by Geoff Ryman
You should be able to turn a corner and find home again, with its undrained marshes in the valley floor. The valley was left unploughed for the waterfowl, the foxes, the stars, and young lovers.
Oh, Mrs Tung, I was a friend of yours, and still I did not know you. I never came close. After you had sat me on your knee and showed me pages of clothes and beautiful women. Even though I saw you every day, still I did not know you. I never asked you about Japanese airplanes. Was it true that the landlord put poachers' heads on spikes?
An answer came from somewhere. Yes.
You see? No one believes that now. People think it was just Communist fairy tales. We lose, we lose so much.
The voice came back. Only everything.
It was as though Old Mrs Tung had come in and sat down.
Once there was a cold snap and I dropped a shirt from the laundry line and it broke.
And Mae saw that world: of rising with the dawn, of bending all day jamming rice plants into mud.
In the morning, you would hear all the men going off, singing songs.
Sing them for me, said Mae in her mind. And stood up to work.
Both of them sang old work songs that only Mrs Tung remembered – simple songs about someone whose work trousers would not stay up, or about the love of the porcupine for the wood louse. She remembered jokes that the villagers had told, jokes about moths. Who was so innocent now to joke about moths, sole leather, or candles?
Mae hung up her laundry, singing to herself in a loud, rough, peasant voice.
'Mrs Chung?' asked a young voice.
Mae turned and had to blink. The round young face could have been from any era: the 1940s, the 1980s, or the 2000s. The low rope collar of the dress told her what year it was.
This was one of Saturday's graduates, Han An. 'I came to thank you for my graduation dress.'
'You are welcome,' said Mae, and bowed. An was the daughter of a woman who had been Mae's best friend when they were children. They hardly saw each other now.
'We heard that you were not well after the Test.'
Mae shook her head. No, she was not well at all.
The young woman looked shaken. 'We all thought that, as fashion expert, you would be most at home with the new things…'
Mae started to say what had happened, and found she could not. It was too complicated and too simple at the same time. She could phrase it, I am haunted by a ghost. She could say: I stole part of Mrs Tung's soul. She could say, I was in Airmail when she died. She could say: I think Airmail is a place.
All of it would be true and all of it false. Language, like Mrs Tung herself, was an old, fragile footbridge, breaking through.
Mae stood with the wet sheets folded over her arm. Everything foxed her. An saw this. 'Let me help you,' said An.
An had bought cakes of gratitude. She passed these to Mae to hold out of reach of Mr Ken's dog, and began to nip clothes pegs onto the sheets.
If I was still concerned about being fashion expert, Mae thought, I would be alarmed. I would be alarmed at this loss of status. But I cannot be alarmed. I cannot help it.
An led her back into her own kitchen. She made Mae tea. Mae unwrapped the cakes, and she began to weep. She wept copiously, like a natural spring welling up out of the depths of the earth.
They were old-fashioned cakes, cakes such as the villagers had baked for each other for hundreds of years; beautiful little cakes made mostly from air, old rice, spare sugar, preserved sweet things in tiny precious slices. A story of hundreds of years of poverty and gratitude was told in those cakes. It seemed to her that Old Mrs Tung, all her friends and her mother's friends, all of the village women from the hard centuries, had clustered around to receive that thank-you.
Joe came home early, with Dr Bauschu, the county doctor.
'You cannot work, wife,' said Joe, heartsick, as if she were a favourite machine that had broken.
She paused and contemplated what must be true. 'My heart is too full,' she replied.
And suddenly, she remembered him, she saw him. Tiny, mischievous, in shorts – the child Joe. She saw him as Mrs Tung saw him. Oh, what an angel! A beautiful, merry little fellow in shorts, running amongst the others, chuckling and buffing them on the head, still laughing when they cuffed him back. He grew quickly and was too soon developed. Joe had ceased to learn.
There was little enough mischief in Joe now, or laughter.
'Oh, husband! What we have all lost, what we will all go on losing through all of history, it cannot be weighed. It cannot be measured!'
Her handsome, comic husband stood helpless, scratching his head. Whoever had heard of a wife who could not work because she perceived the weight of history?
Dr Bauschu asked her to sit down and roll up her sleeve. He was a hard, thin man who circulated among half a dozen villages with a battered old black briefcase. He had always been highly critical of the fashion expert – she did too much massaging with oils, too much dental flossing, services on the borderline where beauty crossed into health.
He seemed quite pleased that she was ill. 'So, you see, when illness really comes, even you call for the doctor.'
How unpleasant could he be? I am in mourning, fool, for a whole way of life.
Dr Bauschu insisted on taking her temperature, her pulse. He prodded her for lumps and peered down her throat. 'It is a nervous condition triggered by the trauma of that Test. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong. I suggest a drawing-off of humours.'
Even Mae knew that he had ceased to be scientific. He heated her good glasses, and set them on her lower back, to suck and draw.
'The doctor used to come every six months,' said Mae, sleepily, 'in a white van with a red crescent. We would all line up for treatment, even if there were nothing wrong. There always was something to cure: a tooth or a cut or head lice.'
The doctor's glasses gleamed as he snapped shut his bag. She was talking nonsense. The fashion expert had fallen.
That night most of the village crowded into Mae's single room.
Mae's sister-in-law, Mrs Wang, barracked around Mae's kitchen, trying to brew tea by looking in all the wrong places, scattering arrangements. Joe's brother Siao quietly followed her, replacing things. Ten of the Soongs, who were connected to Mae by various marriages crowded into her house. She couldn't even think of some of their names.
Mae's mother exclaimed to Old Mrs Soong. 'It is God's will. We have sinned and gone on sinning, so God punishes us.'
'Nonsense, Mother,' said Mae. 'God doesn't punish. He doesn't reward. He lets us get on with it.'
'Her father was murdered,' said her desolate mother, handkerchief gesturing towards Mae, as if that explained everything. 'She lost her sister and her daughter…'
All the family legends came out. Mae was too tired and harassed for them now. Wasted love was wearisome. Her handsome older sister Missy, who died… Mae's elder daughter, who also died… Why remind her of that now? Being with people, feeling so ill, reminded Mae of the worst of her past. She wanted everything gone. She wanted sleep, but they had all come to make her feel better.
Teacher Shen came, looking solemn. He brought his beautiful wife Suloi, in case anyone misunderstood his friendship with Mae.
'Teacher Shen,' Mae said, pleased to see him. Suloi had Kwan's face, the face of their minority, the Eloi. Mrs Shen was just as beautiful as Kwan. Even now, here, she was merry.
Mrs Shen asked, 'How is our fashion expert?'
'Very confused,' Mae replied. 'I am more a history expert now.'
She looked up at Teacher Shen's face and, lo, remembered him as a skinny, put-upon little boy. Old Mrs Tung had worried so about him. She had wished she had more books to give this solemn child.
'You should have gone for that exam,' Mae said sleepily, 'to be a civil servant.'
Teacher Shen blinked, his face darted up towards Kwan, who nodded once downwards.
'I could not afford the time or the books,' he said quietly. 'So I took the teaching course.'
> 'Remember the tiny white book? About the rabbits?' Mae murmured. Old Mrs Tung had found it for him, a book of his very own.
His face was a wan smile, his eyes unblinking. He produced from his pack. 'This one,' he said.
It was a tiny battered book, stained by childhood, and it said in the language of their people The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
The Teacher turned to others in the room about him, and his staring eyes were filling. 'It's true,' he whispered to the room. 'It's true.'
Shen's Eloi wife edged closer to Mae, on her knees, smiling. She took Mae's other hand.
'You have become a prophet,' she said, in a very quiet voice.
'Of the past,' said Mae. What would it be like, just once, to have a moment to herself?
Standing among her friends were Sunni and her husband Mr Haseem. He wanted this house.
The next day was Mrs Tung's funeral.
Mae watched impassively as the cardboard coffin was lowered into the rocky ground. The mosque looked small, high on the hill, its whitewash peeling. The whole hillside looked peeling.
It was somewhat strange to see your own body buried, to see people you did not really know daub their faces. To know that you had lived so long that there was no one left to mourn you. Mrs Tung's grandsons were grown men, sad, yes, discomfited in suits. One was a mechanic in Yeshibozkent, another drove buses. They would be back to business by the afternoon.
Mae was not in mourning; for her, Mrs Tung was not dead. A body was only earth. Mrs Tung was with her in Air.
Sunni Haseem came to her and took Mae's hand. 'I am so sorry,' said Sunni, conventionally.
'Why?' Mae asked.
'She led a full life,' Sunni agreed.
And Mae remembered Mrs Tung making love in the middle of battle, in the marsh.
She remembered the tops of the reeds being cut down by bullets as Mrs Tung embraced. Mrs Tung's young man leaned back and smiled, and Mae remembered that smile. It was careless, as if to say, Life is not worth having if it's not worth losing. And Mae knew: The boy was killed.
'She died at an honourable age,' said Sunni.
Oh, fashion wife with your little kitchen and lack of love, what do you know about it? What have you ever given for anything?
'Honourable?' Mae repeated. As if all Mrs Tung had done was darn tea towels. 'She was a guerrilla; she hid soldiers in the school.'
Kwan and Joe came forward, and took her arm. 'Let's get you back home,' Kwan said.
Mae stood her ground. 'Why do people treat the past as if it had lost a battle that the present won?' she demanded, fists clenched. 'Why do they treat it as if it faded because it was weak?'
Joe looked baffled and distressed.
'I don't know,' said Kwan.
'The past is real,' said Mae. 'It's still here.'
'Then maybe so is the future,' said Kwan.
Through those weeks, into June, Mae slept late and long.
She grew plump through inactivity, dreaming of ninety years' worth of human voices: children, adults, the barking of favourite dogs long since dead, the sloshing of water on burnt-out canoes long since rotted away.
Gradually she found she could make meals again, do some tidying-up, or sweep. She managed to banish her sister-in-law from her kitchen. Her husband Joe began to look relieved. His work clothes were ready again for him in the mornings, and his breakfast of steamed noodles.
But Mae would stand near her tiny kitchen window, to catch a glimpse of Mr Ken. Her heart would go out to him, with two young daughters late in life, leaving for his fields in the earliest dawn, long before her Joe. Her heart would go out to him, for the infant and small boy he had been, and for his plump face, thin waist, and the quick, nimble way he did things.
She kept thinking of Old Mrs Tung in the reeds. How the dress had come up, the trousers down, and how Mrs Tung had opened up to her lover, fully, completely, loose and abandoned like a sail in the wind, wanting him to fill her with babies, nothing held back.
Old Mrs Tung had known that, prim and delicate as she may have looked.
The fashion expert had not, for all her talk of beauty.
The lipsticks, the oil in the hair, the flower hairgrips – they were all signals; signals that said, Love me, I have not been loved. That was why they had power over her, why she was drawn to them, why she needed them. She had wanted to festoon herself with flags, saying, Come to me, I cannot come to you.
Now she simply wanted Mr Ken.
CHAPTER 4
It was night and Mae was half asleep in bed when she heard Joe come home.
Back from the Teahouse, Joe hissed and giggled at his brother Siao. Someone else was with them. 'So where is the wife?' a man asked. Mae recognized the voice: Sunni's husband had come back with them.
Joe murmured something polite and indistinct.
'Back at work? In the fashion business?'
Joe chuckled something; Sunni's husband chuckled back.
'Good to be the man of the house again, ah? Ha-ha!'
Joe told his brother Siao to fetch the whisky. Siao grumbled, fed up with Joe playing the older brother.
'Oh! No – the good stuff for Mr Haseem!' Joe exclaimed in frustration. A clink of glasses. Joe would be pink-faced in the evening and red-eyed in the morning. Joe was worst when drunk; he simply became a sheepish goon. Why couldn't Sunni's husband just come bearing good wishes and go?
Because, thought Mae, Sunni's husband does not bear good wishes. Mae lay still and focused with her ears.
'I can help,' said Sunni's husband. Mae could almost hear the wallet unflap, unfold. She kicked her way free from the sheets, and threw on a robe. Then she thought: No. That is not enough. She needed to look like a fashion expert.
Everything worked against her: the dark and the slovenly disorder the alcove had become. She tried to move quietly; she wanted to appear suddenly, in order, pristine, to say, We do not need your help Sunni's-man, sir.
'How much?' Joe exclaimed in wonder.
Mae fumbled for her best dress in the dark. Her hand struck a hanger, and she felt the dress. The curtain-folds of the collar seemed to be right. She hauled it on over her head and ran her fingers through the bird's-nest tangle of her hair. She patted the windowsill and found a hairgrip. Hands shaking with urgency, she pulled her hair back as tightly as she could bear it and slipped on the grip.
Everything felt lopsided – her face, the grip, the dress hanging off one shoulder but straining around her belly. Shoes. Where were her shoes?
Mr Haseem's voice drawled as if over a woman. 'Enough to clean up the old barn, set up a byre, buy a few goats. Ah? Ha-ha.'
Don't, Joe, fool, that's how he does it, he loans too much money and then takes the farm in payment. Sandals. Inappropriate with a best dress, but anything, now. I feel like a haystack, thought Mae. And pulled back her curtain with gracious slowness.
Around her table, Sunni's husband was leaning back, at home, feet on a chair, rice-whisky bottle opened and half empty.
'Wife!' called Joe, as if overjoyed to see her. Siao looked up in drunken dolefulness.
Faysal Haseem appraised her with narrow eyes, and a grin.
'We are honoured,' said Sunni's husband, pushing a whisky glass to her in her own kitchen. 'You wear your best dress for us.'
'She couldn't find another!' Joe thought this was very funny and laughed, opening his mouth like a duck's bill.
Mae said, 'You are very kind to offer us help.'
'Aren't I?' said Sunni's-man, and lifted up the glass.
'He has already loaned us one hundred riels!' said Joe.
'Oh,' said Mae. 'Then you must give them back.'
'Naw,' growled Sunni's husband, and sloshed the whisky around in his mouth.
'One hundred riels, wife! A new barn! Goats! We will be rich.'
'Mr Haseem is far too kind.' Mae sat down, trying to get her business brain to work. She was not up to cunning. 'But how will you pay him back, husband?'
'Oh, we can come to some ki
nd of arrangement,' said Joe, besotted, foolish.
'No problem about payments!' said Sunni's husband, not so drunk that his eyes did not fix on Mae and twinkle with mischief. 'If it comes to it, you can pay out of your fashion business.'
'Ah,' said Joe in scorn. 'We will not need that.'
'You do not have it,' said Mae, with a sick and weary chuckle. Could not Joe see that? Mae had been ill through the spring fashion season.
'We will have an ox, two oxen,' said Joe, with a bit of swagger.
'Two oxen cannot pay back one hundred riels.' Mae clasped her head to keep her brains together. All she could do was play the game as if everything were above board.
So she asked straight out: 'Please, Mr Haseem, there is no way for us to pay the money back. This is a very bad business proposition for you.'
'I think it is a good one,' he said, red-faced, knowing exactly what he was doing.
'You will lose the money!' Oh, she had been a fool to try to dress! Why did she dress? To show him they still had an extra source of money? All the village knew now that was unlikely. All her dressing-up had done was delay her until it was too late. So much for fashion.
'I won't lose the money,' said Sunni's husband. 'Will I, Joe?'
'Certainly not,' said Joe, dazzled. He unfolded the actual money in a fan.
'Joe, you are drunk,' Mae said in desperation. She looked at Siao, who took light little puffs of his cigarette and gazed at his shoes. He didn't like this, either.
'Siao,' she pleaded. 'Tell him. This is your father's house! Tell him that we won't be able to pay back the money!'
Siao glanced up at her and rubbed his whole face, once, with his hand. He had managed to grow a wispy beard, and around his mouth were strings of muscle. He flicked ash. 'Mr Haseem has been very kind, but we've all hit the bottle. Perhaps we should say thank you, Mr Haseem, and give our answer in the morning.'
'Answer in the morning?' Joe said. 'A friend generously offers money and you insult him by saying we have to consider?'
'I am saying that perhaps Mr Haseem and ourselves will feel different in the morning,' Siao said.