At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

“In what way?”

  “Not fitting in, not social, not like me or First Sister. She didn’t like to use makeup, or wear nice clothes. More interested in books and calligraphy than boys. She didn’t want to get married, but we needed all the girls to get married. I like nice clothes, I have many silk dresses like this. Here, feel it.” She takes Clio’s hand and runs it over the diaphanous fabric. It feels light, airy, almost magical. “Do you like it? I can give you one like it, or I can give you this one.”

  “Yes, fine. I’d like that. But tell me about First Sister?”

  She sighs, puffs, considers. “She is four years older than me. Beautiful, and very smart.” She taps her forehead. “A thinker. I loved her very much. She got interested in politics, trying to help Father with what was done to him by Red Guard, trying to convince the cadres he is no ‘capitalist roader.’ She was in school in Tienja. One night when she was fourteen she went to a meeting of the Red Guards at Tienja Schoolhouse Number Two. She disappeared. We never heard from her again.”

  “Never?”

  “No. We tried. Father was going crazy. Mother was crying all the time, lying in her bed. I had to take over the family. I was the mother of the family, I did all the work, I took care of Third Sister, of everything. I made sure that the family was okay. All the time I was writing to the son of the police chief who I met when I went to Tienja to find First Sister. He came to our village. He wanted to marry me. I did not want to go, leave our family, but I knew I could get money and send it home. Maybe because his father was assistant police chief, I can clear my father’s name—and find First Sister. I was clever. If anyone knew where First Sister disappeared to, it would be the police. I had a secret motive for my life. I tried and tried for years, but did not succeed. I am the hero of the family. Like in a movie.” She lights up, and goes on excitedly, “Like the woman in The Road Home, do you know it?” They did not. “She is very steady in her love for the schoolteacher who comes to her village, and waits for him to return, and spends her life happy, and then when he dies, far away from the village in the winter, she insists that the men of the village follow the old custom and carry him on their shoulders, home. In a snowstorm! A real woman! Like me. I stayed and tried to help. I helped you find Xiao Lu, didn’t I? And now I am the one who needs help.”

  “Do you think First Sister is alive?” Pep asks.

  She looks down into her lap. “No, I don’t think so. But I never stop thinking of her. I am always searching. Whenever I go to Changsha City, I look at every face to see if it is her.” She pauses. Rhett and Clio wait. “I am the one of our family who is left. Father is insane; Mother dead; First Sister gone, Third Sister some kind of fresh-air-needing hermit on a mountain? She is crazy too I think.”

  “Crazy?” Pep says. The word comes out like a shot.

  “Wait, wait,” Rhett says. “I don’t think that’s what she means. Chill.” He goes back and forth with her, trying to clarify. Clio and Pep feel a clutch of real fear—what if Katie’s biological mother is mentally ill? Often when Clio or Pep asks Katie a question she just spaces out and doesn’t answer—and both of them have been worried that their daughter’s addiction to anything on a video screen is a willful withdrawal from human contact. Especially now, when she’s started to talk about feeling “outsidered” socially at Spook Rock. As if dealing with people is just too hard, or even just being with people is. Animals, Katie said once to them, are easier. She often seems to prefer solitude, with her animals or her drawings.

  “Okay,” Rhett says, finally. “Not ‘crazy’-insane—the father is crazy-insane.”

  “Wonderful,” Pep says, sarcastically. “Great, just great.”

  “She means ‘selfish.’ Giving up her family, going off by herself. Selfish. In China, being selfish is worse than crazy. You stick out from the group at your peril.”

  “Ah yes,” Clio says, relieved. “In America it’s the opposite.”

  Ming Tao is talking rapidly, and seems indignant. Rhett tries to catch up, though she keeps on talking as if they now can understand. “She’s saying she didn’t put herself first and run away, she stayed—‘I stayed and took care of everybody, and what do I get? I and my family, we need help now.’ She feels she’s gotten a bad deal in life.”

  Clio begins to catch on to what Pep said before, that her idealized family reunion is descending to the level of a mercenary exchange. Rhett confirms that this is the direction things are headed.

  “Bottom line, guys, is what do you want to know, and what’ll you pay?”

  “I want to know,” Clio says, with distaste, “specifically how to get in touch with Xiao Lu. How to get a message to her, in Chinese, for certain. Specifically and for certain I want her address.” Clio again opens her little notebook—a Shreve, Crump & Lowe silver case with lined light purple pages—and her Whale City Insurance pen. “She can write the address in Chinese here. You can write out the English.”

  “Cool.” He hands Ming Tao the notepad, conveys Clio’s message in slow, firm tones. She hefts the notebook admiringly, opens and closes the cover, looks at her reflection in the high-polished silver. She takes a finger and smooths out a trailing edge of eyeliner, turns her head this way and that, pleased—and writes nothing.

  “She’s not writing,” Pep says.

  “I noticed.” Rhett asks her something. She smiles and nods and, looking Clio in the eye, talks a long time to Rhett.

  “She says that even if she writes it down, she’s not sure you can ever find it yourself, without her. She lives where there are no streets—she lives like a hermit in the woods—and you don’t know what she looks like. She will go with you.”

  “But we’re not going there this trip,” Clio says, “and we can’t come back for, well, I figured not until spring, at best. We can write a note—we’ll do it on the ride back, after we clarify what’s what in the birth father’s family here—maybe there will even be a message we can send to her from her husband and daughter and in-laws—but we need the information!”

  Rhett tells her this, echoing Clio’s passion. Ming smiles broadly, and replies.

  “Okay,” Rhett says. “Make her an offer.”

  “We’ll discuss it,” Pep says.

  Ming Tao nods her head. She reaches out to shake hands, as if now that money is to be exchanged they can be great friends. To Clio her hand feels rough, coarser than you’d think, her grasp stronger, like a workingman’s. For all her silky dresses and makeup she seems to have no empathy for Clio as a woman and a mother wanting to connect, nor to know what this one day might mean to her and Pep and Katie.

  

  With a final desperate lurch the van heaves itself up into a small square in the center of the town of Chindu, shudders, and wheezes to a stop. The driver and Rhett hop out to ask for directions. Clio awakens Katie. Rhett and the driver get back on, and Rhett says that they can’t go much farther in the van. They’ll drive a few blocks to the other edge of town, to the road to the village.

  “The family farm is not far from the village.”

  “The farm!” Katie says, with excitement. “Dad, this really is an ‘amazing’!”

  A few minutes later the van reaches the limit of its ambition—it is too wide for the narrow lane ahead. “Ohh-kay!” Rhett says. “All ashore that’s goin’ ashore!” He makes a special show of escorting Katie out.

  Stiff-limbed and sore all over, they step into the sunlight. The heat is the usual hellish wet fuzz. They are at what looks like a dead end but for a narrow cart path shimmering a bright red-dirt aura up into the metallic glare as it rides along the bank of a narrow river and then curves away through what look like high stalks of sugarcane, out of sight.

  Katie looks up the road with such excitement and hope that it’s as if she could travel the distance to the farm in an instant.

  “How many people here are excited?” Pep asks, with a big smile. “R
aise hands?”

  Katie’s hand shoots up, as does Clio’s, and then Rhett’s. Pep’s stays down.

  “Daddy, aren’t you excited too?”

  He starts to jump this way and that, crazily. “Excited?” he says. “Look at me, I’m jumping out of my skin!”

  “Daddy, don’t!” Katie says, embarrassed, as a small crowd gathers around them.

  Rhett starts to talk to them, and one man shouts back. They go back and forth like jazz musicians on a riff of dueling drums and muscular trombones. “This is as far as the van can go. We can rent motorbikes, or bicycles. By motorbike it’s about fifteen minutes, and by bike it may be half an hour.”

  “Motorbikes!” Katie cries out.

  “Is it a difficult ride?” Clio asks.

  Rhett asks someone in the crowd. “No. It’s level, along the river. Then it’s a little uphill for ten minutes. We have to go to a village called Ja Ja—and there we have to ask for direc—”

  “Listen,” Clio says, “everything is taking longer than we planned. It’s already eleven thirty—to make the train back we’ve got to leave here again by...” She checks her Movado. “To be on the safe side, by about five thirty. With travel to and from the farm, we’ll have at best a couple of hours there. Bicycles will do.”

  “Deal.” Rhett turns back to the man who can arrange this.

  “And don’t forget the helmets,” Clio calls out. Rhett stares at her. “Helmets. Plastic helmets. We don’t ride without helmets. Katie can’t ride without a helmet.”

  “Mom!” Katie whispers to her harshly, embarrassed. “Stop!”

  Rhett asks about helmets. The man bursts out laughing, repeats the Chinese word for “helmets,” and everybody else gathered around laughs too, presenting risk-ridden mouths that Pep sees as a “Before” in a commercial for reconstructive dentistry.

  “He says he has no helmets.”

  “Shit!” Clio says. “Why is everything in this country so difficult?”

  “Welcome to China!” Rhett gestures to the three of them and says, “Where everything is difficult, and...”

  Pep and Katie join in. “—And nothing is impossible!”

  “Okay, okay—no helmets—but total caution. Let’s go!”

  

  “Look, Peppy,” Clio shouts back over her shoulder, “finally you’ve got your ‘lush green, lush green’!”

  Pep smiles. For the first time in China they’re all having fun—as if the landscape is living up to their high hopes. The bicycle ride along the river is lush green lush green, mostly past rice paddies and fava bean fields and wheat, with some sorghum and soy. Water buffalo abound. The greenish-brown noodle of water curls this way and that with hardly a ripple but for the rare fish flipping. Rhett points out ancient lychee trees bending down over the slow-flowing water like courtesans bowing before a stream of passing empresses. Great stands of rare ming aurelias and the more common mimosas—trees that look like they came to life out of classic Chinese scroll paintings—and all kinds of flowers in bloom, from red and purple wildflowers and fragrant jasmine, through great gatherings in backwaters of lotus pads sprouting sturdy tubes of stems that explode in big creamy flowers with streaks of pink like in Renoir’s lily gardens, to wild clematis of deep purple and banks of bougainvillea, a rush of red and pink flowers piling on top of one another like kids playing capture the flag.

  And then around a curve suddenly they see before them a small mountain. Lush green, yes, with sinewy plates of rice paddies glistening all over it like the scales of a snake or, as Rhett points out, like the scales of a dragon, for they are called in Chinese “dragon-backed mountains.” At the bottom of it they can make out the reflections of tin roofs—the tiny village of Ja Ja—“Nothing Village.” The village seems to float, suspended, in the lap of the little mountain, cradled in a hazy cloud of light green dotted finely with bright orange. Clio asks what the orange dots are.

  “Persimmons,” he says. “Hunan persimmons are dynamite!”

  “What’s a persimmon?” Katie asks.

  “The world’s greatest fruit. You’ll see.”

  Pedaling easily up a slight incline, they are among the persimmon trees. They ride down a shaded lane, the ripe orange fruit hanging down all around them. Rhett stops, picks a few, and hands them around. Pep and Katie look at their fruits casually. Clio stares at hers carefully, a signature of the closest village to her daughter’s birthplace. The fruit is as big as a man’s fist, shaped like a tomato. Four perfectly interwoven leaves spiral out from the stem to lie flat over the dome of the fruit. The color is deceptive. Orange, but a subtle orange, as if underlaid with earthy brown, tanned like Chinese skin.

  “We can’t eat ’em,” Pep says. “Nothing unpeeled or raw. Not with the skins.”

  “Pep—my man! You can’t eat the skins—they’re bitter. You skin ’em!” He takes out a jackknife, opens the blade.

  Ming Tao asks him what they said. He tells her. “When I was a girl,” she says, “in the Years of Starvation, we ate the skins of everything, to survive. We even ate acorns, and sorghum—which made all of us very constipated.”

  “Rhett!” Pep cries, having suffered through booming diarrhea for days. “Can she get me some of those?”

  Laughing, Rhett peels one of the fruits, sections it, hands it around, licks the juice, and starts on another. Ming Tao is slurping hers, in heaven. Clio takes a taste. Her eyes widen. “My God!” Katie licks a tiny wedge, shrugs, and hands it back. Pep now inspects his piece assiduously for any trace of skin, and bites. “Golly that’s good. Gimmee another!”

  They sit in the shade, popping pieces of persimmon into their mouths, the sticky juice making runlets down their chins. It is quiet but for the sound of a solitary bird—a sound Clio hears as that velvety one, of nostalgia.

  “You know, Katie,” Clio says, “we’re going back to the place you were born.”

  “We are?” Clio nods. “You mean the hospital?”

  “No, there aren’t any hospitals out here. The farmhouse where they live.”

  “I always thought I was born in a hospital, like everybody else.”

  “Well, hon, it was like everybody else here,” Clio says.

  

  Ja Ja is hardly more than ten low houses around an open patch of dirt. Now, in early afternoon, the village seems deserted. In the open patch sits a pool table, balls unracked, cues abandoned like pick-up sticks. One building looks like a store. They follow Rhett in.

  One counter, one dormant coal stove, a table and several chairs. A shaft of light squeezes itself through a lone and clouded window. The scent is of garlic, tobacco, and ash. An old man is asleep in a chair, in his lax hand an unlit clay pipe. In the golden, shadowy light his face seems all lines, a leathery persimmon. Rhett awakens him and says something. The man answers but Rhett can’t understand him, and tries again. Again, nothing.

  “It’s either him or the local dialect,” Rhett says. He tries again. The old man goes to a freezer and produces ice creams on sticks. They lick hungrily, the ice cream washing down the sticky persimmon. Rhett asks where the farmhouse is. Another long back and forth ensues. At one point the old man makes a face like he’s just swallowed a bad piece of water buffalo and spits on the earth floor and sneers. Rhett asks him a few more questions. The spitting and sneering continues. Rhett leads them out into the sunlight.

  “That was quite something,” Clio says. “What was he saying?”

  “The farm is just up there. They’re not his favorite people.” Rhett glances up at the sky. “Looks like we might get a shower. We better hurry.”

  17

  The red-dirt road to the farmhouse turns immediately up. They get off their bikes and walk them along. The air is still: a dark line of clouds hovers over a range of high mountain peaks far to the west. They go slowly, owing to the brutal heat. The persimmon trees close
in, scratching them. Clio, glad to contain her wild hopes by doing something physical, is in the lead, and holds the branches to keep them from whipping back at the others.

  Finally, after a long uphill serpentine, they come to a clearing.

  A single fig tree marks a fork in the road. The path to the right dips into a valley of early rice. A series of paddies climbs the hills on either side. Some fields are green, others are flooded with no sign of plantings and reflect, in slivers, the high, flat sun. Far down in the valley Pep spots a single white-yellow dot poking up out of the green rice grass—the yellow is a conical straw hat, and the white a shirt: a lone person bent over nearly at a right angle.

  “Man or woman?” Pep asks.

  “Can’t tell,” Rhett says. “Pulling weeds. The house is the other way, up there to the left. Let’s go.”

  A turn in the path, and then a climb up at a harsh angle, through flooded paddies and dikes and narrow mud footpaths between them, some paddies a muddy brown and with no sign of rice-life, some furry with early sproutlings, others flush with knee-high grass. No sign of houses or people.

  “I could see sitting here all day long with a fishing pole,” Pep says, with a wistful sigh, “just fishing. Nobody else around. Throw in your line. Sit. Fish.”

  “How can you think of fishing at a time like this?” Clio says.

  “It’s the only way I can stay calm,” he says, “and it’s not working worth a damn.”

  A few more minutes of uphill pedaling and they turn the corner onto level ground, and see the farmhouse. Set back from a dirt courtyard, it is a concrete-walled one-and-a-half-story structure huddled under a red-tile roof. To the right is a half-dug-out foundation and an attempt at an enclosure for small animals—chicken wire strung between steel rods sitting akimbo in the holes of cinder blocks. Pep notes that the attempt has been weak, and abandoned, with clear gaps exposed. Chickens are pecking in the hard dirt of the courtyard and in the wilted, dusty undergrowth.

  Katie stares at it, surprised at how run-down it is. She thought it would be like in pictures of China, or movies, or even some of the farms she’s seen in their travels, with a neat stone fence, and walls and a roof that look really solid and can withstand a hurricane, and lots of trees and flowers. She looks at Clio, and sees the surprise and disappointment on her face. And Mom thinks Mary’s Farm is a falling-down wreck? She doesn’t look too happy about this. What’s that she always is saying, “A hard dose of reality”? And I was born in there? But the people are what count—my grandparents and birth dad and sister are what really matter—like Mary really matters. Where are they?