by Can Xue
The baby’s days began filling with happiness. Whenever José bent down to pick her up and tell stories, she kicked her little feet happily in the cradle. And so father and daughter, faces touching, kept on talking. The baby was still babbling broken syllables, but with time they became more and more focused and enchanting. These snatches of syllables stimulated José’s thinking. Bit by bit, he felt he no longer controlled his own narration: more and more blanks appeared in his stories. He loved this new narrative style: these stories filled with blank spaces were both simple and a little hard to explain. In the past, he hadn’t known he could tell stories this way. Afterward, even when he was doing housework, recalling the happy moments gave him great pleasure. He realized that his daughter was his invaluable treasure. Naturally he also knew that his daughter would grow up and have her own language. What would his communication with her be like then?
José needed to straighten up the cradle, so he placed the baby on the bed. After a while, he heard her kicking hard and shouting, “Bagu! Bagu . . .” José turned and saw that the skylight had been opened, though he didn’t know when. The blue sky was full of birds. He’d never seen this before! He ran to the window and saw numerous birds covering the entire skylight. The scent of birds suffused the room. His daughter was even more upset and kicked without stopping. Her little face was red. José picked her up and brought his cheek next to hers. Suddenly he heard her say very clearly, “Mama.” That’s when José remembered that Nancy had been gone for ten days. He was a bit hurt. At the same time, he understood a little: what Nancy had left behind in the home wasn’t her daughter, but herself—a past self of hers. And through caring for the baby, he had entered his wife’s past. The birds slowly scattered, and the baby calmed down and stared with big solemn eyes.
“Mr. José, I saw Ms. Nancy. She says hello,” Lee looked at him from the doorway.
“Ah, is she okay?”
“She looked fine. She said she can’t leave the Design Institute. If I were she . . .”
José wondered what he wanted to say. This Lee’s life was so difficult: How could he compare himself with Nancy? Nancy was healthy, except for being a little jumpy. Lee wasn’t aware of what José thought of him. After looking for a while at the sky outside the skylight, he said to José, “These are all resident birds: their nests are in the poplar grove at the riverside. Their gatherings are regulated by an indescribable impulse. When I can’t sleep, I think about their habits and paint pictures in my mind. Many birds are also on that hill, although it’s another variety—black-colored. Ms. Nancy probably sees them every day. Is it good or bad for Pebble Town to have so many birds?”
José sensed that Lee was in a better mood, for he had said so much all at once. Could this be related to the death of their pet dog? How was the little dog connected with this family? The baby kicked him in the chest and said, “Bagu.”
“Your daughter can talk! Wow! She’s so adorable now! She fits in with our life here. Mr. José, I’m going over to the Design Institute soon. Is there anything you’d like me to tell your wife?”
“Just tell her we’re fine, and tell her to take care of herself.”
As José said this, he was kicked again. His daughter seemed to be giving him confidence, appreciating what he was doing. Or could this actually be Nancy admiring him? José beamed at this thought. He opened the drapes again and saw the bright, clean, blue sky; the birds had disappeared into thin air. If their scent hadn’t lingered in the room, he would have forgotten them. From the apartment to the east came Lee’s loud singing. This man was so strange. José remembered seeing the tropical garden at his place. Beginning last night, José felt he was at the center of the world. Now this feeling was even stronger. Could it be that everything revolved around him? Indeed, what kind of person was “José”? He heard Lee sing of a tortoise, and José trembled. Pebble Town residents really had many things in common. Their ideas and intentions were usually similar. At the end of José’s field of vision were some vague contours: Was this the snow mountain? In the daytime, people talked of the mountain, and he could see it from a distance, but he hadn’t been there even once. It was a locale that he absolutely did not understand. Could it be connected with his daughter’s life? In Lee’s song, the tortoise died, and José calmed down a little.
A long, long time ago, he and Nancy had stood on the iron bridge visualizing their future. They lived simple lives then, and they based all of their plans on the present reality. Although they weren’t very content with the present, still—shrouded in the heavy smoke—the contours of things softened a lot. Oh, how the smoke had disguised the realities! Nancy couldn’t see the truth at first, either. “I have some knots of past events in my mind that I can’t untie.” Nancy often said things like this. Now, he heard his daughter babbling at his chest, and he sort of understood what Nancy meant. He said, “As soon as that person pushed the window open, the smoke flowed into the room. He—he heard the people running below, and shouting . . . This building he lived in was swaying. How could this be? Well, it’s true. Baby, he’s dizzy from all of this. He recalls the iron bridge, and as soon as he does, he gets even dizzier.” After he said this, he suddenly understood what he had not understood before. His daughter kept saying one syllable, “Poo, poo, poo . . .”
With his daughter in his arms, he took old Qi’s pedicab over to the hill outside the Design Institute. On the way, his daughter’s silence frightened him and he considered returning home. Her eyes looked dull, no longer like the eyes of an older child: they seemed to have regressed to the look of a baby. Did she know they were going to see her mother? Not knowing which office building Nancy was in, he hesitated as he stood on the rocky hill. Qi walked up to him and said she must be in the third building.
“She’ll be sad that you’ve come here,” Qi added.
Qi hadn’t said a word the whole way here, and now he was actually saying something like this. José started to regret having come. He told Qi that he wanted to go back. Smiling slightly, Qi asked him to get into the pedicab. Just then, an old woman gleaner charged over to José, brandishing a twig and shouting slogans. José ducked at once, and the woman charged past. Beside him, Qi said, “I saw Nancy.” José asked where Nancy was, and Qi replied that he couldn’t say for sure. Anyhow, he had seen her—that’s the way things were on this rocky hill.
All kinds of feelings welling up in his heart, José returned home with his daughter at twilight. He made up his mind not to go to Nancy’s workplace again. On the way home, Qi had told him that the institute director had probably made this arrangement. He went on to say that the director always had the interests of others at heart. No one was more concerned about others than she was, so one had better simply accept her arrangements, and in the end, something good would come of it. Listening to him, José recalled the first time the director had spoken of Qi to Nancy and him: she had described him as “a lovelorn janitor.” So he, too, deeply acknowledged the director’s greatness.
When he went to the market to buy noodles, he saw a wolf. No kidding—a wolf! It was huge—about the size of a pony—and standing next to the cabbage. No one walking past paid any particular attention to it. It was as if everyone thought it was a painting. Of course it wasn’t a painting: it turned its head now and then and looked disdainfully at the whole scene. It also opened its mouth now and then, revealing buckteeth. Could it be a domesticated wolf? José had never seen one before, but he’d heard that wolves could be tamed. José didn’t dare stare at it, for fear that it would sense his presence. He went around to the side where general merchandise was being sold, for there was an exit there. An old woman kept walking beside him, and now she started talking with him.
“A wolf came here a few times in the spring, but this is the first time a wolf has shown up in the market.”
“Aren’t any of you afraid?” José asked.
“Sure we are, but being afraid does no good. Everyone knows that. My legs are shaking, but what can I do? I can’t out
run a wolf. And it’s huge.”
“It seems it doesn’t want to eat anyone.”
José wasn’t very confident of this, and the old woman walked away without answering.
After leaving the market far behind, José kept looking back. He was still refuting the old woman—why did people have to go to the market? Why didn’t they go to some smaller shops instead? Weren’t there several of them in this town? But he felt vaguely that this was a weak argument: the wolf’s might said it all.
When he had just reached the foot of the stairs at his apartment building, he heard his daughter crying. He raced upstairs, taking the steps two at a time.
“I thought something had happened to you,” Grace said.
“Huh? I’m fine,” he answered as he picked up his daughter.
Not until they were back in their own home did his daughter stop crying. José was preoccupied with thoughts of the wolf. He really wanted to tell his daughter about this. Opening her big eyes and looking at him, his daughter seemed to want to tell him something, too. Did she want to talk of the same thing? The dark rocky hill appeared in José’s mind: on top of it was a view of an enormous wolf from behind. Grace probably knew he had run into a wolf, and that’s why she’d spoken as she had. “Sweetheart, wolf. Sweetheart, wolf,” he kept repeating to his daughter. Then he set her in her cradle and started to cook.
That evening, three birds were quarreling on his windowsill. They made three different sounds. José named them “time birds.” He couldn’t turn off the light because his daughter would cry if he did. He had to leave the light on all night. He woke up during the night, and saw that wolf’s silhouette on the wall. His daughter was staring at the silhouette. The moment he made a sound, the silhouette disappeared. The “time birds” sang merrily outside. A bird that he had named “Future” sang even louder in a drawn-out tone, attracting José’s attention. When José opened the drapes, they flew off.
Grace was knitting a sweater in her room, depressed. The baby’s crying disturbed Lee too much. She used to think he would die of it because of his serious heart trouble. Now things had taken a turn for the better. Her husband was not only still alive, but he was feeling much better. So why did Grace still feel depressed? Even she couldn’t explain it. For some reason, she felt vaguely that her husband’s condition was an omen of approaching death. She understood very well that her husband’s disease was incurable, and she knew how serious his condition really was. Even during their honeymoon, he’d been sick. He’d had this disease for more than twenty years.
As it happened, José’s daughter was crying hard on the night their dog died. Lee had taken the last of his heart medicine. Gripping his chest, he half-lay on the bed and moaned. Grace urged him to go to the hospital, but he kept shaking his head. Grace wondered if he was planning a joint funeral for the dog and himself. Would he expect her to take care of it alone? But before daylight, the child suddenly stopped crying, and Lee dozed off. He slept a very long time, not awakening until the next night. After getting up, he ate a large meal, and groped his way through the dark to go outside. Grace was mourning their dog and paid no attention to her husband. She recalled only that he strolled around all night, and when he came back in the morning, he was covered in mud. That was unprecedented: he seldom went out at night for fear of falling down.
“The sound of the baby’s crying reaches the farthest corners of the city—I walked around in order to find out. There’s a two-story stone building holding many coffins. I stayed among the coffins. Grace, tell me: Why does the infant life beside us stimulate us so much? The baby girl inspires me greatly.”
As Lee went on and on, Grace stood in front of the window and looked straight out from there: she saw an elm tree with many birds’ nests in it. The radiant sun shone on the exuberant green leaves. Red wildflowers grew beneath the tree. The scenery outside their window was thriving with vitality. Grace felt the tide of life blowing against her face. Instinctively, she dodged away from it and retreated to the shadows beside the drapes.
Now, sitting in an armchair knitting a sweater, she recalled this incident. She thought one of the frontier’s major characteristics was that the scenery outside exerted tremendous pressure on people. Every time before a major incident occurred in her life, the scenery all around was filled with particularly intense intimations of it. She had seldom experienced this when they lived in the interior. On the nights when the baby cried so hard, a gale blew up. Each time she sat up at midnight and turned the light on, she saw some dead twigs poking through the curtain, reaching toward her on the bed. She had no way to escape. Lee, though, didn’t move: his body had stiffened, as if he were dead.
Yet, in general she liked the scenery here. She and Lee used to be melancholy. They had high expectations of life, but their vision was always dull. The air and water on the frontier seemed to have cleansed their spirits. This cleansing stimulated their desires and enhanced their spiritual realm. When Grace was out walking, she sometimes suddenly stopped in her tracks, listening to all kinds of birds singing sweetly. She felt she was in a wonderland that she’d never been to. There were many birds here. Grace plunged into strange recollections.
Formerly, she and Lee had lived in a southern city. Later, every few years, they had moved a certain distance to the north and settled in a city there. This had gone on for more than ten years before they finally decided to take the train to this northernmost place, Pebble Town. Thinking back on those roller-coaster years, as well as the several cities they had temporarily settled in, Grace sensed that something had been manipulating them all along. One night, in a city in the interior, they had walked on a small street whose lights were out. Lee had said to her, “Why do we always move north?” At the time, Grace was gazing at the stars in the sky, and all at once a noiseless glacial zone appeared in her mind. Lee had gone on, “I think the most magical animal in the world is the penguin.” Grace was too startled to say a word. What made their thoughts move in the same direction? But in the end they couldn’t reach the polar region, and so they had settled in this frontier town. The winters here were long and frigid, but with central heating they didn’t feel the glacial cold inside. Here, Lee got considerable relief from his heart disease. More than once, Grace had thought Pebble Town was their final destination. It wasn’t likely that other places would have air like this and stillness like this. This was the best place they could ever find to live in this nation. Maybe it was because of this that Lee finally brought home a puppy, a miniature dog. Before this, they hadn’t had pets and hadn’t grown plants. When the puppy had just arrived, Grace wasn’t sure she could take care of it; she felt quite conflicted. After a while, though, she considered it a member of the family. But the puppy didn’t thrive in their little family. It was always “hanging by a thread.” Gradually, Grace changed from being aloof toward it to sharing both joy and suffering with it. She worried about it all day long and took good care of it. But in the end, it mocked them by dying prematurely, leaving them with ghastly memories: it had been sick many times, and each time it twitched all over and foamed at the mouth.
Grace had some vivid memories of every city where they had lived. For example, Bell City had long, narrow, unfrequented streets. The shops at the sides of the roads were closed most of the time. Some drunks sat under the canopies in front of the bars. It was a sleepy city. Mountain City was built on a mountain slope. Living there, one had to climb the hill almost every day. This wasn’t good for Lee because of his heart disease. He almost died several times. However, sitting in the revolving restaurant on top of a ten-story building, they surveyed Mountain City, and—one by one—their innermost desires were revived. And then there was Star City. During the season when the sweet osmanthus bloomed, the suffocating fragrance made people fidget all night. In Cotton City, you couldn’t see any cotton; steel structures were everywhere . . . but what did any of this prove? These wafting memories couldn’t be grasped or penetrated. The farther north they went, the less Grace could
tolerate the face she saw in the mirror: it was not at all what she wanted to look like. Later, she became apathetic: she didn’t care what she looked like. Once her brother came to see her and said, “Grace, Grace, you still look so young! How come?” Did she look young? She wasn’t sure. The face in the mirror reflected her decline. In her dreams, she went to Match City, where she had once lived. She was actually lost in this square place. But when she asked directions, she realized she no longer understood the dialect there. It seemed to be the dialect of a remote and backward place. She understood almost nothing. Pebble Town gave her other memories. Some of them resolved the riddles from before, but most were dark holes that were even harder to penetrate. For example, the puppy: Wasn’t it a dark hole in Lee’s and her lives? What was the sickly Lee’s motive for buying the little dog? When she recalled this, she suddenly heard the baby’s laughter coming from the corridor. Such an odd baby—laughing like an older child!
“Grace, you’re the picture of health today,” José said cheerfully.
“Why don’t I think so? You take such good care of the baby. Ms. Nancy certainly doesn’t worry at all.”
José looked perplexed. He thought the woman’s words hid other meanings. When he went home, he was still trying to guess what she meant.
When Qiming saw José appear next to the flowerbed with the baby, a hot current rushed from his heart to his face, and the hand with the broom trembled a little.