A Single Swallow

by Ling Zhang

  “Because there are a lot of applicants, so you have to wait your turn?” he guessed.

  “Yes and no. The wartime commander feels it is necessary to give the soldiers a little time to cool down. There are many men who won’t give these poor Chinese women another look once they get back to America.”

  I looked at him meaningfully. “Do you think you’re one of them?” I asked.

  At the time, I didn’t know that the news I gave Ian was already outdated. In the end, the act wasn’t even passed until the end of that year, leaving many lovelorn soldiers without any way to apply to take their wartime brides home to America. I can only assume they didn’t want the American government to risk having to invest significant resources in the near future in the annulment of quick marriages. Annulment is much more complicated than issuing a marriage certificate. But despite the inaccuracy of the information, Ian was obviously taken aback. After a moment, he smiled, again his mouth pulling straight apart, like a child who had just woken from a dream.

  “I see. Well, that gives me thirty days to think about it,” he said.

  I relaxed. Ultimately, I hadn’t read him wrong, I told myself. No matter how outstanding an officer he was, or how well he spoke about sniper tactics, in the end, he was still an immature kid.

  “When you get to Shanghai, get your teeth cleaned,” I said as he left.

  On a bleak autumn evening, the soldiers of the training camp left Yuehu along the sandy road in front of the church. It was the same path I’d walked when bringing Stella to Yuehu years earlier. Their departing footprints passed over those coming in, and in the future, there would be more incoming footprints passing over these. Life is nothing but a series of such overlaps and interminglings.

  The sunset was odd that day, like a bronze drum mottled with spots of rust and cracks. The sun shone on the phoenix tree, and the surfaces of its broad leaves looked like they were sprinkled with a thick layer of broken brick. When the troop passed, both sides of the road were lined with villagers bidding them farewell. We could hear firecrackers being set off for several miles. The children were the most excited. They sat on adults’ shoulders or climbed trees for a better view. They shouted at the top of their lungs, “Ding hao!” This was a Chinese phrase the Americans had taught them meaning “thumbs up.” When they said it in the past, they would get a bullet case or perhaps a piece of colorful candy. But today, no matter how fiercely they shouted, all they received in return was a faint smile. The Americans had given out all the bullet cases and candy, and now they carried other things in their pockets. There was nothing wrong with a smile, but compared to a bullet case or candy, it felt thin and barren, leaving the children a little disappointed.

  The long parade finally ended, and the figures at the rear of the unit turned to little more than specks of dust on the road. If not for the scraps of firecrackers fluttering like moths in the breeze, one could hardly be sure they’d ever been in Yuehu at all. The village was caught up in a deep, terrible silence, so quiet one could be startled by the sound of their own breath. It was a silence like the seventh day of creation in the book of Genesis. But no. On that seventh day, it was a virgin silence before anything had happened, before the apple, before the serpent, before Adam pushed the blame for his sin to Eve, and before Eve knew the shame of her nakedness. But it was not so in Yuehu. There had been a training camp here, and Americans, and a war. Yuehu would never return to the tranquility of the seventh day. The war would leave scars, and so would peace. The scars looked coldly at one another, but neither could heal the other.

  I didn’t see Stella in the crowd, and I didn’t look for her. I knew she was nursing her sorrow in solitude. I couldn’t intrude on her grief, just as I couldn’t let her intrude on my weakness.

  Ian:

  There’s only a whirlwind of impressions left from after the broadcast of the Japanese emperor’s “Jewel Voice Broadcast” to the day the training camp cleared out of Yuehu. Drink after drink, with whatever excuse, starting with the USS Missouri signing or the ceremony in Nanjing, where the surrender was accepted. Later, when the big excuses had been exhausted, it was someone’s new haircut, or the new dish the cook had come up with, or even a giant rat someone caught. Anything could be elevated to an occasion worthy of a toast. At the time, it created the illusion that the world would never stop celebrating.

  The Japanese reward on every American’s head was no longer in effect. We could finally move around freely. We began to look for gifts to bring home. We bought handwoven fabrics and embroideries, and we searched the pawnshops for gold, silver, or jade jewelry that their owners couldn’t redeem. The busiest person in camp was Buffalo. Every day, he took us to shop after shop and engaged in round after round of bargaining as complex as national treaty negotiations, and every round ended in the curtain falling amid the seller’s fake look of heartache and the buyer’s fake look of helplessness. It seemed like Buffalo was like a high-power pump, drawing the water up from his body and using it to drive this war of words. He even seemed slightly shriveled.

  One week before pulling out, our festivities became incandescent. We no longer used celebrations as an excuse, but gratitude instead. We had to thank everyone who’d had any connection to us. We got the cook so drunk his wife had to bring the donkey to get him home. He sat on the donkey, puking over and over, as the donkey would take a few steps, then shake its head, trying to get rid of the vomit hanging from its mane. Pastor Billy saw this and, shaking his head, said, “Why don’t you guys save some energy for Shanghai? Wait until you’re there, then make trouble.”

  Jack winked at me and said, “We haven’t thanked our spiritual leader yet, have we?”

  We all jumped into action and lifted the pastor up, singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as we carried him in a big circle around the village. Pastor Billy was like a beetle flipped on his back, struggling in vain to get off our shoulders. Finally, we let him down on the side of the road on a pile of firewood.

  When we had thanked all the people we could thank, we thanked the fleas who’d bitten us but had not given us typhoid and the rats that didn’t give typhoid to the fleas. We expressed our heartfelt thanks to the mosquitoes, which started biting after sunset, but benevolently spared us from malaria. We thanked the chickens, who sacrificed their bodies to our plates, but who we also cursed, saying we’d never eat chicken again. I even thanked the water buffalo who’d chased me and nearly gored me. We thanked them all, drinking to each in turn. Oh, those were happy days! The fear of war had passed, and the responsibilities of peacetime had not yet arrived. We were holding a carnival in the vacuum between war and peace, free even from the law of gravity. Everyone knew there were only a few such days in our lifetimes, so we did what we could to make a lifetime of those days.

  One night, for no reason, I woke up suddenly. The moonlight was deep, flattening the branches like ghosts against the glass of my window. I felt that my head, muddled by alcohol, was suddenly very clear. I remembered something crucial. Sitting up, I took my flashlight out from under my pillow, then shone it on every bed until I had awakened everyone, causing a ruckus.

  Buffalo sat up from the floor beside my bed with a quick turn, rubbed his eyes, and said, “Sir, urgent meeting?”

  Buffalo thought American surnames were hard to say, so he just called all of us “sir.” When he needed to refer to one of us specifically, he just pointed.

  I slammed my bed with my fist a few times and said, “Urgent meeting my ass. Quick, get the wine and glasses.”

  “Now? At this time?” Buffalo could barely open his eyes.

  “Immediately. Right now. Now,” I said.

  Buffalo slipped into his shoes and went reluctantly into the kitchen. His footsteps were so heavy, it was like he was dragging a tail behind him.

  “We forgot to thank Buffalo,” I said to my roommates as soon as he left.

  “You couldn’t wait till dawn?” Jack mumbled.

  “Will my mind hold up until morni
ng? And anyway, the daytime has its own things to toast,” I said.

  Everyone in the room burst out laughing, all were starting to wake up now. “Yes,” they said, “we toasted the fleas and the rats. How could we forget the man who was with us all this time?”

  I turned up the kerosene lamp, and everyone got up and sat on the beds, forming a circle. Buffalo brought the last remaining bottle of whisky, along with several bamboo containers that he filled with liquor and passed around. We had learned to drink from these bamboo containers, just like the locals.

  “Sir, if you keep drinking like this, it will turn your brain to mush. My great uncle drank till he had no wits left, just like this,” he said, pulling on my sleeve hesitantly.

  Ignoring him, I took a bamboo tube, filled it, and shoved it into his hand.

  “Drink. This cup is yours.”

  He was shocked. He’d never had a drink before. In fact, in many ways, he was still a child.

  “This round is for you, to thank you for getting up at four every morning to light the stove, for making sure we woke before the military alarm, and for almost smoking us into yellow weasels when you lit the fire.” I found that my Chinese had improved greatly by this time. There were more and more Chinese metaphors mingling with my English phrases.

  I held Buffalo’s nose and held the cup to his mouth. I let go when he’d swallowed half the cup, and he spat all over the floor, saying, “This is terrible! It tastes like rotten leather shoes.”

  I grabbed the cup and finished it on Buffalo’s behalf.

  “If you don’t want to drink something that tastes like rotten leather shoes, do you want rotten leather shoes?”

  I took my winter boots from under my bed and handed them to Buffalo. They hadn’t been worn all summer, and there was still mud on the soles from when I’d stepped in a paddy field the previous year. There could even be a few grains of rice stuck in them, for all I knew. This year’s plum rains had also left their mark on the boots. There were a few green spots of mold on the lining, and a small piece of the leather was peeling from the toe of the left boot. They were actually fairly new, sturdy boots, but seemed aged beyond their years.

  “Clean ’em up and polish ’em, and they should go for a few dollars at the market,” I said.

  After the armistice, American goods suddenly flooded the black market—everything from cigarettes to cough syrup to belts to military daggers. Some items even still had warehouse labels on them. But a genuine pair of American military boots was still a rare item. Buffalo stopped coughing and took the boots. He gently caressed the lining at the top of the boots with the tip of his finger. His eyes shone like an oil lamp. He wore grass slippers year-round, only switching to cloth shoes for a few days in the twelfth lunar month, and even those were his brother’s hand-me-downs. He’d never had his own pair of shoes.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll wear them myself.”

  He took off his sandals, brushed the dirt away, and slipped his feet into the boots. His legs were as scrawny as his body, and in the boots, they looked like sticks poking out of two globes.

  “They’re a little big,” he said.

  Unable to help themselves, everyone laughed. He pulled his feet out of the boots and carefully placed them in a bamboo basket where he kept his things. He said, “When I go home, I’ll ask my mother for some rags to stuff in the front and back. Then I should be able to wear them.”

  Jack took a paper bag from under his bed and handed it to Buffalo. “I collected these for you,” he said. “I almost forgot.”

  Buffalo opened the paper bag and found it was full of cigarette butts. We’d all seen him pick up the discarded cigarette butts to collect the remaining bits of tobacco and roll it into new cigarettes, which he sent to his family to sell. There were fifteen people across four generations in Buffalo’s family, and his income was divided among them. Buffalo smiled as wide as if he’d been given a gold ingot.

  “Sir, if you’d give me that too, I can make more rolling the tobacco in colorful papers,” he said, pointing at the magazine beside Jack’s pillow, an outdated issue of Time, covered with three thousand nine hundred fingerprints, coffee stains, flea blood, and who knew what else. I suddenly felt sad. I grabbed my hat and walked around the room.

  “Put all the change you have in here,” I said.

  Everyone retrieved their pants or jacket and emptied their pockets, tossing everything into the hat, making it tremble under the surprising weight. I emptied my pockets too, then took two big notes from my wallet as well.

  “Buffalo, listen to me. This money is for when you get married. If you use it to smoke, play mahjong, bet on cockfights, or drink, your children will be born with their assholes sewn shut.” I’d learned that curse from Buffalo, so it seemed fitting to return it to the person who’d given it to me.

  His mouth opened, and his front teeth looked like two pieces of garlic hanging over his lower lip. I heard a crying sound, but his tears seemed to bypass his eyes and drip straight out of his nose. He wiped it with the back of his hands, but the more he wiped, the more it flowed, until his hands were a sticky mess. I tossed him my handkerchief and said, “Enough already. I hope you’re not planning to use those hands to get us coffee in the morning?”

  He laughed, snorting so hard a big bubble came out of his nose.

  “Who wants a wife?” he muttered. “Even a good woman becomes a tigress once you take her home.”

  The prolonged farewell lasted nearly a whole week. My goodbye to Wende was thrown in with round after round of celebrations, making it seem almost unremarkable, especially because subconsciously, for me, it was a comma in the middle of a long sentence, not a period bringing it to an end. It won’t be long till we meet again, I thought. The day before we left, I asked her to meet me at Ghost’s—no, I should say at Ghost’s and Millie’s—graves. We sometimes met there when she came to visit Millie and I came to visit Ghost. Or rather, we each took the visits as an excuse to see each other. That day, Wende arrived before me, and as I approached the tombstones, I saw her sitting on the browning grass with her back to me. The leaves had also begun to change color, and the wind had grown a bite. But it wasn’t the grass, or leaves, or even the wind in which I found hints of autumn. It was that view of Wende’s back. Perhaps it was the slight rise of her shoulders or the faintly visible shoulder blades, or maybe the long crease on the back of her blouse. I called her name, and when she turned around, I saw autumn in her cheeks, eyes, and lips.

  “You didn’t sleep well last night?” I asked.

  She nodded, then shook her head, negating the nod.

  “You’ve been drinking for so many days. Do you think there’s any alcohol left in Yuehu?” she asked.

  I could tell it wasn’t really a question, but I couldn’t tell if it was an accusation or complaint. Both were things unusual from Wende.

  I laughed and said, “I can always find alcohol when I want to drink.”

  I asked if she knew about Pastor Billy going back to America. She said she did, but that no specific date had been set yet. That wasn’t what I really wanted to say, but I wasn’t sure what was. All the drinking in recent days had worn out not just my stomach but also my lips, and I suddenly felt I needed to say something.

  “Wende, I forgot to tell you before. Your English is improving quickly. You’ll be more fluent than me next time we meet,” I said, finally pulling some words out of my alcohol-soaked mind.

  “Next time we meet?” She looked at me blankly.

  Next time? I asked myself. There are many people who won’t give these poor Chinese women another look once they get back to America. I thought of what Pastor Billy had said. A thirty-day cooling-off period. Would I even remember Wende after thirty days? I wasn’t sure. Thirty days later, I would be in a different world, completely unlike Yuehu. No one could predict what would happen in thirty days. In fact, no one knows what will happen tomorrow. All I could be sure of was today, that very moment. Today, all
I could tell myself was that I would remember this woman called Wende. By that, I meant I would recall every detail. I would remember the wind in her hair as she rowed the sampan, and I would remember the sparks that flashed in her eyes when she looked at me, and I would remember the nasal tail that dragged behind my name each time she said it.

  “Wende, when I get to Shanghai, wait for me—for my letter, or maybe a telegram . . .”

  I nearly poured out my whole plan at that moment, but I quickly held myself back. There were still nearly five hundred miles before I reached Shanghai. I would travel by land and water, every bend potentially leading in a different direction and each gust of wind potentially bringing some unforeseen change. I couldn’t tell her something that I hadn’t yet done. Just then, I saw Buffalo rushing toward me, panting.

  “Sir, the commanding officer’s looking for you! It’s urgent!”

  I stood up and was about to leave when Wende suddenly grabbed my sleeve and murmured, “Ian, I want to tell you something.”

  Buffalo waved at me vigorously. I touched Wende’s cheek and told her I had to go, but that I’d be in touch as soon as possible. That was the last thing I ever said to Wende. And the last thing she started to say to me was still lodged in her throat, unable to escape through her mouth. Many years later, when a strange woman clasping a button in her hand rang the doorbell of my home in Detroit, I suddenly realized how wide the gap between my mind and Wende’s was that day.

  The next day when we set out, Buffalo wore my old boots, with rags stuffed into the toes and heels, and went to see me off. He insisted on carrying my military pack, which was stuffed so full that it bulged at the seams. Although orders were for us to pack light, we all had small hills sitting on our backs, and we knew that they’d become mountains once we got to Shanghai. When we arrived, all we wanted was to survive. Now that the war was over, survival was no longer enough. We wanted to bring home a slice of meat from the carcass of war. I was a little distracted that day. I was looking for Wende’s face in the crowd that lined the path. I didn’t find it.