by Xu, Lei
“Young grandson, how quickly your speech turns from sweet to sour!” The old man showed his gold tooth again in an evil grin. “It matters little that the old gentleman has passed on. I’m not asking too much of you. Why don’t you just take a look at what I brought, if only so Lao Yang won’t lose face, eh?”
I looked at him as he forced himself to put on an insincere smile and realized he’d probably never go away unless I took a peek at whatever he had. I supposed I ought to do this just to save Lao Yang’s face and to keep him from berating me the next time I saw him.
I nodded. “I’ll take a look but I can’t guarantee the authenticity of your piece.”
I knew there was a collection of more than twenty silk volumes written in ink from the Warring States Period, and that each volume was different from the rest. The chapter that my grandfather had taken from a grave was only a fragment of just one volume, but still it was extremely important. I had a few of these volumes packed away in the bottom of boxes and they were my dearest treasures, which I wouldn’t trade for all the money on the face of the earth.
The old man with the gold tooth took a piece of white cloth out of his breast pocket. As soon as I saw it I felt even more annoyed—hell, it had to be fake.
“Oh, this precious thing really shouldn’t have been traveling around in hiding like that. It’ll fall into shreds if it’s just given a little shake,” he said, lowering his voice to seem mysterious and secretive. “If it weren’t for my connections, this piece would have gone overseas long ago. I suppose my keeping it here in our country is at the very least a service to the Chinese people.”
I laughed in his face. “Looks like you’re a grave robber yourself! I bet you don’t dare to sell it because it’s a national treasure. Who would want to lose his head in a public execution?”
I seemed to have struck upon the truth because the old man’s face turned green. But because he needed a favor from me, he ignored my rudeness.
“That is not precisely true,” he said mildly. “Every trade has its own honorable standards. Everyone remembers that when your grandfather was a grave robber, his awe-inspiring reputation for ethical behavior was known far and wide.”
Now my own complexion lost its normal color and I spoke through clenched teeth. “If you mention my grandfather again, you can get the hell out and take your treasure with you.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll stop. Just take a quick look, so I can be on my way.”
When I unfolded the piece of white cloth, I knew immediately that this was a well-preserved volume of the silk books from the Warring States Period, but it was certainly not the one my grandfather had stolen in Changsha. It looked like a counterfeit made a few dynasties after the original had been created. That was to say, this was an ancient forgery, and such an object would only embarrass anyone who possessed it.
I smiled. “This looks like a counterfeit of the Han dynasty. How can I say this…it’s fake, but at the same time it’s not. It’s real, but at the same time it also isn’t. How the hell can anybody tell if it’s a copy of an original volume or just a careful fabrication of something that never existed? I don’t know what to say.”
“So is it like the one your grandfather stole?”
“To be honest with you, my grandfather himself didn’t even take a good look at the one he stole before the American swindled him out of it. I really can’t answer your question.” It was hard enough to sway you from your initial confidence in what you brought me, I thought, and now I even have to pretend that I give a damn about you or what you have carried in here. But the old man with the gold tooth seemed to have no doubts about my sincerity as he sighed, “What bad luck for me. If I can’t find an American who’s stupid enough to buy this, then there really is no hope of my making any money from it.”
“How come you’re so concerned about this particular volume?” I asked.
“I won’t hide the truth from you, young fellow. I’m no grave robber. Look at my bony old body—it’s neither fast nor agile. But my friend is really an expert and I have no idea what kind of game he’s playing. In any case, every man has his own reasons for what he does.” He smiled and shook his head. “I better quit asking questions and take off,” and he began to walk away without looking back.
I looked down, and realized I still had his piece of silk in my hands. Suddenly I could see something imprinted on the sheet, a foxlike face of a man. His two eyes had no pupils and looked three-dimensional, as if they were convex forms protruding from the cloth. I gasped and took a deep breath. I had never seen anything like this before, and I was sure it must be a valuable treasure. Once Lao Yang got out of prison, we could make a few counterfeits from this piece, just enough to keep me amused—and solvent. I hurried outside, looked around, and saw the old man with the gold tooth scurrying back in my direction.
He must be coming back to retrieve his piece of silk, I thought, so I quickly went back inside, grabbed my digital camera, snapped a few photos of the cloth, and headed out the door. My face almost hit the tip of the old man’s nose. “You forgot something,” I said.
* * *
My grandfather was a “dirt prowler,” as it was commonly termed, a grave robber. The reason he went into this trade was not surprising. It was what we would call today a family business. The year my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather turned thirteen, a severe drought plagued Changsha in central China and famine naturally followed. Even people with money were starving to death.
There was nothing in the streets or in any corner of Changsha that could be used to make a living except for the ancient tombs that could be found there. And as the saying goes, those living on a mountain will survive by using what they can find on the mountain; those who have nothing but graves nearby will rob the graves to stay alive. Only heaven knows how many people died from starvation in Changsha during those years, except for those from my grandfather’s village, who were all well-fed and well-dressed. And that was only possible because they used what they dug from the graves to barter with foreigners for food.
After some time had passed, just as in other trades, grave robbing also began to acquire its own rules and techniques. By the time my grandfather’s generation took up the job, grave robbers were divided into two groups, the northern and the southern factions. My grandfather belonged to the southern faction, who were experts at excavating soil by using the Luoyang shovel. The most talented of them all could ascertain the depth and the age of the soil above a tomb simply through their sense of smell.
The northern faction would never use the Luoyang shovel, but were still very good at figuring out the exact location and the structure of the tombs, a difficult skill few people could attain.
There was something strange about the northern faction. According to my grandfather, too many of them were sly and deceitful. As if robbing a grave wasn’t enough to do, they had to create different rituals to observe such as kowtowing to the dead, which led to an overwhelming bureaucracy overseeing the trade. In contrast, the southern faction had few regulations and was unconcerned about offending the dead.
The northern faction claimed the southerners were pretentious and conceited, denounced them as a disgrace to their culture, and said that every grave robbed by a southerner was left in a state of complete ruin. They spread rumors that southern grave robbers even dragged out the dead bodies and put the corpses up for sale.
The southern faction called the northerners hypocrites and no more than thieves who posed as honorable men. The conflict escalated to the boiling point, so much so that “a battle for corpses” took place and in the end, the two factions were divided by terminology as much as they were by the Yangtze River. The northern faction called the trade “tomb raiding,” while the southern faction called it “digging up the soil.”
The Luoyang shovel wasn’t invented until after the two factions had completely severed all connections, so the northern grave robbers refused to lower themselves by touching a shovel that had been invented
by southerners.
When he was young, my grandfather did not know how to read; he only knew how to rob graves. Later, he took some literacy classes, even though for him learning a new word was as bad as being tortured. But thanks to his education, he was able to record his adventures.
He was the young boy who wounded the blood zombie fifty years ago. He wrote about this and all else that had happened in his journal, in his own words and in his own hand. My grandmother was an intellectual, the daughter of an illustrious and well-respected family. She was deeply attracted to my grandfather’s stories and fell in love with him. My grandfather married her and settled down in Hangzhou, and his journal became a family treasure.
As for how he had survived the Changsha ordeal, or what became of his older brother, their father, or Lao Yantou, my grandfather refused to tell me. He would weep when I asked about this and say, “That is not a story for children.” No matter how sweetly I asked, or how charmingly I begged for details, he would not utter even half a word about it. As I grew up, my childhood curiosity faded, but as far as I can remember, I never saw a great-uncle who had only one eye and one hand.
On the day that I met the old man with the gold tooth, I closed the shop early and sent my salesclerk home. Before I locked up for the night, a text message came in on my cell phone: “9 o’clock, Huangsha Chicken-Eye.”
It was from my father’s third brother, Uncle Three, in a secret code that meant a new shipment had arrived. Another message closely followed: “Spine of a dragon. Come quickly.”
My eyes sparkled. My Uncle Three had an unusually keen intuition. “Spine of a dragon” meant something exceptional had come his way. Anything he deemed exceptional I had to see for myself.
Quickly I drove to my uncle’s place. On one hand, I wanted to have a look at what this good stuff was. On the other hand, I wanted to show him the photos I had just taken and see if he could tell me anything about the figure on the cloth. I hoped he could since he was the only person I knew who had any direct contact with the past generation of grave robbers.
As I drew near the stairway of his building, I heard him shouting from above, “You goddamn kid. Told you to hurry up, and then you take ages. What use is there for you to show up now?”
“Shit,” I yelled back, “are you serious? You had good stuff and you didn’t even wait for me to take a look at it? Why did you have to sell it so fast?”
As I said this, a young man walked out my uncle’s front door, carrying a long object on his back that was wrapped tightly in a piece of cloth. At first glance I could tell it was part of an ancient weapon. Obviously it was very valuable, and no matter what the man had paid my uncle, it could probably be resold for ten times what he given Uncle Three for it.
I pointed to the young man, and Uncle nodded and shrugged. I felt a stab of despair, wondering how much our capital would dwindle with these kinds of business deals and if my shop might go bankrupt this year as a result.
I walked upstairs, made myself a cup of coffee, and told my uncle about the old man with the gold tooth who had come to pry into our family history. I was certain Uncle Three, famous for his quick temper, would share my anger toward the man who had annoyed me so much. Instead my uncle assumed an unfamiliar, benign personality and calmly printed out the photos on my digital camera. As he put them under the light for a closer look, I was able to see the change of expression that washed over his face.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”
Frowning, he muttered, “It can’t be…this looks like a map of the ancient tombs!”
Chapter Three
THE TEMPLE OF SEEDS
I looked at the pictures I’d taken and then back at my uncle’s face. It didn’t look like he was kidding around. Was it possible that Uncle Three had reached the point where he could see a map drawn in a portion of text? It was hard to see any proof of extrasensory perception in this crazy guy who cared for nothing but eating, drinking, gambling, and visiting prostitutes.
Yet I could see he was excited by what he saw in my photos—he shuddered as he said to himself, “How did these people get a hold on such a magnificent piece while I have never been so lucky? This is truly good fortune. It looks like they still haven’t figured out what they have. We can still catch up and go far beyond them before they even begin to dig up the ground.”
I was completely confused, “Uncle, perhaps I’m a bit of an imbecile—but can you really see a map in the midst of such tiny words?”
“You don’t have a clue about what I see here. This is called script mapping—that means the details of the location and the geography of the place are written down and described in words. Other common people probably wouldn’t be able to read this. But thank heaven for me, your uncle, who still has something called experience. On the entire face of the earth, I’m positive that no more than ten individuals—apart from me—could read this.”
My Uncle Three didn’t know a lot but from an early age, he had studied many unusual, eccentric, and unorthodox ancient texts and code words. To summarize, whatever was exotic he learned to analyze. The Five Illustrations of the Wooden Text from Xixia; the earliest Nuzhen Ya characters—it was nothing for him to explain these things clearly and talk about them in knowledgeable detail. That he knew what this arcane script painting was surprised me not one bit.
But he was also the type of guy who liked to refuse to explain what he knew, bragging on and on about his cleverness. If I wanted to find out what he had discovered, I needed to play the part of a humble halfwit. Looking as naïve as possible, I asked, “Oh, so does it say to turn left and then turn right, then at the tree ahead turn right again, and once you see a well then make your way down into it? Is it that sort of thing?”
Uncle sighed. “Who can teach an idiot? Your comprehension skills are so poor. As far as I can see, our family went right downhill after you came into it.”
“What are you saying? My father didn’t teach me any of this stuff and it certainly isn’t anything I was born knowing.”
“Listen carefully,” he gloated, “this type of script mapping is in fact a kind of secret code. It has a strict format, and if you can draw what the text describes according to that format, you then will have a whole and complete map. So don’t badmouth this piece of cloth. Who knows what sort of detailed information it contains—it might even tell the exact number of bricks to be found in a specific area.”
I was intrigued. Never in my life had anyone in my family ever let me accompany them on a grave robbing expedition. But this time Uncle Three had to take me with him so I could enlarge my body of experience, grab a few treasures, and get out of my current economic crisis. As I contemplated this scenario, I asked, “Can you tell from the writing whose grave it refers to? Maybe it’s some historical figure who had power and influence.”
Uncle smiled boastfully. “I can’t completely understand it all right now. But it looks like this grave belonged to one of the nobles from the State of Lu during the Warring States Period. Just from seeing that the location of his grave was recorded on silk with such a complex type of script mapping, I can say that this person’s status was extremely high. What’s more, that his burial ground was so heavily concealed implies that there it holds plenty of riches. It is certainly worth a visit.”
I was amazed to see the glow in his eyes. On an ordinary day, this old guy was too lazy to step out the door of his own house. Could he possibly want to search for this grave himself? If so, I thought, that would be another strange piece of family lore that would echo through the ages. “Uncle,” I asked, “do you really intend to go and dig up this plot of soil?”
Patting me on the shoulder, he looked at me condescendingly and said, “It’s all right. You just don’t know. Let me tell you: the graves of the five dynasties of Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing certainly have treasures, but those can only be described as treasures with superb craftsmanship that excel anything found in nature. The Warring States Period was a
n era containing royal tombs from long-distant centuries. You would never be able to imagine what was put in those graves. The objects in the tombs of this period are things that glorified the powerful rulers of that time and represent the supreme glories of an unknown age. They are things that no longer exist in the living world! How could I not want to have a look for myself?”
“Are you so sure? Perhaps there is nothing inside this grave.”
“That’s impossible. Didn’t you see this pattern?” He pointed to the bizarre foxlike face. “This is from the earliest times of the State of Lu, the mask that a person wore when they were ceremoniously sacrificed in a funeral rite. The person buried in this grave must have enjoyed an exceptional status—maybe even more distinguished than the emperor’s at that time.”
I blurted out, “Oh, bullshit.”
Uncle gave me a reproving look and moved to put away the photos. Pressing my hands down on the pictures before he could pick them up, I smiled at him. “Uncle, don’t rush to put these away. Remember I was the one who took these photos in the first place. You must take me with you to see everything you’ve just described to me—it’s only fair.”
“Impossible!” he shouted. “Digging up this grave is not as simple as you might think. You’ll find no air-conditioning in a tomb, just layer after layer of elaborate traps which could end the whole adventure in a heartbeat. You are your father’s only child. If anything should happen to you, your old dad would without a doubt skin me alive.”
“Then screw it! Pretend that I never came!” I quickly grabbed the photos, turned around and walked away. I knew my Uncle Three well. Once he came across something that interested him, whether it was an antique or a woman, he would abandon every principle he had. I aimed with precision at this personality flaw and sure enough, I had gone only a few steps when he surrendered.