Crimson China

by Betsy Tobin

  “You’ve not come to see me lately,” he said.

  “I’ve been busy with exams,” she replied evasively.

  “I see.” Chen gave a small nod. “I thought perhaps you were disappointed by the outcome of the contest.”

  “Not at all. I’m sure the winners were far more deserving.”

  “Your entry was very good, very capable.”

  “But not outstanding,” she said.

  “Perhaps not,” he admitted.

  “I should have worked harder.”

  A pained expression crossed Chen’s face.

  “You have a genuine talent for English, Lili. But translation isn’t just a question of rendering a book’s meaning, it’s about capturing the author’s intentions. You must interpret not just the words, but the essence of the work.” Chen paused then.

  Lili saw that his shirt was missing a button, and there was a small stain to one side of his collar. I could fix these, she thought fleetingly.

  “At any rate,” Chen added gently, “I think you will make a fine teacher one day.”

  “But not a translator,” she said.

  “I’m sure you can succeed at that too, if you put your mind to it.”

  She looked up at him. But I cannot succeed in capturing you, she thought.

  “Thank you,” she said instead, rising to go.

  “By the way,” Chen said as she was leaving. Lili paused in the doorway. “My wife and daughter will move here in September. Her mother has recovered from her illness.”

  Lili felt a lump rise in the back of her throat. Did he think this news would make her happy?

  “Congratulations,” she murmured.

  “Thank you. It’s been a long time in coming. You’ll be gone by then, won’t you? It’s a pity. She would have liked to meet you.”

  Lili stared at him, unable to speak. The thought of meeting his wife face to face, of making small talk, filled her with dread. How could their minds run in such different directions? Perhaps she had fooled herself about Chen; perhaps he was not her kindred spirit after all.

  That was the last time she had spoken to him, though several months later, when she was passing by the campus, she caught a glimpse of him queuing at a bus stop with his wife and child. He looked older somehow, and more harried. He held tightly to his daughter’s hand, and when the crowd surged around them, he quickly swept the child into his arms. Lili watched from the window of her bus until they’d disappeared from view.

  •

  Now, sitting on her bed in Adrian’s house, the familiar emptiness has returned. Once again, she has succumbed to the lure of a false future, this time without realising. Until now she had thought of Adrian as something of a tragic figure – single, lonely, bereft – a man struggling to raise a child that was not his own. Now she sees that he is something far different, a man in control of his destiny. Lili looks over at the framed photo of Wen. He too had taken charge of his fate, had gone in search of something that lay beyond her understanding. Had he found it? she wondered And had it been worth the price?

  June 2004

  As spring turns to summer, Wen’s days fall into a routine. Mornings are devoted to studying English and afternoons to housekeeping, cooking and gardening. Angie’s garden has thrived under his care: the rangy lawn, once full of weeds, is now lush and green. He has pruned the trees and shrubs back to their intended shape, and restored order to the flower beds, which have begun to bloom in a profusion of colour. He found a mass of old bricks at the back of the garden and spent several days laying a paved area at the top of the garden by the back door. He laid the bricks in the shape of a lotus: a symbol of purity and compassion in his culture, but he struggled to explain its significance to Angie. She seemed surprised that he had taken the trouble to lay the bricks in a pattern, and this in turn surprised him, as he would not have undertaken such a labour without doing so. At such times he realises how deeply his culture is embedded in him.

  Most of the time, though, he feels his country receding. The longer he is away from it, the more he senses its complexity, as if he is a passenger in a tiny rowing boat watching an enormous ship from afar. For the first time he can see the ship in its entirety, but he will never understand its inner workings, what propels the ship forward through the waves. And he no longer understands the place he once occupied within its rigid frame. Perhaps he never did, for a part of him has felt this distance, this uncertainty, all his life.

  As soon as he was old enough, he had begun to question the unlikely circumstances of his birth, and the cataclysmic act of nature that tore apart his family. But it was not until he was sixteen, when his stepmother lay dying with cancer, that he summoned the courage to ask her about the earthquake that had killed his parents. She’d spoken of it before, but only in the vaguest terms, and largely as a means of marking time, as in: after the quake, we did not see the swallows for many years. But this time, she fixed her tired gaze on him and gave a frown of such sadness that he instantly regretted asking. Then she turned her head away and spoke very slowly, her eyes clouding with memory.

  “That was an extraordinary summer,” she said. “It was too hot. As if the earth was trying to burn us all out of our homes. In the weeks leading up to the quake, many people had dragged their mats outside at night to sleep in the open air. They were the lucky ones, when the time came. That morning, the water rose in the well. As I stood there, it rose and fell three times. I remember wondering why I’d never seen such a thing before. I turned away without drawing water – something made me turn away – as if I should not see. That was the first sign. Later that night, the lights started. Beautiful coloured lights strung out across the sky. Silver blues and greens, like the shimmering scales of a fish. I suppose we should have known, after all we’d been through, not to trust such beauty.”

  She paused then, for a moment overcome. He thought perhaps this was all that she would say, and decided maybe this was for the best. But then she began to speak again. “Afterwards, no one cried. There was too much sorrow. Anyway, we were too numb to mourn. It was days before the army came to rescue us. We did what we could in the meantime, but we had no tools, no machinery, no food or clean water. And then the rain came. It fell in torrents, for days on end, to wash away all the death. But of course it only made things worse. There were piles of corpses everywhere, lining the roads, clogging the alleys. Piles as high as a house, rotting in the rain, waiting for a proper burial. And as soon as the rain stopped, the flies. Great black clouds of them, so thick that you could hardly breathe.

  “We were lucky to find you in all the chaos. We knew they’d rescued newborn twins from the hospital wreckage – who didn’t? The story was broadcast for days on the radio. But when we came forward to claim you, at first the local authorities refused to see us. They didn’t believe we were blood relations. They thought we were childless gold diggers. They’d planned to send you to a special orphanage with all the others. The orders had come straight from Beijing: none of the children orphaned by the earthquake were to be given to local families. They were to be raised by the state as model citizens, loyal to the party. We fought hard to get you; and in the end we bribed the hospital superintendent with all our savings. It was the only way.

  “Life was bitterly hard. We slept outside in tents for months, all through that long cold winter. I kept you both inside my quilt, right next to my skin; it was a miracle we didn’t freeze. We’d lived through so much already – first the Japanese occupation, then the famine years, and afterwards, the terrible upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. But this was different, because we bore it alone. We did not share it with the rest of the nation. Afterwards, they tried to call us the Brave City. But we weren’t brave. Not really. We had no choice.

  “I nearly left your stepfather more than once during that time. In those first few years, there were many hasty marriages, men and women who’d lost their spouses and quickly recoupled, so it would not have attracted much attention. But I had twins to raise.
You and your sister. Two precious gifts. And I couldn’t do that on my own. So I stayed.”

  “Thank you,” he murmured.

  She took his hand then, and pressed it to her chest.

  “You’ve been a good son. Not of my own flesh perhaps, but of my own heart. That is what matters most. I’ve often wondered why I found so much fortune out of circumstances that caused such misery for others. I’ll never know.”

  Wen had asked himself the same question: why had he and Lili been spared, when so many others had perished? Growing up, the fact of their shared fortune had led them in different directions. Lili was grateful and determined to make the most out of life. Wen was more philosophical: his parents’ tragedy was also his own. He would carry it with him always, like a birthmark. It wasn’t that he made little of life’s opportunities. It was that he was painfully aware of how fleeting they were.

  •

  One Saturday, after he has finished laying the patio, Angie drives him to a large garden centre where they buy a round painted wrought-iron table and two chairs. The set is half-price and costs ninety-nine pounds: a small fortune at home, but perhaps not so much here, he now realises. A thin-faced older salesman hovers behind them while they look over the furniture. The man directs all of his comments to Angie. She asks a few questions, then turns to Wen.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  Wen looks at the salesman. “What if rain?”

  It is the first time he has spoken and the salesman’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

  “It has a rustproof coating,” the man replies after a moment’s hesitation. “And a five-year guarantee.

  “Five years,” says Angie, staring down at the table. She runs a hand along its surface.

  Five years, thinks Wen. Angie turns to him and their eyes meet.

  “Five years is good enough for me,” she says.

  •

  A few days later, Wen goes for a walk along the coast, heading south of the promenade at Morecambe Bay. The weather is unsettled, and perhaps because of this, he too is restless. He passes an old church and a graveyard, then climbs a flight of stone steps up to the top of a bluff looking out over Half Moon Bay. Here he finds the ruins of an ancient building, another church perhaps, and a scattering of ancient graves hewn into stone. Wen pauses at the site: the six graves have been laid out in a grim line, their corpse shapes etched deep into solid rock. One is disconcertingly smaller than the rest: it must have contained the body of a child. The stone cavities are half filled with rainwater, and the sight unnerves him, for death and water are linked too closely for him now.

  Straight out to sea a line of dark clouds rolls along the horizon. As he stands gazing out across the water, he realises that he has been summoned here by the storm, that the spirits of those he worked alongside now reside here, trapped for ever in its fury. He freezes, the bone-aching cold of that night rushing back through him, together with the terrifying darkness of the sea. If he closes his eyes, he could be with them. He feels slightly faint, as if his legs are no longer beneath him. He turns and stumbles back down the ancient stone steps, leaving the sea and its ghosts behind.

  On the way home he turns inland, seeking refuge in a maze of streets lined with old cottages. He walks without purpose or direction, staring at each house as he passes. The neighbourhood is obviously prosperous: two years ago a road such as this one, with its freshly tarred surface, neatly manicured lawns and immaculately restored old cottages, would not have been conceivable to him. Now it forms part of his reality. The idea still confounds him: the distance he has travelled, the changes he has known, the life he has endured. He comes to the end of a long, winding road, where a large, slightly run-down house is set well back from the street. The lawn is thick and green and overgrown, though he can tell it has been lavished with care in the past. A tall hedge obscures much of the garden from view, but when he peers through the rusty iron gate, he sees a profusion of flowers blooming all along its borders. Roses, he realises – the most beautiful roses he has ever seen.

  He hears the methodic sound of clippers. Someone is working in the front corner of the garden over to his right, just out of view. Wen pauses, knowing he should carry on, but wanting to see more. After a minute the clipping stops. He hears a slight shuffling of steps and in another moment an old woman comes into view: small, a curved back, her head bent low, silver-grey hair piled in a dishevelled manner atop her head. She wears faded cotton trousers and a pale blue apron tied about her waist, and slung over one arm is a basket filled with pale pink roses. She does not notice him at first. He watches her walk slowly across the lawn, can hear the laboured whistle of her breath and see the slight tremor of her head as she concentrates on every step. When she is almost in front of him, she pauses, her head slowly rising towards him like that of a giant tortoise. She blinks at him through her spectacles, and draws a breath. They stare at each other for a moment, before he bows to her apologetically.

  “I am sorry,” he says.

  “No need,” she replies matter-of-factly.

  Her words confuse him. Perhaps she thinks he is selling something?

  “Your garden. Very beautiful.”

  He smiles and indicates the garden with a wave of his arm. She turns and surveys the garden, nodding in agreement.

  “Thank you. The world needs beauty.” She turns back to him. “Do you like to garden?” she asks politely.

  He hesitates, did not realise the word could be used as a verb rather than a noun.

  “Yes, I like garden very much. Your roses.” He breaks off, his English failing him.

  “You may come in and see them if you like.”

  She beckons him in, through the metal gate, and he enters the garden, crossing over towards the bed she was working on. She turns and follows. He points to the rosebush: it is thick with deep red flowers, each blossom extravagantly splayed open by layers of perfectly formed petals. He bends closer to finger one. It smells faintly of peach.

  “Difficult, this rose?”

  “Difficult? To grow? Not particularly. Just temperamental. Roses are like children. They need time and attention, yet in fact they will tolerate a great deal.” She pauses for a moment and reaches up to snap off a dead-head. “I suppose these roses are my children,” she muses.

  “You have no children?” he asks pityingly. She turns to him with a smile.

  “I have two children. Grown now. With families of their own.”

  “Oh,” he says, relieved. “They live here?”

  She tilts her head to one side, regarding him.

  “No. They live a long way away. But I have my garden to keep me busy. And my roses.”

  Wen wonders fleetingly about her children, whether they visit with their families, whether they take time to admire her garden.

  “These roses come from China, in fact,” she says.

  He looks at her with surprise.

  “I am from China,” he says.

  She smiles. “I thought as much. The Chinese grew roses for centuries before they were brought to Europe. We owe them a great deal.”

  “I do not know,” he murmurs.

  “China roses are very hardy. They root easily and are very adaptable.”

  “Hard?”

  “They’re strong. And they can survive in many different places.”

  Wen nods. Survive. A word he has come to understand only too well.

  “But what I like best is their colour,” she says. She reaches over and snips a stem at its base with her shears. She holds the blossom out to him, and after a moment’s surprise, he takes it. “You see?” She says. “The reddest of reds. Tinged with the faintest hint of blue.”

  Wen studies the delicate arrangement of petals, as if someone had fanned out a deck of cards at perfect intervals.

  “It’s called Crimson China. The colour never fades, but gets darker with age. So it grows more and more beautiful each day. To my mind, these roses try harder than all the others,” the old woman adds with
a smile.

  He hands the rose back to her, but she shakes her head in protest.

  “Please. Keep it. A small gift.”

  “Thank you,” he says, a little embarrassed.

  “Would you like some cuttings?”

  He stares at her uncertainly. The word is new to him: a type of drink perhaps?

  “No, thank you,” he murmurs, a little embarrassed.

  “I have some in my greenhouse, ready for replanting.”

  Wen struggles to decipher her meaning.

  “If you come again tomorrow, at teatime, I’ll have them ready for you.” She turns and starts to shuffle away from him.

  “I am sorry?”

  She stops and turns around.

  “Tomorrow. Shall we say four o’clock? I will have the roses ready for you then,” she says slowly, careful to enunciate each word. Wen is not certain he has understood, but nods in agreement.

  “Thank you,” he ventures.

  “You can thank me tomorrow,” she says with a wave of her hand.

  He watches her step carefully across the long grass, and disappear around the corner of the house.

  •

  That night he does not tell Angie of his encounter with the old woman, but writes down the name of her road, which he has carefully memorised. He wonders whether he will be able to find her house upon his return, or whether he has imagined the entire episode, so unlikely does it seem. But the following afternoon, when he retraces his steps down the winding lane, the house is there behind the old rusty gate, with its tangled lawn and spectacular roses. Wen pushes open the gate, walks up to the house and rings the doorbell. He waits politely for a few minutes before trying it a second time. At length he hears the shuffle of her step and she appears along the side of the house, once again wearing the faded cotton trousers and pale blue apron. Today she also wears a large floppy straw hat.