by Zhang Yueran
She looks weakly at him. The boy truly intends to be with her. Stunned for a moment, she shakes her head vigorously, forcing a smile. Ridhuan bends to pick up a pearl that has rolled loose from the bag and places it in her hand. “Keep this one.”
The milk-white surface of the pearl is shiny, dazzling. It must have slipped off the necklace her mother planned for her to wear on her wedding day. Her fingers close around it, as if her mother has reached from the other world. “It’s so small. I’ll lose it.”
Ridhuan has the answer: he plucks two hairs from her head and strings them through the pearl, knotting it in place and then tying it to her finger. She smiles, and he is happy too. With this ring, he has laid claim to this girl.
They started moving again, leaving the sack behind them. All those precious things from China, dozing fireflies dropped in the hidden parts of the jungle, watching with cloudy eyes as this love drifts into the distance, waiting to see how far it will get.
13
Chun Chi lies unconscious in Ridhuan’s arms. He shakes her gently, so she wakes and sees the ocean, smells the salt air. The sea is already showing signs of the violence to come, great waves trawling across its surface. There are almost no ships to be seen, the still and deep blue sky very low, as if it might tumble into the water. The world is two halves of a walnut, coming together along the faultline of the horizon. Perhaps the rotten kernel within will be healed and made whole again. The sea wind blows a faint blush into Chun Chi’s face. She feels a little stronger.
The ship that brought them here lies by the shore. Next to it is a small fishing boat, which Ridhuan now runs towards.
“Why don’t we take the big boat?” asks Chun Chi.
“If we do, and the fishermen happen to come back for their boat, my brothers will be trapped on this island. I couldn’t do that to them,” Ridhuan explains as he lifts her onto the fishing boat.
Family ties remain strong, then. Her faint trust in him evaporates in a second. Still, all she says to him is, “That’s right. They are your flesh and blood.”
They set out into the vast and borderless sea with no direction in mind, thinking only of getting as far from the island as possible. The waves are now the height of a man, demons in black robes unfurling their sleeves, ready to engulf them. Chun Chi leans against Ridhuan, shivering as water splashes her. Cold seems to rise from her injured feet, an ice-worm creeping through bones and flesh, hollowing her out.
The little boat shakes with despair. Darkness surrounds them, thick clouds obscuring the moon. Chun Chi screams, “My ring! It’s slipped off.” She bends and feels around the bottom of the boat, but without light it is hopeless.
Ridhuan holds her. “There’s no point. How will you find anything in the dark?”
But still she gropes blindly. How can she bear to be separated from her mother, so soon after their reunion?
Ridhuan grabs her hands and clutches them to his chest. “I’ll find you another pearl. Would you like that?”
Chun Chi bites her lip and is silent. Even pressed against Ridhuan, she feels no warmth. Her body is filled with icy foreboding that weakens her even faster. Is this because her mother is gone? Terror takes hold of her.
14
Even as he rows, Ridhuan keeps turning back, until his greatest fear is realised — his brothers approaching on their boat. “They’re coming,” he says, his face changing colour.
Chun Chi is calm, not even looking back, only somewhat saddened at the thought of being recaptured by those two pirates and violated again. The shame will be hard to bear. She looks at the young man beside her, single-mindedly pulling his oar, using such strength, and holds him tightly, her face pressed to his chin, her hands running over his eyes and nose. But he has no time for this, and stands to row faster, his movements almost manic, like a storm-blown tree about to snap in two. Chun Chi rests her face on his thigh. “Their boat is so much faster. They’re sure to catch us.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Ridhuan snaps. Even as his brothers shorten the distance between them, his arms continue to move frantically. Sea water splashes into the boat and it sinks a little, so he seems to be standing on the water surface.
Chun Chi sighs. Cold air swirls up again from her injured feet. She curls and shrinks, shivering. “I don’t hope for anything. If only I could find that ring —”
Ridhuan looks down to see Chun Chi searching the bottom of the boat again. His heart contracts and he no longer has the energy to fight on. Her twisted body presses against his leg, no longer feverish, in fact icy cold. She is so thin he thinks he can feel the bumps of her spine. He is finally still now. Crouching, he holds Chun Chi and kisses her face and lips, softly asking, “Is this better?” She nods, her face still tight with pain.
The larger boat pulls up alongside. He ignores his brothers’ curses, frantically kissing the girl. She pulls back. “Ridhuan — there’s no escape, is there?”
“No.”
“But I wanted so much to be with you, to escape to an island, just us, to live a life without worries, no one to hurt us,” she murmurs.
“Yes —” For a moment he sees himself running with her on a distant beach.
Metal hooks attached to ropes come flying at them. Even with the choppy waves and darkness, they are swift and silent, vicious as eagle beaks. Ridhuan wraps himself around Chun Chi, his body completely covering hers.
“Can you imagine — such peaceful days.” She speaks slowly, as if unable to see the glinting metal flashing through the air. “And our children, lots of them, so well-behaved. They’d help us with our work. You’d take the boys hunting, I’d teach the girls to sew. We’d need a big boat so we could all go out to sea together — fishing, playing, collecting shells —” Her voice shrivels. She’s too cold, having used the dregs of her energy to fashion this pretty story.
Ridhuan is trembling from her words. He stands and strokes her head. “I’ll go over to the other boat and negotiate with them.”
She clutches his hand. “Don’t leave me.”
“I’ll come back, I promise.” As he speaks, her hands are already loosening.
He wraps his jacket around her and nimbly catches a flying hook so it lifts him into the air. Chun Chi hazily sees his body describe an arc that ends heavily on the deck of the other boat, the thin wooden boards creaking. Then everything is still again, nothing but the sound of waves.
Questions dart through Chun Chi’s mind: are they quarrelling, or fighting? Or have they reconciled? Will he come back to her?
The little boat floats blindly, gradually drawing apart from the other one. Two or three inches of water have splashed into it, soaking her battered feet. Perhaps they are already infected, perhaps the liquid she can feel seeping out is not blood but pus. She rests her head helplessly on her knees. He has been talked round by his brothers, persuaded to abandon her. They will win him round in the end. He will betray himself. They are brothers. They are pirates. She is a ruined foreign woman. Why wouldn’t Ridhuan choose them over her? All his romantic words were just a boy’s momentary infatuation.
She waits for the waves to come and drown her. She loves the sea here, it is where her mother is buried.
15
Ridhuan appears suddenly at the end of a rope. He tumbles into the boat almost on top of Chun Chi, rocking them violently, an instant of confusion. Too weak to raise her head, Chun Chi only knows that a pair of strong arms have wrapped around her.
“They tried to keep me there. I fought — they’re wounded, I escaped.” His breath is laboured, heavy as the futile wing-beats of a trapped bird.
This is good news. Chun Chi smiles inwardly. Thinking of the two pirates sends waves of pain across her heart. She would like to see them torn into small pieces.
Ridhuan suddenly reaches to hang his small golden knife around her neck. His hands clutch her face and his mouth seeks hers. She opens her mouth to him, as if she might draw breath from his body. But she is too numb to feel the warm air passing from
his mouth into hers, the tender message of lip and tongue.
They hold each other now, without words. He tries to contain her within the narrow world of his arms, so the universe can no longer hurt her. The boat beneath their feet flops like a dead fish. The ocean continues its tumult, but even this racket recedes to the background. They are together in silent warmth.
Clasped to him, she begins to recover, her feet less numb. Could his embrace really have the power of healing? She cannot believe it. Water continues to swamp the boat, but even the seawater is tepid now, like the hot springs she remembers from a childhood visit to the north. She was in such a spring when her first period arrived, a flower of mystery and destiny blossoming just below the surface. Now, she feels enveloped with good fortune again, floating up into the heavens on misty clouds.
“I’m no longer cold, Ridhuan.”
He grunts, like the weak rasp of a match failing to light on a rainy day.
“Not cold at all, and my feet don’t hurt either.” Is time flowing backwards?
“That’s good,” he says.
When she hears how thin and broken his voice is, she becomes afraid, and rallies herself. “Rest for a bit. I’m fine now. I’ll row.” She stands, but before she can take a step, Ridhuan has collapsed. Terrified, she struggles to lift him from the water and sit him upright, but his eyes do not open, and the liquid covering his face is not seawater. Even in the dim light, she can tell — this is blood, soaking his head, staining her hand. Can this be? She stretches her hand into the water filling the boat, and it comes up red. She looks at her scarlet hand, hovering like a low-flying vampire bat. When she raises a leg, blood drips from her toes, tangling her feet like creeping vines.
So it is blood that has warmed her, like the hot springs. She throws herself around Ridhuan. Her lover is shrinking, he is becoming dry, his body slackening. He has a wound the size of a fist on his back. Even when she covers it she can hear the blood trickle, every drop sent by him to take away her pain, her cold.
“Ridhuan. Ridhuan,” she calls, but he is beyond response. When she shakes him, he rocks mechanically.
Inconceivable that a man has sacrificed himself for her. Once again she feels the lightness of existence. Kissing her a moment ago, and now no longer there. She shivers to think of the words he spoke. Now she realises she has never seen death before. Her mother’s passing was too sudden, and in the middle of her own torment — she passed out, and after regaining consciousness, it felt like something long ago, her mother had long since climbed the mountain, crossed the bridge, and reached the other shore. Now she sees the man beside her growing cold and stiff, fluid features hardening like drying clay. She does not dare to touch the body — but when she lets go, it wobbles and threatens to tumble into the water, so she is forced to hold its hand.
That other night, this hand floated over and soothed a broken girl. She clutches at it now, hoping it still has some warmth for her, but its life is over, and it begins to close. She will never be able to pay it back. Her debt will be eternal.
And then a bright glow from something nearby. She turns and sees it is the missing pearl, calmly floating on the rising water. No, not water, blood. The ring is an enchanted princess, stirred to life by her lover’s blood. The awakened pearl shines with a blinding light, jade-white, flecked with red like the dawn. The water pushes at it and, like a tadpole, it bobs over to her. It has found her.
Chun Chi reaches out carefully and retrieves the pearl from its pool of blood. She weighs it in her hand, suddenly uncertain: at the other end of this ring, will she find her mother, or Ridhuan?
And now, neither late nor early, the tsunami arrives. like a god come to draw the tragedy to a close, opening wide black sleeves full of waves and wind to collect them all. Chun Chi sees an orange glow spread across the water, tall churning waves behind it, rushing towards her and the tiny boat. Filling the horizon is vermilion water, as if this might turn into a lake of fire, from which there can be no escape. The ocean is the centre of the world now, the most clamorous stage, the widest execution ground.
Chun Chi does not have time to think of any of this. She is rubbing streaks of blood from the pearl so layers of white light spread from it like a halo.
The instant before the great wave overturns her boat, Chun Chi brings the pearl to her mouth and holds it between her lips. She imagines herself as a tiny bird, a precious stone in her beak, circling her prince as his empty eye sockets shed tears of joy.
Shell
18
My fingers brushed the surface of the scarlet conch in my palm, opening the Dragon Palace’s doors, freeing the past events locked up inside.
Chun Chi at the age of five in a red silk dress, soft hair only just long enough to be put up in a bun, sits with her father in a horse carriage. Her father carries her on his back as they stand on the beach. Her first sight of the sea. She used to think the endless blue of the sky was beautiful; now she knows the sea is far better, a moving sky. She loves the ocean. If only she could leave a mark of herself on it. She allows one of her purple-red shoes to fall so it bobs like a boat on the waves. Her father bends to retrieve it, but it is moving too fast. He turns his head to see his daughter watch unblinkingly as her shoe drifts into the distance. She insists on watching until it is out of sight. The sea has accepted her gift.
Chun Chi at the age of nine, sitting by her zither, plucking at the strings. She shuts her eyes and listens to the separate notes, falling into a kind of trance, becoming fascinated by her posture, how little energy she is using, as if it is not her but some entity behind her moving her arm. She does not dare look back or stop in case He leaves. Each moment is precious. She does not need an audience. Next to the graceful dance of the spirit, these seem unnecessary, shallow. She does not see the dark writing: her fate is to endure a lifetime’s loneliness.
When she is fourteen, her father takes a new wife. Chun Chi watches the bride with curiosity — so young, barely a few years older than herself, so pretty, her cheeks so red — is she blushing, or is colour reflecting off her red veil? If this girl weren’t causing her mother such pain, Chun Chi might have liked her. Since she came to the house, her father comes to see her mother much less often. When the family gathers for a meal, it is easy to see how he favours the new one — putting food on her plate, and when she wipes the pearls of sweat from his brow, smiling devotedly with half-closed eyes. Her mother never eats very much, and now can barely choke down any food at all. Instead, she watches them out of the corner of her eye, the anguish in her face impossible to hide.
Chun Chi feels uneasy at her mother’s weakness. There were eight wives and concubines before Mother, all of them now indifferent to the newcomer. They have their own interests: cats, mahjong, gardening — and hardly think about their husband. Only her mother has nothing to do and sits by the window missing him, occupying herself sewing robes and cloth shoes for him. Every moment spent with him is precious. If he happens to come by for a few words and a cuddle, she is so happy she can’t sleep for days; but if she sees him intimate with another woman, she hides and weeps copiously, her face swelling. When her mother is sad, Chun Chi always stands dutifully by her side, comforting her. Her narrow shoulders and trembling body make Chun Chi uncertain what to do. Her mother says that she is so affected because only her love is real. She would like their home to crumble and her father to lose his standing — only then, she says, will they see everyone’s true face. When the commotion has fallen into silence and the money-grubbers have departed, only her mother and her father will be left standing side by side. This is the blind hope that her mother is labouring under.
After hearing this, Chun Chi feels awkward looking at the new wife. She thinks she can detect falseness in every smile, every frown.
Chun Chi at the age of seventeen, standing at the prow of a ship. She has embarked on this journey for her mother’s sake, plunging into the South Seas after her father. She is not going for herself, but to represent a kind of love,
floating across the ocean all the way from China. She is so happy to be close to the sea again. The night before she dreamt of the shoe she dropped into the water as a child. It had grown into the size of a boat, and she was riding it across the waves.
19
I followed Chun Chi through the shuttle of her memories. No, I was her. I shared her thoughts, her sadness, her joy. Everything was so real that the twenty years I spent with hernow seemed insubstantial.
What stunned me was that her bone-deep love for Camel was nowhere in those missing memories — in fact, Camel did not appear at all. He deceived her. Poor Chun Chi, to search with such devotion, to blind herself and dig out her own fingernails, to sacrifice twenty years and live in such austerity. I thought of her locked in that dark, airless room, her face blank, impassively tending to her tableful of shells; Chun Chi singing on the boats, waiting for everyone to sleep before creeping into a corner, pulling a shell from her wooden chest and gently rubbing it — such pain. Tears fell from my eyes.
There could be no more cruel deception under the sun. To discover the truth left me at a loss. Should I tell Chun Chi? If she found out the years of labour were all for nothing, would she be able to take the blow? But then how could I bear not to tell her, to allow her to continue, perhaps for the rest of her life?
I sold the coffee plantation and the house, as well as its contents — everything belonging to my life with Hua Hua. I knew I should leave as soon as I could, but still hesitated. What should I say to Chun Chi? I lingered on the island a few more days, listless by day, restless at night.
When sleep finally found me, I dreamt of Chun Chi. She was seriously ill, perhaps on the verge of death, no one by her bedside. She called my name — Xiao Xing, Xiao Xing — each word thudded against my chest, waking me. Was it already too late? Would I be in time to see her?
I knew I had to go back. Nothing was more important than seeing her again.
I visited the spot where Hua Hua and the child were buried. The grass on the larger grave was almost as tall as the smaller. In another month or two, they would be equally tall; and a month or two after that, no one would be able to tell the shape or size of each grave under its shroud, and nature would swallow them. Hua Hua always detested this island, and would never have set foot here if not for me; now she would rest here forever.