by Ge Fei
“But why? I don’t get it.”
“It’s all about Little Thing, right?” Lilypad said. “Back in the academy days, everyone thought she was crazy for ignoring her own son the way she did. But she was thinking about that boy every single day.”
“How do you know that?”
“One day, when I was talking to her in the garan, I asked her, ‘Why are you so cruel to Little Thing? No matter what, the boy is still the flesh of your flesh. How could you bear to treat him so badly?’ You know what she said to me?”
Magpie shook her head.
“She told me that the moment she started down this path, she had accepted the inevitability of her own death, just like Master Xue and Zhang Jiyuan. The harder she was on her son, the less he would miss her after she was gone.”
Magpie started to cry again. After finally controlling her tears, she asked Lilypad what she was going to do in the future.
“What will I do?” Lilypad turned the question around as if she were asking Magpie as well as herself. “I don’t know. I’ll take it one step at a time. But I’ll never come back to Puji again.”
Magpie had a forgiving, compassionate heart, and it pained her to hear Lilypad speak this way. In a tentative voice she said, “Maybe if I can talk to Xiumi about it, you can stay in Puji and live with us.”
“Nuh-uh, nope,” Lilypad replied. “Even if she did agree to take me in, I couldn’t bear to look at her again. She may have been the one who sold all the family’s land to Long Qingtang, but the idea was mine to begin with. And even though Little Thing didn’t die by my hand, he did die because of me . . .” Something else suddenly occurred to her. “I heard she had another child while she was in jail?”
Magpie replied, “They said the baby was taken away three days after the birth. Nobody knows where the child ended up, or if it’s still alive.”
The two women talked from noon to the early evening. The northwest wind picked up, and Magpie realized her hands and feet had gone numb with cold. Lilypad collected her nightstick and put on her straw hat, readying herself to leave.
Not knowing what to say, Magpie blurted out, “If you ever get really desperate, you might as well come back to Puji.”
Lilypad grimaced at her from over her shoulder and set off without replying.
As Magpie trudged home, her eyes red, she frequently cast her gaze back in Lilypad’s direction. By the time she reached the estate, she spied Xiumi standing by the front gate waiting for her. Xiumi looked at Magpie, then out into the vast, windswept wilderness behind her, and asked, “So Lilypad isn’t coming home after all?”
9
TWELVE years passed.
By late fall, the rice crop had been cut and harvested, and the shaved paddies lay under a gray-white layer of frost. The copses of tallow trees by the roads and streams turned red overnight. Their white berries dangled on the branches like snow, or willow catkins, or plum blossoms.
Xiumi said that the rice in the fields was ripe, its time had come and it would soon be cut. Xiumi said that the tallow trees were turning red. Once their leaves dropped and their berries blackened, the winter snows would begin.
Her words materialized out of the blue; Magpie could merely guess at the feelings behind them. The weather was unbelievably perfect—days without a breath of wind, the sky a boundless field of blue—truly an “autumn spring,” as southerners called it. Time seemed to halt under the warm sunlight. Flocks of geese passed occasionally over the treetops. Xiumi said that after the geese passed, the winter crows would soon follow. Her pronouncements seemed to carry a heavy implication. Fortunately, Magpie had become accustomed to hearing them, so that while they still surprised her, she no longer thought about them much.
For over ten years, Xiumi had tended her flowers and plants in the rear courtyard. Pots, basins, and buckets of various sizes filled the open space corner-to-corner in a chorus of leafy hostas, peonies, perilla, bush cherries, rhododendrons, sweet chrysanthemums, and winter plums. From the roseleaf trellis to the studio stairs and the vegetable garden, from the foot of the courtyard wall to the border of the bamboo grove, no spot remained empty.
Though her vow of silence had been broken, Xiumi still didn’t speak very often. With autumn far along and the chrysanthemums in full bloom, Xiumi copied out chrysanthemum poems as she remembered them for Magpie to read when she needed a brief distraction. Yet Magpie frequently found their messages disturbing, such as:
The hermit’s hedgerow is like the Peach Blossom Paradise:
After these flowers open, no others will bloom.
Or:
At times, looking back with a drunken eye,
I mistake the dreaming hermit for the man who found the orchard.
Or, on another occasion:
Yellow stamens and green stalks like years past;
Hearts hold fruitless cries of regret.
A hundred anxious thoughts seemed tangled in Xiumi’s breast. One day, as they pruned branches in the courtyard, Xiumi asked Magpie, “You’ve heard of a place called Huajiashe, yes?”
Magpie nodded.
“Do you know how to get there?” Xiumi prodded her.
Magpie shook her head.
Magpie had never in her life traveled farther than the market in Changzhou. She raised her head to look at the sky. Huajiashe was like a wisp of white cloud up there—you could see it, yet it was as distant as a dream. Magpie couldn’t understand why Xiumi would suddenly want to go back there.
She said she wanted to see the little island again.
As Xiumi was determined to go, Magpie had little choice but to ask around the village for directions to Huajiashe and prepare dry rations for the trip.
A nice, long trip might be a good thing, Magpie thought. It might distract her a little and ease her worries. A few days later, Xiumi asked Magpie to send someone out to tend to the grave mounds for Madame Lu and Little Thing. Once that was done, the two of them set off.
•
Magpie prepared three days’ worth of dry rations. In her opinion, three days was already too long—more than enough time to reach every corner of the earth. Xiumi refused to hire a rickshaw at any point in the journey, no matter how tired they were. They walked at a steady pace, crossing valleys and mountains; Magpie noticed that Xiumi cried frequently, and that her interactions with others, her gestures, were noticeably slower than normal, causing Magpie’s anxiety to escalate again.
They asked directions in each village, drank water from each well, got lost seven or eight times, and passed a week of nights in unfamiliar peasant huts. Xiumi suffered from dysentery for a stretch on the road, and babbled through the night in a fever-induced delirium. Magpie ended up having to carry her on her back to continue on. When they arrived at Huajiashe at noon on the eighth day, Xiumi was asleep, her head resting on Magpie’s shoulders.
•
Xiumi opened her bleary eyes, which instantly overflowed with tears again. They appeared to be standing near a tavern at the village entrance. Its faded and fraying banner, which hung over a window, rose and fell in the breeze. No patrons were in sight. The New Year’s couplets, originally written on bright red paper and glued to the door frame, had apparently faded first to pink, and on to their current ashen gray. A young girl in a floral-print cotton jacket sat on the doorstep, rolling skeins of yarn, and repeatedly raised a watchful eye toward the two travelers.
The mountainside village looked much smaller and more run-down than Xiumi remembered. The blackened ruins caused by the fire those many years ago still stood out starkly in the surroundings. The covered walkway that connected each home had been dismantled long ago, leaving only shallow, round postholes on either side of the road. Whenever a gust passed through it raised clouds of dust.
The forest behind the village had been almost completely cut down, leaving the mountainside bald. House after crumbling house looked lik
e it might topple at any moment. The streams of clear water still running along the aqueducts and the cooing of a few pigeons that circled over the gray tiled roofs were the only signs of life.
As they prepared to keep walking, the window of the tavern opened, and a middle-aged woman’s plump, somewhat puffy face emerged.
“Here to eat?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” Magpie replied with a smile.
With a crisp smack, the window closed again.
•
They found their way to the lakeside. The island, barely an arrow’s flight away from the village, was nothing more than a dark smudge on the water’s surface. The house that Xiumi and Han Liu had inhabited for a year and three months was gone, and the island now bristled with mulberry trees. Aside from a single fisherman on the water bringing in his nets, there seemed to be no one else around.
They waited on the shore until noon passed, when the fisherman finally docked his boat. Xiumi asked if he would take them out to see the island. He examined both women suspiciously for a long moment, then said, “Nobody lives out there.”
Xiumi replied, “We’d just like to go have a look. Would you be able to ferry us over?”
“Nothing to see out there. Only mulberry trees, not a single person,” replied the fisherman.
Hearing the fisherman’s refusal, Magpie pulled a banknote out of her waist pocket and passed it to him. On seeing the money, the fisherman made no move to take it but quietly replied, “If you really want to go, I’ll just row you over. Don’t worry about the money.”
The two women boarded the boat. The fisherman told them that the island was exactly the same as when he first arrived at Huajiashe. However, he had heard people say that there used to be a house there with a nun living in it. But at some point, the house was torn down, and he had no clue where the nun had gone.
“So that means you’re not local?” Magpie asked.
The fisherman said he had married into his mother’s sister’s family five years ago. He fished the lake every day and had never seen anyone on the island. Only the village women went out to the island in the spring, after their black-haired silkworms emerged from their eggs, to collect mulberry leaves.
He said his wife had also raised four or five baskets of silkworms. Once, the worms were hungry late one night, and his wife begged him to go out to the island with a lantern to pick some leaves. She didn’t know that eating mulberry leaves swollen with dew would kill silkworms. The next morning, they dumped all the snow-white worms into the lake. He said he loved the noise silkworms made when they ate; it sounded like rain.
Looking up at the two women, the fisherman asked, “And where is home for you? Why do you want to see the island?”
Xiumi didn’t reply; she was gazing at the dark expanse of the mulberry orchard. The wind rattled the stiff, green leaves.
As the boat glided closer to the island, Magpie spied the ruins of an old foundation through the trees. Xiumi let out a deep sigh, then said, “Enough. We’re not getting off. Take us back.”
“Why change your mind now?” the fisherman asked.
“This isn’t an easy place to get to after eight days of travel,” Magpie implored. “Let’s just get out and stand for a while. At least it’ll put something to rest.”
“I’ve seen it before. We’re going back,” Xiumi replied. She spoke softly, in a hard, emotionless tone that silenced any argument.
•
They decided to leave Huajiashe that same day.
A black-capped sampan took them back to Puji by water. The boatman said that if they were lucky and there was a tailwind, they could make it to the Yangtze River by noon the next day. Xiumi lay in the chilly darkness of the tiny cabin and fell asleep to the sound of water flowing past her head. Soon, tall reeds began to tickle the cabin’s roof, making a crisp hissing noise. She dreamed once more of the tiny island sequestered by lake water, the blue face of the tomb in moonlight, the mulberry orchard, and the shards of wall plaster and roof tiles scattered on the earth. Of course, she also dreamed of Han Liu. Heaven knew how many times the two of them had sat beside the window, chatting and watching the night’s blackness fade as a trembling morning sun the color of molten iron rose over the lake and washed the trees by the shore with red. She heard Han Liu say at her elbow, “Every person’s heart is an island, trapped by water, sequestered from the world.”
But where was Han Liu today?
•
Sometime around midnight, a dusky yellow glow lit the cabin. Xiumi threw her jacket around her as she sat up and peered outside: A convoy was passing by. Every boat glowed with a single lamp—Xiumi counted seven. The boats were connected to one another with an iron chain. Seen from afar, they looked like a line of travelers carrying lanterns down the road.
A wind rose, and the stars above twinkled. It was certainly a clear autumn night. Xiumi shivered as she watched the convoy of boats float into the distance; tears welled up in her eyes. She knew she had encountered not a passing convoy, but her own self of twenty years earlier.
*
One winter morning, Xiumi woke up in the studio just like always. The cold air was unbearable, and she couldn’t bring herself to throw off her blankets. The sun rose. Magpie called up to her from the vegetable garden. She said, “The winter plums under the roseleaf trellis have all bloomed!”
Xiumi dragged herself out of bed and approached the dresser to brush her hair. She noticed that a spiky rime of frost coated the copper basin sitting on her table. She recalled that she had used it to wash her face the previous night and must not have dumped all the water out, so the bottom and sides had iced over. She cast a careless glance into the basin, but then didn’t look away. A sudden, profound shock contorted her expression.
In the mosaic of lines drawn by the frost, she saw a face—the face of her father. She couldn’t believe her own eyes. Father appeared to be stroking his beard and smiling. He was sitting on the ground at the edge of a broad avenue, playing go with someone.
The light in the studio was far too weak. Xiumi dropped her wooden comb, picked up the basin, and carried it outside to the gazebo. Sitting on one of the stone stools, she held the basin under a ray of morning sunlight that shined over the tops of the trees by the eastern courtyard wall and examined it closely. Another person was seated across from Father, but she could see only his back. They both sat in the shade of a large pine tree. The foothills of a mountain rose gently behind them, and a flock of sheep appeared to be grazing on the slope. Beside the two figures stretched a wide, open highway that bordered a powerful river on its opposite side. The two people, the pine tree, grass, river, and sheep all stood out in crisp, fully lifelike detail.
A car was parked on the edge of the highway. One of its doors was open, and a passenger (a bald man) had one foot outside the door, as if he were about to get out. His face was indistinct but definitely familiar to Xiumi; the more she scrutinized it, the hazier it grew. The frost crystals were melting under the sunlight, gradually, irreversibly disappearing.
The ice pattern that faded before Xiumi’s eyes was her past and future.
Ice is delicate, just like people. Xiumi felt a painful wrenching in her chest, and she leaned on a pillar to recover her breath. With her back against the pillar, she quietly died.
•
In April 1956, the governor of Meicheng County* was riding in a new Jeep down the mountain road that led to the Puji Reservoir. By chance, Governor Tan noticed two elderly people sitting cross-legged beneath a large pine tree playing go, and he ordered his driver to stop the car. His secretary, Miss Yao, was sitting next to him, sucking on hard candy and enjoying the scenery. When she heard the governor order the driver to pull over, she touched him gently on the arm and asked with a smile, “Is that go bug of yours biting again, Governor?”
*Tan Gongda (1911–1976), previously named Mei Yuanbao, was Lu Xiumi’s se
cond son, removed from her custody at birth by the wife of the prison guard Mei Shiguang. He lived for many years in Pukou. Just before Mei Shiguang passed away in 1935, he revealed to his adopted son the actual history of his birth. The boy’s real father was purported to be Tan Si of Puji, though this was impossible to prove. In 1946, Tan Gongda was appointed chief political officer for the battalion of the New Fourth Army’s advance column that encamped in Puji. In 1952, he was made governor of the county.