At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  Forget about it, they all said.

  I can’t forget about it, she answered.

  Your problem, they said, is that you can’t forget about it.

  She tried to act as if she had forgotten about it.

  And it worked, for a while. Her acting as if the pain were gone was helped by the hellish work of the second rice harvest that summer. Once the rice had ripened, it had to be harvested quickly. Every hand was needed, and although Xiao Lu could have stayed in the compound with Xia, she left her with her mother-in-law and went up the foothills with everyone else to the rice paddies. The work was backbreaking. It started before dawn, at the sound of the village boss’s gong, went through the whole white-hot day, and ended after dark. A thousand years ago the paddies had been carved up onto Black Dome Mountain in dragon-backed plates, flooded and drained by an ancient system of bamboo pipes. The curving dams of mud served as footpaths, and constantly needed repair. Despite the height of the mountain, the heat seemed to reflect off the water of the paddies rather than be tempered by the altitude. The hard work with the sickles on the rice stalks was made all that much harder by having to constantly climb up or down, the only level place being the paddy itself.

  Xiao Lu was unused to this work. She had grown up many hours away in a less mountainous spot, where the river was more central than the hills, and where the crops were soy and wheat and lychee and sugarcane and fish. Because of Xia and the pregnancy with Chun, she hadn’t worked in the fields in several years. Now she found it exhausting. She was not used to going out in the cool predawn and, when she stepped into the mucky water to start cutting, feeling all kinds of animals slithering and nipping at her feet—eels and worms and water rats and the odd startled frog and all kinds of voracious insects. The knee-high rice stalks cut her uncalloused hands, and raised welts on her arms and face. Her back, unused to constant bending, ached so that shooting pains went down her left leg and her toes tingled constantly. Her legs cramped and trembled. The Hunan summer sun was relentless. The time until the lunch break seemed a white-hot eternity.

  It was harsh, hard, painful work, but as each day went on her pain began to feel more welcome to her. Not only did it, for little spaces of time, obscure the memory of actually having placed her dear baby in the pile of celery, but it also felt like just retribution for what she had done. Her huge conical straw hat hid her face from the others, and hid their world from her. Nights were easier. Exhausted, Jiwei fell asleep instantly, snoring—she didn’t have to rebuff his unwelcome sexual advances. Even though she was filthy with sweat and itchy from bug bites the size of small acorns, with Xia close beside her she too would collapse into sleep, into the enigma of her dreams.

  The work never stopped. After the second rice harvest, the fields had to be prepared again, to try for a third. There was plowing and seeding and fertilizing to do. Many paddies were too precariously placed on the mountain for water buffalo, and had to be hoed and seeded by hand. The night waste had to be hauled uphill from the village for fertilizer, in two five-gallon plastic cans balanced on a bamboo yoke across her shoulders. Again, the stench was a perverse comfort, one of guilt and retribution.

  Through that second rice harvest and immediate first plantings of the new seedlings for the third crop, through the fava bean harvest and the picking and drying of the persimmons, and then into the autumn and the planting of the winter wheat, all through this, the ancient rhythm of the farm, Xiao Lu maintained a sense of calm, and gave the appearance that she had forgotten. To everyone except her husband—and perhaps her daughter Xia—she seemed almost back to normal.

  

  But that year the winter was early, and harsh. The family house had been built partway up the mountain, for protection, and despite its carefully chosen spot in the lee of a hill, if the wind shifted to come out of the east, the weather was fierce. That winter would turn out to be one of the worst. It started with incessant rain and then came windy sleet and hail and even snow—almost unheard-of at that latitude and altitude. Luckily for the family, it was the quiet season for tending the crops, and much of their time was spent sitting around the coal fire. They were lucky in another way—there was a coal mine not far from them, on the west side of the mountain, and they were friends with a man who hauled coal to the nearby village. Every year he would drive his horse and old wooden cart with car tires up to the farm and unload the cheapest grade, glistening rough black rocks of coal, which would last all winter. To Xiao Lu it was always a frightening sight—the horse, the cart, and the man were black, covered in coal dust. Rather than a farmer’s straw hat, the coal man wore a floppy train-engineer’s cap, and his coal-streaked face showed white only in his eyes and, when he ate, his teeth. Everyone else seemed to like him, and he often spent the evening drinking rice wine with Jiwei and his father. They got drunk, told stupid stories, and laughed too loud. She alone was fearful of him. When Jiwei asked her why, she couldn’t tell him. Maybe because he limped. She had always been afraid of cripples.

  The bad weather was the beginning of her undoing. All of them were forced to stay inside, keeping warm with the coal fire in the big main room, the fire throwing its light onto the large Mao poster, which, to her, seemed a threat. As she sat there staring into those intended-to-be-seen-as-benevolent eyes, she started to count off, as if in one of her mother’s prayers to the Buddha or her other kitchen gods, the ways that each great grief in her life had come from the Chairman’s orders: famine, “landlordism,” lost sister, crazed father, and now, lost baby. As the family chattered, she clicked each of these over in her mind like pieces of a game played with bones on an alabaster stone. While she could hide her grief—it had turned, with time, from a sharp knife slash to a dull ache—she could not hide her distraction. The farm family, unlike her own but like most of the families she had come to know in her life in western Hunan, could not abide frank feeling, but were acutely sensitive to anyone’s distraction, figuring it meant a hidden plan that could not be good for them.

  She became the focus of their attention, by it not being directed at her.

  “She’s gotten even more quiet, Jiwei,” her mother-in-law said.

  “She’s always quiet.”

  “But not like this. She sits there, but she’s not there.”

  “She’s all right, Mom.”

  “No, she is not. Watch her carefully. Get her pregnant again soon.”

  But her husband knew what no one else knew. She did not want to get pregnant again.

  

  When he had first approached her sexually, a few days after she had come back from Changsha, she had refused him, saying that she was too upset to start in again so soon. At first he had been understanding, and she appreciated it enough that she in fact was the one who initiated their lovemaking. She did not tell him that she had been to the village doctor for pills. Several months went by, with no pregnancy. She had gotten pregnant easily—within two months—the first two times.

  “She got birth control,” Jiwei’s mother said to him after three months.

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked my friend to ask her friend to ask the doctor’s wife.”

  “Did you get birth control?” Jiwei asked her that night.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t want a son?” he asked, astonished.

  “I do. A son would make me very happy, very proud. But I can’t know if it will be a son or another daughter, and I can’t stand giving away another daughter.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Wait. Maybe I will change my mind.”

  She tried very hard. But whenever she envisioned being pregnant, her mind filled with the memory of the increasing horror she had felt when she was pregnant with Chun. At the start of that pregnancy, to give the baby up if it wasn’t a boy had just been an idea, something in the air, an expectation, not talked about. But as the pregnancy went on, e
specially when the baby started to kick, she began to live with the portent of it being a girl. It was a strange new feeling, of being of two minds. Up until that time in her life, she had usually seen things as simple, based on pragmatic solutions to problems of food, clothing, shelter, shame. Even injustice of the kind that had rained down on her family had been clear—it came from the Chairman, and they were unlucky enough to have owned a little land and a house that they had rented to others. And if it had led to the Red Guard putting a dunce cap on her father’s head and hanging a sign that said “Landlord!” around his neck and during the New Year celebrations with firecrackers popping like pistols parading him down the main street of their village in front of everyone and then loading him onto a fisherman’s boat and rowing him up and down the river, the fisherman’s cormorant sitting like a sentry in the bow of the sleek narrow boat—well, it was understandable, they were just following the Chairman’s orders. And if, as soon as the Chairman died, there were new orders, and if millions of lives had been lost because of the old orders that were now wrong orders, and tens of millions more lives, connected by fine threads to the dead, had been ruined—First Sister’s among them—well, how to understand that?

  “Karma,” her mother had said to this question. “We have bad karma.”

  It was not satisfying to her, but she had nothing else to satisfy her, so it would have to do.

  This was virgin territory for her, to yearn for the baby and fear the baby, to carry a vision of nursing a sweet-smelling little baby and then have the vision darken when she saw it was a girl. By the end of the pregnancy with Chun she was hardly eating, and feeling half-crazed. The trip to Changsha made her feel more so.

  “I can’t go through that again!” she said to her husband.

  “You have no choice,” he said tensely. “To live here we need a boy.”

  “I can’t bear giving up another girl, I would die—I can’t do it.”

  “We can’t afford another daughter! Where can we get money for the penalty? They can take our land, destroy our house! It costs too much—unless it’s a boy!”

  “I will die!”

  He looked at her, incomprehension in his eyes, and walked away.

  

  Not so his mother. When she heard that Xiao Lu did not want to get pregnant again, she was furious. One day as soon as the men had gone off to weed the winter wheat she cornered Xiao Lu and said the thing that she knew would hurt her the most—thinking that the thing that hurts the most brings the most result.

  “You gave away your daughter so that we could have a son, and now you won’t have a son? Are you crazy?”

  Xiao Lu said nothing.

  “If you don’t even try for a son it makes your giving away your daughter worse!” In her worn and tightly wrinkled old face, her eyes narrowed, and her mouth settled into a grimace that almost looked like a smile. And then, to Xiao Lu’s horror, she did smile, and said, “You gave away your child—your own flesh and blood—for nothing?”

  Xiao Lu was stunned by the cruelty of this accusation. The tension in the air was solid, like a clod of earth.

  Her mother-in-law burst out laughing. When she calmed down, she said, “You say your mother was Buddhist. Go to the temple in Ja, it’s not far—take two lengths of red cloth and a bundle of incense. There is a famous Kwan Yin there, the goddess who brings sons. Give her the cloth, light the incense, pray to her. She will give us a son.”

  “I will do that.” Trying to make the best of it, Xiao Lu asked, “But if it’s still a girl, will you let me keep it?”

  “Yes.” She laughed so hard and so long that tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Xiao Lu looked into her mother-in-law’s eyes, eyes yellowish where white should have been, eyes lying in the face like dead oysters. “Forgive me, Mother, but I don’t believe you.”

  That winter there came a truce, but an uneasy one, as if Jiwei’s mother was giving her a chance to get pregnant. The only hint that she was furious and contemptuous was her laughter. Of course it was usual in the family to laugh at any hint of trouble, or of strong feeling behind it, and as they sat in front of the coal stove mending clothes or playing cards, or games with Xia, from time to time it was clear that Jiwei’s mother was laughing at her, at her misfortune. If she did a bad job on a stitch, or distractedly fell behind in shelling fava beans or attending to Xia—even if she, flustered, made a stupid move at cards—his mother would make a digging comment and laugh, and the others would join in. Xiao Lu, embarrassed, would be even more awkward with the next stitches, or shellings, or card, and more laughter would come. At first, Jiwei resisted this, but after a while he too joined in. Much to her horror, so did Xia.

  

  Spring came early. The fields needed to be prepared for the first rice. Every hand was needed. Again she left little Xia with her mother-in-law, and went with the men into the fields. It was so cold that soon she couldn’t feel her bare feet as they sank at each step into the mud. The hoe seemed theoretical, bouncing off the hard earth with every other blow. The wind was from the east, and carried a thick stinging mist. She had to squint to see, and had to plant her feet wide apart to steady herself. But the pain helped her to forget, and to go on.

  After a few days of this she noticed a change in Xia. Nothing tangible, but it seemed that the little girl was less attached to her, looking less often first for her, and to her. She was now almost four, though, so Xiao Lu figured it must just be a step in her growing up, and a healthy step at that. But then she noticed that the person Xia went to, first, was her mother-in-law.

  She realized what was happening. They had used Xia before, as the reason to give away Chun, and that had worked. Now they figured that they would use Xia again. If they could turn Xia against her, if she had the feeling that if she didn’t get pregnant again and produce a son she would lose Xia too, they would do it.

  “You’re turning Xia against me,” she said to Jiwei.

  “Talk to my mother.”

  “You’re turning my daughter against me,” she said to his mother, who, from the stove, stared up at her with a mixture of contempt and cruel curiosity.

  “Did you get yourself sterilized without telling us?”

  “No! I want a son too!”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “If you don’t get pregnant, you cannot stay.”

  “And Xia?”

  “Will stay with us.”

  “You cannot do that to me, and to her.”

  “We can.”

  “You would not.”

  She smiled, and then, without covering her almost toothless mouth with her hand, she laughed, and her laughter made her laugh even harder, so that her face in the dim light had the icy eyes of a cruel ghost. She seemed oblivious to Xiao Lu staring at her in revulsion. Finally, holding her little belly, she said, “It is up to you. It is your choice. Give us a son.”

  

  Nothing changed, and everything did. Little by little, day by day, as the seasons rolled into one another, despite all of Xiao Lu’s efforts, Xia was being pulled away from her, pulled toward Jiwei and his mother and father. In all of the compound and farmland, Xiao Lu had found one spot of comfort, one actual spot, on the ground. Up the path out of sight of the house was an ancient guava tree. It had not borne fruit in anyone’s memory, and some of its branches were dead, snapped off at the ends by storms. Yet Xiao Lu had been struck from the first by the tremendous life force in it. In two places where horizontal branches had been snapped off, new branches had grown straight up toward the light. It spoke to her of a living thing that, broken off bluntly in two places, had channeled the blocked flow of chi out toward the phantom limb to flow up in healthy, straight, flowering new trunks. She had heard how, on the swampy south coast, banyan trees—called “walking trees”—would, when blocked in one direction, send d
own suckers from the branches and trunk to root in the mud and surround it, protecting it and extending it in another direction.

  But the guava tree seemed even more to speak to her own life. When she first had married and come to live at Jiwei’s compound, feeling that there was no privacy in the house—they had a tiny room in the loft, with a makeshift door—she and Jiwei had found this place. They could mold their backs to the trunk, and nestle on the big fallen guava leaves, and look out and down to the curl of the river through the paddies in the valley below, and watch the sun set over the far mountains. It was their special place—a place where two young strangers had fallen into liking each other, a like that soon blossomed, through touch, into love. They played there like children, chasing each other around the weathered trunk, ducking under the branches, screeching and laughing. When Xia came, it was the special place for the three of them. The little girl loved playing around the trunk of the tree—hide-and-seek, and running here and there to the edge of the path, and onto the dikes of the nearby paddy. The guava tree seemed, to both Jiwei and her, to respond to their joy and laughter. Blossoms threaded out along limbs that seemed totally dead and, tenacious, persisted, a few bearing fruit. To them, a magical place.

  It was to this tree that Xiao Lu retreated during these months and years—the one place of comfort in the world that she had left. Jiwei sometimes would come there with her, but the vision of a son and her reluctance would never leave them alone, and he soon stopped. Xia came less and less.

  One day Xia bit into a piece of bread and squealed in pain and reached into her mouth.

  “I lost my first tooth! Look!”

  In her hand was an upper tooth. “Good for you, Xia!” Xiao Lu said. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes!”

  “Here.” Xiao Lu took her on her lap and pressed an edge of her shirt to the gap, to stop the bleeding. Xia quieted. “Now we have to go outside and, since it was an upper tooth, throw it up on the roof for good luck.”