by Sam Meekings
However, despite the careful attentions of the servants in the adjudicator’s household, Liang Shanbo did not recover. He awoke only once and, when he remembered the conversation and realised that not only had he loved a woman in disguise all this time, but that she was now going to be separated from him forever, he felt a tiny splinter, like the tip of a calligraphy brush, enter his heart and split it in two. The next morning his family arrived and carried his body into the hills, where they buried it beneath an ancient yew with howls and sobs. Word of the boy’s strange death carried like smoke throughout the villages in the valley below.
Zhu Yingtai was inconsolable. She awoke on the morning of her wedding to see the sky gone sour, a downy grey mould skimming over its surface. She wriggled into her dress and combed the horsehair wig while wiping away her tears, aware that, storm or no storm, her father would not relent. Hiding her grief under layers of make-up, she joined her expectant family. Yet just as the wedding procession was about to weave up through the hills toward her new home in the Ma-family mansion, Zhu Yingtai felt her sedan being lowered to the ground and heard the servants muttering among themselves. She peeked out from behind the silk curtains, and saw what was bothering them. A great hurricane was tearing up the trees on the distant horizon, drawing them towards disaster. Yet it was not the storm that caught her attention. She saw only a solitary yew standing near the top of the hill. She tugged the long red train of her wedding dress up around her calves and pulled herself out of the sedan, squelching into the mud.
Zhu Yingtai heard the servants begin to shout in panic, but she was too fast for them. Slipping from her shoes she ran up the hill, towards the storm. Rain lashed down and her dress slopped with water, but still she dragged herself forward, until she had reached the ancient yew where Liang Shanbo had been buried. She turned to see the servants catching up with her, ready to restrain her and carry out her father’s stern commands. As their panting bodies drew closer, she closed her eyes and threw herself towards the grave.
The servants stopped, confused. They rubbed their eyes, and stared at each other in disbelief. Zhu Yingtai seemed to have vanished into the very earth. Then they heard the sound of something cracking, and the soil on the grave began to shudder. As the servants turned and ran in fright, the grave split open, and out fluttered two white butterflies, united at last.
Yuying caught only the last few minutes of the film before the credits came scrolling up the screen. Her rice and aubergine from the small canteen had turned cold on the plate in front of her. What better end, she thought, than butterflies? If only she could bring herself to believe that death was just a change, a sudden righting of the mistakes of life: shadows wound into a brittle chrysalis from which we are reborn. Perhaps it was, she thought; she had been wrong so many times before, and if the world could change so utterly then why couldn’t she?
She returned to Jinyi’s ward, her head buzzing. She had been daughter, student, wife, farmer, mother, commune member, comrade, colleague, traitor, revolutionary, mute, grandmother, nursemaid, carer. What was left? She had shed so many skins that she was not sure that anything remained underneath. But there must be something left, she reasoned, for she had not turned into a butterfly, her story had not ended.
She sat down once more and took Jinyi’s brittle hand in hers. If only all stories were as simple as the story of the Butterfly Lovers. But she knew Jinyi would not be transformed, no matter what her daughters said to try to stop her worrying. All you can do, she thought, is try to hang on to the things you love while the undertow of history tugs away all your finely made plans.
Jinyi’s eyes crumpled open. He did not see the two butterlies fluttering towards him. He saw two snags of a colour he could not name in a place he did not recognise in a room that was blurring in and out of focus. He saw things. Things and other things; their names and purposes beyond him. He saw things he thought he ought to know, things he thought he should recognise but could not, no matter how hard he grasped in the darkness. Like the old woman sitting at his bedside, snoring lightly, with an open book laid across her lap. Wasn’t she that … that …that. He felt nervous, and so cold that he was shivering; he felt scared, and so hot that his eyes were on fire. He felt afraid, and the fact that he was not sure what it was that was so frightening only served to make him even more terrified.
His lips were sheets of sandpaper, grating against each other. Pain slithered through his body, sinking its teeth in harder whenever it grew restless. But there was something else also, some dull, deeper ache, that was knotting his body. Perhaps if the surgeons had been able to cut in that deep, they might have found the promise that bound the coronary arteries to the thumping muscle and kept it wringing life through the broken-down body. Jinyi managed to raise his eyes once more to the old woman keeping vigil beside his bedside and, for a second, before he slumped back to his fitful sleep, felt a little less scared.
Yuying opened her bag once more and pulled out a ravel of twine and a pair of needles. She would knit. This would be enough for now, she thought. To do something useful. To knot these days into a pattern she could recognise. To keep going. That was all she had ever done, she reflected, knitted, unpicked and knitted again, turning herself into whatever she needed to be. She would tie herself to the future; after all, people were always growing out of old clothes, and new babies were always being born. She would weave herself into the fabric of their lives, so that something might remain once Jinyi and she were gone and the whole sorry last century had been forgotten. She would do what her mother had done, and what her daughters now did, and fill the time with the skipping clicks of long needles.
As soon as she began, she started to feel strangely comforted. She remembered knitting for the hoped-for baby in her father’s house when the schools had shut down during the civil war and she remembered burying those knitted blankets with her first son. She remembered embroidering clothes in the shack in the country, in order to make money to buy her way out of a nightmare. She remembered knitting for a house of wailing toddlers after returning from the bread factory, while Jinyi stood at the stove waiting for dumplings to rise to the top of a bubbling pot. She remembered sewing clothes for herself and the other women being re-educated with her in the endless fields. She remembered knitting for her granddaughter Lian while Jinyi told the little girl stories about his journeys north, and how lucky she was to have a family who loved her. She remembered a thousand and one other little details that added up to make a life. She would carry on, because that was what she had always done.
Jinyi’s eyes opened once more a few minutes before midnight.
‘I love you,’ whispered the old woman hunched at his bedside.
‘Where am I?’ he rasped.
‘You’re right here, with me. Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right,’ she said, and clasped his hand tight in hers.
‘Who are you?’
So she told him. She started at their wedding day with the sound of the hooves clattering against the street outside the Bian mansion, and worked her way forward through the years. And as each story took flight from her tongue Yuying realised the same thing that I had long ago learnt in my bet with the Jade Emperor, that the heart survives on the tiniest details – driven by hunger, hardened by hope. Hearts are made, piece by piece, forged in the furnace of our feelings and fears and doubts and longings. Jinyi and Yuying had set their hearts against history, and they had won out. Without love, we would be lost among dreams. Truth, history, socialism, revolution – all are illusions. Love is the only thing that sustains, that keeps people moving, that ties them to the earth. This is what I would tell the Jade Emperor, and I realised that I did not care whether or not he would understand.
I left Yuying and Jinyi in the small hospital room. As I began my homeward journey, I thought of my old friend Chang Tzu, who, waking suddenly in the night, wondered whether he had dreamt that he was a butterfly or whether a butterfly was now dreaming that it was Chang Tzu.
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bsp; Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2011 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
First published in 2009 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
Copyright © Sam Meekings 2009
The moral right of Sam Meekings to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978–0–85790–007–4
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library