A Single Swallow

by Ling Zhang

  I hadn’t expected to see her again. And then, when I’d given up all hope, she delivered herself, standing right there before my eyes.

  “Wende. You look like Wende,” I mumbled.

  I was equally stunned to find that after a decade of paralysis, a finger on my right hand suddenly began to twitch.

  She understood me. I saw moisture gathering in her eyes. She didn’t reach for her handkerchief or a tissue, wanting to ignore the tears. She simply pretended to tidy her hat, tilting her head back slightly, forcing the tears to retreat as she did. Then she cleared her throat and, speaking each word deliberately, said, “I don’t know . . . any Wende.”

  She took a beautifully printed business card from the pocket of her delicate coat and placed it on my bed. She said she was a reporter from a well-known Chinese media outlet in Washington, DC. On the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of victory in the anti-Japanese war, they wanted to interview veterans of the US military who’d served in China and compile a commemorative album. She found my name in an old directory of Naval Group China in the Library of Congress.

  Her English had improved a good deal in these twenty-three years. If she didn’t drag a sentence out, it was nearly flawless, though she did occasionally turn “thank you” into “sank you.” Her tone spoke of the capability and experience of a well-trained journalist, solid and stable, with almost no crack of emotion. She pinned me in her sight firmly, and even if she didn’t speak, I knew who was in control here.

  I suddenly understood the purpose of her visit. She wanted me to know that she knew my whereabouts before I died, and that no matter where I went, she forever held my guilt in her grasp. She wore her full armor and kept the polite distance of a stranger, letting me know she had erased all trace of me from her memory. She hated me, but not with the sort of hate that could be expressed in words. Hate that can find expression is not hate. Hate must come to the end of its own rope before being forgotten.

  There was no point explaining or arguing. I reined my emotions in and invited her to sit by my bed. I asked the nurse to translate, since only she understood the odd accent of my speech after the stroke. I told Catherine that I only had energy for one story. My tongue would not fully obey me, so I spoke slowly. Catherine turned on her recorder and began to take careful notes. Occasionally, she interrupted and asked me to repeat a few words that even the nurse couldn’t make out. Most of the time, she kept her head lowered so I couldn’t see her expression, but from the intensity of her breaths, I could detect the current of her emotions. But that submerged current never flooded its banks, and she remained restrained from beginning to end.

  When I finished the story, I was exhausted, like a fish that had been over-salted.

  “This girl, Wende—did you find her later?” Catherine asked after a long pause.

  I shook my head.

  “Memory is a fragile thing,” I said.

  I was telling the truth.

  My first day in Shanghai, in my newly tailored blue military uniform, sitting in the military club and drinking that long-missed first beer in comfort, Yuehu had already become a thing of the past. It didn’t take three months for the memory to fade, or even three days.

  When I was on the plane from Calcutta back to the States, Wende did come to my mind. But it wasn’t really Wende I was thinking of. I was recalling the advice Pastor Billy had given me when I left Yuehu, even though it sounded scathing at the time. Pastor Billy was fifteen years older than I was, and he heard God’s voice at a closer range than I did. He knew that human nature was riddled with a thousand gaping wounds. War is one world, and peace another. Each world has its own door, and they are not connected in any way.

  In fact, each also forgot the other. After many years, I was still asking myself, Did Wende forget me before I forgot her? Why didn’t she respond to my letter? Should I count her silence a regret or my good fortune?

  After returning to the US, I still sometimes thought of Wende. For instance, when I was driving alone at night on a highway or perhaps on some sleepless night. In those unimaginably strange moments, Wende broke into my thoughts without warning. But even when I was thinking about her, I didn’t really think about her. I was just thinking about a younger version of myself.

  The nurse stood up to check my blood pressure.

  “Mr. Ferguson hasn’t spoken this much in a long time,” she said.

  It sounded like something was caught in her throat. Her voice was murky and hoarse. That was the scar my story had left on her.

  Immediately understanding the nurse’s meaning, Catherine stood up to leave.

  “Farewell, Mr. Ferguson. Thank you for this . . . unforgettable story,” she said.

  I noticed her embarrassment as she searched for a suitable adjective. I also noticed that she said “farewell,” not “goodbye.” She and I both knew that when she went out of the door, it was farewell.

  From the bed, I stopped her.

  “Can you tell me again what you used to be called? I mean, the name given to you by your mother?” I had the nurse ask on my behalf.

  She didn’t answer, but she stopped.

  “Can you accept an apology from a ninety-four-year-old man? It’s probably the last apology I’ll offer before I go,” I muttered.

  My eyes were closed when I said it, because I couldn’t bear to see her expression when she turned around. I couldn’t bear to see anything in that room, including the half-empty cup on the table, the spider staring with its big eyes in the corner, or the dust collected in the gaps between the blinds.

  She kept silent, but I heard the tremble in the air around her.

  “Everything that happens in this world happens for reasons suited to its particular time,” she said at last.

  She left, and all was quiet in the air behind her.

  After she’d gone, I could not sleep for two nights. On the third night, I stared wide eyed at the venetian blinds, watching them turn from dark night to a light gray. When I heard a robin utter its first chirp on the branches outside the window, I finally closed my eyes. This time, I closed them forever.

  I know we’re slowly getting to the heart of the matter. I’ve already seen from the glint in your eyes that the thing you most want to hear about is the woman I called Wende. No, she was a girl. In fact, she’s the reason we’re here. If our lives are three separate circles, then she is their intersection. You want to talk about her, but you don’t dare, or perhaps I should say, you can’t bear to. Now that I’ve finally broached the subject, let’s start with you, Liu Zhaohu. You knew her for years, far longer than Pastor Billy or I did. Her life before she came to the camp was a mystery to me. Please, reveal the mystery to us. Tell us about her past, and maybe about what happened later, if you can.

  Liu Zhaohu: Sishiyi Bu, the Village with Forty-One Steps

  Ian, to you she’s called Wende. To me, she’s Yao Ah Yan, “Swallow.” When you met Ah Yan, she’d been living at Pastor Billy’s house for almost a year, but she wasn’t native to that village. She was from Sishiyi Bu, about fifty miles from Yuehu. Today, the villages are practically neighbors, but in those days, people separated by forty-five li might never see each other in their lifetimes. That’s why Ah Yan came to Yuehu.

  Ah Yan’s village was also my village. We knew each other as children. Anyone with a surname other than Yao or Yang had to be an outsider, so you’ve probably figured out from my name that my family members were outsiders. When Ah Yan was a child, I carried her and fed her rice cereal. Our village was called Sishiyi Bu, meaning “forty-one steps,” because of a river. The river sat far below the village, requiring us to walk up and down a long stone staircase. Going down to the river, there were forty-one steps, but ascending, there were only thirty-nine. A third of the way up, there was a groove worn into the hillside, and someone familiar with the path could walk along the groove, jump lightly, and skip two steps. This number was only when the river was in a good mood. With rains or in the typhoon season when summer turns
to autumn, the river would lose its reason and swallow a dozen steps in one gulp. Yang Taigong, Great-Grandpa Yang, the oldest villager, told a story that in the autumn of the twenty-first year of the Guangxu reign—that’s 1895 on your calendar—it rained for forty-nine days. When the rain finally stopped, he was herding the ducks out the courtyard gate, and looking down, he thought he’d gone the wrong way because all forty-one steps had vanished, leaving only a sliver of stone vaguely visible. But even Yang Taigong didn’t know when the stone steps were put in. He guessed that the river and steps existed before the village, since the village was named after the stairway.

  Sishiyi Bu was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the nameless river was the only waterway in or out. It was a narrow river, but rowing a sampan across it required fierce strength. Then, once docked, you had to climb the stone steps. Forty-one steps don’t sound like much, but for anyone not used to mountainous terrain, it would be quite difficult. The land was easy to defend and difficult to attack, so even though the Japanese occupied the Chinese coast from the capital to Guangdong, the people of Sishiyi Bu had never seen even a single Japanese person. For the Japanese, it wasn’t worth wasting the resources to attack.

  Ah Yan didn’t know much about any of it. The furthest she’d ever traveled was the county seat. How could she know anything about the capital, Guangdong, or the Japanese? She only heard things from her father’s sworn brother, Uncle Ah Quan. Uncle Ah Quan didn’t understand those things either, but he heard about them from his son, Huwa, who’d gone to school in the county seat. Huwa returned home every month, bringing a bag full of rice and salted vegetables with him when he left home and news to the village when he came back. This way, news regarding the Japanese found Ah Yan’s ears, so she knew there was trouble with Japanese people outside the village.

  That boy, Huwa, was me. It was the childish nickname my family gave me and meant “baby tiger.” All my speculation about the terrain and the war ultimately proved to be the meaningless talk of a half-scholar. Ah Yan listened, but it didn’t make sense. How could the Japanese make trouble? She knew that her father had told her that over thirty years earlier, Sishiyi Bu and the neighboring village, Liupu Ridge, had a fight over a slate plank at the border between them. All the men and boys—even the male dogs—in both villages had gone to the battle, which lasted from sunrise to sunset, until the sky was so dark, one couldn’t tell friend from foe. The next morning, teeth covered the ground. The pigs and dogs were covered with red mud for the next several days. The Japanese were fierce, but could they fight like that? After the battle, the two villages were hostile for many years. At some point, the elders of the villages arranged a feast. After sharing food and wine, it had become customary for them to give their children in marriage to the other village so that the two villages could live peacefully together in the future. And so, Ah Yan didn’t take the Japanese seriously.

  Ah Yan’s story is long. I have to skip her childhood and start from when she was fourteen years old, when I was escorted home from school.

  The day after I returned one time, in the morning, Ah Yan took a bamboo basket and went to wash clothes. The morning fog still hadn’t dissipated. The eaves, the blue paving stones, the branches, and the cats and dogs on the street looking for food were visible, but barely. If you reached out, you could actually grab a handful of water in the air.

  “Press it, then press it again. This year’s harvest will be secure.”

  That’s what my father—the man she called Uncle Ah Quan—had said once while drinking with her father. Ah Yan had laughed at how my father spoke as if fog really had substance. My father had tapped her head with his bamboo chopsticks, and said, “You don’t believe me? Well, people eat dogs, dogs eat shit, and tea leaves eat fog. Look at all the good tea leaves around the world and tell me, which does not come from a misty mountain?”

  My father wasn’t just her father’s sworn brother but was also the supervisor of her family’s tea plantation. Her family wasn’t the only one who planted tea, and her family’s garden wasn’t large, not more than a dozen mu, but her family’s tea was famed far and wide, and not just because their tea was perfect in taste, color, and shape but also because it could stave off hunger, and a cup of their tea was better than a bowl of meat broth.

  Though the plantation belonged to her family, my father was the real manager. He’d given the tea grown on her family’s plantation a name not easily forgotten: Yunshan tea, or in English, “tea from the cloudy mountain that can fill you up.” It wasn’t only famous but also reasonably priced, so it was sold as far as the northeastern provinces and Guangxi, in the south. There was always someone asking how my father cultivated “a tea that could fill one up,” but my father would just laugh. People asked if it was a family secret, but again, he would just laugh, not saying a word. Everyone was convinced he had some secret formula, and the villagers often wondered whom he’d give it to. My father had two sons, but my older brother had been apprenticed to the village carpenter, Yang, since he was just a kid, and I was in school. Neither of us seemed likely to become tea farmers.

  One day, Ah Yan asked her father in private, “Where does Uncle Ah Quan hide his secret formula?”

  Her father looked to make sure there was no one else around, then laughed and said that my father’s secret formula was nothing but hot air. The rumor about drinking his tea and not getting hungry was started by my father. The talk spread from person to person—first one, then ten, and then a hundred, with each retelling exaggerating the claims. As it spread further, it came to be accepted as true.

  Hearing this, Ah Yan came to realize that business could be done in this way.

  A few days later, it was time to harvest the Qingming tea. Even the sparrows flying over the tea trees knew it was going to be a good year. My father said it had been many years since he’d seen such ideal weather, with lingering fog and a mix of wind and rain and sunshine each arriving on time, as if they’d arranged everything over dinner and wine, all agreeing to a schedule, nobody quarreling with anyone.

  Not even the tip of a single shoot of new tea was visible, and our mothers were already making plans for what was to be done after the harvest. The roof in the front of the house was a little leaky, so they would need a mason to repair the tiles. The tailor would make new cotton jackets for everyone too. Ah Yan’s mother’s joy that year was not based on the harvest alone. More importantly, she would never need to worry again about adding a new jacket for another woman. After the Spring festival, Ah Yan’s father had gotten rid of his second wife. Before her, there had been another he’d sent away. Ah Yan’s father had kept other women because he really wanted a son. Two years after he had taken his wife, she’d had Ah Yan, but after that, her belly remained flat. He’d taken a woman, sold to the Yao household by her brother for a few copper coins as they fled the famine in Sichuan. The woman stayed in the Yao household for three years, but her belly too remained empty. Ah Yan’s father sent her away and took in another woman. She was a distant relative of the Yao family and a virgin. Because she was so poor, she was willing to become a second wife. Ah Yan’s father was of the opinion that if one piece of land didn’t bear fruit, it was best to move to another. It hadn’t occurred to him that the problem might actually be the seed. At the end of the year, he consulted a famous blind fortune-teller a hundred miles away who told him he could only expect half a son in his life, and the hope finally died within him.

  After he sent the second woman away, Ah Yan’s father asked his wife if she thought they could find a boy to adopt and make their heir. His wife said that no matter how good an adopted child was, he wouldn’t be their own flesh and blood. Why not instead find a suitable young man, and he could become the half a son the fortune-teller had spoken of? The child Ah Yan would have in the future would be their own blood. His wife had her own agenda, but Ah Yan’s father didn’t reply, and generally, his silence was approval.

  This discussion was carried out without Ah Yan’s kn
owledge, and it was my mother who brought it to me. I said, “Shouldn’t Ah Yan be the one consulted about her marriage?”

  My mother scolded me. “You’ve studied so much that it’s ruined your brain. You’re more confused each year.”

  The “press” my father had spoken of was the sort of fog we had that day. Ah Yan walked to the river with her bamboo basket on her back in the early morning light. Sishiyi Bu was just waking up, each house opening the door to shoo the chickens onto the street, filling the town with cackling and shouts. There was the sound of Ah Yan’s mother boiling water to cook rice. Ah Yan was so efficient that she could wash all the clothes in her basket and be back by the time the rice was cooked.

  I called to her from the big pagoda tree on the shore. Startled, she rubbed her eyes. As soon as she realized it was me, she laughed, revealing two rows of white teeth.

  “Huwa, don’t act like a ghost.”

  In the month since I’d seen her, Ah Yan had changed. I couldn’t say exactly what was different about her, but her clothes seemed a little smaller. She was still thin, her shoulders poking against the cloth of her shirt like a pair of machetes.

  A child this age is like a weed, growing another inch in the blink of an eye, I thought.

  I was four years older than she was. At that point in our lives, even one year could mean two different crops, so she was still a child in my eyes.

  “It’s so early, and the air is so damp. What are you washing? Wouldn’t it be better to wash when the sun is higher?” I said.

  I had returned the previous night in the company of a teacher from school. This teacher came to tell my father that I wasn’t doing well in school, but instead was leading a group of students every day to protest in the streets against the government’s refusal to resist Japan, the soaring cost of living, and China’s failing school system. We had grown fiercer, bringing our protest to the door of the county administrator, and as the leader, I was caught and jailed for two days. The old principal had to fight with his life for my release. Fearing I would get into further trouble, the school sent me home.