by Zhang Yueran
If only I had more time to spend with her, my good and pure wife. But my heart was now occupied by the contents of that seashell, with not a bit left to spare. Perhaps when all this was over, I might be able to think properly about Hua Hua, to remember her many virtues, to feel grief at her departure.
20
Finally, I was back in the place most familiar to me. The same road I took home from the schoolhouse. How many times had I sprinted down its paved surface, wanting only to see Chun Chi again?
This time it was drizzling, and I had no energy to run across the mossy stone, especially with a wooden chest on my back. I also understood now that there was no point. However fast you go, you cannot outpace destiny. No more illusions. I had become a man who knew the nature of fate. The chest was so heavy I couldn’t stand upright. I thought of Master Zhong, the many times he arrived at our door with a trunk, his bent body, his constant coughing. He was so peaceable, so unruffled. Even if he had longings, they must have been dulled.
And now, in the end, I had come to resemble him. Reaching the door, I set the chest down and straightened my back. Rapping the knocker, the sad sound — tu tut tu — tapped at my heart.
A middle-aged woman came to the door with an oiled umbrella — the new servant Hua Hua had hired to care for Chun Chi. I asked if she was Juan. She nodded, and guessed that I must be Young Master Xiao Xing.
The hall was gloomy. The rain had filled it with a familiar smell of damp and mould. Nothing had changed here. I sat and found Juan already at my side with a pot of hot tea. I drank a mouthful, and told her I wanted to see Chun Chi. Only then did she tell me, “Miss Chun Chi has gone.”
My throat constricted. Had she left, or was she— I didn’t dare to ask.
Juan told me that Chun Chi had been very ill, coming close to death. As soon as she was well enough, she insisted on going back out to sea to find more shells. Juan had been unable to stop her.
I nodded, torn between relief and sadness at missing her. It could be that Chun Chi was fated to come close to the Dragon Palace, but not close enough.
I pushed open the door to her room. It was full of open chests, each neatly stacked with shells, all polished till they shone, making the room seem bright. They were all here, every shell she’d collected over twenty years. She must have arranged them one last time before leaving.
Juan recalled that when Chun Chi was at her worst, her head hurt so badly it felt like it would split in two. Many doctors were summoned, but none could tell what was wrong with her, unsure even what medicines to offer her. Yet she was in such pain, thrashing so hard she fell from her bed, insisting on dashing out into the garden on rainy days. She said something inside her body wanted to tear her into pieces.
I knew what that was. Memory.
Finally, Chun Chi ordered Juan to place a layer of shells in a wooden tub and fill it with water, setting it in the centre of the room. She wanted to lie in this tub all day. She pierced her fingers with needles, placed flower-red conches on them, and soaked. After several days, the shells’ colour had deepened, their markings more sharply defined. Juan didn’t understand what dark art this was, but it worked, Chun Chi quickly recovered.
Again, I nodded. She was using the shells to absorb her blood, causing troubling memories to be carried away, or at least fade. Seashells are the jade of the ocean, and just as jade changes with the touch, shells absorb our heat, allowing a body afflicted with the burning of memory to find respite in coolness. Letting blood in this way had saved Chun Chi’s life.
21
After Chun Chi left, Juan moved the wooden tub into the courtyard, where I found it. Pushing aside the floating duckweed, I saw Chun Chi’s beloved flower-red conches. The grey surface of each shell blossomed with brown speckles, silent beneath the water, breathing in rhythm withthe ripples, like sleeping worms.
I plucked them out and read them — but the memories sunk in them were shallow. No matter how I concentrated, it was too difficult to gather these scraps. For days on end I knocked at their door, but was answered with silence.
Several days later, I was rubbing the shells at night, still with little success, and finally fell asleep holding them. I continued to touch them in my dreams, and they melted in my hands, scattering and leaping up like flame. In the spreading firelight I saw Chun Chi’s still skin, like fragments of bone china in the conflagration, becoming whiter, gleaming ever more brightly. I nudged them with my forehead, my nose, and placed my lips over them. When I woke, the brown markings on the shell had turned a deep red, shimmering like flowing blood. I felt an urgent need to use it to feed my burning body.
As the floral-red shell passed over my body, I heard the thrum of flowing blood, every hair on me coated stark red. I penetrated the deepest part of the shell, in exchange for these bloodstained memories. Never had I been filled with such joy as when I studied Chun Chi’s later life. I learnt about my father, my mother, my strange birth. When I pulled myself from the delight of the shell, I grew weak. Curling up in bed, I wept bitterly, howling like a newborn child — no, this was the cry I should have had upon being born, twenty years too late.
The knife that Chun Chi always carried with her, the one she thought Camel must once have given to her (I was not yet used to calling Camel “father”), was really Ridhuan’s. Camel had a larger knife and his features were a little like Ridhuan’s — he must be the big brother they referred to.
Camel must have seen that Chun Chi had Ridhuan’s knife, and known she had something to do with him — but she remembered nothing, so he brought her with him to help in his search. All that time on the beach, examining the bodies as they came in — he must have been searching for his brothers.
Their story finally came together, bit by bit, pearls in a necklace. However, I still had no idea what my place in it was. Perhaps a narrator, fated to record these events.
I brought out the Dragon Palace. Now Chun Chi’s history lay entirely within these walls. I could be with it all day long, reading it over and over, until it fused with my own memories. Three months passed in this way, maybe longer. When I finally left my room, it hurt to see the light, and the sky outside seemed older.
22
Chun Chi did not come home, but I didn’t miss her as much now. Possessing all her memories, I could be with her whenever I wanted. I felt her heartbeat, I knew she was alive and well. Were I to see her again, I would turn indecisive, hesitating over whether to give her the Dragon Palace.
I went to sea again. Not to find her, but to travel in her footsteps. On Lombok Island, I found my father’s —Camel’s — grave, built in secret by his followers after his execution. I stayed on the island for some time, and heard many stories about my mother, Tsong Tsong. Most people didn’t particularly like her, and many tales painted her as a beautiful temptress, a succubus, bringing destruction to the tribe and to my father. They said she slept with a prison sentry, and later produced a bastard.
Leaving Lombok Island, my ferryman told me he was a member of a fallen aristocracy. He was young and strong, but his eyes were full of sadness. I paid him several coins more than he’d asked for; he was delighted, and offered to wait at the dock, to bring me on the next leg of my journey. My voyage had no fixed route, I smiled. He argued politely before reluctantly pushing off. I stood on the shore, watching my brother grow smaller, disappearing into a flock of seagulls on the horizon. I shut my eyes, and spent some time trying to forget the sorrow I’d seen in him.
I sat through a service at the Lian Yan Island church, then shared lunch with the preacher, Alan. He’d taken over the post when his father died, and had been here ever since. He was a tall Dutch man, with a gruff voice and sideburns like cotton clouds. He told me what he remembered. He’d attended my mother’s funeral, and remembered watching as the beautiful woman he’d never met was slowly covered by earth still damp from rain. His father had wanted to adopt me, not just out of fondness for my mother, but for the sake of my one-quarter Dutch blood; but I would not b
e close to him, refusing to stay by his side for even a second, causing him much sadness. This embarrassed me — after all these years, the people who’d shown me affection could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the Preacher was one of them, the first one to extend a warm hand to me. I couldn’t help thinking: what if I’d stayed with the Preacher, stayed on this island? What would I be now? A man like Alan, ordinary but full of passion, or someone as forbearing and unknowing as my brother? In any case, the days would have gone faster. Alan spoke about how quickly time was slipping away. More than once he looked at me and sighed, “In the blink of an eye, you’ve grown up.”
23
I continued my journey around the South Seas, and heard many stories about Chun Chi. She’d arrived at an island where, not long before, an epidemic had killed a great number of people. In one of the refugee camps, she encountered children suffering the torments of illness. They longed to die peacefully in their sleep, but were in too much pain to sleep. Chun Chi gave them all seashells that carried happy memories. She blindfolded them, and guided their fingertips gently over the shells, allowing the past to flow like clear spring water into their parched bodies. They opened fevered eyes and saw the stars, the jungle, and a blind woman with a radiant face. A day later, the pain left them. Chun Chi was mobbed by little children who kissed her stark red feet and called her Holy Mother.
Later, in the easternmost islands of the South Seas, a state came into being that used seashells as currency. Its inhabitants did not plant crops or hunt. They barely survived by picking wild fruit, preferring to spend their time picking shells from the sea, mesmerised by the stories contained within, absorbing others’ recollections as a substitute for their own lives. The rich became replete with ample sweet memories while the poor had to make do with fragmentsof murder and war. This was a low-spirited, intoxicated country. Memory was their addiction, their poison.
When I learnt of this place, I decided to visit in the guise of a shell merchant, but en route my boat was overturned in a storm and I had to make my preparations all over again. The shell kingdom had been destroyed by the time I finally arrived there. They said a blind woman was seen making her way through the debris, brushing past corpses like a carrion bird, scooping up fallen shells, prising them from cold hands. The troops who’d sacked the city saw this woman kicking up red-soled feet and dancing with a corpse on fallen wooden beams.
They didn’t kill her. She was left behind, the last bloodstain in this wasted place. Beneath the sunlight sharp as a dagger, the soldiers watched the blind woman manically grabbing at shells, her glee — as if she had discovered treasure — making them laugh. If only they had known — she was the richest woman in the world.