Village of Stone

by Xiaolu Guo

  After that, the bed next to us is empty. The old man stays awake most of the night, as do I. Perhaps he is too frightened to sleep. In the silence of the emergency ward, we have our thoughts to ourselves. Fear of death and the primal desire for survival are never far from our minds. I give the old man my hand, for I know that he needs me. After all, what else in this world can he cling to?

  He grips my hand tightly, as if he is trying to hold on to an entire world. We sit like this for a long time, neither of us saying a word. He has lost his voice and I am afraid to speak. I know that if I open my mouth, I will start crying right in front of him.

  In the morning, a nurse comes into the ward and inserts a long plastic feeding tube into the old man’s nose. It must be painful, for he keeps opening and closing his mouth and seems to be having trouble breathing. Using a large syringe, the nurse feeds a mixture of egg and corn soup into the tube and down into his stomach.

  At about noon, the old man finally has the urge to urinate. Because he is still weak and partially paralysed from the surgery, he is unable to do so. The pain must be excruciating, for his entire body is soaked with sweat, his face flushed a deep red and his breathing erratic. The doctor said that it was important for the patient to urinate after surgery, in order to expel the toxins from his system. A build-up of toxins can cause serious complications. The two nurses try everything they can think of to help. They pour water into glasses in the hope that the sound will encourage him to urinate, but even the faint sound of running water proves unbearable and excruciatingly painful for the old man. Two hours later, the doctor decides that the only option is to use a catheter. The process is unpleasant to watch, and involves another long plastic tube.

  Early in the evening, the old man wakes and the nurse comes in to give him his liquid food. She teaches me how to use the syringe and feeding tube, so that I can help feed him when the nurses are not around. Following the nurse’s example, I practise clearing the air from the tube and testing the temperature and consistency of the liquid to make sure it is neither too hot nor too cold, too thin nor too thick. Then I try my first feed.

  I have not yet mastered the technique. A few times I feed the liquid through the tube too quickly, causing the old man to choke. His silent choking terrifies me. Though he makes no sound, his face grows very red, his upper body begins to tremble and I can see the fear in his eyes.

  Later that night, we repeat the same process – another catheter, more food, and finally, the dawn of a new day …

  The third evening is deathly silent, and the old man remains in a semi-comatose state. The silence so frightens me that I resolve to go out the next day and buy a radio, just to relieve the silence and give him something to listen to while lying in bed. But as the old man’s condition grows more critical, I know that I will never have the chance. He dies at 6.20 a.m., just before dawn.

  The nurses immediately remove the feeding tube from his nose and disconnect the IV drip. They wheel away his hospital bed, and I release his hand for the last time.

  There are so many things that I did not have time to tell him. He will never know that my grandfather named me Little Dog because it was a lucky nickname, a talisman that would prevent the Sea Demon from snatching me from the shore.

  It is too late to tell him anything now. I had hoped, when his condition stabilised, to tell him about my grandparents, about all the things that happened in our three-storey house of stone, and about why their Little Dog had to leave the village. Even if he wasn’t really my father, even if he knew nothing about the Village of Stone, he came to find me before he died, and I sat by his bedside and held his hand. He seemed to know and understand me. His death brought us together, caused our fates to intertwine. And I am pregnant.

  But it is too late to tell him that, too.

  I sign my name to the old man’s death certificate. Time of death: 6.20 a.m. Witness: Coral Jiang.

  As I emerge from the hospital, I glance upwards and see that the sky is tinged with a faint red. It is late afternoon already and the intersections are thronged with bicyclists, pedalling with supreme indifference through traffic signals. I am still enveloped in the antiseptic smell of the hospital. I shed no tears. No longer do I feel plagued by unresolved questions about my father and my childhood in the Village of Stone. When I was growing up, I so hated that village and everything about it: the coldness of its inhabitants, the endless typhoons, the crumbling houses on the mountainside, my grandfather’s cruelty to my grandmother and, most of all, the secret shame of my experiences with the mute. But now I feel my hatred ebbing away. I realise that there is something cold about my hatred of the village, something as cold and cruel as the deaths that befell the village each year during the seventh moon. It is a hatred without reason. After all, what logical reason can a person have for hating a place?

  In truth, I did love some of the people in my home town. And as I watched that old man dying in the hospital, I realised that I retain some nostalgia for the Village of Stone, despite its constant typhoons and fishing boats dashed to pieces against the rocks. Because I held that old man’s hand and waited with him for death, I find that I can hate no longer. It is as if my love has finally been repaid. At last, the accounts are even.

  22

  A WEEK AFTER my father – or perhaps I should say the man who might have been my father – passed away, Red and I finish our last piece of salted eel. We have averaged about two portions per day, not a bad pace for such an enormous and overpoweringly salty piece of seafood. Red even took to making eel sandwiches garnished with crispy slices of lettuce. It sounds a strange sort of sandwich, but it was actually quite a delicious combination. Sometimes I packed rice and bits of steamed eel into a plastic lunchbox to take to work with me so that I could eat my lunch in the video shop while I advised customers on the latest movies and new releases. I doubt that the manager was particularly happy about having a video shop that smelled of eel, but I enjoyed my lunches. In this way, the eel fed us through the summer.

  Now that the eel is gone, the cat upstairs has stopped meowing.

  Red and I feel as if something important has disappeared from our lives. We sniff around the kitchen, hoping to find some trace of the old familiar smell on the chopping boards, pots and pans, white porcelain bowls and plastic lunchboxes. We hold them up to our noses, hoping that some last vestige of the scent might remain. But the pungent smell of eel, an odour so like the sea of the Village of Stone, a scent that Red said reminded him of a woman’s vagina, is fading from our rooms with each passing day. It leaves in its wake an emptiness that seems to permeate everything. Something has changed in our lives, and now our lives need another change, something new to fill the void.

  Red and I have muddled through the summer’s blistering heat like two wild animals slumbering in their mountain caves. Now that we have awoken, our first impulse is to escape our towering block of flats, this gigantic prison cell, and go out for a walk.

  We have no idea where we are going, nor do we care. All we want is to get out of our high-rise. We wander, directionless, down to the street. The sky above is clear and blue. The silver spokes spinning beneath bicyclists’ feet glint metallic in the autumn sunlight. The green leaves of the poplar trees cast dappled shadows on the ground below. And then there are the ‘scholar’ trees, so silent and fragile, shedding their pale yellow blossoms, carpeting the pavement, and even the passers-by, with flower petals. Idlers sitting at the kerbside reading newspapers soon find their shoulders cloaked with yellow petals.

  We spend hours wandering around the city and go to Liulichang, our favourite antiques street, to look at jade ornaments and other curios. We buy freshly roasted sweet potatoes from a man who cooks them over a large metal drum. The sweet potatoes are so piping hot that we have to blow on the orange flesh to cool it. I stop to admire the miniature carvings and delicate cut-paper pictures being sold on the street. The stone carvings are about the size of a thumb and wrapped in festive red paper. I examine the tiny
scenes with a magnifying glass; there are classical Chinese landscapes and scholars in their long Chinese robes. Red waits beside me, munching on his sweet potato and gazing back down the length of the narrow street filled with antiques. The mournful coo of pigeons fills the air and echoes from the glazed tile rooftops.

  Red stands beneath one of the ancient scholar trees that still line this street and cocks his head as if he is listening to something. Then he turns to me and says, ‘The blossoms are falling. I can hear them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The blossoms. I can hear them falling.’

  Red pops the last bit of sweet potato into his mouth and keeps walking.

  Two weeks later, Red finds a job writing a regular column for a sports magazine. It is the perfect job for him, and he has already written several Frisbee-related pieces for the same magazine. On the subject of Frisbee, Red is an expert without equal.

  Now that Red has a job and we can finally afford a new flat, we consider moving. But every time the subject comes up, I begin to feel a bit reluctant to leave. I have lived in the flat for a long time and it holds so many memories. If we move, I will miss all the things that once annoyed me. I would even miss the small corner of the balcony, with its brief forty-five minute spells of sunlight.

  After many days of indecision, Red finally puts an end to the discussion. ‘I don’t want us to live like hermit crabs any more,’ he says. ‘We should buy a little house of our own.’

  I agree, mostly because I like the way he says it.

  Just before the end of autumn, Red and I borrow all the money we can to buy a small house in the hills west of Beijing where property is very cheap. We are thrilled to have found a place in the countryside, where we will have more early morning sunshine and fresh air. When the weather is pleasant, we can climb to the top of the hill and gaze at the Great Wall snaking off into the distance.

  I decide to try my hand at sports, rather than simply standing on the sidelines and watching. I start playing Frisbee, and have soon begun to grasp the intricacies of Red’s tournament rules. For example, there are seven players to each team, and it is important for the players to work together to keep possession of the Frisbee. The team that manages to keep the Frisbee from touching the ground and acquire the most points by throwing it into the end zone is the winner. If the Frisbee touches the ground or is intercepted by the other team, possession changes to the opposing team. The main things to remember are not to move your feet when you have possession of the Frisbee and, most importantly, to hang on to it for dear life.

  Meanwhile, tremendous changes are taking place within my body. I am emerging from my cave. I begin to realise that my body is still young, and that I am capable of handing down warmth and love to another human being. My baby will not be a second-generation hermit crab. He or she will inherit a new start.

  As winter approaches, the forested hills around our house turn a brilliant red. The late autumn frosts set in, turning the leaves an even deeper shade of vermilion. A single gusty night can blow away half of the leaves. Far from all of the sounds of the city, Red and I sit outside our doorway and look out at the hills covered in green bristlegrass. I turn to Red and tell him that I want to go back.

  ‘Go back?’ he asks. ‘Go back where?’

  ‘To the Village of Stone. I want to go back and see it again.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Red sounds dubious.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘This is the same Village of Stone that the eel came from?’

  I nod.

  ‘All right,’ he says, ‘but I’m going with you. And I’ll bring my Frisbee, too.’

  We burst out laughing at the same time.

  23

  WE LEAVE BEIJING and travel three days and nights by train. The days and nights seem endless, the mountain tunnels interminable, but at long last, we emerge from beneath the mountain and I see my childhood village.

  We disembark at the long-distance bus station. The station is in the same location I remember, but no longer is it the tiny kingdom over which the old stationmaster reigned supreme. The staff of one has expanded to include ticket takers, ticket sellers and timetablers. The three vomit-splattered buses have been displaced by a whole fleet of new buses, of different makes and models. The old stationmaster is nowhere to be seen, but I do catch a glimpse of a young man dressed in a white T-shirt and tight blue jeans who is his spitting image. The man stands in one corner of the depot, giving instructions to the staff. I notice that the bus timetable in the waiting room now lists frequent departures to and from most of the major cities in China, and that the bus station yard is filled with long-distance coaches from all over. These days, traversing the mountains is a simple matter for the village fishermen. They can go anywhere they want and come back again whenever they wish.

  Red and I stay in the Village of Stone for three days.

  There is nothing hidden, nothing artful in the sea or in the snaking, narrow alleyways laid out so guilelessly before Red’s eyes. I wonder what secrets of my past incarnation those cobblestone streets might be trying to communicate to him. I watch Red’s face carefully for any change of expression, but he seems as placid and silent as ever. He doesn’t ask me a single question.

  It is as if Red has been here before, as if he somehow already knows this place.

  Number 13 Pirate’s Alley. My childhood house is still standing, the same as always. It is the same three-storey house of stone that I remember, with the same termite-riddled wooden front door and cramped, narrow staircase, the same small second-floor window looking out at the ocean. Even the charred electricity pole listing outside the front door is the same. I can still see my grandmother, dressed in mourning black, clinging to the pole and weeping for her dead husband, and the crowd of fishermen’s wives clustered around the coffin, gossiping about us.

  The old wooden dining table still occupies the same place in the downstairs kitchen, although the familiar pot of shrimp paste has disappeared.

  It is the scene of my childhood, but it is no longer my childhood home. My grandfather’s chamber pot and creaky bamboo bed are gone, as are my grandmother’s vat of water and her statues of Guanyin and Mazu. The village housing authority says that the house still belongs to me, although in the interim, they have lent it to a young couple who run a hairdresser’s shop. When I visit the house, the couple are not at home, so I don’t get the chance to meet them. But I do meet their son, a seven-or eight-year-old boy who is downstairs watching television. I notice that the television stands in exactly the same place my grandmother used to keep her statues. The rough stone walls have been covered with a new coat of white paint, and now boast a large poster advertising imported French hair dye. The wall formerly occupied by the sideboard is taken up by a large plastic hairdryer and two large mirrors mounted side by side. Below the mirrors, there is a counter cluttered with scissors and combs of various shapes and sizes.

  The boy tells me that his parents have gone to market. I cannot remember what day of the lunar calendar it is, so I am unsure whether it is a regular village market day, or some special event or village fair. My sense of time is geared to the modern calendar of city life, rather than to the lunar calendar of the villagers.

  Next door, Boy Waiting’s family still has the same small courtyard and flowering jasmine tree, but their seven daughters have grown up and moved away. After Boy at Last died, Boy Waiting’s parents never succeeded in having a son. The six older sisters have husbands and children of their own now, and Boy Waiting has married a young man from a neighbouring village. He is not a fisherman, but an employee at the local seafood cold processing plant. Their life together seems happy and tranquil. Boy Waiting’s older sister, Golden Phoenix, spent several years performing with the provincial theatre troupe until she grew too old to continue playing the ingénue roles and returned to the village, where they had established a new opera troupe. Golden Phoenix was put in charge of their scenery and theatrical props. She married an actor known for
his lead role in the opera Tiger King: Thief of Hearts, thus fulfilling her parents’ prophecy that she would fall in love with an actor. After retiring from the stage, her husband was promoted to director of the village theatre troupe, and is now considered a bit of a local celebrity. Boy Waiting’s father, the Captain, has finally retired after a lifetime spent at sea. Though he has recently celebrated his seventy-third birthday and seems quite elderly, he cannot quite bear to sell his fishing boat. He puts a new coat of paint on the boat every year and rents it out to some young men in the village in return for a percentage of their annual profits. As long as he still has his boat, he will always be the Captain.

  Although the Captain is no longer a fisherman, he enjoys repeating his favourite maritime saying:

  ‘The only thing separating a sea scavenger from the Sea Demon is three inches of wooden plank.’

  Boy Waiting’s mother is still alive and well. I don’t know whether she still grieves over the loss of her youngest child, her Boy at Last.

  Nobody brings up the topic of Mr Mou while I am there, but I am sure that he leads the same normal life as the other men in the village. He must have a house and children. Perhaps he is still teaching at the village school, or maybe he has found a different job by now. In my heart he is still beautiful and pure, quiet and peaceful, the same Mr Mou who stood with me on that moonlit mountaintop. I have no wish to disturb him or to talk about him or even to see him again. He occupies a special place in my heart, a quiet corner where he can live on, forever undisturbed.

  One new addition to the village is a high breakwater constructed on the seashore. I hear that it does little to protect the village from typhoons, and that the high waves still manage to flow over the breakwater and threaten the stone houses on the other side.