by Zhang Yueran
There were elements of truth mixed in with the lies, and my eyes moistened as I spoke.
The girl believed me. She exchanged a few words with the translator, who said, “Your devotion has moved Miss Bessie. She paid thirty gold coins for these shells, and is willing to sell them to you for the same price.”
I bit my lip hard. “You must know that thirty gold coins is a huge sum for a poor farmer like me. Would she consider lowering the price?”
Miss Bessie shook her head, her hair a dazzling golden blur. She set down her coffee cup and leaned back. Perhaps she thought I had no real intention of buying the shells, but had come to see what I could get away with.
The interpreter said, “The price is fixed. You should leave now.”
I stood, swallowing my pain, and pleaded again, “Miss Bessie, you must believe that I am sincere — I just need more time to get the money together.”
She thought about it, and the reply came: “Miss Bessie will return to Holland next month. She asks that you keep this in mind.”
I nodded in gratitude. The interpreter indicated I should leave. A thought hit me at the door — there was a small chance — “Miss Bessie — can I buy them piecemeal? I mean, when I get the money for each shell, can I take them one at a time?”
Miss Bessie nodded her head.
5
I shuffled home, disheartened. The baby was crawling on the bed, full of spirit. Occasionally Hua Hua tossed him a piece of string, which he took great delight in twisting and flinging. He could already speak, and when I walked in he screamed, “Daddy! Daddy!”
Hua Hua had made dinner. I sat at the table and she placed chopsticks in my hand. Fish and pumpkin soup was our unvarying diet; staring at the sticky mess in front of me, I lost my appetite. Baby was also crying, refusing to eat. When Hua Hua placed a little pumpkin soup in his mouth, he swallowed a tiny morsel and spat the rest out. I glared at him and he looked back, all innocence.
All I could think of was how to get my hands on that money. Even if I sold the coffee plantation, which was not in bad shape, I wouldn’t be able to afford a single one of those shells. Never mind my income from selling coffee beans — a lifetime of that wouldn’t be enough.
I flung down my bowl and chopsticks and stormed out of the unhappy house. Hua Hua finished feeding the child and came to find me. As always when my temper was bad, she stood behind me, not daring to speak. I loosened the soil and tipped some fertiliser over it, going down the row of coffee plants, working manically. At the last one I flung down my hoe and flopped to the ground. Hua Hua, terrified, ran over and flung her arms around me. She smelled of mother’s milk, almost bringing me to tears.
“What’s happened?” she asked gently, stroking my hair.
“I found the shell, the one Chun Chi’s been looking for.”
“But you should be happy, then.” She kept her voice deliberately light.
“She wants so much money for it. Too much. I’ll never be able to afford it.”
I struggled free of her embrace and, grabbing the hoe, stalked away. She called from behind me, “I want to help you.”
Now, apart from tending my own farm, I started working for other people. Whenever they beat the drum for day workers, I ran over and stood with the others, working day and night, returning exhausted, a few coins in my fist. Hua Hua watched me tumble into bed, sleeping like a corpse, afraid to say anything. Only the child, little more than a year old, crawled over and scratched at my face, but my poor skin was burnt virtually purple by the sun and incapable of feeling. When I woke, he was sitting beside me, ecstatically slapping my cheeks and shouting like a curse, “Daddy! Daddy!”
This was after another terrifying dream. To be startled awake like this — I stared at him, round-eyed, my face like a wild animal. He stared back, then his jaw sprang open and the room filled with his howling. Even as he cried, he continued watching me sidelong, as if hoping for a shred of comfort. I continued gazing at him, thinking: he never goes out, lounging on the bed all day, plump and white from a diet of pumpkin and coconut juice, no idea what it is to suffer. And yet he was crying, with no indication that he might stop soon. I grabbed his arms and swung him high into the air. His mouth stayed open, but the noise stopped.
We stayed like this for some time, before I slowly brought him down. He stumbled backwards immediately, and tumbled off the bed. I rolled over and looked at him. His forehead was green-black, but he must have been in shock, sprawled on the floor in utter silence.
Hua Hua came back from the market to find her bruised baby on the floor, and me still in bed. She picked him up, looking accusingly at me, but not daring to actually complain. From then on, the child didn’t cry. When he felt unhappy, a sob might bubble up in his throat, but he forced it down again. Yet his nature was kind and forgiving, and his behaviour to me was as loving as ever. Each time I came home, he toddled over to greet me, smiling face beaming upwards. If the day had gone well, I might bend to ruffle his hair, and he’d dance a jig of joy, following me around the room. But if I returned ill-tempered, he knew to hide from me.
6
Later, we became too busy to care about the child. Hua Hua and I both found work shifting goods at the docks, three bronze coins a day, working for different employers. We met in the evenings, exhausted. A few times, she bought some smoked fish or duck from one of the native women, but when I said that was too expensive, we went back to oureternal diet of pumpkin soup.
To start with, Hua Hua came to the docks with the baby strapped to her back, but it was difficult to work so encumbered, and the supervisor sent her home. She had no choice but leave the baby alone in the house with a little food; he always ate quickly, and was starving by the time we got home. Once, we found him gnawing on a seashell.
At the end of the month, the Malay foreman refused to give us our wages. We waited a few days, then ambushed him one evening on his way home. I beat him to the ground and Hua Hua throttled him with a sturdy vine. We grabbed his money pouch and ran. Breathless, Hua Hua rattled the coins and gasped, “Xiao Xing, we’re rich!”
It wasn’t actually enough money to change anything, and I saw no reason for celebration, but her happiness was infectious. I barely had time to smile when her mood changed to anxiety. Had we killed the man? I told her not to be silly, she wasn’t strong enough to strangle a man to death — and with that, she was all smiles again, hugging the child and showing him the money. He batted at the pouch so it chinked. Still, I refused to let Hua Hua use even one of those coins to buy food for the baby.
That night, we lay in bed stiffly. She reached out tentatively to stroke my chest with a rough hand. “Xiao Xing, when we have enough money to buy those shells — then can we go home?”
I grunted agreement.
“And Baby won’t have to be hungry anymore.” Her voice brightened at the thought, sharp as a crescent moon over the equator. Such fleeting happiness. I wished she would speak a little more, but the poor girl was too tired, and lapsed into sleep and snores. Still, this was an evening of tenderness, and felt like the end of a job. We certainly couldn’t return to the docks after this.
Next, I found work collecting beeswax. This was one of the island’s chief products, like sandalwood, and came from a particularly vicious species of bee. Their hives were semi-circles, built in threes in the top branches. I learnt from the native men to cinch up my trousers, and cover my head and upper body with cloth so only my face and legs showed. I was inept at climbing, and was put in charge of the fire. I made torches of long grass and palm leaves, which were tied to thick vines and hurled high into the trees, where the climbers would grab them and smoke the bees out. As the agitated swarm buzzed around them, the native men advanced calmly and lopped the hives free with a parang, letting them fall to the ground. I was initially astonished at how they withstood being stung repeatedly — but that was simply the basic requirement of the beecatcher’s craft. I learnt it too, and collected my three coins a day.
Hua
Hua always had dinner waiting for me when I reached home. She worked during the day as a maid for a Dutch family, and sometimes asked the lady of the house for some soothing ointment, which she brought home in her bamboo container and carefully applied to my stung and reddened body. She burst into tears when she saw how bad the swelling was — like a bloated, decaying carcass. “I suddenly thought of when I first met you —”
“” Yes?” My breathing was heavy. I was on the point of falling asleep.
“You were a Young Master then, so well-bred. Your grey-green robes, such good posture, and a big, round jade amulet at your waist. You’d never done any work. Didn’t even know how to water the plants.”
As my eyes shut, I let out a single burst of dry laughter.
7
At this rate, by the end of the next month, I would just about be able to buy one of the Dragon Palace shells from Miss Bessie. Still, I thought I would be lucky, somehow finding a route to sudden fortune, or that the shell I bought would happen to be the one with Chun Chi’s memories intact.
It was at this time that something happened to the baby.
We got home later than usual one night, and the child, starving, had sucked hungrily at a brocade-weave conical shell. We found him huddled in a corner, his little body in spasms, his face slate grey and lips bloodless. Hua Hua hugged him, asking over and over what was wrong. He struggled so much she had to let him go. When she loosened his clothes, his body was streaked dull green.
“He’s very cold,” she said, removing her own clothes and draping them over him. Still he shivered, but more weakly now. When I lifted his hand, he turned to look at me, his eyes like guttering candle flames.
Some shells were poisonous — I knew this, but hadn’t realised that the brocade-weave cone was one of the lethal ones. Ever since discovering the Dutchwoman’s shells, I’d lost interest in the ones spread over the table, and Hua Hua hadn’t dared move them without my permission.
Hua Hua held the child as if in a trance, then seemed to recover her senses and flung herself at my feet, tearfully pleading that we take him to the doctor. I hesitated only a moment before taking some coins from the jar under the bed. We set out at once, but even the nearest doctor was at the foot of the hill. Hua Hua keened all the way down, clutching the baby tight, one minute saying he was growing colder, the other shouting that he had woken up, his jaw working against her shoulder. Her wits were disordered, repeating the same sentences three or four times, and then descending into mumbled incoherence. She was no longer speaking to me.
In the village, we found an old medicine man, and Hua Hua became extremely calm. I asked her to let the man examine the baby, but she stayed frozen, glaring at me when I asked again. I tried to take the child from her, but cried out when my fingers touched it — cold and hard as a rock, completely rigid. Trembling, I forced myself to prise the baby loose and show it to the medicine man, who sighed, “Dead.”
Hua Hua fell to the ground, her hands over her ears, trails of tears down her face. I too felt a great force pulling my body down to the centre of the earth. Was it the baby’s ghost? Did he hate me? But no, the little face was as innocent as ever, even in death bright with joy and wonder. If those eyes could open, they would surely smile at me.
I slowly lifted Hua Hua to her feet, and said, “Let’s go home.”
She was unable to walk. I carried her home on my back, and she in turn held the dead baby, sandwiched between our bodies like a shield. We were sunk in separate miseries, unable to comfort each other. When I let her down from my back, I felt we had already drifted very far apart.
A slender moon was low in the sky, like a gaping scar. Wildcats roamed the nearby jungle, emitting chilling cries. The trees seemed thicker than before, obscuring the path to the house, as if we had been gone not a night but a month, a year, even longer. Our surroundings were unfamiliar. The hut was a tiny raft floating in a great tidal flood of vegetation. This had never been our home, not even temporarily.
I pushed open the door and lit a lamp. The shells glinted accusingly at me. I swept them off the table so they skittered across the floor, like living animals.
Hua Hua crouched on the bed, hugging the corpse, not looking at me. A conch the size of an egg rolled into her leg. She picked it up and tried to crush it between her hands, but it was too thick, so she began gnawing at it. I tried to prise it loose — what if this shell was poisonous too? Crunching noises came from her mouth. I let go and she spat out fragments of shell in a jet of blood, smiling so I could see her front teeth were gone. I rinsed her mouth out with cold water until the bleeding stopped.
She seemed in good spirits after this episode, cradling the baby and singing it lullabies, sweet music coming from her ruined mouth, echoing through the gaps in her teeth as if the song would never end.
I wanted to buy medicinal herbs from the village for her bloody gums, but was afraid to leave her alone. She sang all night, and as the sun rose sat still in the bed, apparently calm despite the blood that still trickled from a corner of her mouth. I wiped her face, and she obediently rested her head on my body.
“Do you regret coming to find me?” I asked. “If you hadn’t, the child wouldn’t have died.”
She smiled vacantly, incapable of answering. Why was this question so important to me? If she didn’t regret her choice, would that lessen my guilt?
After a long time, she grabbed my arm. “Can you see Baby’s ghost?”
“No.”
“I see him. He’s starting his journey, he wants to say goodbye to us.”
“Really?” I looked in the direction she was indicating, but the house was empty, only a tired ray of moonlight asleep on the floor.
Her sigh was freighted with sorrow. “You can’t see him, because you didn’t love him enough.” This was the closest she had come to rebuking me, and even then her tone was neutral. She seemed to have transcended this world, moved beyond life and death.
When Hua Hua had fallen asleep, I lifted her onto the bed. Taking the baby outside, I buried it under a rain tree so thick that two people couldn’t have wrapped their arms around it. The soil was damp and some roots poked above the surface. With such a sturdy tree shading the corpse, it would be safe.
The sun was rising by the time I had dug a hole big enough. As I put the body it, the cloth around it fell open to show the poor white skin. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or my eyes were tired, but I could have sworn that the baby was covered in dull green streaks, like a snake, winding from his head down to his feet, like the markings on a brocade-weave cone. The colour deepened, even stirred, like waves crashing towards me. Was the poison in the child still surging, coming for me? I’d thought this would end with his death. Kneeling, I shovelled dirt into the grave as quickly as I could, stamping it down hard until it was sealed, then piling rocks on top of it.
Even exhausted as I was, I couldn’t have stayed there a minute longer. My heart in a jumble, I ran down the hill, replaying the scene in my mind: soil pouring thickly into the pit, like a heavy curtain falling on the child’s short life. How cold, how damp that earth was. Now worms would crawl through it, gently pulling apart the baby’s naked body. And I hadn’t even the courage to pull the cloth back on top of him. I’d stamped on his grave — now I imagined him, underground, soil tumbling on him from all directions, trapping him as he struggled, his limbs wriggling more slowly and finally stopping.
Even as I bought healing herbs for Hua Hua in the village, my mind kept going back to the writhing colours on his skin. And what if he turned around in the soil until he had room to breathe, and then struggled back to the surface? I started running.
I reached home at noon. Hua Hua was waiting for me. “Xiao Xing,” she announced with joy. “Baby’s come back to life.”
My body shook and almost collapsed. Hua Hua picked up a big cat from beside her, and walked over beaming. “I knew he wouldn’t abandon us like that.”
That morning, while I was burying the child, a sc
rawny wildcat had passed over the roof. Perhaps attracted by Hua Hua’s sleep-muttering, it had jumped in the window. Hua Hua only knew there was a sudden warmth on her face, something hairy. She opened her eyes to see two yellow pupils staring back at her. They were like fireflies in the dark house. She remembered how bright her child’s eyes were, and couldn’t stop herself calling, “Baby.” And with a miaow, the wildcat burrowed into her bosom.
8
Hua Hua was now convinced that the wildcat was Baby. She couldn’t bear to let it go, and was constantly bathing it, combing its fur, cooking it meals of mashed corn and pumpkin. Strangely, the cat stayed and submitted to being mauled about. When Hua Hua spoke, it stared at her with unblinking yellow eyes. At night it leapt onto the bed of its own volition, and slept cuddled against her body.
If I woke in the night and had to go outside, it raised its head alertly and scrutinised me. In the moonlight spilling through the door, it looked like a leopard with its protruding muzzle and long body. Its tail was a patchwork of black and white markings, startling in the half-darkness. Strangest of all was its scent — faint and difficult to describe, but extremely pleasing. At first I thought it must have brushed against strong-smelling flowers, but the scent was even stronger after Hua Hua bathed it.
Hua Hua was possessed. She wanted to spend every moment with the cat, and would tear the house apart looking for it, calling Baby, Baby. The creature seemed to know that was its name, and would come running to her side, purring against her calf. She no longer went to work in the Dutch family’s house, or even made dinner. She ate little herself, preferring to feed Baby instead. Her body lessened by the day, and her world shrank too, until it contained only the cat. Perhaps I should have found a medium to exorcise her, to banish the illusions in her head and make her face reality. But I was too fearful to do this — if she came back to herself, her anger and hatred for me might resurface, and I could not face that.