Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  The wake had been going on for days, the body lying in the silent main hall. Yuying almost expected her father to rise up at any second, and stroll from the house, shaking his head. At the foot of the coffin was a portrait of Bian, younger than any of the gathered friends and relatives could remember him ever having looked in real life. The household gods had been packed away, all the mirrors covered. Yuying moved beside her father and took his cold hand, remembering how he had gripped hers whenever he had taken her to a showy banquet as a child: a small girl facing the upturned noses of the eldest sons of other businessmen, the only female in the room. If her father had possessed countless flaws, then he had also had strengths. Either he had never cared what anyone thought of him, or he had been canny enough to know that few would risk his wrath by bad-mouthing him.

  The hired mourners that sat behind the regular guests provided a great spectacle of grief. They wept and howled and tore at their clothes, all for a very reasonable price. The dead nibble on these showy sobs, still trying to save face, even in the underworld. And it is there, incidentally, that the more hearty meals of the gods are provided: screams and guttural wails, tears lashed from flayed skin. I’ve never been down there myself, of course, but word gets around.

  The final chanted prayers faded into silence, and the mourners turned their backs as the coffin was closed and sealed. Yuying’s eyes sought out her mother among the hung heads – she had unusually let her greying hair fall freely, covering the craggy lines of her furrowed brow. She had not yet asked Yuying anything about the last two years. This is what all families are best at, Yuying thought: pretending to forget.

  The coffin was hoisted up from the table above the small altar and carried from the house. The slim procession, with its white memorial banners, meandered around the city, and each of the sisters wondered why more of Old Bian’s associates had not joined them. The streets were busy, though the milling crowds parted, and stopped to stare and appraise, as they let the mourners through. This was not simply out of respect for the dead – most of the watchers were silently calculating the cost, working out how much had been spent on the funeral. Yuying looked around, ignoring the staring faces. Everyone around her seemed distant – her mother confused and slow, Yaba leading her carefully by the elbow, her sisters trying to outdo each other with the amount of tears they could shed – and she found her mind wandering to where her husband might be.

  The mourners stopped in the courtyard of the biggest of Old Bian’s restaurants, to offer the final prayers before the coffin could be carried to the hillside and laid in the ground. They burnt huge bouquets of paper flowers, dense wads of fake banknotes, and even a horse created from finely bunched coloured paper, to send to Bian to help him in the next world. After tears, there is nothing better than a meal of smoke for a god or a loose soul. The billowy cirrus from incense, the thick slobbery char from paper and card, thin delicate rings wobbling from pious lips, or the luscious mist rising from the burnt offering of sacrificial sows; each and every wisp is delicious. I am no connoisseur – the Buddha and his posse of bodhisattvas, even old Lao Tzu and the Taoists, get their fill in temples every day. I get candy once a year at the Spring Festival. Not that I feel bitter.

  They found the streets on the way back home even more crowded than before. On every corner, square or crossroads there were men standing on chairs, surrounded by throngs of onlookers. Each man’s raised voice veered between agitation and excitement, and some went as far as to raise their fists into the air to punctuate their declarations. Yuying was the only one of the quiet group not yet used to this sight.

  ‘This is the beginning of a new life for us, my comrades. No more tyranny from landlords! No more suffering at the hands of greedy employers! No more poverty! No more foreigners telling us what to do! Chairman Mao has proclaimed –’

  She turned a corner, beginning to lag behind the rest of the mourners, only to spot another speaker, the crowd around him nodding exaggeratingly in agreement.

  ‘– everything split equally. A dictatorship of the people! A great country once again! But it will not be easy, my friends! Oh no! There is much work to be done, land to be redistributed, traitors and landlords and tyrants still to be hunted down –’

  If you ask me (and why not, because I’ve gathered my fair share of opinions over the millenia), then this is how ideas travel best, borne by hungry mouths and clenched fists. It doesn’t really matter how ridiculous they are – anger and indignation are infectious. And everyone wants a better world, don’t they?

  Yuying walked on, not wanted to be left behind. A few posters had been plastered to the walls of abandoned buildings, and the air was like electricity. What does all of this mean, she wondered as they reached their own street. And, will it mean Jinyi will return?

  ‘We’ve been saved from the Japanese! Saved from the Nationalist devils, from persecution and injustice! Throw out the old broken gods, throw out the old ways. We are free! The Party promises complete economic and social reform, complete equality. Soon –’

  Another one was crowing to a smaller gathering near their house, but Yuying was no longer listening. There was no need to listen, for the words oozed between cracks in walls, blew in through open windows, crept under warped doorframes and down through skylights, and were soaked up in soggy bread. The words would be there every time Yuying went out, repeated in every teahouse, restaurant or family dining room until they stuck to her clothes like the smell of smoke, and finally seeped through into her pores.

  Yuying and her mother returned to keep vigil in their rooms, waiting, as custom dictated, for the soul to return seven days later. They scattered flour in the doorways to try to catch the telltale footprints of Bian’s spirit transformed into its zodiac animal for one last trip back before the greater journey. They would not consider the possibility that his spirit might have chosen to wander to one of his other women instead, or that it had become lost in a city whose shape was changing daily.

  I followed his directions and soon came to the bridge the poet had described. Though from a distance I might indeed have mistaken it for the sublime swoop of an arching rainbow, when I got closer I found to my dismay that it seemed to be constructed entirely from bones, which a hundred winters had trampled down to juts and footfalls. Furthermore, much of the pathway had crumbled to dust and grit, leaving huge holes opening on a bloom of mist that disguised the inevitable fall. It took me many days to scramble across, half of the time on my hands and knees, my hail-rapped fingers grabbing for the next gnarled knot of bone to pull my body a little further forward.

  When I eventually clambered down on the other side my feet were blistered and bloody and my head was spinning. In front of me, at the highest point of the gorge, was a small thatched cottage. As I approached, I noticed that the cottage was surrounded by a swarm of noisily buzzing fireflies; they were nosing around the flowers in the garden, setting the stone walls and the straw roof agleam, and could even be seen inside the windows, flitting around the study. I pushed past them and entered through the half-open door.

  ‘Honourable Du Fu,’ I said, addressing a seated old man with a light beard that turned out to be, on closer inspection, a muzzle of fireflies. ‘I have been given your address by your friend, Li Bai. I have come to ask your advice, poet of history. I must find a way to describe the working of the human heart.’

  ‘Ah ha,’ he nodded. ‘The heart is a traveller who never arrives. I suppose old Li Bai told you that the heart lives in the tiniest details that it takes in?’

  ‘He did indeed, in a manner of speaking. Do you agree, then?’

  ‘I have lived through much suffering: poverty, arrest, exile, being snubbed by the court, war, disease and the death of my child, among other hardships. I tell you this not out of pity, for in these I am not alone. There will always be great mansions where the wealthy hold lavish feasts, and outside the gates of these mansions there will always be beggars shivering with hunger. There is perhaps no limit to the winds th
at can blow through the heart, and turn it cold. You must find what makes it survive.’

  ‘You mean, if I find out what makes the heart keep going, despite everything, then I will have found out how it works?’ I asked.

  ‘Precisely. Remember, though, that just as hearts are slaves to love, so men are slaves to history. All you can really hope to do is catch a moment, a feeling, a glance, before it is gone.’

  I thanked him profusely, and left him to the sonorous murmurs of the fireflies that filled his home.

  6

  1951 THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT

  To celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, Bian Shi bought mooncakes, those octagonal pastries full of sweet red-bean paste, fruits and jams, sometimes with a plump golden egg yolk hidden in the centre. She could think of no other way to cheer Yuying up. It surely cannot be healthy to sulk for more than a year – it takes a while for life to catch up again, she told her daughter. Yuying took half a bite of one the cakes, then left it, with a crescent of teeth marks, on the antique kitchen table.

  When she was a little girl, Yuying had looked forward to the Mid-Autumn Festival, to the sweet mooncakes and the stories her mother used to tell about Chang E, the woman on the moon, who had lived out her early life in the Palace of the Immortals. She was one of those divine beings whose beds are the silky underside of summer clouds, back in the days when the names of us gods and goddesses hadn’t yet been dragged through the mud. She was tall and slender, her charcoal mane sloping down to her pale toes, and, let me tell you, the rumours were true: she was the most beautiful woman who ever drew breath. Her eyes looked as though they had been formed from shards of arctic ice. Pouting and cold, she possessed that singular kind of heart-stopping, double-take beauty that allows its owner to get away with almost anything.

  Chang E’s husband Hou Yi, meanwhile, was an average man, renowned only for his skills at archery. He woke up beside his wife one morning and found that he could barely open his eyes because of the stark rays of red light blistering the sky. Shielding his face, he stumbled from his room and looked down to see the face of the earth beneath slowly blackening and bubbling in the heat. Ten burning suns were spinning through the sky like a freshly broken pack of pool balls. Hou Yi quickly reached for his longbow and quiver and, without a moment to lose, shot down nine of the suns, leaving a single burning star hanging in the heavens.

  ‘What’s all that ruckus?’ Hou Yi heard his sleepy wife simper from back inside.

  ‘Nothing, dear,’ he called. He then mopped his brow and went back to bed.

  Husband and wife were woken several hours later by the furious shouting of the Jade Emperor; when he is angry, the whole universe knows about it. The enraged emperor wanted to know why Hou Yi had killed nine of his sons. Hou Yi stammered, muttered a little, blushed and hung his head.

  ‘You are no longer welcome in my kingdom. You are both banished to earth, where you will live out the remainder of your life as mortals,’ the Jade Emperor announced.

  Chang E sulked and moaned for the next month, sitting around and fanning herself while her husband built a small house for them in the crumpled mountains to which they had been exiled. For a year they lived alone, Hou Yi chopping wood, growing vegetables, hunting hares and cooking meals while Chang E brooded and threw tantrums. Then one night, Chang E suddenly sat up in bed and woke her husband with her laughter.

  ‘It’s so simple, yet I never thought of it before! Didn’t you ever hear about the Mother of the West? Everyone used to say that she knows the secret of eternal life.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, rubbing his eyes and yawning. ‘I think I heard that one. But isn’t it just a story?’

  ‘Of course not! What a strange thing to say! You must find her and learn the secret, and then we won’t be condemned to become ghosts in this horrid place.’

  ‘For you I would do anything,’ he said. ‘I will leave as soon as the sun rises.’

  Tears began to blossom in the corners of her eyes. ‘But how can we possible sleep now, just knowing that we don’t have to die in this dirty, smelly –’

  ‘Yes, you are right, my darling. I will set forth immediately!’ he told her, already pulling on his clothes.

  Hou Yi saddled his horse and set off in the direction that the sun had gone down in only hours earlier. I could tell you about the red-hot mountain peaks he ascended, the endless rivers he swam across, the meals he was forced to make of barbecued horsemeat, and the thousands of li he marched through parched desert plains and dense whispering forests, but that would take more time than we have. Perhaps you would be more interested to know how Chang E survived on her own, having to cook and provide for herself for the two years in which her husband journeyed west? That is much simpler – for even in the most remote reaches of the earth, there are always men willing to help out a poor, beautiful woman fluttering her dazzling eyelashes and pouting her cherry-red lips.

  The Mother of the West was a wide-hipped matron with a permanent grin set amidst her basset-hound jowls. She took pity on the thin, bedraggled man who hobbled into her palace and kowtowed before her.

  ‘I have heard of your unfair treatment, and I know you have travelled far to reach me. Therefore, I am prepared to give you this medicine.’

  She summoned a dog-headed lion, which carried a small box in its mouth. Hou Yi stepped closer as she opened it to reveal a small silver pill, the size of a shelled cashew.

  ‘No doubt you have heard that there are now emperors down here on earth, as well as in heaven. What you may not know is that Shen Nung, the second emperor of this country, was fathered by the great imperial dragon himself. While giving birth to Shen Nung, his mother’s screams caused earthquakes and avalanches. This pill is made from the tears she shed as the dragon’s child emerged from her breaking body.’

  She placed the pill in his hand and grinned.

  ‘Break it in half – half of this pill is enough for anyone to become immortal. It will therefore enable both you and your wife to live forever. Again. Good luck, Hou Yi.’

  Hou Yi thanked her for her generosity, and kowtowed until his knees and palms ached, then hurried from the palace. It took him another year to make the return journey, by which time his wife was growing impatient.

  ‘What took you so long? Don’t you know what I’ve had to put up with while you’ve been away? Oh, that any woman should have to suffer as much as me!’ Chang E said, sitting outside their house and looking in disdain at the mud-caked, emaciated man walking towards her.

  ‘I am so sorry, my darling. But I have done it! I have a pill from the Mother of the West. Here, let me show you,’ he panted, handing her the box.

  She raised her eyebrows as she peered down at the silver pill. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Oh yes – this is the key to eternal life. Half of this pill will make us immortal again!’

  Hou Yi leaned down to kiss his wife. She wrinkled her nose and raised a finely manicured hand.

  ‘What do you think you are doing? You’re filthy and you smell worse than a rotting dog! Don’t even think about touching me until you’ve had a thorough wash. Ugh!’

  As her husband traipsed inside to wash, exhausted but content, Chang E studied the pill once more. Half a pill – would that really be enough, she wondered. If half could make them immortal here on earth, then surely the whole thing would be enough to return her to the Palace of the Immortals. And what’s more, she considered, it was all Hou Yi’s fault that they had been banished down here in the first place. He was dirty and thoughtless, and clearly didn’t deserve her, so why should she share it with him? And with that thought, she popped the whole pill into her mouth and swallowed.

  Suddenly she was overcome with dizziness, and something began to splutter and gurgle in her stomach. Pins and needles numbed her fingers and toes, before spreading through the rest of her body. She felt tipsy and light-headed, and only then did she realise that she had begun to float into the air. She gripped frantically at the eaves of the house as she asc
ended, but she could not hold on, and began drifting higher.

  ‘Hou Yi! Get out here now!’ she wailed as she began to rise over the tops of the tallest trees.

  Her husband rushed from the house, half-undressed, and gasped as he saw Chang E disappearing into the clouds.

  ‘Help me! Hou Yi, do something!’

  He fumbled for his quiver and, without a moment to lose, fed an arrow into his longbow and took aim.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing, you idiot? You’ll kill me with that! Think of something else, quickly!’ she hollered.

  However, by the time he had put down the bow, it was too late. He had to squint to see the tiny speck that was his wife, continuing to rise steadily through the sky. She shook her arms and kicked her legs furiously, trying to stop the ascent, drawing curious looks from the high-flying birds soaring around her. Soon they too were beneath her, and she felt a sudden squelching pop as she burst free of the earth’s atmosphere, and yet she still could not stop. It was only when she tilted her head backwards that she spotted her destination, craggy and yellow and swelling larger and larger as she approached.

  It was with an unladylike thwump that Chang E tumbled to the ground on the surface of the moon. After dusting herself down, she looked around. There was nothing but murky craters and rocky ridges. She spent the first couple of hours on her new home jumping up and down, frantically flapping her arms and trying to take off, but to no avail. She was stuck. It was only then, as Yuying’s mother used to emphasise with a raised hand pointing to the sky, that Chang E began to miss her husband and thought about all the things she had now lost because of her rash decision. For what is the use of being immortal if you have to spend eternity on your own?