously.
“To be honest, she is beautiful to a degree that these tired eyes have rarely witnessed. Even after she’s shut her door and turned away from the outside world, she still attracts a swarm of wandering bees and butterflies.” Ding Shuze stole a glance at Magpie, then took her hand in his and patted it gently, whispering, “But you, my dear, are easy on the eyes as well . . .”
•
At the start of winter, a middle-aged man in a felt hat found his way to Puji following the tail end of a silent blizzard. He looked around forty-five, with a wild mustache and beard that spanned half of his face. He entered the estate covered with snow from head to foot. His padded jacket had worn through at the shoulders, so that the cotton lining puffed out, and he wore only thin trousers and cloth shoes. The buttons on his jacket had all fallen off; it was secured with a length of white cord tied hastily at the waist. He walked with a slight hitch in his gait, and carried an old bag made of woven reeds in one hand. He started shouting for Xiumi to come out and talk to him the minute he strolled through the door; while he waited, he warmed his fingers with his breath and stamped his feet. When Magpie received him with the usual excuses, he opened his round eyes wide and declared in a stentorian voice, “You just go tell her that I have six fingers on my left hand and she’ll see me.”
Hearing this, Magpie retreated into the rear courtyard.
Xiumi was arranging freshly cut sprigs of winter plum in a vase, their heavy scent permeating the room. Magpie repeated to Xiumi what the man outside had said to her. Xiumi continued to arrange the flowering branches, as if she had heard nothing at all. Every blossom that dropped onto the table she picked up and put into a bowl of clear water. Magpie watched the blossoms float in circles like little golden bells; she didn’t know what to do.
She returned to the front courtyard moments later with a made-up excuse. “My mistress is feeling poorly today, so she can’t see guests. You should probably go home.”
This made the guest furious, and his beard shook as he said, “What? She won’t see me? Not even me, for God’s sake? You go back and tell her it’s Dapples. Dapples!”
Magpie hurried back upstairs to relay this new information. But Xiumi seemed to pay even less attention to whether it was Dapples or Apples or Maples than she had before, and simply stared at Magpie without saying anything. So Magpie returned to the visitor once more, shaking her head in silence. She expected that such a surly, impatient man would surely fly into a profane rage at her refusal. Instead, his temper deflated. He tossed his cattail bag onto the floor and rubbed his forehead in confusion. After a long pause, he reached into a pocket of his jacket with a trembling hand and brought out a small object wrapped in a handkerchief, which he passed to Magpie with a smile. “If your mistress can’t see me, then I’ll be on my way. But please give this to her. The country’s a republic now; I have no need to hold on to this cursed thing, so I’ll leave it with her. She can always sell it for some cash in an emergency.”
Magpie accepted the object and ran upstairs. Xiumi was busy separating the stamens of her plum blossoms with a sewing needle, her lips pursed in something like a tight smile. Magpie put the object on the table and went back downstairs without addressing her, but
when she reached the bottom, Xiumi came racing down after her, the handkerchief in her hand. By the time they both passed the guest room, they could see Dapples had left.
Magpie opened the cattail bag and found a couple of strips of dried fish, a string of preserved sausages, and a few sections of bamboo shoots. Xiumi stood in the front doorway and looked out. The snow was falling fast already; no human form was visible through the flying flakes.
The handkerchief held a golden cicada, exactly identical to the one buried with Little Thing.* Who knew that two rare objects so completely alike could exist! Magpie thought. The cicadas were an intimation to Magpie of the size and mystery of the outside world. All the doors to that world seemed closed to her, and she knew neither where they led to nor the reasons why they existed—just like her mistress’s silence.
Who was the middle-aged man Dapples? Where had he come from? What did the cicada stand for, and why did it make Xiumi cry to see it? And why did she forgo a perfectly good life as a rich man’s wife to go mess around with revolution? Needless to say, Xiumi’s world was utterly inaccessible to Magpie, even at its farthest reaches. It seemed to her like everyone was surrounded and tied down by a whole assortment of causes, and she was no different. The moment Xiumi tried to escape from her cloistered world, her efforts evaporated like a drop of water on hot iron. Outside the window, snow was falling and falling, faster and faster, and the multitude of snowflakes seemed uninterested in her questions.
•
By the time of Dapples’s appearance, Magpie had already learned to read many words; as her teacher said, she was already “half a literary lady.” Before her studies had started, she spent most of her time with the pigs, geese, ducks, and chickens, or running between the market and the milliner’s or the rice chandler’s, and never thought herself unhappy. Once she learned to read and write a little, new problems started to crop up.