by Ge Fei
Xiumi began spending more time in the front courtyard. When Magpie cooked meals, Xiumi helped her keep the fire going; when she went to feed the pigs, Xiumi followed along to watch. That winter, the sow had another litter of piglets, and Xiumi spent the entire evening with her in the overpowering stench of the pigpen. Every time another piglet was born, Magpie would smile, and Xiumi would smile with her. It appeared that they both liked the animals. Xiumi washed the blood off the newborn piglets with a cloth soaked in hot water and wrung out so as to avoid burning their tender skin. She even picked them up and rocked them to sleep like babies.
Xiumi was already used to washing her own clothes, cleaning her own room, and dumping her own chamber pot. She later learned to plant vegetables, hull rice, make sticky-rice cakes, cut shoe patterns, and sew shoe soles. She even learned to tell the difference between male and female chickens at a glance. She still didn’t speak.
One day, Magpie went to the market and didn’t come home until after nightfall. To her astonishment, she found Xiumi waiting for her in the lamplit kitchen with dinner already made. Her face and hands were black with soot. Though the rice was burned and the vegetable dishes much too salty, a tearful Magpie energetically shoveled the food into her mouth until her stomach nearly burst as a show of gratitude. Afterward, Xiumi pushed her out of the kitchen so she could do the dishes, and ended up knocking a hole in the iron wok with the spatula.
Magpie observed that Xiumi was growing a little plumper, and her cheeks glowed a healthy pink. She would frequently stare at Magpie for no reason and smile. She just wouldn’t talk; nor had she taken a single step outside the estate since her arrival from prison. Even when Hua Erniang’s son got married and repeatedly invited Xiumi over for celebratory drinks, she merely smiled in reply.
One quiet winter evening after the day’s work, the two sat together in the main hall doing needlework. Though the northwest wind howled outside, the fire in the stove burned brightly. The two women would occasionally look over at each other and smile; the room was so quiet you could hear the snowflakes brushing the window paper. Magpie looked out at the snow filling the windowsill and thought, Wouldn’t it be so nice if she weren’t mute and could talk to me? I have so, so much to tell her. If Xiumi wanted to, I could stay with her like this until dawn.
A new desire stirred in Magpie’s breast, and turned into a daring idea. Mr. Ding had been teaching her for nearly six months, and she could write a number of words now. Why not write down what she wanted to say on paper, and talk that way? If she wrote anything wrong, Xiumi could correct it for her. It would help her learn faster. She blushed deeply as she sneaked a look at Xiumi. Xiumi noticed the color in her cheeks and turned her eyes up to her with a quizzical expression.
Magpie’s idea kept her excited the rest of the night. Finally, by noon of the following day, she could hold it in no longer. She clenched her teeth, breathed in deeply, and scampered up the penthouse stairs to Xiumi’s room. She lay a piece of workbook paper in front of Xiumi, on which she had written: “What do you want to eat this evening? I wrote these words myself.”
Xiumi stared at the paper in awe, then looked back at Magpie with disbelief. She ground her inkstone in some water and picked up a brush. Turning to look once more at Magpie, she very carefully wrote a single character in reply.
One look at the character Xiumi had written made Magpie’s eyes cross. She picked up the paper and took it back to her room to study, but she could not for the life of her figure out what it meant. It made her angry. She felt like Xiumi must have intentionally written a really difficult character for her; she thought Xiumi must be confusing her intentionally as a way of teasing her. The character contained so many strokes, like a hurricane of sweeping black lines. No human could read a character like that! Maybe not even Mr. Ding.
When Magpie showed the character to her teacher, Ding Shuze pulled his wooden back-scratcher out through his shirt collar and rapped her hard on the head. “How do you not know that one, bonehead! It’s the character for ‘congee’!”
*Zhou Yichun (1865–1937), known as Dapples, went to Japan in the summer of 1898 to study. He returned to China in 1901 and devoted himself to revolutionary activism, cofounding the Cicadas and Crickets Society with Zhang Jiyuan, Tong Lannian, and others. Zhou orchestrated a successful outlaw uprising at Huajiashe in 1905, then led an assault on Meicheng in the spring of the following year, besieging the town for twenty-seven days before being injured and subsequently captured. After the Republican Revolution, he was hired as a staff officer in Gu Zhongshen’s Yangtze River Army. One year later, in December 1912, he returned to Huajiashe and opened a school. In August 1937, as the Japanese army advanced on Nanjing, he and a handful of students with long rifles barricaded the road. When his ammunition ran out, he continued to shout down the enemy before dying of multiple gunshot wounds.
5
FOR THE sake of Magpie’s studies, she and Xiumi began a written correspondence. Xiumi assiduously corrected her miswritten characters and grammatical errors. Their conversations generally focused on trivial aspects of daily life: crops, meals, planting flowers and vegetables, and of course the market. Eventually they moved on to different subjects, which introduced new information, such as:
—It’s snowing again today.
—It sure is.
—The neighbor’s new wife has pockmarks on her face.
—Does she?
—She does.
—Mr. Ding is sick again. He has an open sore on his back.
—Oh.
Most of their exchange was surely inspired by boredom. Midwinter days were short and the nights long, and Magpie needed to talk about something to endure the loneliness. Yet Xiumi often provided only perfunctory, one- or two-word answers. Xiumi would occasionally start an exchange herself, with questions like, “Do you know where I can get a winter plum tree around here?” She was still thinking about flowers. But this was winter—the vegetation had long since withered and died back, the earth covered in layers of ice and snow. Where would she ever find a plum tree?
Conversing through a writing brush made Magpie happy; there was something strangely exciting about it. But as the two of them spent more and more of their time together, she found that situations in which conversation was truly necessary didn’t arise so often. Eye contact was much more efficient than talking, and there were plenty of times when one look was all one of them needed to know what the other was thinking.
It was still snowing on New Year’s Eve; Magpie and Xiumi were busy preparing the traditional celebratory meal for the following day. Afterward, the two of them lit the charcoal bricks in the brazier in Magpie’s bedroom and crawled into bed. Though a frigid wind blew outside, the bedroom stayed toasty warm, red reflections of the fire dancing on the walls. Magpie had never been so close to Xiumi’s body. She had come to think of Xiumi like an infant who needed her care and protection; the idea brought her security and peace. The room got so warm and the two of them lay so still that soon Magpie began to sweat. Fortunately, a cold draft seeped through the molding around the skylight above and floated down right above her nose.
When it turned midnight, and New Year’s firecrackers popped through the neighborhood, Magpie still couldn’t sleep. She felt Xiumi’s toes brush against her upper arm. Assuming it was unintentional, she pretended not to notice, until moments later she felt her arm being poked again.
“You still awake?” Magpie asked her, completely ignorant as to what Xiumi wanted.
To Magpie’s surprise, Xiumi tossed her covers off and crawled over to her end of the bed. The two lay shoulder to shoulder as Magpie’s heart raced. Charcoal snapped loudly in the basin; snowflakes rushed onto the roof tiles. She sensed through the darkness that Xiumi was crying. Extending a hand to touch her cheek, Magpie felt fresh tears. Xiumi reached out and touched Magpie’s face, too; she gently pulled Xiumi’s head to her chest.
&
nbsp; Xiumi curled into her embrace and sobbed until her whole body shook; Magpie patted her shoulder until Xiumi’s distress slowly subsided and she fell fast asleep. Magpie, though, stayed awake. Her shoulder fell asleep under the weight of Xiumi’s head, and her long hair tickled Magpie’s nose, yet she didn’t move, forcing herself to remain perfectly still. When Xiumi had touched her face a moment earlier, Magpie felt a weird, complicated sweetness—something very, very deep in her had been affected. She had never experienced such emotions before. Only when a rogue snowflake that had slipped through the skylight dropped onto her cheek did she realize how hot her face had become.
When Magpie woke up the next morning, she discovered that Xiumi wasn’t in bed. She dressed herself and went into the kitchen. Xiumi, wearing a cloth apron, smiled at her with her head cocked to one side—a smile that looked different from any other she had given her. Magpie opened her mouth to speak, but her heart was so full she became dizzy and no words came out. She sighed to herself and wondered, What’s going on here?
Neither of them said much that first day of the new year, though they spent the day together. Wherever Xiumi went, Magpie followed her, and vice versa. One of them could be in the front courtyard and the other in the rear, and soon they would find themselves sitting next to each another.
•
In a flash, three years passed.
A shower of rain one evening brought with it an unexpected peal of thunder. Xiumi enthusiastically copied out a line of poetry for Magpie to read. It went: Beyond the lotus pool echoes distant thunder.
Magpie had a taste for literature by then. Although she didn’t know that Li Shangyin had written the line, she knew it was poetry—the stuff scholars made up after dinner when they had nothing better to do. She took the paper and studied the line closely until she finally began to understand the meaning of the words. Though the pond outside didn’t have any lotuses, there were a few ducks in it currently shedding their feathers, and the thunder in the sky was real enough. Such an ordinary, insignificant sentence, but when you thought about it long enough, there really was something ineffable about it. The more she pondered the verse the more she liked it. The air felt fresher in her nostrils, and she couldn’t help but admit to herself that maybe not all the poets in the world were idiots. Maybe all their chanting and rhapsodizing had a higher purpose hidden within.
Magpie quietly asked Xiumi if she would teach her to write poetry. Xiumi ignored her at first, but Magpie wore her down. Xiumi thought for a moment, then wrote the first line of a couplet for Magpie to match: Apricot flowers spring rains southern banks.
Magpie received this as if it were a priceless treasure; she took it back to her room to plumb its mysteries. Just looking at the line made her feel good. Apricot flowers were a common enough sight in the village; Grandma Meng had an apricot tree outside her door. As for spring rains, well, those started to drizzle down in early March and just kept falling. “Southern banks” here obviously meant the southern banks of the Yangtze River, the area around Puji and Meicheng. But the meaning of the three images seemed to change the instant you placed them together in one line, like making a painting you couldn’t physically see but only imagine. How wonderful, wonderful! Who knew poetry could be so easy. Magpie laughed to herself. She felt she could write this kind of poetry too if it merely consisted of putting three random things together.
That night, Magpie lay in bed and thought until her brain nearly fell out of her skull. Then she sat up and threw the blankets around her, scolding herself for acting crazy from just trying to think of a single line. Around midnight she finally constructed a matching couplet, but when she counted the characters in her line, it didn’t match the length of Xiumi’s. Her line ran, Rooster hen and chicken eggs. Even after she cut out the “and,” it still looked off; she thought it was horrible. Xiumi’s line was so refined and refreshing, and hers? It smelled vaguely of chicken shit.
Exhausted, she slumped over her makeup table and fell sleep. She dreamt of a rooster and a hen that clucked incessantly. The hen laid an egg. Her dream felt heavy, and long. When she lifted her head, morning had arrived. Lamp ash covered the table, morning light filled the room, and a morning chill gripped her whole body.
A white porcelain bowl with a few newly picked purple bayberries had been placed on the table; Xiumi must have come over at some point. Why didn’t she wake me up? Magpie wondered. She picked up a bayberry and put it into her mouth, and while sucking on it, she noticed her rooster poem on the table. Her face flushed, and in the midst of her burning embarrassment, she thought of a good line. Perhaps out of fear that the words would fly out of her brain like a bird, she hurriedly ground some ink, unfurled a new sheet of paper, and wrote it down. Before the ink had dried, it was on its way to Xiumi. But Xiumi was suddenly nowhere to be found. Magpie stormed around the courtyard, calling her name and complaining, until she finally discovered her underneath the roseleaf trellis. Flowers had bloomed from the thirty or forty pots and now covered the bottom of the trellis; Xiumi was pruning stems and leaves with gloved hands and a pair of scissors. When Magpie handed over her line of poetry, Xiumi first looked at it in surprise, then turned to look at Magpie, as if unable to believe she had really written it: Lamp ash winter snow endless nights.*
•
That evening, Xiumi brought Magpie down a copy of Li Shangyin’s collected poems from the studio library. It was one of Father’s few thirteenth-century woodblock-printed editions, its pages of tiny printed characters chaotically interspersed with Father’s own handwritten marginalia, in-line notes, and poetic responses. But clearly, Li Shangyin’s poetry was still too difficult for Magpie to understand at that stage. Immortal maidens seemed to float in and out of the lines as they pleased, and Magpie couldn’t make sense out of much of the verse. She lay on her bamboo mat in the sweltering summer heat, flipping through the pages, picking out lines about rain and snow that spoke to her: “Your red chambers look colder through the rain,” “Our emissaries not yet returned across snowy peaks,” “A spring of soft rains misting my roof,” and so on. While she couldn’t quite tell what the ancient poet was talking about, it was the perfect distraction from the torturous climate.
Late one night, while a sudden downpour drummed the roof above her, Magpie came to a poem called “Untitled,” with the line “Golden toad bites the lock; burning perfume enters.” For some reason, old Master Lu had drawn little circles beside “golden toad.” Magpie recognized the character for “toad,” though it was a rare one—why would the master want to highlight it? In the margin next to the poem she found a brief note:
Golden cicada
Enters—any woman, even the most faithful or virtuous
Who is Zhang Jiyuan?
This startled her. Granted, Magpie couldn’t fully grasp the meaning of the original poem (what did he mean by “golden toad bites the lock, burning perfume enters” anyway?), but the master’s annotation, though nonsensical, did suggest a connection between the line, Zhang Jiyuan, and the gold cicada figurine. Magpie recalled that Zhang Jiyuan had arrived in Puji after the master went crazy and ran away—so how could the master have known about him? And why “golden cicada”? Of course, the characters for “toad” and “cicada” were pronounced the same way, and perhaps that was the reason. But thinking of the cicada that Little Thing took to his grave and the one the strange visitor had left them years ago produced a cold lump in her stomach.
Thunder and lightning crashed outside as the storm surged directly above them. Magpie’s single lamp flickered amid layers of phantasmal shadow. Was Master Lu’s insanity somehow connected to Zhang Jiyuan? Magpie couldn’t bring herself to think about it further; it almost felt like the old man was standing right behind her. She closed the book, feeling no desire to open it again, and huddled quietly beside the table. Once the rain let up, with the book clutched in her arms, she ran to the back of the estate to talk to Xiumi.
Xiumi was s
till awake, seated at her table and staring blankly at the enameled-copper basin Magpie had used to ferment pickles. After her return home, Xiumi had emptied it, cleaned it out, and taken it back to the studio. She had a weird look in her eyes and her face was a greenish hue. Opening the book, Magpie flipped to the poem “Untitled” and pointed out the note to Xiumi. Xiumi took the book and gave it one indifferent glance before closing it and tossing it aside. Bitter resentment was apparent in her frigid expression.
She turned once more to the basin. She flicked its side lightly with a fingernail, then bent her head to bring her ear closer. Ripples of sound expanded into the rain and empty darkness like the peals of a temple bell. Xiumi tapped the basin over and over, as tearstains smeared the heavy layer of powder on her cheeks. Then she looked up at Magpie and stuck her tongue out like a willful child.
At that moment, Magpie felt as if Xiumi had transformed into her original self.
*Shen Xiaoque (1879–1953), also known as Magpie, was born in the Shen family court in Dapu village, Xinghua Township. She moved to Puji around the turn of the century. Never married, Magpie learned to read in her thirties, and later composed over three hundred and sixty poems. Her poetic style, informed by classical masters like Wen Tingyun and Li Shangyin, is known for its metrical sensitivity, buoyant lyricism, and formal virtuosity, and occasionally touches on Buddhist and Taoist themes. Her collection Lamp Ashes is still extant.
6
MAGPIE had visited Mr. Ding’s house less often the last few years. She still stopped in on holidays and sent him the large eggs he liked so much every month without fail. Naturally, this gave Ding Shuze no cause to complain, but Mrs. Ding still came running to the estate every now and then to fetch her, each time stumbling over her bound feet in awkward haste and yelling, “Quickly, quickly, your teacher’s in bad shape” the moment she stepped through the door. And each time Magpie would run back with her, only to find Ding Shuze lying in bed, humming an opera tune. Yet in November of that year, Ding Shuze really was in bad shape. Once again, Mrs. Ding came by with the news, but only got as far as “That old devil . . .” before she burst into tears.