Village of Stone

by Xiaolu Guo

  * * *

  Though my grandmother had passed away, I found myself forgetting that she was gone. Each evening as I stood on the beach, watching the waves grow dark and the sun making its descent into the sea, I was stricken with a sort of temporary amnesia. I half expected my grandmother, leaning on her cane, her back bent with the effort, to come walking down the length of Pirate’s Alley and down to the beach. After that, I would hear her long drawn-out cries, shrill as a whistle, calling me home: Little Dog, get yourself home to eat!

  I had always waited for my grandmother’s voice, always listened for her faraway call echoing around the mountain, before I returned home for dinner, home to that large wooden table with its solitary two bowls of gruel and bottle of shrimp paste. But now there was nothing awaiting me there: no voice calling, no dinner laid. There was nothing awaiting me, and nothing to wait for.

  I began to look upon my grandmother’s death as a good thing. After all, she had died of old age. It was a peaceful death, the kind of death everyone hopes for. And her passing had brought her the kind of good fortune she had never known while she was alive. Although she was not a native of the Village of Stone and had come into it only by marriage, she would never again find herself shunted aside by the villagers. She now had her very own patch of earth, a place on the mountain beside the brackish sea, where she could rest in eternal slumber. She had finally become a part of the Village of Stone. Her suffering had ceased, and happiness was hers at last.

  That winter seemed to pass very quickly. Solar terms followed one upon another – first the Lesser Snow, then the Greater Snow (although, as usual, there was no snow in the Village of Stone) and then, before I knew it, the New Year was at hand. For the fishermen and their wives, New Year meant a period of safety, a respite from fishing. For the village children it meant the delicious anticipation of New Year treats and new holiday clothes. It was always a busy time in the village. The lights in the houses went on in the small hours of the morning and were not extinguished until late at night, and the kitchens were a bustle of activity all day long. In the midst of all this, I suddenly found myself alone, a single teenager on the verge of adulthood with no parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles. I was alone in the world.

  So I carried on alone. The strange thing is that I never once lost hope. Like a tiny sand crab hiding in the cracks between the rocks along the shoreline, I simply kept to myself and kept growing up.

  17

  ‘DO YOU KNOW the Marianas Trench?’ I ask Red. I am lying on our mattress on the floor and staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘The Marianas what?’ Red scratches his head.

  ‘The Marianas Trench. It’s the deepest ocean trench in the world.’

  I feel my train of thought projecting upwards, bursting through the ceiling and the twenty-five storeys overhead, sailing off into the infinite distance.

  ‘The Marianas Trench has a depth of eleven thousand and thirty-four metres.’

  ‘Eleven thousand and thirty-four metres …’ Red mumbles, as if repeating the figure will somehow make it less of an abstraction.

  I doubt whether it would be possible to live in a twenty-five storey high-rise, particularly one as crowded and hideously ugly as ours, and still retain the imagination required to grasp the idea of the Marianas Trench.

  ‘Where is the Marianas Trench?’ Red asks.

  ‘In the South Pacific’

  Red gazes blankly out the window. Our forty-five minutes of early morning sunlight have already packed up and departed, leaving the balcony in darkness.

  ‘In the deepest parts of the ocean, even the fish are flat. It’s because of the water pressure …’ I add in an undertone.

  I am talking to myself now. I know that there are some things that, no matter how infinitely deep they are buried, will always come floating back to the surface.

  * * *

  Distant memory is the Marianas Trench of the soul.

  This time it is my teacher, Mr Mou, who floats up from the depths of my Marianas Trench, from the waters of my Village of Stone.

  My memories of him run too deep, so deep that there isn’t enough oxygen to sustain them. This lack of oxygen has caused his memory to pale and thin, leaving only disconnected shards and muddied images. But my memory of Mr Mou is like the sea of the Village of Stone. No matter how muddied, an ocean is still an ocean, tempestuous and frightening in its intensity.

  Mr Mou is yet another dark undercurrent in my memory. Even after all these years, memories of him continue to well up into my present consciousness.

  18

  THE YEAR I turned fifteen, my body began to emerge from its childhood cave. As the sun shone down upon me, I remained oblivious to the fact that my body was growing. I grew taller, grew out of the fearful child I once was and into a young woman. My plaited hair, once so thin and frazzled, grew as thick and dark as the inky seaweed growing in the kelp beds along the shore. It spilled over my shoulders and down my back. It was as if I had become an adult almost overnight. With the help of Boy Waiting’s parents, I enrolled at the only secondary school in the Village of Stone.

  I never knew where Mr Mou, my chemistry teacher, came from. Had he been born in the Village of Stone? Was he already living in the village at the time I was born? Or was he an outsider like my grandmother, someone who had moved here from an inland village far away from the sea?

  When I think back about Mr Mou after all these years, I realise that he had certain qualities that marked him out as different from the other villagers. He was gentle and kind, incapable of cruelty or violence. Perhaps that was the reason I was so immediately drawn to him.

  It started during my second year at the school. I remember that it was nearing the end of summer, and that the typhoons were still raging. They always came from the east, gaining strength as they swept over the East China Sea, until at last they spiralled from the skies and touched down in the Village of Stone. The typhoons inundated the village, tossed it to and fro as if it were but a small wooden bucket bobbing on the surface of an endless sea.

  I had already noticed how long and pale Mr Mou’s hands were, and how he always seemed to be alone. He was alone when he emerged from his office, alone when he paced around the schoolyard, alone when he walked down the street outside the schoolhouse. He was very fair, his face almost as pale and delicate as his long, slender hands. He wore his hair rather long, the locks tumbling over his forehead. This made him look very different from the other teachers at our school.

  In my eyes, he was truly an exception to the rule. Instead of marking our homework notebooks in red pen like the other teachers in our little village school, Mr Mou used a stone stamp dipped in red ink. He had three different stamps that he had carved by hand himself; each was the shape of an animal. A lion stamp symbolised ‘excellent’ marks, a tiger stamp was ‘good’ and a rabbit stamp meant ‘poor’. At first, all the stamps in my homework notebook were tigers, indicating that my chemistry marks were about average. As my marks in inorganic chemistry gradually improved, the tigers changed to lions and I managed to earn five lions in the course of the term. I had grown to like chemistry. Or, I suppose you could say, I had grown to like my chemistry teacher.

  One afternoon, I was leaning on my desk in chemistry class listening to my classmates trying to memorise the periodic table of elements for a forthcoming test: Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, Neon, Sodium, Magnesium, Aluminium … I was too tired to study. The cicadas were buzzing outside the window and there was the feeling in the air that a round of storms was brewing. It was hot and humid, and rain seemed imminent. As the time for class drew nearer, the clamour in the classroom intensified. The students, struggling to memorise the periodic table, turned up the volume and frequency of their recitations. The collective chant grew louder, the frequencies intensified and the hiss of voices began to sound like something being stir-fried.

  Though the other students were nervous about
the test, I was not at all anxious. I wasn’t afraid of being punished if I received a poor mark. After all, what could my teachers do to me? How could they inflict a punishment worse than what I had already endured? The stifling afternoon heat was making me drowsy, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to lay my head on my desk and rest. The bell rang, signalling the start of class, and Mr Mou entered the classroom carrying a test tube and a Bunsen burner. He set the test tube gently on the burner, and the classroom full of students quieted down. Dragging my head from the desk, I propped it up with my elbows and made a token effort to keep my eyes riveted to the front of the classroom, so that I would appear to be listening to the lecture rather than dozing. So intently did I focus on looking straight ahead and keeping my eyes wide open that, from Mr Mou’s vantage point, it must have looked as if I were glaring at him through the entire class.

  Some time afterwards, I ran into Mr Mou as he was wheeling his decrepit bicycle out of the schoolyard. I remember that he was wearing an orange shirt that day, and seemed to be in rather low spirits. As I passed him at the gate, we happened to glance at each other. He stopped to mention that he had seen an angry young woman glaring up at him one day during chemistry class. No matter how hard he had tried, he told me, he could not manage to avoid her gaze.

  ‘Oh, that …’ I made an effort to explain. ‘I was just feeling tired.’

  ‘But I’ve noticed that you have the same expression even when you aren’t tired.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I answered apathetically.

  Mr Mou continued pushing his bicycle and made no reply. As we reached the wrought-iron front gate of the schoolyard, he suddenly spoke.

  The eyes he had seen, he told me, were not the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl. They were the eyes of a wild animal, something wary and constantly on its guard, a creature that could never be tamed.

  That was more or less what I had become at the age of fifteen: a wild animal with an inborn hatred of the world.

  Mr Mou wanted to know what had made me that way, what had happened to turn me into the despondent, wild-eyed creature he saw in his classes.

  That was how our story began. We were only eight years apart. Mr Mou was rather young, for a teacher.

  One evening, Mr Mou and I climbed to the top of the mountain behind the Village of Stone. We stood in the graveyard beneath the full moon hanging over the roiling sea, looking down at the expanse of inky darkness below. On the slope of the mountain, the grass growing over the graves swayed softly in the breeze, and fireflies flitted between the headstones. Among all those graves, where generation upon generation of villagers lay buried, were my grandfather and grandmother.

  There, beneath the moonlight, I reached for Mr Mou’s hand, although I wasn’t at all afraid of ghosts. I wasn’t afraid of anything.

  I told him that I didn’t like family. Family was a thing I could never love again.

  This seemed to shock him. ‘Why wouldn’t you love your family?’

  ‘No particular reason,’ I answered. ‘It’s just that family is meaningless.’

  ‘How can family be meaningless?’ He was genuinely puzzled now.

  ‘Because family can’t make a person happy. Family doesn’t mean a thing.’

  It was a roundabout answer. I didn’t dare tell Mr Mou about my grandparents, or about the things mat had happened to me when I was seven.

  Mr Mou gazed at me for a very long time but said nothing. After a while, we both raised our heads to look at the moon, that lonely and desolate sphere hanging frozen in the black sky. At that moment, the moon seemed every bit as cold as my world.

  ‘I know about your parents,’ Mr Mou finally said. ‘I know that you lost them both. That must be very painful for you.’

  Although I was a bit surprised to hear Mr Mou admit this, I also had the feeling that he had known about my parents, and about me, all along. I never asked what else he knew about me, or where he had heard it. I was just glad to know that he had noticed.

  Below us, I could hear seagulls, a whole flock of them, crying out one after another. I felt the salt breeze on my forehead.

  Mr Mou spoke again, softly this time. ‘You always look so frightened.’

  Did I? I wasn’t sure what made him think so, because there was nothing that could frighten me, at least not any more. Death, tombstones, ghosts … what was so frightening about those? What could be more frightening than that pit in the earth I had known when I was seven years old?

  Thinking about this, I suddenly started to laugh. In all my fifteen years, it was the first time I could ever remember laughing.

  Mr Mou kept his eyes riveted on my face until my newfound laughter faded, almost as quickly as it had come.

  ‘So you can laugh, after all,’ Mr Mou said at last. ‘You have a beautiful smile.’ He gazed into my eyes, from which the laughter had died, as if they concealed an ocean of secrets.

  I wanted to say something, but I could think of nothing to say.

  The air was filled with night sounds – pine needles rustling in the breeze, the cries of the seabirds, the tips of their silver wings skimming over the water, and the sound of fishermen dragging their nets across the beach. The sounds were faint and peaceful, comforting somehow.

  We sat watching the moon slide west across the evening sky. We made no move to go home because neither of us wanted to leave. Leaving meant going back home alone, back to our separate lives, until the next day when we would once again find ourselves in the same classroom, the same and very public place.

  ‘Mr Mou, I’m cold …’

  He put his arms around me and opened his jacket so that I could nestle inside. His chest was so warm. In that warm, tiny world I could still hear the sound of the ocean.

  There under the moonlight, on the far side of the mountain of the Village of Stone, Mr Mou whispered to me, ‘You’re still just a child.’

  I raised my head so that I could look at him. ‘I’m not a child. I’ve been old almost since I can remember.’

  Mr Mou looked at me in surprise. His eyes were like the ocean below, a reflection of moonlight on the waves. He gazed at me for such a long time, so very long that I could see the waning moon over his shoulder, making its slow descent into the western sky.

  I’ve forgotten so many of the details. But I will always remember our first time.

  His house was rather bare, the floors littered with carving tools and oddly shaped stones. I noticed that the three familiar stone stamps he used in our homework notebooks – lion, tiger and rabbit – had been tossed carelessly upon his cluttered desktop. Until that moment, I had considered those stamps somehow sacred, because they symbolised our chemistry marks and Mr Mou’s authority as a teacher. In his hand, they had the power to determine whether we were outstanding lions, average tigers or simply rabbits who had failed to earn even a pass. But as I stood there before Mr Mou’s untidy desk, I realised that in his hands, these stamps were nothing more than playthings.

  What kind of person was this man, my teacher, I wondered.

  At first, we simply stood together beside his bed. Mr Mou seemed extremely nervous, though I felt calm and composed. So calm, in fact, that I wondered how I could help him overcome his nervousness. For a long time, neither of us spoke. All I could hear was the sound of his ragged breathing.

  No longer was he my teacher. He was just a man without experience. A little boy, really.

  Finally, we sat down on his bed. I took his hand in mine and guided it to my chest, let it linger there, feeling the warmth and softness. Mr Mou said nothing. Silently, obediently, he followed my lead as I helped him to unbutton my blouse, reach inside and touch my skin.

  From start to finish, I was the one helping him, the one guiding him. It was as if I were the teacher and he the student. He trembled like a child.

  I never meant to hurt him. I didn’t think that I could hurt him.

  His was a single bed, cramped and narrow. Lying there, my body small and pale, I felt as pure and u
nsullied as a newborn child. Naturally, I told Mr Mou nothing of my secret. I wanted him to believe that mine was the body of a young girl, pure and innocent.

  In the light slanting through the shutters, I could see that Mr Mou was blushing. The pale blue shutters rattled softly in the light summer breeze and bands of sunlight falling through the slats played over Mr Mou’s face, making him look anxious and bewildered.

  And then he was inside me.

  There was no blood. No blood, no sound, nothing. Not even pain.

  Afterwards, I saw whitish fluid. It was not unfamiliar.

  I never meant to hurt him.

  I thought I was helping him, really I did. Helping him to become a man.

  It was my first sexual experience as an equal.

  Afterwards, he said he wished it hadn’t happened. I never had any regrets.

  But I could tell he was ashamed. He sat on the edge of the bed, just staring at the shutters and watching the waning sunlight cast shadows on the bedroom wall.

  We had tumbled into an abyss. An abyss in which the only warmth came from one another’s bodies. In that abyss, I finally felt safe and free.

  Mr Mou was blameless. I can swear to that.

  But in that abyss, that world our two bodies had made, even my love would not prove to be enough to assuage Mr Mou’s guilty conscience.

  I discovered that I was pregnant in the middle of that term. Exams were approaching and Mr Mou had started assigning revision questions in his class. But I had already stopped attending chemistry class. Whilst the other students laboured over their equations, I waited at Mr Mou’s house, watching the clock on the wall, until it was time to put on my backpack and leave to attend my other required courses. I still had Chinese, maths, political science and physical education classes to attend. I had started feeling sick during lessons. I did what I could to control the nausea, but there was no question about what was happening to my body. I was certain I was pregnant.