by Ge Fei
Ding Shuze lay supine on his bamboo bed, his belly distended, skin tight as a drum. His bedroom was crowded with people: Dr. Tang, Hua Erniang, Grandma Meng, and two relatives who had traveled to see him stood silently by the bedside, waiting for Mr. Ding to breathe his last breath. According to his wife, the teacher had not had a full bowel movement since the height of summer. Eight straight days of drinking the broth Dr. Tang prescribed—a concoction of fibrous laxatives like aloe root, lotus leaf, and rhubarb—had no effect at all. His eyes half-closed, Mr. Ding had been panting and kicking his legs through the afternoon into evening. Eventually, even his wife couldn’t bear it any longer; with tears in her eyes, she bent down and whispered in her husband’s ear:
“Shuze, just let go. Holding on like this won’t do you any good. If you go before me, at least you’ll have someone to see you off. If I die first, you won’t even have anyone here to feed you.”
At his wife’s exhortation, Mr. Ding obediently calmed down. And yet he managed to raise one trembling, emaciated hand to slap the mattress three times, causing everyone in the room to look at one another in confusion. But his wife knew him better than anyone else; lifting the mattress, she found a folded piece of bamboo paper. She unfolded it, and handed it to Grandma Meng to look at.
“Ah . . . Mr. Ding wrote his own epitaph.”
“That’s just like him to be so thorough,” Hua Erniang said with a smile. “There’s no one else in Puji who can write one of those except for Mr. Ding.”
“There are plenty of people who can write epitaphs,” Doctor Tang replied with a mirthless half smile, “but my guess is that he didn’t trust anybody else to do it for him. He had written tomb inscriptions his whole life, and when he got to his own, he couldn’t leave it for someone else.”*
The others continued to argue as Mrs. Ding threw herself over the body and began to cry. Doctor Tang took his pulse and announced, “He’s cold.”
*
The departure of schoolmaster Ding Shuze at the impressive age of eighty-seven gave the funeral proceedings something of a festival air. His wife’s wailings, even at their most extreme, never strayed far from the mention of money. Local dignitaries paid for his coffin and engraved headstone, and also hired Buddhist monks and Taoist priests to perform the necessary rites. By chance, an opera troupe from Zhengzhou was passing through, so interested parties hired them to perform in the village for three days. Diviners and geomancers dropped by to contribute their ritual expertise, while friends and neighbors provided enough money and food to make the event exciting as well as respectable. The funeral lunch alone fed over thirty tablesful of guests, more than two hundred people.
Grandma Meng said to Magpie, “You were one of his official students, and a tutor for a day is a father forever, so they say, so you shouldn’t avoid your responsibilities.”
To which Mrs. Ding forcibly objected, “You know, by rights, Xiumi was a student of his, too.”
Hua Erniang replied, “There’s no use in picking a fight with a mute like her.” So Magpie accompanied Grandma Meng and Hua Erniang to help with the Ding household, leaving home before dawn and coming home after nightfall, on top of her daily workload.
In the later hours of one such exhausting evening, Magpie decided to run home to check on things there. As she was leaving the Ding family’s courtyard, she noticed a group of people in tattered clothing eating and drinking at a round dinner table beneath the trees by the wall. They were beggars who had followed the smell of food and drink to the party but couldn’t be seated with the other guests, so the family had provided them with their own table, amply supplied with rice and simple vegetable dishes. Many of them shouted and pushed one another; one small child climbed onto the table to shovel rice from the serving bowl directly into his mouth.
But one beggar in a hempen robe and a battered straw hat with a dog-beating nightstick clutched under his armpit was sitting quietly as if thinking of something. Magpie thought it strange, and so examined him closely. After she got home and lit the fire under the stove, she suddenly felt like she had seen the beggar’s face before, but couldn’t remember where. She was so unsettled that she put the fire out again and returned to the Ding estate to look at him once more. But when she got to the house, the beggar had already gone.
On the day of the funeral procession, the strange figure reappeared. He was crouched under the eaves of a neighbor’s house, his back against the wall as he wolfed down mouthfuls of steamed bread. The straw hat lay low over his face, and the nightstick was still tucked under one arm. His hands were bony and tanned almost to black. Magpie couldn’t see his eyes. She definitely recognized him from somewhere. She continued to walk around with Grandma Meng, carrying a reed basket of flower corsages for the procession and helping to pass them out. The flowers were either white or yellow and made of paper. Magpie quietly went through a mental list of all the people she knew, but couldn’t come up with a match; she decided to get near him and look more closely. Yet every step she took toward the beggar, the other moved a step along the wall away from her. As Magpie quickened her pace, the beggar did the same, and soon ran for the village outskirts while keeping one eye on Magpie. This meant not only that the beggar recognized Magpie, but also that he was afraid she would recognize him. She chased him all the way to the edge of the village; only when she saw him take the high road to Meicheng did she stop to catch her breath and rub her lower back as she watched him go. The incident bothered her for several days—she couldn’t get the beggar’s familiar visage out of her head.
He wasn’t the only irritation she had to deal with. The second day after the funeral, an ill wind from somewhere blew in an epidemic of bird flu that killed every single one of the twenty-plus chickens she had worked so hard to raise. Magpie boiled and plucked them all, then brined about half, sending a few of these to Grandma Meng and Hua Erniang.
Grandma Meng laughed. “Mr. Ding sure is a lucky man—he dies, and every chicken in the village dies with him. Just think, if he were still alive, how would you get him his eggs?”
In August, the red dates ripened. Magpie awoke one morning to find Xiumi had gone out. She looked all around the estate for her, but Xiumi was nowhere to be found. Magpie counted the days and realized that today was market day; could she have gone to the market in Changzhou by herself? By noon, Xiumi still hadn’t returned and Magpie couldn’t wait anymore—she hurried off to the market alone. But the vendors were already closing shop when she got there. She peered into dark corners and asked everyone she knew if they had seen Xiumi—no luck. Dusk forced her to head home.
Entering the village, she saw Hua Erniang and her sons shaking dates off the trees. When the old lady noticed Magpie’s beleaguered state, she motioned her over with a nod and a smile. She told Magpie that when she heard Xiumi had gone missing, she and Grandma Meng went to look for her.
“She hadn’t actually gone anywhere; she spent the whole day sitting by Little Thing’s grave. We convinced her to come back, and she’s now home, lying down.”
Hearing this, Magpie could feel her anxiety dissipate. As she walked home, she heard Hua Erniang say behind her back, “Isn’t it a little late to finally be thinking of that poor child?”
Magpie found Xiumi fast asleep in the studio; only then could she finally relax. But something even stranger would happen that same night.
Magpie made dinner, but Xiumi stayed in bed and wouldn’t come down. Magpie swallowed a few hasty mouthfuls of rice and went up to the studio to spend the night with her. Xiumi appeared to be crying: her pillowcase and the edge of her blanket were wet. Magpie thought, Maybe she saw the village families visiting the graves for the Mid-Autumn Festival and couldn’t help thinking of Little Thing. The memory of Little Thing brought endless tears to her own eyes. She had heard that Xiumi had given birth to another child in prison, but no one knew if the child survived. The child would be around Little Thing’s age if alive now. F
erryman Tan Shuijin had sworn it was the child of his son Tan Si, and tried to track the baby down as best he could. He said he’d even sell his boat if it meant getting the child back. But with the mother now mute, what could he do? She met his every word with closed lips and a steely expression. Magpie recalled these painful events and cried with Xiumi for a while. Then she took off her shoes and socks, blew out the lamp, and lay down beside her to sleep.
At midnight, a long, low moan reached Magpie’s ears through her sleep.
The sound frightened her awake. Who was moaning? The sound had been low but clear, as if it came from a long way off. Magpie sat up in bed, lit the lamp, and turned to Xiumi. But Xiumi seemed fast asleep, her teeth grinding off and on. Now filled with suspicion, Magpie crept to the studio door and peered outside: the moon hung half-concealed behind clouds, trees swayed noisily in the wind, but there was no sign of anyone. Could her ears have tricked her, or had she heard the sound in a dream? Her heart still felt uneasy.
Magpie went back to bed and was about to drift off to sleep again when she heard Xiumi roll over and say in a clear, loud voice:
“Ahhh . . . his face isn’t warm, that’s why the snow piles up.”
This time Magpie heard every word, though she could barely believe her ears.
Too weird, too weird . . . she can still talk after all! She wasn’t mute! So she had been . . .
Magpie sat in bed hugging her knees to her chest, her body chilled as if with fever. An hour or so passed and she listened to Xiumi’s snoring abate and her teeth start to grind once more; Magpie’s nerves slowly calmed down.
She tricked me for three and a half years! If she hadn’t exposed herself by talking in her sleep, she might have kept it up for the rest of my life. But what did she mean, anyway? I’ll have to sit her down and confront her when she wakes up tomorrow.
Yet when she ran into Xiumi under the roseleaf trellis the next morning, she abruptly changed her mind.
*Ding Shuze wrote his own epitaph. The text is a perfect copy of the Tang dynasty luminary Chen Zi’ang’s “Epitaph for My Younger Brother.” It reads:
A solitary child, he was gifted with a courageous, upright nature and a beautiful brilliance that set him apart. Though serious and fastidious, he admired unrestrained originality; though honest and disciplined, he was not aggressively solitary. Having first mastered the classics of poetry and rites, he perused the histories and biographies, and immediately harbored dreams of bringing order to all things and rising above all others of his age. To that end, he never spoke a promise he wouldn’t keep, or compromised his principles for temporary gain. He controlled his body and mind, committed himself to studying the Way, and revered morality. His female relations lived harmoniously, and his comrades acted with courtesy. In truth, he was strong in the accomplishment of justice, brave in the preservation of compassion, faithful in the support of enterprise, and determined in his adherence to morality. He made his decisions in his heart and acted of his own volition. Truly he was esteemed by all, and none dared to compare themselves to him.
7
SPRING breezes returned in February and March, turning the water in the fishpond green during the incessant mist and rains. Water droplets fell like needles in bursts of showers from early March to the Tomb-Sweeping Festival in mid-April. When sunnier days returned, Xiumi discovered that the many potted plums she had planted under the roseleaf trellis had all bloomed.
The wild plums displayed only a few gently fragrant blossoms that burst through delicate buds and dotted their slender branches in a pleasing pattern. The wild hybrids, by contrast, produced many blooms with fleshy, layered petals and pale gold centers thick with fine stamens. The other varieties—the Hunan plum, Green Sepal, Mille Fleur, Mandarin Duck, Apricot Air, and the rest—reached outward in diverse bouquets of flower-laden branches that quivered in the breeze. Their colors ranged from reds and purples to soft whites, their scents from heavy to faint, yet all were growing enthusiastically and competing among themselves to be the greatest spectacle.
Several years of careful cultivation had resulted in over a hundred different flowering plants in the garden beneath the roseleaf trellis. In spring bloomed crab apples, plums, peonies, perilla, and rambler rose; in summer, hibiscus, hollyhocks, and pomegranates; in fall, royal jasmine, sweet olive, eupatorium, and impatiens; while winter featured the winter plum and narcissus. It was customary among the locals in Puji to grow narcissus in the winter. They would buy a bulb or two at the market, sometime after midwinter, placing each in a bowlful of water that they would fill with river stones and set beside a well-lit window; soon, flowers would bloom boldly against the snow outside. Winter plums were more difficult to procure. In his classic handbook On Plums, Fan Chengda notes that the winter plum is not actually a plum; it is named thus because it behaves so much like one, its honeycomb-shaped blossom opening in nearly the same season and smelling almost identical to a plum flower. Xiumi had reminded Magpie several times to keep an eye out for one on market days, yet years passed without either of them seeing a single specimen.
Near the end of winter the previous year, Magpie’s nose caught the scent of their demure fragrance as she passed by Black Dragon Temple on her way to pull mustard leaves from the daylily field. She followed it to the collapsed remains of the garan, where three winter plums grew through the broken tiles. From these she cut a few flowering sprigs, which she brought back and arranged in a vase in the penthouse. The flowers were a deep yellow-orange, tightly packed, and so richly fragrant that even after their petals fell and the vase put away, their scent lingered for days afterward.
Xiumi knew that the winter plums at the temple had been planted by a monk, and the variety was known locally as Dog Louse. She could still recall the snowy scene at the temple when Mother took her out to cut a few branches each year after the New Year. Of course, she could never forget that the ruined temple was the old home of the Puji Academy, though it was one memory among others that Xiumi tried her hardest to forget, memories that can stab your heart at any unexpected moment, like a wooden splinter under your fingernail.
•
When Xiumi and Magpie went to the market in winter, they would often pass by an old man selling flowers in front of a Taoist temple. They noticed he never had any customers. While on occasion they stopped in front of the temple to see what he carried, they never even inquired about his prices, as he mostly sold common flowers and plants, nothing rare. One day, however, the old man called them over. He said he had an heirloom plum at his house, an old shrub he had bought in Shaoxing. He had tended it for sixty years. He said his home wasn’t far, and would they want to come see it? Xiumi looked at Magpie, who looked back at Xiumi in a moment of mutual ambivalence. Yet they ended up following the old man home anyway.
He led them around the temple, through two narrow stone alleys and over a few small bridges that led to a clean and well-cared-for courtyard house. It was a decently sized property, bordered on three sides by a bamboo fence. There appeared to have been a large vegetable and flower garden in the inner courtyard, though the plants had long since withered. The place had clearly once belonged to a wealthy owner but had now fallen into the old man’s solitary care. He walked them down the courtyard path to a thatched-roof gazebo, which sheltered an old plum tree. The tree’s branches twisted in corkscrew curves that left an unforgettable impression of ancient, sinewy, uncompromising strength. Decades of sun and foul weather had brought it perfectly in tune with its environment. It filled the pot completely, its blooming branches twisted into every imaginable position, scales of green moss covering its bark like wrinkled skin. A delicate hanging moss draped long threads over several branches. The slightest breeze stirred the green hairs and made them billow in a most enchanting fashion.
“This flower has followed me all my life,” the man admitted. “If I weren’t worried about paying for my own funeral, I swear I’d never let it go.”
>
Xiumi gazed at it with admiration and a powerful longing, but the old man wanted too high a price, and she had to back down. As the two women exited the courtyard the old man followed them and called them back, saying, “There’s a lot of vulgar, superficial people here in Changzhou these days. The hermits and educated men who had real taste in flowers are all gone. The fact you two were willing to visit this broken house means you must genuinely love them. So if this plum tree suits your fancy, take it home with you. As for the money, give what you think is right. I can’t tell you how many people have come by looking to buy this tree; I just couldn’t bear to let it depend on a stranger’s goodwill, so I never sold it. But now at my age, I take my socks off at night and don’t know whether I’ll be putting them on again the next morning. If this plum tree can find a good home, I’ll rest easy.” He sobbed faintly as he spoke.
Xiumi and Magpie fished all the money out of their pockets and gave it to him. Before handing over the tree, the old man stroked the plum’s leaves with a shaking hand, obviously unwilling to let his lifelong companion go. He reminded them repeatedly of the tricks to watering it, pruning it, and feeding the soil, and he walked with them as far as the outskirts of Changzhou before waving goodbye and turning homeward.
Yet after the heirloom plum came to rest in Puji, despite Xiumi’s constant and meticulous attention, it withered away and died in less than two months.
Magpie sighed. “I guess flowers really are exactly like people. It simply didn’t want to be separated from its owner.” Xiumi grieved silently. On a later market day, the two made a special trip back to the old man’s residence, but found his place empty, the garden overgrown, and the door leaning off its hinges. Only dried beanstalks in the arbor rattled their brown pods in the wind. When they asked the neighbors about him, they said the old man had died some days earlier.