Peach Blossom Paradise

by Ge Fei

  8

  AT THE end of the summer, Puji endured its worst drought in over a hundred years. The village elders said that all the year’s rain fell in the spring, and heaven didn’t give them a drop more after July. The ground split and the river dried up as the sun spit fire that scorched the earth for miles around. Even the apricot tree that had stood in front of Grandma Meng’s door for two centuries died. The many flowers beneath the roseleaf trellis in Xiumi’s garden couldn’t take the bitter cold of well water; they began to yellow and die, half of them gone within a month.

  While the men, women, and children of the village knelt outside Black Dragon Temple to pray for rain, clever businessmen in town were already predicting the famine that would surely follow. They quietly hoarded foodstuffs, which drove up prices and inspired panic in the village. The day Magpie planned to take her piglets to the market, Hua Erniang said to her, “Who’s going to have enough grain to feed a pig when people are starving?” Sure enough, the market was almost empty but for a handful of hungry-eyed strangers asking about the price of wheat; no one had any interest in buying her pigs.

  In August, at the peak of the drought, locusts arrived. The first to see them was Tan Shuijin. The moment he found a handful of them in his boat, he ran toward the village, shouting, “People will die! People will die . . . !”

  Less than three days later, a solid mass of insects swarmed up from the southeast, slashing through the sky like arrowheads and blocking out the sun. Farmers lit fireworks and ran through their fields with torches tied to bamboo poles, trying to drive them away. But the swarm only thickened, and soon the locusts flew into their hair, under their collar, into their mouths and ears. Many merely squatted down in the irrigation ditches and wept. Once the swarm passed, the villagers discovered that every single ear, fruit, and seed—not to mention the leaves on the trees—had been eaten.

  The severity of the situation dawned on Mrs. Ding. She stood at the edge of the village, saying to herself repeatedly, “With all these locusts, what will we eat come winter?”

  “Shit,” Grandma Meng replied bitterly.

  The depressed farmers broke out into raucous laughter. Only Tan Shuijin didn’t laugh; he was too busy picking up dead locusts. He filled several burlap bags’ worth of the insects, then brined them in a basin. Those pickled locusts would see him and his wife through the famine now upon them.

  In the last two weeks of January, people started dying—Mrs. Ding included, though no one knew at the time it happened. The village thought of her only in early February, with the New Year’s holiday drawing near. The body they found on her bed had already begun to mummify in the dry cold.

  Magpie spent the days so hungry that, in her own words, she could have pulled the legs off the furniture and eaten them. Xiumi ate nothing but a small bowl of wheat-hull soup every day; she spent most of her time reading in bed, and only rarely came downstairs. But her expression showed neither panic nor suffering; in fact, she seemed happier than ever. Most of the things in the house that could be sold were sold.

  Xiumi had long kept the golden cicada close to her, in the lining of her clothes. When she gingerly unfolded its handkerchief wrapping and passed it to Magpie, her eyes shimmered. Seeing the cicada reminded Magpie of Little Thing and of Xiumi’s words while she slept: “His face isn’t warm, that’s why the snow piles up.”

  Magpie brought the cicada to the pawnshop, but the pawnbroker wouldn’t take it. In fact, he wouldn’t even look at it twice. He stuffed his hands in his sleeves and said dully, “I know it’s gold. But gold isn’t worth anything when people are starving.”

  Magpie had heard that Baldy’s household still had some grain, so she lay down her pride and went to barter with him. Baldy had helped Xiumi build the Puji Academy, and later took Yellowtooth’s place as the village butcher. After making enough money as a butcher, he opened his own grain shop.

  Baldy was sitting in his bedroom doorway lighting a portable hand warmer when he saw Magpie step into his courtyard. He looked her up and down without speaking as she stood in the courtyard shifting her weight awkwardly, her eyes on the ground and her cheeks red. Finally, Baldy put down the hand warmer and sauntered up to her, a friendly smile on his face. He drew nearer and put his lips to her ear, whispering, “You’ve come to ask for food, yeah?”

  Magpie nodded.

  “At this point, I’m like the boils on a mouse’s tail—the pus I’ve got isn’t much.”

  Magpie turned to leave when she heard Baldy say, “Unless . . .”

  “Unless what?” Magpie asked hopefully.

  “You come inside and let me fool around with you. We can find you some food,” he replied in a low voice.

  Magpie couldn’t have imagined he would be so vulgar. Embarrassment and anger sent her hurrying out of the courtyard toward Grandma Meng’s house.

  But before she had even walked through Grandma Meng’s door, the crying of many children reached her ears from behind the wall. She turned and headed for Hua Erniang’s house, entering without knocking.

  Hua Erniang was sitting inside with her grandson on her knee, staring dumbly at the snowflakes drifting across her doorway and whispering, “It’s okay, it’s okay. If we must die, we’ll die together, all of us together . . .” Hearing her words, Magpie pretended that she was just passing by and, without saying anything, went straight home.

  Later that night, when hunger woke her up and drove her to peel some plaster off the wall to chew on, Magpie felt a twinge of regret. She should have just said to hell with it and let Baldy play with her like he asked. She sat up in bed and looked at Xiumi. “What do we do?” she asked.

  Xiumi dropped the book in her hand, looked back at her, and smiled, as if to say, What do we do? We die!

  •

  Magpie rose early the next morning. But when she knelt down to light the kitchen stove, she remembered there was no food to cook, so she sat beside the stove and cried. The room began to spin in front of her. She recovered herself enough to halt the movement, only to see everything around her split into double images. When she stood up, the ground wavered beneath her feet. She knew she didn’t have many days left. She filled the ladle with cold water, drank a few mouthfuls, and went to lie back down.

  Passing through the skywell, she noticed something spherical and soft-looking on the ground against the wall. The previous night’s snowfall had covered it. Magpie walked over and nudged it with her foot—a cloth sack. After brushing away the snow, she put a hand on the sack and squeezed; her heart skipped a beat. Good heavens, it couldn’t be? She hurriedly untied the mouth. The bag was full of milk-white rice.

  “Lord!” Magpie shrieked. “Where did this come from?” She looked up at the courtyard wall, then down at the ground again. Several roof tiles lay in fragments around the bag, suggesting someone had pushed it over the wall last night.

  Without thinking twice, Magpie raced to the rear courtyard, her legs propelling her up the studio stairs with a strength she didn’t know she still had. Bursting into the room, she called out to Xiumi, who was brushing her hair, “Rice! Rice! There’s rice!”

  Magpie’s excitement infected Xiumi as well. She tossed her brush down and followed Magpie downstairs into the courtyard. Sure enough, it was a bag full of rice. Xiumi scooped up a handful and sniffed it, then turned immediately to Magpie and ordered, “Go get Grandma Meng and Hua Erniang over here now.”

  “Why them?”

  “Just do it. I need to talk to them both.”

  Magpie made an assenting noise and turned to leave. Her excitement was so intense she felt nothing out of the ordinary about the conversation. But just as she put her foot over the threshold, she froze and looked back at Xiumi in shock. Wait . . . wait . . . what? What did she say?

  She . . . she . . . Magpie’s heart surged as tears rose in her eyes. She finally spoke. She isn’t mute. I knew she wasn’t mute; how could a mute
talk in her sleep?

  But now everything would be okay: They had food, and Xiumi could talk. Every worry disappeared. Magpie felt full of energy, as if she were strong enough to last another two weeks, or a month.

  Perhaps it was her elation or the hazy confusion of extreme hunger that caused her to announce as she pushed open Grandma Meng’s door, “Our Xiumi just said something!”

  “She said something?” Grandma Meng replied feebly. She was scraping the bottom of her wok with a soup spoon, looking for flecks of old food but getting nothing but shards of iron.

  “She did,” Magpie replied. “She just started talking. She’s not mute.”

  “Ah, so she’s not mute. Well, she’s not mute, she can speak, that’s good, very good. Very good,” Grandma Meng chattered to herself, then returned to scraping her wok.

  Magpie stepped into Hua Erniang’s house and said, “Erniang, I just heard our Xiumi talking a minute ago.”

  “Talking? So what if she’s talking?” Hua Erniang was holding her grandson in her arms; the boy’s cheeks were blue, and his hands shook.

  “I always thought she was mute.”

  “She was mute?” Hua Erniang asked with no trace of feeling. She was obviously deranged with hunger.

  Magpie walked homeward, utterly perplexed with her neighbors’ reactions. Only when she reached her own doorway did she remember her most important item of business, and had to turn around and go right back.

  •

  Seeing the rice, Hua Erniang gushed, “Oh savior, savior, savior . . .” several times over before exclaiming, “Who could have the kind of money to offer such a rare thing these days!”

  Grandma Meng asked, “My dear, where did you get this bag of rice?”

  “I saw it in the courtyard after I got up this morning,” Magpie told her. “I think somebody pushed it over the wall last night.”

  Xiumi chimed in, “Don’t worry about where it came from, we need to feed people.”

  “It’s true,” agreed Grandma Meng, “feeding people comes first. What do you plan to do, my dear?”

  Xiumi wanted to put the two women in charge of making rice congee, which they would serve every day in an equal amount to each villager. The community would hold on for as long as it could on this sack of rice. “You know, my dear,” Grandma Meng confessed to Xiumi, “I hate to say it, but back in those days when you were crazy, doing your revolution and your communal cafeteria and playing with all those weapons, Auntie was awfully worried about you . . .”

  Hua Erniang tugged Grandma Meng’s sleeve to shut her up, then smiled and said, “But this will save the whole village. After the famine has passed, we’ll have someone raise a monument to you.”

  The two old women teetered off on their small feet to spread the news around the village. Miraculously, the other villagers responded by bringing out handfuls of rice bran, wheat bran, and bean cakes. Some even offered their seed crop for the following year, while Baldy and his wife brought over a bag of white flour.

  The old women made congee out of the rice from the bag and served it once a day in front of Grandma Meng’s house. The sight of the village men, women, and children waiting patiently at Grandma Meng’s doorway for their share filled Xiumi’s heart with a mix of grief and pleasure. The riots she had worried about didn’t occur; even when a few strangers and beggars lined up, the villagers didn’t drive them away. Each person received one ladleful of congee; no one was left out. The scene reminded her of Zhang Jiyuan and the Great Unity he never got a chance to build, of her days at Huajiashe and the stillborn Puji Academy, as well as the peach blossom fantasy Father took with him when he vanished.

  One day, Magpie was helping Hua Erniang serve the congee. But when the final pair of hands held out a cracked bowl to them, there was no more left in the pot. Hua Erniang remarked, “That’s a sad coincidence—we’re only short your share.”

  Magpie raised her eyes and saw that the bowl belonged to the same beggar she had seen at Mr. Ding’s funeral. Magpie stared intently, then said, “Where are you from? I feel like I know you.”

  Panicking, the beggar dropped the bowl and turned to run without even picking it up. Magpie chased the beggar with her big feet all the way to the river, thinking, I’m going to find out who this is once and for all. The beggar was losing steam, now pausing for breath, now bending over, hands on waist. Finally, as the two of them circled around a fishpond, Magpie stopped running and cried out, “Stop! I recognize you now, anyway. You’re Lilypad.”

  Hearing this, the beggar stopped. After a stunned silence, she fell into a crouch and started to bawl.

  •

  The two sat on the edge of an abandoned mill wheel beside the pond and talked. Bright sunlight fell on their faces and warmed the air around them. Fresh meltwater trickled down through the teeth of the mill wheel and burbled into the river.

  Magpie sat and cried with Lilypad for a while, then wiped her cheeks on her sleeve. Still sniffling, she asked her why she was dressed like a man, and how she had been living the past few years. Lilypad cried and said nothing.

  “Didn’t you get married to . . . to what’s-his-name, Long Shoubei? How did you end up like this?” The question caused Lilypad to weep hysterically; she repeatedly wiped the dripping snot from her nose onto the edge of the mill wheel.

  “Alas,” Lilypad sighed, then said slowly, “it’s just my destiny.”

  She told Magpie that after leaving Puji, she went to live in Meicheng with Long Shoubei. During her first year with him, Long Shoubei acquired more property elsewhere, and added another two concubines. After that, he never darkened her doorway again. Lilypad swallowed her shame and endured another three anxious months in his household, until Long Shoubei sent a young nephew to give her the news.

  “He never actually said anything, just walked through the door and slammed his pistol down on the table. I knew my time there was up, so I asked him if he was driving me out. The messenger was only a kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen; he gave me a dirty smile, and I could smell the booze on his breath when he got close and said, ‘No rush, no rush. Let me take a load off first.’ ”

  Once she had been thrown out of Shoubei’s house, Lilypad returned to her old trade, working in a couple of local brothels. At the first one, the madam eventually heard about her former husband and threw her out.

  “Makes no difference if it’s true or not,” she told Lilypad. “In any case, you’ve been a man’s wife. If Director Long finds out you’re here, he might think I’m trying to humiliate him. And you’re too old for this anyway.”

  Lilypad moved to another brothel, but the madam there said the same thing. She had no choice but to walk the streets with a bowl in her hands.

  What was strange was that no matter what direction she traveled, the road always took her back to Puji. “As if Little Thing’s soul were dragging me back,” she said.

  The mention of Little Thing made Magpie’s heart ache. “For the most part, when you were at Puji Academy, the Principal was good to you . . .” Magpie bit her tongue, unable to complete the second half of the sentence.

  “I know, I know . . .” Lilypad sucked in her breath sharply. “It’s just my destiny.”

  She recounted her story of being on her own in the southwest and meeting a beggar on the road who had a starving child in tow. The child was clearly on his last legs, and pity moved Lilypad to give them a couple of steamed buns. As she walked away, the beggar stopped her. He said that the gift of a meal should be repaid with a lifetime of servitude, and though he wasn’t good at much, he did have a knack for telling fortunes. After looking at her closely, he pronounced that she would end her life as a beggar and die on the roadside to be eaten by wild dogs. It wouldn’t be hard to avoid that fate, however, as long as she married a man born in the year of the pig.

  “Long Shoubei disguised himself as a cotton fluffer and came to the village to s
cout out the activities of the revolutionaries. I had no idea of his true identity. By coincidence, the Principal—Xiumi, I mean—had a painful toothache and sent me out to get Doctor Tang. When I passed Miss Sun’s house, I saw the fluffer sitting out front resting, smoking his pipe. So I chatted with him. The sonuvabitch may be rotten right through, but he sure is handsome, and he knows how to talk. He had me hook, line, and sinker before I even knew what was happening. I swear I had no idea then that he was spying for the court. Back then, I wouldn’t even have had the courage to betray the Principal for anything, even if my life depended on it. But then . . .”

  “Did you decide to go with him because he was born in a pig year?” Magpie asked.

  Lilypad considered this for a moment and nodded, then shook her head. “Not entirely. You’ve never been with a man so you don’t know what the good part can be like. And that sonuvabitch sure was a fine piece of man meat—tall, strong, beautifully built. For women like us, once a man like that pinches you in the soft parts, it doesn’t matter if you agree or not, you’ll still make mistake after mistake for him until all you can do is close your eyes and let him move you any way he wants.”

  Magpie’s cheeks turned crimson; she stared silently at the ground.

  After a pause, Lilypad asked how Xiumi was doing, and if she had mentioned her at all upon her return. “Good question,” Magpie replied. “All these years, she hasn’t said a single word. I thought she had gone mute.”

  “She isn’t mute, she can talk.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m the only one who knows what she’s thinking. She refuses to talk in order to punish herself.”