Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

  “But really this is just a tiny percentage,” Li Qing says. “Most everybody is in favor of the dam. The flooding downstream is awful, you know. It killed two thousand people last summer. And we can’t keep burning all this coal. Talk is good. It is healthy. I encourage it.”

  Selfishness, recompense, and the chalice of ecstasy. Her son wants to know about his father; what does she think his father would have thought about the dam? But everything reels; she is floating through rapids, trapped between the walls of a gorge. Limestone walls flash past, white and crumbling.

  RETURN

  In the village, two hundred miles away, another neighbor leaves: mother, father, son, daughter, a parade of furniture, a guinea pig, rabbit, and ferret, their cages suspended from the bamboo poles of porters, their black eyes peering into a snowfall, their breath showing in little spirals.

  She has been in the city nine days when she rises and dresses and walks out into the other room, where her son sleeps crammed onto his polyester couch. His glasses are folded on the floor beside him. His nostrils flare slightly with each breath; his eyelids are big and blue and traced with tiny capillaries.

  She says his name. His eyes flutter.

  “How does the water come, when it comes?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does it come fast? Does it surge?”

  “It comes slowly.” He blinks. “First the currents will go out of the river, and then the water will become very calm. The rapids will disappear. Then, after a day, the wharfs. To reach high water will take eight and a half days, we think.”

  She closes her eyes. The wind hisses through the rails on the balcony, a sound like electricity.

  “You’re going back,” he says. “You’re leaving.”

  THE VILLAGE

  Nothing new has been built in months. Windows break and are left broken. Rocks as big as dogs fall into streets and no one bothers to remove them. She ascends the long staircase and creeps down the crumbling alley to the schoolteacher’s house. His door is open; a kerosene lantern hangs from a beam. Teacher Ke sits over a sheet of paper in a shaft of light. A blanket hangs over his lap; he dips a brush in a bottle of ink. His beard wags over the paper.

  He has not been arrested; he has not been killed. Maybe he was never gone at all—maybe he was in a nearby town drinking mao tai.

  “Good evening, Teacher,” she calls, and continues up the street.

  Her house sits unmolested. Her seeds are where she left them. She drags the coal bucket across the floor and opens the mouth of the stove.

  There are maybe a hundred villagers left, some old fishermen and a few wives and a handful of rice farmers waiting until their seedlings are big enough to transplant. The children are gone; the Village Director is gone. Excrement sits in the empty shells of houses. But in the morning the seed keeper feels strangely unburdened, even euphoric: It feels right to be here, in the silver air, to stand in her garden amid the scraps of slush and listen to the wind stream through the gorge.

  Light pours between clouds, glazing rooftops, splashing into streets. She lugs a pot of stew up the staircases and through the crumbling alley and leaves it steaming on the steps of the house of the schoolteacher.

  SPRING

  February brings rainstorms and the first scent of rapeseed. Threads of water spill from the canyon walls. Inside the temple six or seven women sing between blasts of thunder. The roof is leaking and rainwater leaches through great brown splotches and drips into pans scattered around the aisles.

  There is no Spring Festival, no rowing races down the river, no fireworks on the summits. She would be seeding rice now, a seed in each container of her plastic trays, then earth, then water. Instead she seeds her garden, and the neighbor’s garden, and throws handfuls of seeds into the yards of abandoned houses, too: kale, radish, turnip, chives. She is suddenly wealthy: She has the seeds for fifty gardens. In the evenings she cooks—spicy noodles, bean curd soup—and brings the pots to the steps of the schoolteacher and leaves them under lids and collects the pots she has left before, empty, clumsily washed.

  Meanwhile the village disappears. The boards of the docks vanish. The wrappings are taken off trees. Clock hands disappear and the doors off the Government House and the guide wires from radio antennas and the antennas, too. Whole groves of bamboo are taken. Magnolia trees are dug up and carted in wheelbarrows onto barges. Hinges and knobs and screws and nuts evaporate. Every ounce of teak in every house is dismantled and packed away in blankets and lugged down the staircases.

  In March the few farmers who are left thresh their wheat. When the wind is low she can hear them, the chop-chop of scythes. Every March of her life she has heard that sound.

  She cannot remember a spring more colorful. Flowers seem to be exploding out of the mud. By April there is scarlet and lavender and jade everywhere. Behind the Government House zinnias are coming up with a deep, almost unnatural vigor—as if they were pouring up out of the earth. She kneels over them for a half hour, studying the smooth, stout stems of the seedlings.

  Soon so many plants in her garden are coming up she has to start pulling them. It is as if someone is underneath the earth, pushing her vegetables up with his fingers. Has spring always been like this? Startling, overpowering? Maybe she is more sensitive to it this year. Bees drift through the alleys with their heavy baskets, seemingly drunk; to stand beneath the sycamores is to stand in a blizzard of seeds.

  At night she walks the town and has the sense that the darkness is a great cool lake. Everything seems about to float away. Darkness, she thinks, is the permanent thing.

  And silence. With the people gone, and the ore factory quiet, it is as if the village has become a trove of silence, as if the sounds of her shoes on the stairs, and the air passing in and out of her lungs, are the only sounds for miles.

  Mail service stops. She does not hear from Li Qing. Any moment, perhaps, he will appear at her door and demand she leave with him immediately. But he never shows. At night there are only three or four lights against the huge background of the gorge and the dark sky and the darker river with its faint avenue of reflected stars.

  FIREFLIES

  Every night now thousands of fireflies float up the staircases and hang in the trees, flashing their sequenced trains of light, until the whole gorge looks as if it has been threaded with green bulbs. She bends to exchange a pot of soup for the empty one sitting on the schoolteacher’s stair when the door swings open.

  “You’re watching the beetles,” he says. He clambers out the doorway and sits with the point of his cane balanced on the bottom step. She nods.

  “I thought you had left. In the winter.”

  She shrugs. “Everyone is leaving.”

  “But you’re still here.”

  “So are you.”

  He clears his throat. Out in his fruit trees the fireflies rise and flash, rise and flash. “My son—” she says.

  “Let’s not talk about him.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re courting females,” he says. “The beetles. In some of the big trees along the river, I’ve seen thousands of them all flashing in synchrony. On, off. On, off.”

  She stands to go.

  “Stay,” he says. “Talk a while.”

  MEMORY

  Every stone, every stair, is a key to a memory. Here the sons of her neighbors flew kites. Here the toothless knife-sharpener used to set up his coughing, smoking wheel. Here, forty years ago, a legless girl roasted nuts in a copper wok and here the seed keeper’s mother once let her drink a glass of beer on Old Festivals Day. Here the river took a clean shirt right out of her hands; here was once a field, furred with green shoots; here a fisherman put his hot, dry mouth on hers. The body odor of porters, the white faces of tombs, the sweet, bulging calves of Li Qing’s father—the village drowns in memory.

  Again and again her feet take her up the long staircases past the park to the crumbling alley, the tides of fireflies, and the sour perfume of the schoolt
eacher’s yard. She brings a pot of hot water and a bag of sugar cubes, and the schoolteacher joins her on the steps and they drink and watch the beetles pulse and rise as if the whole gorge is smoldering and these are sparks that have shaken free.

  Before the construction of the Government House, before mail service, before the ore factory, this was a place of monks, and warriors, and fishermen. Always fishermen. The seed keeper and the teacher talk of presidents and emperors, and the songs of trackers, and the temple, and the birds. Mostly she listens to the old man’s voice in the darkness, his sentences parceling out one after another until his frail body beside her seems to disappear in the darkness and he is only a voice, a schoolteacher’s fading elocution.

  “Maybe,” he says, “a place looks different when you know you’re seeing it for the last time. Or maybe it’s knowing no one will ever see it again. Maybe knowing no one will see it again changes it.”

  “Changes the place or how you see it?”

  “Both.”

  She sips her sweet water. He says: “Earth is four and a half billion years old. You know how much a billion is?”

  One-thirteen, sixty-six, forty-four. A hundred billion suns per galaxy, a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Teacher Ke writes three letters a day, a hundred words each. He shows them to her; the white paper, his wobbly calligraphy. He addresses them to newspapers, officials, engineers. He shows her a whole roster—hundreds of pages thick—of dam commission employees. She thinks: My son’s name is in there.

  “What do you say in the letters?”

  “That the dam is a mistake. That they’re drowning centuries of history, risking lives, working with faulty numbers.”

  “And do they make a difference?”

  He looks at her; the moisture in his eyes reflects the fireflies, the soaring, glossy ruins of the cliffs. “What do you think?”

  JULY

  Everything accumulates a terrible beauty. Dawns are long and pink; dusks last an hour. Swallows swerve and dive and the stripe of sky between the walls of the gorge is purple and as soft as flesh. The fireflies float higher up on the cliffs, a foam of green, as if they know, as if they can sense the water coming.

  Is Li Qing trying to reach her? Is he right now racing up the river in a hydrofoil to take her away?

  Teacher Ke asks her to carry his letters to the wharfs and see if passing boats will take them to another village to mail them. The fishermen almost always say no; they squint at the rickety script on the envelopes and sense they are dangerous. She has more luck with the hollow-eyed scavengers who come up on ramshackle motor launches to salvage scrap metal or paving stones; she bribes them with an old dress, or kerosene, or a paper bag heavy with eggplant. Maybe they mail them; maybe they round the bend and pitch them into the rapids.

  By now all the unbroken flagstones have been taken and sunflowers begin to rise from the center of the streets. Her improvised gardens in her neighbors’ yards are unruly with bees and nettles. “There are hours,” the schoolteacher says, “when I think of the shoeshine boys making fun of me, and the piles of trash steaming in the rain, and the burns on my fingers from that old stove, and I cannot wait to see it all go underwater.”

  The long staircase, one landing after another, the front of each step edged with light. No chisels, no dogs, no engines. Just the sky, and light falling down between the shells of buildings, like a fine rain, and her footfalls echoing through the alleys.

  She stands in her house and stares into the mouths of containers, watching little diamonds of light reflect off the smooth polish of seeds, their perfect geometries, their hibernal dreams.

  She peers past the schoolteacher into his tiny shed, the scattered piles of papers and the books and his blackened lantern and the husks of beetles in the corners.

  She says, “You’re going to drown with the village.”

  “You’re the one,” he says, “we should be worried about.”

  FINALLY

  There are two nights left in July when the schoolteacher appears in her doorway. He is wearing a suit, his shoes are shined, and his beard is combed. His eyes gleam. Over his shoulder is a knapsack, in one fist is his cane, and in the other the neck of a large plastic bag.

  “Look.” Inside are hundreds, maybe thousands, of fireflies. “Honey and water. They can’t get enough of it.”

  She smiles. He unloads his knapsack: a bottle of mao tai and a stack of thirty or so letters.

  “Two glasses,” he says, and drags his stiff legs over to her chair and sits and wrestles the cork out of the bottle. They toast.

  “To one last mailing.”

  “To one last mailing.”

  He explains what he needs and she empties every jar she has, pouring the seeds into buckets and trays. The schoolteacher strips corks with a penknife and rolls letters into the bottles and together they use a paper funnel to shake the fireflies in. The insects fly everywhere and clog the bottlenecks but they manage to get thirty or so into each bottle.

  They stack the corked bottles in a basket. Fireflies crawl the glass. The light from the lantern wavers and shadows lap the walls. She can feel the liquor burning in her stomach and down the lines of her arms.

  “Good,” Teacher Ke is saying, “good, good, good.” His voice is a whisper, the hissing revolutions of needle across an old record.

  When she extinguishes the lantern the bottles glow softly. She heaves the basket onto her shoulders and carries it down the staircases, and the schoolteacher limps beside her, leaning on his cane.

  The air is warm and damp; the sky is a stripe of dark blue ink between the black walls of the cliffs. The basket on her shoulder buzzes softly. They reach what’s left of the docks, fifteen or so piles driven into the riverbed, and she sets down the basket and studies it.

  “They’ll run out of air,” she says, but she can feel the liquor working now, and Teacher Ke is breathing hard, already half drunk himself. Everything is silent except for the river.

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s put them in.”

  She wades out into the cold water. Pebbles stir beneath her shoes. The current parts lightly around her knees. The schoolteacher is a trembling weight at her elbow. She floats the basket out alongside them. The bottles flash and flash. Eventually the two of them—seed keeper and schoolteacher—are submerged to their waists.

  Maybe the river is already beginning to slack, to back up and rise. Maybe ghosts pour out of the Earth, out of the mouths of tombs up and down the gorges, out of the tips of twigs at the ends of branches. The fireflies tap against the glass. More than anything, she thinks, I’ll be sad to see the speed go out of the water.

  She hands him the first bottle and he sets it in and they watch the river take it, a green-blue light winking out into the current, turning slightly as it picks up pace.

  Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?

  The bottle disappears. She hands him the next one. When he turns she can see he is crying.

  Everything has trained her to expect this to work out badly. Li Qing with his cigarettes; the schoolteacher with his questions. Our side, their side. But perhaps, she thinks, there is no good and bad to it at all. Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater. Progress is a storm and the wings of everything are swept up in it.

  She leans forward and wipes the schoolteacher’s eye with her thumb. The second bottle is gone.

  Teacher Ke drags his forearm across his nose. “All this trouble,” he says, “and still—doesn’t it feel good? Doesn’t it make you feel young?”

  The river murmurs against their bodies and the bottles go out of the basket one after another. The old man takes his time. The bottles glow and flash in the current and round the bend and are gone. She listens to the current, and the old
man sends his letters downstream, and they stand in the water until they cannot tell where their legs end and where the river begins.

  JULY 31

  On the last day, five or six steady, level-faced servicemen with chainsaws come for the trees. They bring them down in four-foot sections, and load the logs onto handwagons, and bounce the handwagons down what’s left of the staircases, past the broken pavement and the sunflowers and the seed keeper’s gardens in the neighbors’ yards. They take the oaks, the ginkgos, the three old sycamores from the garden behind the Government House. They leave the lions.

  All day she does not see the schoolteacher and she hopes he is already gone, making his way upriver on some old trail, or squatting in the canoe of a passing fisherman, watching the gorges drift past. Maybe she is the last person in the village; maybe she is the last person on the river.

  In the afternoon three policemen come to sweep the village, shining flashlights into rooms, lifting discarded plywood with the toes of their boots, but it is easy to hide from them and in an hour their hydrofoil is gone, roaring toward the next town.

  She spreads a blanket across her table and upends containers of seeds onto it. Mustard tuber, pak choy, cabbage, eggplant, cauliflower. Millet, chestnut, radish. Her mother’s voice: Seeds are the dreams plants dream while they sleep. Seeds big as coins; seeds light as breath. They all go onto the blanket. When all the containers are empty she folds the corners of the blanket over each other and ties the whole thing into a bundle.

  In her arms it is maybe as heavy as a child. The sun rolls down behind the gorge. By now the diversion has been sealed off, and water is piling up behind the dam.

  A wool cap. A jacket. She leaves her dishes stacked in the cupboards.

  She walks down the staircases for the last time and out to the Bridge of Beautiful Glances and sits on the parapet. The day’s heat rises from the stone into the backs of her thighs. Everything is radiant.