Frontier

by Can Xue

  “I have to go, Liujin. Don’t worry. The wolf can’t bite you.”

  He picked up the iron cage with a carrying pole and slung it over his shoulders. People stayed out of his way as he walked out with long strides. Liujin and her boss craned their necks, staring at his receding figure. The boss whispered that he was a “swindler.” Liujin asked why he said this.

  “Why did he bring a wolf cub here? Did he think we were little children? And since he brought the cub with him, he should have taken it out and shown it to us. I think it was a fake. It wasn’t even a demi-wolf. It was just an ordinary mutt.”

  Liujin was surprised by the boss’s indignation.

  “Take the rest of the day off, Liujin. Anyhow, you’re in no mood to work.”

  When Liujin walked out of the market, she spotted Sherman emerging from the rice shop. It was obvious that he didn’t want to see her, for he immediately ducked back inside. Liujin muttered “sinister guy” to herself and walked past the rice shop with her head high. Liujin thought, Everyone is putting on a disguise. Amy’s brother is the only exception. Maybe that’s the way mountain people are. Liujin disliked his barbaric candor, and yet was helplessly attracted to it. On the mountaintop four thousand meters above sea level, could the rarefied air affect people’s thoughts? Liujin had grown up in the city, and it seemed she would always be fascinated with the snow mountain.

  She kept thinking about Amy, so without stopping at home, she went into the courtyard across the street. Eyes drooping, Meng Yu’s wife stood in the courtyard. She looked unhappy.

  “Amy’s sick.”

  “Oh!”

  “She’s heartsick. As soon as that old Qiming showed up, she got sick. And her brother—he’s a bad influence on her. This girl has no mind of her own.”

  Liujin could see that the old woman didn’t want her there, so she left and went home.

  As she tended the plants in the courtyard, she was a little anxious, but she didn’t know why. Just then, Roy appeared at the fence. Liujin kept calling his name “Roy, Roy—” and her tears gushed forth.

  “The snow leopard really did come down the mountain. Did you smell it?” she asked Roy.

  Hugging each other, they sat on the stone bench. Roy held Liujin’s left hand tightly and said uneasily, “Liujin, you mustn’t leave. If you do, I won’t recognize this house.”

  “Who said I was going, Roy?”

  “It was the gecko. I saw it climb the fence the other day.”

  After a while, they heard singing. The white clouds drifted in the sky, and the two of them sank into memories. Liujin thought, Amy is such a passionate woman! Roy imagined his parents sitting in the sunshine peeling lotus seeds, and five snow leopards surrounding them. How had the snow leopards gotten there? He couldn’t remember.

  As soon as Amy stopped singing, Roy jumped up and said, “The train has pulled in. I have to go right now.”

  As Liujin watched him dashing away, she ached. Roy and Amy—she would always be separated from them by mountains and oceans. She packed up her tools, went into the house, sat down, and started a letter to her mother.

  “. . . Today I have some good news. A young friend told me that he could recognize this house only if I continued to live here. I think others probably also feel this way. Mama, Dad, our home will always be here, won’t it? Day before yesterday, the long-life bird really came. It lit on the grape arbor. I saw it the moment I entered the courtyard. It must have flown over from your place. This messenger calmly stopped there, as if reporting that all is well with you.

  “The last couple of days, it’s been very windy. I heard that on the border a sandstorm buried a whole village. I can’t imagine what that would have been like. Now, it’s tranquil here, and the long-life bird came. I think I won’t leave, because the two of you haven’t left, either. This place holds your youth, and that is not a mirage. Just as Amy said, the two of you built this hidden ancient castle . . .”

  Liujin stood up and sealed the letter. Some things became clear in her mind. Formerly, in front of the window in the room at the Snow Mountain Hotel, her stonecutter boyfriend had said to her, “Pebble Town is a young city.” Where had that ex-boyfriend gone? She felt this had happened a lifetime ago.

  It was evening before Amy came over. She told Liujin that her brother had gone back. Amy looked uneasy and kept saying, “He’s certainly disappointed in me.” She meant her brother. She leapt across the room and tried to grab the gecko from the wall. When she failed, she was really annoyed. She said she didn’t have a clue about Uncle Qiming or old man Meng Yu. She was completely ignorant. After complaining for a while, she suddenly calmed down and said she would get over it.

  “I fell in love with an old man. Can you understand this?” Amy said suddenly.

  “It must be Uncle Qiming—right? Even I almost fell in love with him.”

  “When I was three, he took me to see the river. He didn’t come to my home. He waited on a faraway slope. Mama handed me to him on that windy day. He and I stood on the riverside. He told me to stand still and shout. I shouted ‘Mama.’ Later, I fell in love with him. You mustn’t think that I fell for this old man because I didn’t have many chances to meet young men in that place. That’s not true. Many young men lived in the village below the mountain. And for the most part, they were handsome, but I didn’t love them.”

  In the lamplight, Amy’s face looked rather tired. This was unusual. She was always so vivacious and lively. Liujin wondered if something was wrong. Was Uncle Qiming all right?

  “Amy, you’re so pretty, Uncle must love you a lot. We think you’re like the sun.”

  “No, no. He doesn’t love me. The one he loves is my deceased mama.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s injured. You saw that. He’s always getting hurt, and then he hides somewhere until he recovers. I can’t find his hiding place, Pebble Town is so large.”

  “Does your brother hate him?”

  “My brother also loves him. He wants to be like him, but he can’t. He was sad when he went home.”

  Liujin turned the light off, but she didn’t see the green moonlight. The cat walked past the windowsill, looking very large. And a bird was pecking at something on the floor. Amy said it was feed that she had scattered.

  “I often think about coming here to hide, but this ancient castle doesn’t belong to me. We can only visit.”

  “My home is your home. It would be great if you moved here. Little birds are coming back, and frogs will, too.”

  “The air here is too thin. People in your family have extraordinary lungs. That’s what Uncle Qiming told me. You didn’t know that, did you? And so we can stay here only a short time.”

  Liujin had long ago sensed what she spoke of, but she had never given it careful thought. She walked over to the window and moved the parrot to a different spot. When she turned back, Amy had disappeared.

  “She loves him. He doesn’t love her!” the parrot said.

  Liujin turned on the light and looked closely at the floor. She saw neither a bird nor any feed.

  Liujin sat down and thought back to Amy’s brother’s appearance. He was about forty years old, a good-looking man. His face would have been charming if he weren’t so aloof. When someone like this strolled around the city with a wolf cub, it was conspicuous. He didn’t seem to like cities, so why had he come here? Amy had said that snow leopards, black bears, and other carnivores wouldn’t harm woodsmen, because woodsmen were in the mountains every day and so the animals thought they were one of them. A man who worked in the mountains every day was actually interested in cities and came to see if city residents “were ever off-guard.” Having such a brother, would Amy be likely to feel tense all the time? Amy said her father had never come down the mountain. Was Liujin ever negligent? For example, did she write to her mother regularly?

  This was the first time Liujin had seen a real mountain man. She knew there were woodsmen in the mountains and she had thought they must
be like Ying—covered all over with memories and stumbling when on flat land. She was interested in Amy because of her singing and her beauty—but mostly because she was from the mountains.

  That little gecko (could it be the big one’s daughter?) was crawling in the light outside. She could hear animals passing through the underbrush in the courtyard. On a night like this, Liujin sensed that she was particularly good at communicating with people like Amy’s brother. Of course, her thoughts held no erotic overtones. She was merely imagining visiting a snow leopard’s home with him. If this really happened, maybe she would be able to solve the riddle of the snow mountain. Woodsmen were part of the riddle, and so was Roy. The little gecko crawled over to the window frame and stopped. Liujin lamented to herself: It really is a new era. She had sympathized with Amy’s brother, and now she felt that her train of thought was flowing particularly freely. Inhaling deeply, she could even smell the smoke from Smoke City. But for some reason, she still couldn’t recall what Uncle Qiming used to be like. What she remembered was still a cloud of smoke.

  Outside the window, someone gasped for breath. Liujin rushed out the door and saw three neighbor boys doing handstands by the wall. Their upside-down bodies kept trembling in the moonlight. When Liujin approached, they stood up and wiped the sweat from their faces with their sleeves.

  “You look exhausted,” Liujin said.

  “We came here to do exercises. It’s hard to breathe here,” the slightly older one said.

  “Really?”

  The three kids started laughing and ran off.

  When Liujin looked down, she saw the sickle on the ground. Was Amy still here? She picked up the sickle and looked at its serrated edge in the moonlight. She felt a chill in her back and immediately put the sickle down on the windowsill. She went to the courtyard and looked around again, but didn’t see Amy. When she went back inside, Amy was sitting upright in the living room.

  “Did you see the sickle?” Amy asked, her head drooping.

  “Yes. I didn’t dare look very long. I was afraid of being cut.”

  “I made marks on their hands. Such well-behaved children!”

  Amy said she was all mixed up. She’d like to sit up all night in the living room. Liujin went off to bed.

  Liujin awakened when she saw wolves in her dream. Then she heard animals gasping for breath throughout the whole house. She turned on the lights, but didn’t see any animals. She went to the living room and saw Amy still sitting next to the table, her head propped up in one hand. There were no animals in the living room, either.

  “I’m waiting for Uncle Qiming. Are you waiting for him, too?” Amy asked.

  “No. I was dreaming. There were so many big animals in this house.”

  “Unh. That’s because your house is so big. Your dad and mama are broad-minded. So are my parents.”

  When Amy laughed in the dark, the parrot in the bedroom also laughed. The parrot’s laughter made Liujin’s hair stand on end. Liujin put the birdcage on the living room table, returned to her room, and went back to sleep.

  Between sleep and waking, she kept hearing Amy talking with the bird. The bird responded harshly, as if in a pique. Was it possible that the bird didn’t like Amy? Or that it didn’t like staying in the living room? Plagued by these questions, Liujin couldn’t sleep well. She awakened at dawn: it was the parrot that awakened her. The parrot kept repeating in a loud voice: “Is this it? I’m so happy! Is this it? I’m so . . .”

  Rubbing her eyes, Liujin ran to the living room. She didn’t see Amy. The bird had emerged from the cage and was standing on the table. One of its legs was bleeding; the bones were exposed. It stood on its good leg, and was still very excited.

  As Liujin bandaged its leg, she said, “Bah! Bah!” It looked disdainful, and Liujin was amused. As she laughed, she glanced at the sickle on the chair, and so she again recalled the wound on Roy’s hand.

  “What an Amy!” she sighed.

  “What an Amy!” the parrot sighed back.

  Chapter 12

  LIUJIN AND ROY, AS WELL AS A HEADLESS MAN

  Roy went to the courtyard at dawn and sat beside the abandoned well. Liujin must have seen him. She shouted from the house: “Roy! Roy!” He didn’t answer. He was observing ants coming out of cracks in the well’s granite. He wondered if the ants would build their nests at the bottom of the well. What a long and narrow, twisting and secluded path they had been crimped through! He was so absorbed in nervously watching these worker ants that he didn’t notice Liujin approaching.

  “This well is a legacy, built before Pebble Town. The engineers must have been highly skilled. It is said that they still live in seclusion somewhere around here,” Liujin said softly.

  Roy stood up and smiled appreciatively at Liujin. They went to the kitchen to eat.

  “Roy, are you ready?

  Roy finished the sheep’s milk and set his bowl down. He said somewhat hesitantly, “I don’t know, Liujin. I’m really on edge. I’ve never been sure of myself.”

  The day before, the two of them had agreed to go together to the Gobi Desert because Liujin wanted to spend her vacation “repeating the trip I made with my father.” So many years had passed since then, and her idea of going back had grown stronger with time, she had told Roy. After contemplating this, Roy asked her, “Will the people there remember me?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  They tidied the kitchen, and the cart showed up at the courtyard right on time. It was a simple, crude cart, pulled by two black horses. The driver was arrogant and always seemed to be sneering.

  They got into the cart, and Roy gripped Liujin’s hand. He seemed afraid. Liujin felt warm toward him. She thought, Roy is only a kid, after all, even though he’s been traveling on his own for a long time.

  The cart soon exited Pebble Town and reached the open countryside. Roy still looked tense and said nothing. Liujin noticed they were traveling on a good asphalt road, but the strange thing was that they could see no signs of human habitation on either side of the road. After going a long way, they could still see only a vast wilderness. Wildflowers—yellow and purple—bloomed everywhere. There were very few trees. The sky was high and distant. The cart’s wheels rolled smoothly and lightly, yet that didn’t ease Liujin’s doubts. She wanted to dilute the tension by talking, but Roy didn’t want to talk. The driver had been introduced to Liujin by one of her coworkers. It was said that he went back and forth between Pebble Town and the Gobi all the time and knew this route well.

  “Roy, don’t be afraid. In the evening, we’ll go to a hostel. I know the manager.”

  The driver turned and asked loudly, “Is it that headless man? It’s a good sign that you know him!”

  All of a sudden, Liujin’s hazy memories became focused: it was a cold night when she and her father, dressed in cotton clothes and hats, reached the patio of the hostel. Something like a torch landed on the flagstones, sounding like glass shattering. Was it a meteor? Below the corridor, that person had shouted for Dad, and Dad walked over. They talked for a long time. Liujin nearly fainted from the cold. It’s true—not even once had she seen that face wrapped in a scarf. She had asked her dad about him, and he’d said that he used to be a soldier and had been injured on patrol.

  In the afternoon, the cart left the wilderness and entered a small county seat. Roy finally seemed more active. Liujin and Roy got out of the cart and went to eat while the driver watered the horse.

  The small restaurant wasn’t very welcoming. Liujin was depressed by the two watercolors on the wall. They both depicted rocks on the Gobi Desert, the rocks illuminated like fire by the setting sun. Roy stepped closer to look at those rocks with a magnifying glass. He kept mumbling “whoa.”

  “We haven’t reached the Gobi yet,” Liujin reminded him.

  The restaurant had no other customers while they were eating. Yet, the restaurant across the street was filled with people. Having nothing
to do, the waitress walked over and chatted with them.

  “Customers say we shouldn’t hang this kind of picture here, for it puts people in a bad mood. People here don’t have good taste.” She curled her lips in disdain.

  When Liujin wanted to pick up the tab, the waitress said it wasn’t necessary. She explained that this restaurant offered complimentary meals to “friends from afar.”

  Walking out of the restaurant, Roy rubbed his hands excitedly and kept saying, “What kind of rocks were they? I never imagined! And then there was this . . .”

  Liujin asked, “What did you see?”

  “What? Are you asking what I saw? Everything.”

  “Do you always carry a magnifying glass? To look at pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  The cart and driver weren’t where they had stopped. Liujin sensed vaguely that something had changed. She stood next to the road to get hold of herself, and she told Roy about the time she had traveled here before. For some reason, her impression of the Gobi seemed to be changing. She struggled to talk and to remember, yet—in spite of herself—she always brought up “the headless man”—that is, the hostel manager. She couldn’t help it. That black-swathed apparition who had talked with her father: she found him infinitely appealing.

  “Oh,” Roy said, “from what you’re saying, the mystery of the Gobi lies in that hostel—right? Liujin, do you think our waitress recognized me?”

  “But we aren’t there yet, Roy.”

  “Is that what you think? Are you sure?”

  Liujin couldn’t answer. Something was happening: the waitress was reading a newspaper at the kiosk. But who knew if she was really reading? At the restaurant across the road, patrons were coming out all the time and standing beside the road in pairs or groups, looking at Liujin and Roy. Roy took his magnifying glass out of his pocket and peered at a small advertisement on the power pole. Liujin also took a look. It was nothing but a hostel’s advertisement: the Peculiar Hostel, two hundred meters ahead, offered room and board. The ad actually used the words “Gobi style.”