Peach Blossom Paradise

by Ge Fei

  *Allegedly painted by Han Yu, Peach Blossom Spring was passed down through the Ding family of Puji for several generations, then fell into other hands. In August 1957, a joint working group of experts from the antiquities departments of Beijing and Jiangsu determined it to be a forgery. It is currently stored in a museum vault in Puqing.

  3

  A STREAM of visitors showed up the day after Father disappeared.

  Tan Shuijin and Gao Caixia, the ferryman and his wife, arrived first. There had been no traffic at all at the ford yesterday, they said, and Shuijin had spent the whole day playing go with his son inside the ferry. They were both good go players, Shuijin told Mother. Skill at the game was passed down through the family. Apparently his own father had died at the go board, right after losing a whole field of pieces and spitting up blood. That afternoon, he and his son had played three rounds of the game; Shuijin won the first two, and the third was still going on when the downpour started. “Boy, that was a big storm,” Shuijin said, his wife chiming in, “Big, oh boy, it was big.” Mother sat quietly and listened to them babble for as long as patience would allow before finally interrupting, “Have either of you seen the man of this house?”

  Gao Caixia said no, she hadn’t, and Shuijin shook his head. “Not a single person crossed the river yesterday afternoon; no, I didn’t even see a bird cross the river, much less a passenger. We came out here early this morning to tell you that. We haven’t seen your old man. My son and I were playing go in the boat, played four rounds of it.”

  “Not four rounds, three, and you didn’t finish the last one before the rain came,” Gao Caixia corrected him. The pair went through the whole story backward and upside down one more time, lingering on until noon before marching off in a huff.

  As they were leaving, Baoshen showed in an old woman who wore dirty, tattered clothing and whom nobody recognized. She swore she had seen Father leave with her own eyes. “Which way did he go?” Mother asked. “Bring me something to eat first,” the old lady replied.

  Magpie rushed off to the kitchen, returning with a full platter of sticky-rice cakes. The old lady ate hand to mouth, swallowing five in quick succession and pocketing three more. Then she burped heavily and turned to go. Lilypad grabbed her. “You still haven’t told us where the master went.”

  The crone pointed to the ceiling. “Up to heaven.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Baoshen asked.

  The crone pointed once more at the eaves. “He went up to heaven. You needn’t wait for him. A crimson cloud appeared from the southeast and descended to him in the form of a magical kirin. He got onto its back, and rode off into the sky. As he rose, he dropped a piece of cloth . . .” With a shivering hand she drew an old handkerchief from her ragged clothing and passed it to Lilypad. “Have a look. Isn’t this his?”

  Lilypad took it from her and examined it closely. “It sure is, no doubt about it. It’s an old one, but that’s the plum flower I embroidered for him in the corner.”

  “Well, there you are.” The crone tucked her hands into her sleeves and walked out.

  Mother’s face assumed a look of quiet shock, and her eyes turned confused and distant. After a long silence, she said, “It isn’t very likely that he could have ascended to heaven. But where did that handkerchief come from?”

  That afternoon, as Xiumi climbed the stairs to her room for a nap, a young woman in a red jacket arrived at their front door. She seemed to be in her early twenties, though her face was covered in pockmarks. She said she had been walking all morning, and had walked so far that the soles of her shoes were coming unstitched. She came from Beili, a village at least six or seven miles from Puji. No matter how Mother entreated her to come in for tea, she refused, claiming she had only a short message for Mother, and had to go back immediately. She leaned on the door frame and told her story.

  It was the evening of the day before, after the rain had been falling for a while, when she remembered that she had hung a basket of soybeans out to dry from the roof of the pigsty, and ran out in the rain to fetch it. In the falling darkness she caught sight of a man, huddled beneath the eaves of the pigsty, holding a wicker suitcase in one hand and leaning on a cane.

  “I had no idea that it was the master of your house. It was raining so hard. I asked him where he came from, and he said Puji village. I asked where he was headed, but he wouldn’t tell me, and when I invited him to come inside to wait out the rain, he refused. So I brought the beans in and told my mother-in-law about him. She said that if he was from Puji, that made him a neighbor, and the least we could do was lend him an umbrella. So I grabbed one and went back out for him, but I couldn’t find hide nor hair! And that rain coming down so fast. Later that night, when my husband returned home from drinking at his uncle’s, he told me a couple of porters had come by carrying lanterns and asking for a lost old man, and I knew it must have been the man whom I had seen. That’s what I came to tell you.”

  Having provided this news, the pockmarked young woman set off homeward again, refusing to stay even for a glass of water because, she said, they needed her for the wheat harvest. Mother immediately pressed Baoshen to send people in her direction in search of Father, but just as Baoshen was getting ready to leave, a smiling Hua Erniang brought someone else through the front door.

  •

  This last guest wasn’t connected to Father’s disappearance. He was a man in his forties with a short goatee and attentively coiffed hair, dressed in a traditional shirt of white cloth. Pince-nez spectacles sat on his nose, while a large pipe hung from his mouth.

  The very sight of him instantaneously dispelled the clouds from Mother’s expression. She invited him into the guest room, peppering him with questions the whole way. Xiumi, Magpie, and Lilypad all came in to be introduced. The man sat with legs crossed, smoking his pipe with an air of sincere self-satisfaction. It was the first time Xiumi had smelled tobacco smoke since the onset of Father’s madness. The man’s name was Zhang Jiyuan, and he had supposedly come from Meicheng. Mother initially told Xiumi that he was a cousin, but later instructed her to call him Uncle. To this, the man named Zhang Jiyuan spoke up. “Just think of me as your elder brother.”

  “But that would jumble up seniority,” Mother said, smiling.

  “Then jumble it,” Zhang Jiyuan responded, carelessly. “Everything’s jumbled up these days. Let’s go ahead and jumble it all into jambalaya.” He laughed loudly at his own joke.

  One more lunatic. He pared his fingernails, jiggled his legs, and spoke with a powerful condescension. This elder brother made Xiumi deeply uncomfortable. His skin was pale and his cheekbones high, yet his narrow eyes were set deeply into his skull, giving him a sort of feminine delicacy. Though his aloof demeanor seemed to suggest arrogance, a closer look revealed a cold, deep-seated gloominess at its heart, as if he were a being from another world.

  He had been staying in Meicheng to recover from illness, and would be in Puji for a short stretch. But if he were sick, why would he leave Meicheng and travel out here to the countryside? When Grandma was alive, Xiumi and Mother often visited Meicheng. How come she had never seen him before? According to Mother, he was a fine writer and a man of the world; he had been to Japan, and lived several years in both Nanjing and Beiping.

  Mother ordered Lilypad to prepare Father’s room for him, and sat and chatted with him in the living room until the lamps were lit and the call for dinner came. Baoshen and Magpie were very deferential at the dinner table, calling him Uncle. Only Lilypad seemed unimpressed by his presence, and watched him with a faint suspicion. Zhang Jiyuan talked forcefully and at length about the state of the outside world, touching on everything from reform and revolution to “piles of bones” and “rivers of blood.” Baoshen shook his head and sighed, “The world has turned upside down.”

  After the meal, Xiumi sneaked into the kitchen to talk to Lilypad, who was washing dishes alone. They
chatted about the crazy old woman’s handkerchief, and about Baoshen’s business with Miss Sun. Lilypad spoke on the latter subject with great interest, though Xiumi didn’t always comprehend her. On the topic of their new guest, however, Lilypad was as much in the dark as Xiumi. “His family name is Zhang, but your mother’s is Wen, and she doesn’t have any sisters, so how could he be your uncle? There’s a good chance he isn’t a direct relation at all. I never heard his name once in all the years I’ve been in this house. He claims he’s here because of an illness, but does he look like an invalid to you? Clopping around in those heeled shoes of his so that even the water in the basin ripples. And the weirdest thing”—Lilypad stretched her neck to peer out the window before continuing—“the weirdest thing is, your mother only just came home from Meicheng yesterday. If Mr. Mustache had planned to visit us, why didn’t he come with her? Instead of just walking in here just as your father walked out, as if they planned the whole thing. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

  Xiumi asked if what he had said at dinner about “rivers of blood” was true. “Of course it’s true,” Lilypad replied. “The whole world is falling apart.”

  Hearing this, Xiumi fell silent, absorbed in her own dark anxieties. Seeing her lost in thought beside the sink, Lilypad dunked a hand in the water and flicked it at her cheek.

  “If Puji fell apart, what would happen?” Xiumi asked.

  Lilypad sighed. “Everything in this world can be predicted except for trouble. Every time trouble appears it’s different, and only after it starts do you find out what it’s really like.”

  •

  Xiumi could see the studio through the north-facing window of her bedroom. It seemed small and threatening beneath the rich shade of the trees that towered above it. Those trees and the clear, reedy brook that once ran beside them were supposedly the reason Great-Grandfather had selected this ground for his estate, back when Puji was nothing more than a small fishing village. He raised a wall around the area so he could fish in the rear courtyard. When Xiumi was still very young, she once saw a charcoal drawing of the courtyard from those days, with wild ducks and migratory birds dotting the banks of the stream and roosting on the eaves and the courtyard wall. According to Mother, the stream had shrunk to no more than a trickle through the sunbaked pebbles by the time she and Father arrived. Only the reeds still thrived. Eventually, Father piled boulders from Lake Tai over the streambed to make an artificial knoll, on top of which he built his studio and the gazebo and put a woodshed at the base. A row of hardy impatiens bloomed along the woodshed wall, and every year Lilypad would grind some of the petals to dye her fingernails.

  Zhang Jiyuan moving into Father’s studio gave Xiumi the illusory sense that Father had not left. His lamp burned all night, every night, and aside from two meals a day (he did not eat breakfast), the occupant rarely appeared. Lilypad was responsible for cleaning up after him every morning, and when she came down she would find Xiumi to report the latest news.

  “He’s sound asleep,” she reported on the first day.

  “He’s clipping his fingernails,” she said on the following morning.

  “He’s moving his bowels,” she said on the third day, and waved a hand before her nose. “Peeee-eww.”

  On the fourth day, her report was longer and more complex. “The idiot is staring at your father’s old washbasin. He asked me where we had gotten it, and I told him the master had bought it off a peddler in exchange for a meal. The idiot just kept shaking his head and saying, ‘Priceless, priceless.’ The master always washed his face and hands in it; I don’t know what’s so special about it. He stopped me as I was going out, and said, ‘Sister, wait a minute. I was wondering if you could help me find someone.’

  “I asked him who he was looking for, and he smiled and asked, ‘Might you know of a six-fingered carpenter living in this area?’ I said, ‘There’s a carpenter in the village, but he doesn’t have six fingers.’ ‘Could he be in any of the neighboring towns?’ he asked. I said there was someone in Xia village known for having an extra finger, but he wasn’t a carpenter, and he’s been dead for two years. What’s he hunting a six-fingered man for?”

  On the fifth day, Lilypad came downstairs and said nothing. “What’s the idiot doing today?” Xiumi asked.

  “He’s gone,” Lilypad replied. “The lamp on the table was still lit, but he wasn’t there.”

  This was Zhang Jiyuan’s first disappearance. Mother didn’t seem worried, nor did she ask many questions. When Lilypad pushed her, Mother scowled and said, “His affairs are no concern of yours. If he left for a few days, he’ll be back.”

  He reappeared a few days later at noon, startling Magpie as she coached Xiumi on her needlework. “Whose pants are these?” Xiumi heard his voice ask from behind her. She turned around and saw her own underwear in his hands. She had left them drying on the hedge the day Father disappeared and had forgotten about them. By now, heavy rain and several days of full sunlight had stiffened them into a cloth board. The sight of the idiot shaking them loose and examining them closely set Xiumi quivering with angry embarrassment, and jumping from her seat, she ran over to him, snatched the underwear from his grasp, and ran straight upstairs.

  On her way up, the faint clattering of hooves drew her to a window. A team of mounted police suddenly streamed down the high road beyond the village, following the river to the west, their hurrying mounts raising huge billows of yellow dust. Xiumi watched the red tassels on their official hats flicker and undulate with the horses’ gait, the tassels glistening like fresh pig’s blood.

  4

  SHE BLED again. At first it was no more than a dark trickle, the color of a freckle, but then it deepened in color and spread in a sticky mess all over her thighs. She changed underwear twice, but it kept coming. She spent the morning lying as still as she could in bed, afraid that the slightest movement would start a flow she couldn’t stanch and eventually kill her. The last two times it had happened, the bleeding had stopped after three or four days, yet now it was back in full force again, along with the feverish nights and the twisting pain that felt like someone was turning a hot iron in her gut. She didn’t dare use the mirror this time; she thought she would rather die than look at that hideous, bleeding fissure once more.

  She thought about dying often. If she had to die, she wanted to avoid all the traditional endings—the silk noose, the well, the bottle of poison—but she couldn’t think of any better way to do it. How should her death happen? She remembered the line from a Peking opera, “May golden sands cover my face, and my limbs be scattered,” and wondered what kind of death that was; she knew that when she had heard the legendary general Yang Yanhui sing it, her legs shook and her eyes welled with tears. If she must die, it should be grand. The day before, when the horsemen had thundered past the village, the sight of their red caps and tassels, shining halberds, and strong horses churning up dust had exhilarated her. She felt a similar energy surging within herself, like an untamed and restless horse, ready to bolt off to parts unknown the second she loosened the reins.

  Xiumi sat up in bed to change cotton balls. The first clump was soaked with black blood. She suddenly felt like everything in the room had turned black, even the sunlight filtering through the window. She sat on the toilet for a while, then tried to work with her needle on some embroidered flowers, but a wave of irritation drove her to grab scissors from the drawer and cut the red thread into pieces.

  No, this wouldn’t do. She had to talk to someone.

  She didn’t want Mother to know, and Dr. Tang was a lost cause as well. The old dotard never spoke during his visits, except to give bad news. He took pulses, wrote prescriptions, and took his payment in silence; if he did say anything, you were probably doomed. His favorite line was “Better get the coffin ready,” which he always proclaimed with a barely visible elation.

  The only three people left were Baoshen, Magpie, and Lilypad. Baoshen
was good-hearted and trustworthy, but he was also a man, and how could she talk to a man about such a thing? Magpie was too timid, and she had a weak head that was easily confused. Xiumi thought the problem over thoroughly, and finally went to Lilypad for help.

  •

  Lilypad’s first home was Huzhou, several hundred miles southeast of Puji. Her parents had died when she was only a few years old, and after she turned eight, her uncle sold her off to a family in Hangzhou. At twelve she ran away, finding refuge in a nunnery in Wuxi. One evening, the abbess led her down to the pier to steal silk thread from the merchant boats; the last boat they boarded wouldn’t let them off. It carried them all the way to Sichuan Province in the west, a journey that lasted a full two years. The abbess made the best of a bad situation by getting pregnant on board. She had twins, officially became the captain’s wife, and spent the rest of her life on the water. Meanwhile, Lilypad began a more arduous journey. She was sold to five different brothels and married four times, once to a palace eunuch. By the time Lu Kan paid her indenture at the last brothel, she had traveled across more than half the country, going as far as Zhaoqing in the deep southeast.

  During their years in Yangzhou together, she tried running away three times, each without success. It had become an addiction. Lu Kan frequently asked her why she tried to leave, to which she replied, “I don’t know. I like trying.”

  When he asked her where she was running to, she said, “Doesn’t matter. You figure it out as you go.”

  After Lu Kan lost his position, he summoned her to his study to talk. “You need not bother running off again,” he told her. “I’ll give you some silver and you can go where you like.”

  He did not expect her to protest. “So you’re driving me away?” she cried.