by Sam Meekings
‘Clothes. Am I right? Silk? Is it real? Don’t answer that, I know it is terribly impolite of me to ask that question of a lady.’ His voice was a high-pitched whine.
This must have been one of the only pawnshops that lacked a display window – the shopkeeper preferred to let the needy, the broken and the bargain-hunters come to him. In a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business, a little discretion goes a long way. Yuying looked around at the strange collection of objects filling the small room. In the silence before he spoke again she was sure she heard the flutter of wings from near one of the chests of drawers. Behind the shopkeeper was a large wardrobe with one door open, as if to flaunt the hint of the long robes hanging inside. A solitary marble Fu Lion sat on the floor, looking for its mate. Beside the wardrobe was a large empty cage, and three clocks, each displaying a different time. Their ticking echoed around the cramped room, bouncing off the odd cooking pots, the bottles of herbal medicine, the abandoned heirlooms and the uncatalogued paraphernalia of the desperate.
‘The foxes are louder this year. Have you heard them? They must have been building up their courage, because I swear now they’re padding right through the night. Paw prints everywhere, my dear. By morning they’ve all disappeared, of course. My grandfather became a fox, you know. One morning, he just wasn’t in his bed. We never saw him again, but a fox began to howl for kitchen scraps soon after that. He left the house to the squabbling of an aged wife and four bitchy concubines. Can you imagine!’
He talked without expecting a reply in order to put his customer at ease, as though setting foot inside the shop was itself shameful. His eyes never left his tapering pyramid of cards.
‘Fathers can be like that. I never met my grandfathers, but some days my father becomes a ghost,’ she said as she opened the bag and began to pull out some of her dresses, still damp and reeking of the river.
‘Yes, I quite understand. Your clothes are beautiful,’ he drawled.
‘Everything has its beauty, but not everyone can see it. Isn’t that what they say?’
‘Ah, Confucius. I’m not as uneducated as you might think,’ he replied. ‘Inside this shop it is a different country, not shown on any globe mind you, and about as far from the village outside as you can imagine. You might have noticed that things are different in here. You can trust me.’
‘So, how much will you give me?’
He stretched out his hands in front of him.
‘You have two options. I’ll give you five for each piece if you sell them to me straight. But if you want them back, you’ll need to pay the going price at the time, whatever that may be. Or, and this is the more popular option, I’ll give you two a piece and you can buy them back for the same amount any time within a year.’
‘And how many people come back?’
He said nothing. The house collapsed with the penultimate card, the last one still flexed out between his upheld fingers.
‘I’ll come back. Soon. So I’ll take the second option, thank you. It’s just for a few days, you see. A week perhaps,’ Yuying said.
‘Of course. Then I will see you again soon.’
They both spoke without thinking, as though they were reading from a familiar script. Yuying handed over every one of her dresses, trying not to cry. The owner then discreetly pointed to a space beside the wardrobe, where she could remove the dress and jacket she was wearing.
Jinyi’s eyes rose to meet her as she strolled back to the table with the empty bag. She tried to read them for acceptance, apology, love, but could make out none of those. Despite the tender moments, his lopsided smile and his gentle way of rubbing the backs of her hands, as he was now doing with their snoozing child, Yuying was never quite sure what Jinyi was thinking. She knew from her secret handsign conversations with Yaba that he was like that in the kitchen too: quiet, defensive and thoughtful. Next to the bustle and shouts of her family and the other girls she knew from school, his measured thoughtfulness seemed strange, almost frightening. She remembered the way he had hovered in the doorway for his first week in the house, waiting each time for permission to cross the threshold, the way he had tentatively asked her if she could teach him to read and the way his eyebrows had twisted into knots when she had then laughed, thinking that that he was pulling her leg – surely you can read! But once the house was left behind, neither of them were certain whether those roles still held. If he could, he might have told her that he was only trying to look after the first family he had ever known. If he could, he might have mentioned love, the strange butterfly feeling in his stomach that he could not understand. But he could not, and he would not, which was why they usually walked in silence.
Is this more like the way he expected a wife to look? Yuying wondered. She was now dressed in the drab woollens worn by everyone in almost every village they had passed through. Manly, waist-pinching trousers, layers of itchy woollen undershirts and a bulky black zhongshan jacket, all second-hand and dirt-cheap from the pawnshop. Her glittering slippers had been replaced with warm, fur-lined boots. Am I still myself without things from back home, she wondered as she stood before her husband. How many little parts have to change before I stop being my mother’s daughter and start being someone I have never met? She had picked up some fur-lined blankets for Wawa, but nothing for Jinyi. He at least seemed happy in his old, dirty clothes. They two of them now looked almost identical. Jinyi’s lips rose up into a grin as his eyes roamed over her.
‘Are you laughing at me?’ she asked.
‘No, no, of course not! Don’t be so silly. I was just thinking about what your parents might say if they could see you now.’
She smiled too. ‘They’d think that you’d corrupted me.’
‘And that I’d undone all their hard work. It’s lucky we’ve given them a grandson, or they would really be mad with me. Come on, he’s exhausted. He didn’t even giggle when I tickled him. Let’s wrap him up and get to the room – I can see those old spinsters coming back.’
This was how their truces usually worked, each one pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened, each one pretending to forget. It was easier than saying sorry. In the small room they shared a single stone kang, the bricks beneath them heated by a small fire. Though it was only afternoon, they collapsed with Wawa between them, kicking his little feet against them. In the other room, the owners shuffled about, boiling pot after pot of river water, and the little family slowed towards a drifting, fitful sleep.
Yuying woke with the mêlée of animal noises that always attended sunrise. Straight away she felt confused – Wawa hadn’t woken her once, and had last eaten at the same time as them. Her heart thumped so loudly she could hear nothing else. She lifted the baby’s sleeping form closer to her. He was heavy, a limp sack of pebbles. She opened her mouth to scream, but instead of sound came a dry rasp.
They buried him half a li away from the village, where a hillside flexed up into mist and wild grass. Jinyi did not argue with his wife when she placed the new blankets, the warm sets of clothes she had knitted and the small double-tiger pillow into the shallow stretch he had dug, handful by handful, gripping the crumbling earth between his fingers. Wawa would need them to take with him, beyond their reach. They did not only bury his wattles of puppy fat, his cheeky smiles, his duckling frizz of black hair and his jet-black eyebrows that had been forever dancing above his curious eyes, but also his sobs, his tugs of his mother’s hair, his first tooth and first teething bites, his tiny pyjamas, and all his possible futures.
They lost each other to the silent undertow of grief, the wordless tug pulling them as they struggled through the depths of thought. Its waters had a strange clarity, as though the layers of stained glass through which they usually saw the world had suddenly been shattered and the sky was burning through, its vast spectrum scarring their retinas.
‘He has my family now,’ Jinyi said, though not loud enough to be heard.
The suddenness of it shocked them. They stood in silenc
e, tormenting themselves by cataloguing the coughs they had ignored, the midnight whimpers they might have slept through, the reddening cheeks, the colour of his soiled swaddling cloths, the lack of breastmilk, the cleanliness of the water and the tiny cup carried at the bottom of the damp bag, and most of all the tiring journey they still had to see through to its conclusion. There were words and hopes and sobs stopped inside them
‘I’m sorry,’ Jinyi whispered, shoulder to shoulder with her, so close that his breath seemed ghostly, almost unable to believe that the universe had collapsed without pulling them down with it.
Yuying said nothing, her mouth full of salt, full of tears. He said nothing back.
It was hard to tell whether they stayed beside the tiny mound of earth for minutes or for days. Finally, they began to walk again. And because death is terrible, there is nothing that can be done but to give it the quiet it deserves; for nothing so demeans our feelings of grief as to have them set down or spoken. Even us gods are powerless here.
They pushed their sobs down to the bottom of their guts, and kept walking. Somehow it was easier now to hate each other than to think of the last year. Even the day before suddenly seemed unbelievably distant, perfect in its innocence.
There are two countrysides. One people carry with them, carved from the words of books read in the safety of well-lit houses; the other exists beyond people, and its words are indecipherable howls, its language that of barks and bracken and vine. It is the second people face, if they face the world at all. And in this way there are two futures – the one that people conjure up to make the present seem easier to stomach, and the second, a caged bear which will not be tamed, and which will not dance. It is his rough and clammy paws people feel on their skin at night.
They saw the house from the distance, marked out as a hunched silhouette against the swelling horizon, near the bottom of a squat valley. They would make it before night fell. It looked like all the other dwellings they had passed over the last few days: a narrow russet-coloured main building with a mill stone and trough on the left, and on the right a roofed frame under which clustered tools or animals. A knee-high rough stone wall ran around the courtyard, with a single thin break as an entrance. Yuying was only alerted to the uniqueness of this latest house by the change in her husband. His pace slowed, and Yuying could hear his jaws begin to grind, though she was tactful enough not to mention it.
‘You can put your bags in your old room – your cousin isn’t here anymore,’ the fifty-something woman said, striding out into the courtyard to get a look at the approaching travellers. She towered above both Yuying and Jinyi. The skin around her pug nose was pinched and pockmarked, her hair inexpertly cropped. Her voice was neither welcoming nor cold; she simply sounded exhausted.
‘Thank you. You are looking well, Auntie Hou. This is my wife, Bian Yuying.’
‘Then you must be Bian Jinyi. Though I’m not sure why you are calling me auntie, as you left this family when you took another name. What, no children yet? Are you sure you’re really married?’
Yuying tried, but did not manage to suppress a sob. Auntie Hou looked at her with a mixture of contempt and confusion.
‘Well, I expect you need a rest after your journey. We’ve eaten, but there’s some broth left. I’ll heat it up,’ she sighed.
‘It’s nice to meet you, Auntie Hou,’ Yuying stuttered through her tears.
‘I’m sure. Nice to meet you too, Bian Yuying. I guess you’re both staying? Then I hope you will be comfortable here.’ Even before she had finished speaking she was moving away, sinking into the last half hour of dusty sunlight.
The broth was lukewarm water in which an unripened vegetable might once have sat for a couple of hours. They gulped it down, not daring to look at each other. Across the fields a heron darted, still slick from the water it had grazed. On a hill somewhere behind them, a hill indistinguishable from the many they had passed and would not be able to find again, a sapling began to ready itself beneath the earth, waiting for spring to come, to push out roots.
I am ashamed to say that I found it impossible to forget the Jade Emperor’s words, and I gradually let doubt gnaw at my fingers and toes until my whole body felt sore. Maybe he was right. After spending weeks worrying over my abilities, I decided to take action. I would ask a real writer for advice. And who better, I surmised, than Li Bai? After all, everyone was always saying he was probably the greatest poet our country had ever produced. So I set about finding him.
I took a couple of bottles of cheap, sour liquor, and sat on the bank of the Yellow River, swigging and singing old songs about the trees and the beasts as I waited for night to fall from the sky. When I was so drunk that I was seeing two of every star puckering in the dark fabric above me, I took off my shoes and jogged down into the river. I waded through the murky waters until I found the spot where the full moon was reflecting in the sway; and that was where I dived under, immersing myself in the silver light.
My head came up almost instantly in the middle of a small pond. I clambered out and shook the tangled weeds and small Koi carp from my robes, then looked around. It was night on this side as well, though the moon seemed closer, filling half the sky between the mountains to the east and the mountains to the west. Before me was a small wooden cottage with chipped eaves, the only building in the vast, dark valley. I banged the fat brass knuckle of a door-knocker and went in.
‘You are perhaps a traveller,’ said a short man who was seated on the floor with his legs folded beneath him. He was surrounded by half-empty bottles of rice wine and piles of paper; on the wall were ink portraits of women of unimaginable beauty.
‘You are perhaps a traveller,’ he repeated, ‘forever searching in vain for a way to return to your hometown.’
‘Well … not really,’ I replied. ‘I have come to ask your advice, honourable poet of the Way. I must find a way to describe the working of the human heart.’
He nodded slowly. A sharp slither of black beard jutted down from his round chin.
He finally spoke. ‘The long journey carries us through a river of stars.’
It was my turn to nod, though I was not sure this was helpful. Had he heard me properly?
‘Do you mean that the heart is like a river, sir?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, sounding irritated. ‘I mean that life is a journey, and we are carried along like uprooted waterweeds. You can either keep trying to work out where it will take you, and ignore the things that pass you by, or you can enjoy the stars reflected in the river and not worry about where you will finally end up.’
‘I see,’ I said. And I thought I almost did.
‘Of course, many would disagree. If you are serious about studying the vicissitudes of the heart, perhaps you should talk to my friend, the great poet Du Fu. He is sure to have a different view.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, retreating towards the door. ‘And where might I find him?’
‘You must cross a bridge that curls over ravines as though it were a rainbow,’ Li Bai said, before returning to his rice wine.
5
1949 THE YEAR OF THE OX
If you have never lived in the fields, taking part in the sowing and tending and trading and planting and weeding and knitting and weaving and milling and kneading and chopping and baking and tilling and ploughing, all before the sun sizzles down like a broken egg yolk over the hills; if you have never felt that the only solace in life was the hope of a few hours’ rest, children, grandchildren, and a painless death; if you have never measured the borders of your world with a stretch of river, the shadows of a forest or a few sun-furrowed faces from the only village you have ever visited, then you would not understand. But wait – whenever I try to tell a story like this to the Jade Emperor, he stamps his feet, on the verge of one of his tantrums. Which you do not want to see – trust me. Anyway, he always tells me that we can imagine anything, and that everything is connected. So I’d better suspend my scepticism and start this bit again.<
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It seems to me that many of our greatest poets, such as Bai Juyi, Du Fu and Qu Yuan (not that I like to name-drop, but I do know most of them pretty well), seemed to share a knack for falling out of favour. Now, when driven across the continent on an emperor’s whim, in exile or in some humiliatingly distant official posting, these ancient poets would slowly disappear into their verses, their bodies fading until all that remained were their words, loose couplets marking their paths in place of footsteps.
Those were the verses that Yuying had learnt by heart and recited to herself back when she was still her father’s favourite, back when she was still a student and being offered the privileged position of translator for one of the units of the then resplendent Japanese army. Now, once again, she muttered the rhymes under her breath as she squatted in the turned earth, her muddy hands gripping a rusty trowel. And where once the poems had seemed surreal, strange and giddily romantic to her, they now seemed hard, crisp, unyielding. The scrunch of leaves underfoot; lone, soaring birds; abandoned temples, empty villages; moonlight seeping under doors and through the cracks in walls or reflected in the swell of a river – all of these images had become entwined with her new home, with the endless stretch of empty land on either side. Yuying clung to the old verses to make her new life seem more bearable, to try and slough off her loneliness and regret. She told herself she was not the only one. In the most minute of details, the poets seemed to have found the truth about the whole world; inside the slightest of prized-open atoms, there are whole universes.