The mayor gestures to the house and explains that it was built sometime in the late 1800s for the Chungking Tea Export Company. “Of course, our Zaobeijian tea was very popular then, too,” he says, “but the cultivation and transport was very disorganized.” After the wars with Britain, he tells them in an official tone, Chungking Export set up office in Tao Xu and everyone sold exclusively to them. He waves his hand vaguely, as if the hills all around are planted with tea. Juanlan sees only bamboo and trees.
The men pass around cigarettes and seem content to smoke and allow her to take on the burden of listening. “Was this the office?” she asks Mayor Hu politely.
“No—that building is gone now. It was likely in town, right along the river.” He pauses, allowing her to envision the town as it might have looked back then. No motorbikes, no radios, no cellophane wrappers clogging the streams. She thinks of Rob’s fascination with little villages “off the beaten path,” when he was telling Lulu and her about his visit to Yunnan. Places that time doesn’t touch—that’s how he’d described it. A poetic expression. But it’s not true that time doesn’t touch these places: it’s selective in what it changes. Time runs over these places like a river over its bed, and the land is shaped by what it takes up and what it leaves behind.
Mayor Hu is still talking, his hands clasped together as he explains that in the house they’d found some papers stored in a chest, some documents that were a mixture of Chinese and English. They’d found an English prayer book as well.
“A missionary?” Juanlan frowns. “That seems unlikely, all the way up here.”
“Unlikely, maybe, but not impossible. Ru Dan’s own grandfather . . .”
The tense man blinks suddenly at the mention of his name, and he blinks even more rapidly when he sees that they’re all waiting for him to speak. “My grandfather,” he begins, “said that his grandmother used to tell him about a foreigner who came through here. He thinks so, anyway—it was a long time ago.”
“And he was alone,” Mayor Hu offers.
“Yes, alone.”
“So you see,” the mayor says, turning back to Juanlan, “this is what we think we know about him. It’s not very much, but—”
“He wore a hat.”
They all turn again to look at Ru Dan. He presses his lips together and ducks his head, bashful at having their attention turned on him again. After a few beats of silence, he explains: “That’s what my grandfather remembers. He says his grandmother used to tell him about a foreigner with a big hat.”
“A foreigner with a hat,” the mayor says, smiling nervously. He glances at Director Wei as if afraid that this new piece of information will disturb him. But the director is stamping out a cigarette on the ground, indifferent. “Let’s go in,” he says.
They step through the crumbling entrance gate into a courtyard overgrown with weeds and bamboo. The old stone floor is broken up, and some of the tiles are turned almost perpendicular to the ground. Two headless lions, their remaining features softened by more than a century of rain, stand guard on either side of the central room.
The plan is to salvage all that they can. During the drive up, Director Wei had explained that his danwei is considering a few small villages around Heng’an to designate as gucheng. These “old towns” are starting to take off as tourist attractions in other parts of China, and there’s no reason Heng’an can’t have them, too. Once the new expressway is completed, all the new tourists will want special sites to visit. The mayor calls her into a room off the corner in the back. A pile of rubble stands in the middle, and along one side is a broken ladder leading up to a loft. “I thought you would like to see this,” he says.
“Is this where you found the chest of documents?”
“No,” he says with a laugh. To Director Wei, who has just entered the room behind them, he says, “She thought the chest was up in the storage loft.”
“Comrade Bai hasn’t been in the countryside very often,” Director Wei explains. Then, to Juanlan, he says, “You see the old stove?” He kicks a stone back into the pile of rubble. “This was the kitchen.”
It seems she has been brought here not to explain anything to these men but to have things explained to her.
“And the loft was for storing grain,” the mayor says. “It would have been crawling with rats. Not a good place to stash things you’re hoping to save.”
“Can I see them?” she asks. “The letters?”
The mayor frowns. “Oh, they’re only records and receipts. Director Wei might have use for them; I’m not sure they’d interest you.”
“But I thought there were letters. Letters in English. That’s why I’m here . . .” She looks from the mayor to Director Wei, who are sharing a look—she has proved herself stupid—and then the two men turn as one to the doorway. She sees and a moment later hears the rain. It is a silver-white sheet, a waving shroud, a brimming bucket turned upside down over the roof, which is full of holes.
Mayor Hu shakes opens an umbrella and hands it to Director Wei. “I’ll give out these others,” he shouts over the sound of the rain and, ducking his head, goes out through the doorway into the courtyard to find the other men.
Before she can look around for a better place to shelter, Juanlan finds herself standing beneath the umbrella with Director Wei. “Let me show you,” he says.
“Show me what?”
A touch on her back, and it is his hand, guiding her, pushing her toward the far wall. “Over here,” he says, leading her to the place where a person would once have sat to feed the stove, to a place in the corner that even now is still dark.
Her heart is beating fast. This is the moment everything changes: Director Wei will kiss her. And she will let him do it, without knowing why.
But instead of bending his face to hers, he points to a wooden beam in the wall. “Here,” he says, leaning toward it, “look.”
Two words in English, and they are clear enough even now, surviving a century or more. Forgive me, she reads.
She pictures a knife at the wall, a hand clenched tightly around the handle. The knife is moving slowly, intently, in ragged lines.
Director Wei asks what it means, and for a moment, she does not have the words in Chinese. She shakes her head, clears her throat. She puts her fingers to the lines, rough slashes in wood, to conjure up the person who carved this message into the wall. But it’s no use: the room offers up no ghosts. “Forgive me,” she says in Chinese.
Director Wei cocks his head. “Forgive you for what?”
The rain lightens during lunch, and Mayor Hu decides that they should drive up to see the construction on the dam. Progress has been made since the last time Director Wei saw it, he says. “And you”—he nods to Juanlan—“you have not ever had the chance to see it.”
They pile into two cars, the group from Tao Xu in one and the group from Heng’an in the other. Director Wei is seated in the passenger seat again, dressed in Ru Dan’s clothes. His own muddy pants were handed over to Ru Dan’s wife to wash. They were assured that the clothes would be waiting for them back at the office before their return. She thinks of Lulu, who still has her shirt and shorts from yesterday. But of course she will get them back, whereas Ru Dan likely will not.
They take the winding roads, slick with mud. Juanlan watches the green blur of landscape through the windshield, and her mind turns to the day’s discovery. Forgive me. The words hover a little behind her vision, imprinting themselves on the glass before her. She doesn’t speak them aloud, yet she hears them: an insistent refrain running under the men’s conversation. Forgive me, forgive me. The rhythm of a heartbeat.
Sleep overtakes her in the warm, humid car, and her eyes are closed when they roll to a stop. She blinks rapidly as the doors are pushed opened and the others climb out. Seated in the middle, she waits her turn. They have arrived at an area that feels eerily open, a wide, flat space covered in gravel that could easily fit five or six more cars. After the narrow roads they’ve been driving, th
e extra space is unnerving. This is not a place that naturally allows for it.
The gravel expanse prevents her from seeing for a moment the more dramatic sight, but then the construction reveals itself: a giant wall that has replaced half of the opposite mountain slope. A massive concrete blankness, the whole area white and beige, and too bright. Juanlan turns away as if from some image of violence.
Mayor Hu is as proud as if he were in charge of the project, and he goes on and on about spillways and generators and hydraulic heads. As he winds down his speech, they walk the edge of the gravel lot, looking down at the smooth walls of the dam below. Juanlan finds herself strolling beside her brother and Director Wei, who suddenly brings up their morning’s work. “Your sister was a great help earlier,” he says to Zhuo Ge. “I’m glad you were able to convince her to come along.”
“It was only a few words carved into the wall,” Juanlan says, blushing. “I thought there would be more. I brought my English-Chinese dictionary.” This makes the two men laugh, though she hadn’t meant to be funny. The dictionary has been a weight in her purse all day.
“And what did it say?” Zhuo Ge asks.
She tells him what was carved on the wall at the house, and he speculates about the man Ru Dan’s grandfather described. Who was he? Where did he come from? And what did he do that made him ask for forgiveness? “He must have murdered someone,” Zhuo Ge declares.
“Our friend here”—Director Wei gestures to Ru Dan, walking ahead—“says his grandfather was always told that the man wore a hat. If a detail like that made it into the story, don’t you think he would have heard if the man was a murderer, too?”
“Only if he was caught.”
“My own belief,” the mayor, who has suddenly appeared beside them, says, “is that the man was a trader doing business with Chungking Export. He was probably cheating his Chinese friends.”
Director Wei laughs. “That’s not such an interesting story, though. No, on second thought, I like Policeman Bai’s idea better.”
“But you still need to figure out who the laowai murdered.”
“I think it must have been about a woman.” Director Wei catches Juanlan’s eye for an instant before turning his face to the dam.
Zhuo Ge says, “A love triangle. The foreigner stole away some rich man’s wife, and had to kill him to keep her from going back.”
“Why rich?”
“Because that makes the crime worse.”
Director Wei nods. “But the foreigner—let’s agree that he was young and handsome. Not like our friend. We have a foreigner in Heng’an right now,” he explains to the mayor, “but he’s an old man. He’s not sweeping any young girls off their feet, is he, Comrade Bai?”
Everyone turns to Juanlan, and she feels the blood rush to her cheeks. But Zhuo Ge answers for her: “I sure hope not! He’s spending the day with my wife.”
The conversation spins on, all nonsense theories to explain the presence of a foreigner, so long ago, in this place. Juanlan doesn’t join in. She thinks of the words, the knife, the hand. She tries to imagine a foreigner, a man in a hat, walking up the mountain to the house they’d visited. Behind his stooped frame are the green slopes rising into mist. Down below is the river. There is no guessing what he might have come here for.
There’s been a landslide fifteen kilometers south of Tao Xu. A small one, but the road is washed out, and it might be a day or longer before it’s repaired. They only learn about the event once they’ve returned to the village. The rain has started up again; it was falling in sheets all the way back down from the dam. “A landslide?” Juanlan says, uncomprehending. She glances out the window of the government building as if she might see mud sluicing down onto the streets.
“We got lucky this time,” says Baozi. “At least we’re not stuck somewhere on the road.”
“But we’re supposed to be back in Heng’an this evening.” She finds herself addressing Director Wei, as if he has the power to change the situation.
“What is it, Mei, have you got some big plans or something? A date? Who’s it with?”
Juanlan blushes at her brother’s questions. “No one. Nothing. It’s nothing like that.”
“Your sister should not be going on any dates in Heng’an. Her boyfriend lives somewhere else, you know.”
Zhuo Ge looks momentarily surprised. To Juanlan he says, “You’ve been confiding in Director Wei instead of your brother, huh?”
Her cheeks are burning as she shakes her head.
“So it’s true?”
“Of course not,” Director Wei says easily. “I was only making a joke. But I think your sister has had enough of our humor. Let’s turn our attention to the rest of the day. Mayor Hu, I hope you can show us a good time.”
The mayor is eager to oblige. He makes a call, and very soon they are checked into a small hotel down the street. Juanlan and Director Wei are given their own rooms, and Zhuo Ge and Baozi share another. Guo Jun has a second cousin he can stay with, he says. He hadn’t planned on seeing him this trip, but since they have the time—
They meet up for dinner at six o’clock. On their way to the restaurant, she asks Zhuo Ge if he’s called Lulu yet, to let her know they won’t be home tonight. “No answer,” he says, searching his pants pocket for cigarettes. “She’s probably still out with your foreigner.”
Juanlan bites her lip. “Probably.”
“Anyway, Ma answered at the hotel. If Lulu gets worried, she can call them and find out why her husband’s not home.”
Dinner includes the same group that went up to the dam, plus several other men and women besides. They are various local party members. Juanlan doesn’t try to remember their names. There are not enough women to make up their own table, so the group divides evenly into two. When the beer and the baijiu come, a glass is set before her. The other woman at the table is the laughing wife of one of the Tao Xu men. “Come on,” she says to Juanlan. “Let’s show these guys that we can hold our own.”
“Beer, please,” Juanlan demurs, but the others convince her to have a single toast of baijiu before switching to beer.
Director Wei toasts the mayor, and the mayor toasts Director Wei. The tables toast each other. The group from Heng’an toasts the people from Tao Xu. They all drink to the landslide, to the crew that is fixing the road, to the new town up the mountain that will be a new and better Tao Xu.
They drink and drink, and after a while Juanlan thinks that perhaps it would be wiser to stop. But the damage is done. She looks at the table of food and finds that it is difficult to keep any of the dishes from wandering out of her field of vision. Looking up, she sees that Director Wei, too, is sliding away. “Forgive me,” she thinks, or maybe she says it aloud. He raises his glass, and she has no choice but to do the same.
After dinner, the world slips out of time. Her brother and Director Wei walk her back to the hotel, supported between them. Walk now, Mei. There we are.
Everything is slow—objects right in front of her eyes make smears on her vision, not moving fast enough. Or maybe they are too quick and already ahead of her. She is left alone in her hotel room, where she lays herself carefully on the bed and rolls onto her back.
Fast, faster. With her eyes closed, she’s inside a dark tunnel and can feel the rush of speed at her face. Not wind but speed, and it’s a terrible sensation. Those tunnels they passed through earlier—only this morning? Dark tunnels through mountains and the mountains might fall on top of them, the rock might crumble, they will all be crushed. A car racing through darkness and men on either side of her, too close, too close.
Ten minutes later, she’s crouched on the wet tile in the bathroom, vomiting into the squat toilet. Her hair is hanging down into her face, but she doesn’t tuck it behind her ear because the hair is a curtain that keeps out her surroundings. Beneath her plastic slippers, the floor is damp and streaked with dirt. A pail of water with a scoop stands at the ready for flushing, but she is not ready for it yet. She squeezes h
er eyes shut and takes a shuddering breath.
There’s a knock at the door: two short raps. “Juanlan?”
A male voice. Her brother’s? She runs her tongue over her teeth. It feels twisted, like a towel being wrung out to dry. She addresses the closed door: “It’s me.”
“I came to see how you’re doing. You’re sick?”
Not her brother. Director Wei. She stays quiet, hoping he’ll go away. It would be bad enough for him to see her like this—drunk, swaying—in a better environment. But the bathroom, with the vomit at her feet and the trash can close by, makes the indignity much greater, something not to be accepted.
“Can I get you anything?” comes the voice through the door. “They sell bottles of water at the desk. It would be no trouble.”
“Thank you, I don’t need anything.” Her own voice comes out much softer than she intended, and she repeats herself, forcing volume into the reply. The sound seems almost to stick to the tile walls. For a moment, she feels as if she is sealed off from the world, and this bathroom is simply an extension of her body: her creaky voice, the smell of her, the swirl of acid in her stomach.
Then she is vomiting again. A horrible retching and, even worse, the sound of the vomit splashing onto the tile. She feels her toes bathed in warmth and knows that she has thrown up on them, too. She heaves, coughs. With one hand on the damp wall for support, she stands shakily and waits to find her balance. Then she bends to scoop water into the toilet basin.
Rebellion Page 40