Frontier

by Can Xue

  After quite a while, she closed her notebook and let out a scarcely perceptible sigh. Qiming noticed that her white hair had recently turned wispy, and her plump face seemed more wrinkled. She covered her face with one hand and kept saying, “I’m getting old.” Qiming recalled that this conference room hadn’t been used for a long time. Perhaps the director had abandoned her job? Just then, she looked up and said a little ruefully, “Oh, Qiming, my life is really tough. I’ve always been cornered. Just think, if someone knows all your secrets and even what you would do in the future, knows all of that better than you do—because you’re not at all sure what you’ll do in the future—what’s the point of living? It might be tolerable if that person lived far away from you, but he doesn’t! Instead, he keeps sneaking back and forth in front of you to remind you of his presence. What can you do?”

  “Are you talking of Haizai? I’ll talk with him and tell him to leave. I knew him when we were kids.” Qiming wanted to help out; that’s why he spoke this way.

  But the institute director shook her head, not wanting him to intervene. She looked even more worried.

  “What’s wrong with you, Qiming? That’s just silly. So he’s your childhood companion—what does this have to do with the present? He’s a completely different person now! You mustn’t drive him away; that wouldn’t be at all good for me. Oh, God, who can understand me?”

  Qiming sat there blankly, unable to think of anything to say. He sensed that he was still too immature—far removed from understanding the director. Just then, she changed the subject and asked about the Uighur woman.

  “Since the time I saw her dancing next to the road, I’ve never seen her again. I’ve gone over to the snow mountain twice. I’ve stood on the slope gazing at her home in the distance. Her children are grown up now,” he replied earnestly.

  “Qiming, you’re really fortunate. You’ve never taken a detour. Do you like living in this room?”

  “Yes, I do! I’ve seen miracles here. One night, a wall . . .”

  But the director turned around. As she looked at the window to the east, the hands of a burly man grabbed onto the window frame: he seemed about to climb into the room. Qiming wanted to get up and take a good look, but the director pushed him back into his chair. They waited and waited, but the man below never showed his face. Qiming sensed that the director knew who he was, but why did this man want to hang from the window? Was he courting the institute director in this way? Qiming was curious, but he didn’t dare ask. The director stared at the man’s hands until they disappeared. Qiming thought this was a prank. Exhausted, the director bent over the front row of chairs. The notebook fell from her knees. When Qiming picked it up for her, he saw one colored page inside with a sharp arrow drawn on it. The director looked up and thanked him. She’d been crying: her cheeks were still wet. She pouted like a young girl and wiped her face with a handkerchief.

  “Qiming, you don’t think I ignored you, do you? It’s just the way I am. I have too much to do, but I do think about you. Over time, you’ve carved out your own path. As for me, I’m halfway to my grave. I want to simplify my life. That person just now—you saw him, too. He goes to extremes. He wants to vanish completely from this world. Do you think that’s possible? Hunh.”

  Qiming thought privately that it was the gardener hanging on the windowsill. Was he a spider-man? He was so arrogant that he must have hurt the director’s feelings. Qiming felt spiteful toward him because the director was such a nice person.

  When Qiming and the director went outside, they saw Nancy carrying her baby again under the newly planted fir tree. Once more, he thought this woman was a little abnormal: How could she be walking around after just giving birth?

  “Look at how pretty they are. The child has really beautiful hair.”

  “Sure they are. This is the frontier,” the director smiled. “She’s Pebble Town’s child.”

  The director looked vivacious, her spirits renewed.

  Qiming finished cleaning the conference room. He looked down from the window several times. Each time, the director was conversing with Nancy. The child at her breast didn’t cry or fuss. José merely watched from the entrance. Qiming realized that José had become mature and sober: he was now burdened with worries. This was a generation that had taken root on the frontier! Had he taken root here, too? Qiming wasn’t sure. He had neither children nor relatives here. What he had were only some wispy feelings, but wasn’t everyone here the same? Everyone bustled about for fanciful things they couldn’t grasp, so they understood each other. It was said that the institute office was going to move from the suburbs into the city, because the employees had been complaining that the area was desolate—too removed from social life. They wanted to move to a more populated place. Qiming could absolutely understand this. A larger population would mean more communication. All kinds of subtle things were transmitted through the crowds. It was especially true in Pebble Town. Here, everyone revealed some message when speaking, even though the one speaking was unaware of it. Yet, Qiming was able to grasp these messages. This was why he found it agreeable to live in the city. What would it be like if he lived in the desolate suburbs? Qiming shut his eyes and tried hard to imagine it; he supposed it was a little like life in Fish Village. Naturally, people living in small enclosed places always wanted to escape to the outside world. After all, hadn’t he and Haizai both come to the frontier?

  Sometimes Qiming had insomnia at night. At such times, he didn’t feel at all alone. He wandered through the small town, and rested in one warm, dark hideout after another. He thought of how lucky he was! He was grateful to his father, but he wasn’t interested in going home to visit him. He’d rather keep his memories of his father. Sometimes, he wandered for an entire night, sleeping for a while only at dawn. The next day, he began work as energetically as ever. Occasionally, he would get out of bed at midnight and sit for a while next to the flowerbed at the guesthouse, looking up at the stars and thinking of his Uighur beauty. The stars in the north shone particularly brightly. As he watched them, his heart would tremble for a long time, as though something inside him had been opened. He would soliloquize, “People living in this small town are so fortunate!” Sometimes, as he was immersed in these feelings, a cool wind blew over from the snow mountain: that wind would lift his emotions to high tide. A lot of children were running through the rosebushes, shouting, “Aigury! Aigury!” Aigury was his beauty’s name. When he went back to his room, he would sleep soundly. In his dreams, Pebble Town and Fish Village were mixed together, and he was mixed together with his childhood. There were some doors in that scenery, but those doors didn’t open to any place. He would involuntarily run to a doorframe and stand inside it, distractedly recalling stories of his life. In these stories, his figure was blurred, sometimes like a child and sometimes like an old man. Yet the background was always snow lotus flowers and calliopsis. No ocean, though. In his dreams, he asked: Where has the ocean gone?

  One dreamless night, Qiming was awakened by the baby’s crying. At first, he thought it was a cat in heat, but he gradually realized it was the baby. The infant was next to his door! He got out of bed at once and opened the door: in the moonlight he saw the baby wrapped in pink. He looked out and saw Nancy sitting silently beside the flowerbed.

  “Nancy!”

  “She’s crying—crying all the time! What can I do? José has gone to buy some medicine,” she whined.

  The baby girl made even more noise, and Qiming held her and lifted her up in the air. One, two, three! But it did no good: she was still crying loudly.

  “The doctor says there’s nothing wrong with her. But why does she cry? I think she hates me.”

  Nancy held her head and squatted on the ground.

  “Nancy, she’s such a treasure, and her crying is so full of life! Even the snow mountain can hear her. Go ahead and cry, cry. I like listening to it!”

  Qiming lifted the baby up in the air five or six more times, and she eventually stopped cr
ying and began to smile.

  Nancy jumped up and said, “Oh, she likes you! This little monster likes you! God, no one else can do anything with her!”

  “Sure she likes me. She’s a child of our frontier, isn’t she? Nancy, you’ve done us a great favor. She’s fine now. She’s sleeping. You can go home and get some rest, too.”

  A long time after Nancy and the baby left, Qiming still felt emotional. He had never held a baby before. Just now, with the baby in his arms, a strange sensation had come over him. He could still see the baby’s smiles, and something was growing within him. He felt a little aching—an aching filled with expectation and wonder. He said to himself, “This is a person, a new person, who was born not long ago. My God . . .” Just now as he had lifted her up, he had seen the ocean in her tiny face. In the same instant, somewhere nearby, a desert bird had chirped “dididi” incessantly. He had never imagined that a new life could so unsettle him. Was it because she was Nancy’s daughter and the mother’s warmth had been transmitted to the infant? On this dark night, this mother and daughter had appeared at his door. It happened so naturally—yet how had this happened? The baby was much like her mother, a bundle of warmth. Ah . . . Qiming was lost in his thoughts.

  As he lay in the dark, what was eddying in his mind was not the beauty Aigury, but the skinny Nancy and the baby in her arms. He did his utmost to banish this vision and said to himself repeatedly, “This woman is but a migratory bird.” But the baby? The baby was different from the mother. The conflicts between them had already appeared. When he first arrived in Pebble Town, he had longed to fuse with this land. Because of this, he even deliberately harmed himself. He thought that being injured could deepen his emotions. The baby’s continual crying—was this also to deepen something? He turned over, and his hand bumped into the watch beside his pillow. He took hold of it, and after a while, he saw the ocean and the baby’s face. “Dididi . . .” His face was hot, his heart throbbing. The sudden change in himself scared him.

  “Haizai, how the hell did you run out?”

  “I didn’t run. I walked and walked under the water, and when I surfaced I had reached another province.”

  Qiming and Haizai were talking in the shed of the convicts’ labor camp. This was a labor reform unit from another province. They were helping with afforestation in Pebble Town. The shed was filthy. Dirty socks and underwear were everywhere. Haizai was content here. He was smoking a cigarette in a leisurely fashion. Qiming told him he had looked for him at the hospital’s morgue. Haizai said he probably would have continued working in the morgue if he hadn’t encountered the institute director there. “It wasn’t for me, but for her sake, that I left the hospital. Who would want to be lying there like a corpse?”

  A young convict entered. His hair stood up and his gaze was fierce. As soon as he came in, he made a lot of noise. It was clear that he didn’t like Qiming sitting there. Qiming considered leaving, but Haizai kept him from getting up by pressing on his knee. All of a sudden, the other person picked up a brick and threw it at his back; the impact sent Qiming rolling to the floor. He shouted “Ouch, oh ouch!” Luckily, he wasn’t badly hurt.

  “People here are violent,” said Haizai from above him.

  “Why didn’t you let me go?” Qiming complained, “It’s all your fault!”

  “You idiot. Once you came here, you couldn’t leave. If you had run, he would have chased you and killed you. It’s better this way. You may hurt a little, but you’re safe now.”

  Haizai started laughing. Qiming didn’t think it was at all funny. He heard heavy, hesitant footsteps outside the work shed. Several people were walking back and forth at the entrance, as though they intended to come in. Qiming’s nerves were taut. Haizai finished smoking and said he had to go to work and wanted Qiming to go with him. He handed him a shovel. Qiming’s back hurt, and he couldn’t stand up straight, so he used the shovel as a walking stick.

  When they went outside, the convicts stared at them from both sides. Qiming was afraid they would throw bricks at him again, and so he cringed, trying to hide his head and face in the hollow of his shoulder. Just then, Haizai ordered, “Hold your head high!” Qiming looked up and saw that the others had turned their backs.

  When they reached the poplar park, Qiming asked Haizai if they had to dig a hole. Haizai said no. He said they had brought the work tools to throw others off. He found a grassy spot and lay down, his hands pillowing his head, staring at the sky. Qiming asked, “Did those people want to hurt me?”

  Haizai laughed and didn’t bother to answer.

  “Is this the work you found? Are you a volunteer?” Qiming asked.

  “Yes. Qiming, when your father was dying, what did he wish? Do you know?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know, either. I looked into his eyes, but I couldn’t figure it out. I knew he was very worried. Then, he gave me that watch.”

  “Oh, the watch! I can guess a little now,” Qiming cried.

  All at once, he remembered the “dididi” sound in the middle of the night. He had always found that sound exciting. He noticed that Haizai’s eyes had softened and were even a little too affectionate. This vagrant was staring at the gray-blue sky and worrying. Qiming took the old watch out of his pocket and looked at it carefully. This was a good watch, even though the copper plating had broken off. The hands still ticked vigorously. When Qiming was a child, his father tried to commit suicide once. At the time, he didn’t understand what had happened in his home; he just knew that everyone was unusually quiet, even walking on tiptoe. His father, his neck wrapped in a bandage, lay quietly in bed, and asked Qiming to read him a section of their family history every day. Qiming remembered that the family history mentioned this watch. It was said that his grandfather had taken the watch from the body of a dead prisoner of war on the battlefield. Back then, dead prisoners weren’t buried, but just rotted outdoors. At that time, Father lay in bed for two months. He took the watch out frequently and looked at it. Pride showed on his face. Sometimes, Father would rub his head and say, “Son, you must do your best to remember those blurry past events.” Of course Qiming didn’t understand, but Father said this time after time, and he remembered it. Father was seventy when he died: in the fishing villages along the seacoast this was a long life. He had lived a long time! Had he really considered ending his life on that long-ago day? If he had, then why hadn’t he succeeded? He certainly wasn’t indecisive. Of all the people Qiming had known, he was the most resolute. Qiming asked Haizai, “Was my father in pain when he died?”

  “Are you serious? I think he was at peace. He died without suffering. He didn’t have any strange disease.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, but I needed to hear you say it.”

  Qiming lifted the watch, and a curassow appeared in the direction the watch pointed to. When he moved his arm, the curassow moved in the same direction. He turned around so that the watch would point in the opposite direction—and the bird quickly flew in that direction. When he slid the watch into his pocket, the bird disappeared into the high clouds. Below, Haizai was talking—but in a low voice, and he couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  The two of them stayed in the poplar park until late that day without eating any supper. When they parted ways, Haizai was a little sentimental, telling Qiming that it would probably be hard to see each other in the future because his labor reform unit was moving to another city. He also said that he had wanted to stay in the hospital, but the institute director had made him abandon that idea. At first, he had felt that Pebble Town was the best place for him, but this was the institute director’s domain, and he couldn’t contend with her. So he had to get out of the way. “She’ll never make peace with me in this lifetime.”

  Shouldering the two shovels, Haizai took off dejectedly. And Qiming once more circled around among the flowers. When he left the park, the old gatekeeper stopped him. The old man asked how Haizai was related to him, and seeing the old man’s seriousness,
Qiming told him. The old guy sipped his tea and said slowly, “There’s something wrong with his mind. He comes to the park every day, pretending to be coming to work. After he gets here, he lies on the grass. Before long, an old woman shows up. As they chat, they begin quarreling, and the old woman hits and kicks him. He covers his head with both hands, but doesn’t retaliate. Each time after the old woman finishes beating up on him, she leaves, but he continues squatting there for a long time. The old woman hasn’t come the last few days, yet he still has. I suspect that today is his last time here. What do you think is wrong with him?”

  Qiming thought to himself, This old man is more a spy than a gatekeeper. And so as he departed, he said loudly, “True, he’s a little crazy. You’d better be careful.”

  “A madman! Haha, a madman! A madman has come to the park again! This happened before, too!”

  He leaned out the window and shouted at Qiming’s back. Then he turned and asked his wife to join him in taking a look. So the old woman also squeezed in at the window to watch Qiming. They shook their fists at him.

  Qiming started to run, anxious to leave the nightmare behind. By the time he reached the guesthouse, he was sweating all over. He felt weak.

  Chapter 4

  SHERMAN

  Sherman was an orphan who had grown up in an orphanage in the interior. When he was old enough, he left and went to many places before finally settling down on the frontier. A well-off family near the snow mountain adopted him. Later, he enrolled in a school that taught spinning. He dropped out and started working, not as a spinner but in the Pebble Town park archives. It was a cushy job. Since it didn’t matter if he went to work, he often stayed home. He, his wife, and daughter lived in the parks’ apartments—poor quality two-story buildings. They lived on the second floor. The roof leaked every year when it rained.