by Ling Zhang
After a long while, she turned to me and said, “You jumped off that boat just to tell me that?”
When Ah Yan took me to the rooms in the back, she locked the door from the outside. She placed a few bundles of firewood in front of the door for extra security. The room hadn’t been lived in for a while, and the spiderwebs strung between the corner of the window and the eaves made it seem a good hiding place. Before I went in, she called Ah May and, pointing at me, said, “You know who he is?”
Ah May shook her head.
Ah Yan said, “He’s your . . . uncle.” Before she said “uncle,” she paused, as if sorting through a pile of ugly words for a more pleasant one. Ah May didn’t know what “uncle” meant, so she tried rolling it about on her tongue a few times, like a new toy.
“Do you want your uncle to get captured and have his head cut off?” she asked, her face stern as she made a cutting gesture across her neck.
Ah May’s features froze, and her mouth turned downward.
“Don’t scare the child.” I wanted to intercept the tears before they started to roll down Ah May’s face. But Ah Yan stuck her arm out, blocking my path like an iron rod.
“If you don’t want him to be captured and beheaded, you cannot tell anyone where he is. You can’t say a single word about it. Do you understand?”
Ah May nodded in confusion.
“What do you understand? Say it to me,” Ah Yan said, her eyes holding her daughter’s in an iron grip.
“Don’t say anything about Uncle,” Ah May stammered.
She suddenly slithered out from under her mother’s arm and came to me and hugged my leg. A warm little worm of her tears crept down my leg, intolerably itchy and wet, but I didn’t want to move at all.
“Uncle, don’t get your head cut off,” she said.
As I went into the empty room, I heard the dust groan under my shoes. When the groans quieted down, I met its accomplices in action. The dust that wasn’t crushed beneath my feet hovered in the air, with the sadness of suppressed cries. The peace of some souls is built on the displacement of others, if dust could be considered a living soul. With the oil lamp, I located the small wooden bed I used to sleep on. It seemed like that corner of the room had been left undisturbed. Everything was exactly as it had been when I left home. I picked up the dusty blanket and noticed there was still the old pillow stuffed with rice straw lying on the bed, and there was a faint dent in it. I wondered if it was from the last time I had slept there. I lay down. It was a perfect fit. My body was crying for sleep, but my brain refused to switch off. There were all sorts of strange thoughts wandering in and out of my mind, and as my body couldn’t fight the mind, it helplessly kept the mind company.
I found myself thinking of Yuehu. Our parting on the sandy road in front of Pastor Billy’s house already was three and a half years in the past by this time. It’s an awkward place in the cycle of memory, beyond the time of short-term enthusiasm, but not yet distant enough to feel a sense of nostalgia. I rarely thought of Yuehu during this time. But that night I thought of Snot. I couldn’t recall his name, since I’d only ever seen it on his tombstone. I thought of him in a series of images—a cloth badge with the number 520 sewn on it, the string of snot that dangled from his nose, a bullet hole slightly larger than a pinworm hole on a melon, a headless neck with the muscles so contracted that it looked like a pink pomegranate.
I also thought of the captain. His real name was Zhao Haifa, which I’d only come to know when we were at the police training school. Similarly, it was only there that he learned I was Liu Zhaohu. Even so, I never called him Mr. Zhao or Captain Zhao, as those titles didn’t really refer to him in my mind. He also evoked a string of images in my head—the shock and humiliation in his eyes when I knocked him to the ground, like a leopard that realized it had been bested by a rabbit, and his white forehead desperately refusing to be swallowed by the inky black sea.
He and Snot had died very differently. I would’ve rather seen the captain die like Snot, in a death that could make a woman who hated him put his head on her lap with an expression as holy as the Virgin Mary’s as she made his body whole again.
The captain’s wife, home with their infant child, was probably waiting for a letter from him that would never arrive. The only people who knew what had happened to him had taken that ship across the strait, leaving only me behind. Only I could tell the poor woman the truth, allowing her to mourn and then carry on living. Heaven had let him die before my eyes so that I could take care of his funeral affairs. It would be a funeral without the corpse. The shame was that I wasn’t able to attend to it until almost seven years later. Once I had gotten out of prison and managed to find the captain’s house after many setbacks, I told his wife about his final moments. She was with their boy, now almost eight. When I told her, she didn’t cry. She grinned, showing the few teeth she had left, and said, “It’s good he died. If he were still alive, it could only hurt our son.” I wanted to say that the captain was trying to return to see her and the child when he jumped, but in the end, I said nothing. She was right. If the captain were alive, he would only harm his family, just like me.
I thought of you that night too, Ian, but differently. I didn’t remember numbers, code names, or nicknames, because from the first moment I knew you, your name was Ian Ferguson. Later, when we were closer, you told me to call you Ian, but only in private. In class, I still respectfully called you Mr. Ferguson. You had a confidence that we didn’t possess. You walked with the wind under your feet, because you were the only one still called by the name your mother gave you. But more than that, you were a tall, imposing figure, with a physique derived from beef, eggs, butter, and cheese, where our stomachs only knew porridge, radishes, and salted fish all year-round. A wall separated you from the Chinese students, a wall called English. Of course, I was slightly different, since I’d gone to a church-run school that advocated Western education and so taught us English. That English made cracks in the wall between us, and you kept tossing stones over the wall so I could turn those cracks into holes. Eventually, there were only fragments of a wall. I forget how we surmounted that pile of rubble. Maybe you climbed over, or maybe I did—or maybe we both climbed and met somewhere in the middle. Either way, we eventually had a meeting of the minds, without any walls. The unruly English phrases that you taught me, I passed every one of them on to Ah May. By the time she went to college, she didn’t hesitate to use these phrases on her pedantic old professors. When she did, they looked at her, as stunned as if she were a madwoman from Mars.
Unable to sleep, I got up, went to the window, and lifted a corner of the bamboo curtain. The moon was not full, but it was very bright. It cast faint shadows, like layered mountains in an ink painting. The insects had already sensed the first hint of summer, timidly trying out their chirps. They chirped intermittently, each new start seeming to make the moon quiver as if it were afraid. This wasn’t the first time I’d gazed at the moon, but it was the first time in as long as I could remember that I’d done so in such peace. I had no watch, no calendar, no newspaper, and no radio. I could only keep track of time by counting my meetings with the moon. How many faces of the moon would I see before I met the sun again? I lifted up the string on the curtain and tied a knot. This was my first day in this familiar cage.
And so I settled in that tightly cloistered house, counting the days by tying knots on the string of the bamboo curtain. During the day, there was a constant flow of people in and out of the front rooms. Fearing that Ah May would run to the back and look for me, Ah Yan blocked the passage leading to the rear of the house with a cabinet. Only when the last patients had left at night, the wooden sign was brought in, and the door was locked would Ah Yan move the cabinet.
When Ah Yan came, she would tap three times on the glass at my window, one hard tap followed by two soft ones. That was the secret code we’d set. Only hearing that would I raise the bamboo curtain and open the window. She then passed a pot of food and a bucket
of water from the well through my window. She brought me enough food for three meals each day. The well water was not only for washing but also for me to cool the leftover rice in. It was getting hotter by this time, and the leftover food might spoil.
Though I couldn’t see what was going on in the front rooms, I could hear the movements. It wasn’t just sick people who came to see Ah Yan but also mothers with babies who came to chat. The village was boring, so people came in their idle time to visit with Ah Yan, watch her treat patients, and gossip. After all, it was more interesting than staring at a mother-in-law’s face. Mostly the women would talk, and Ah Yan would listen quietly, occasionally inserting a sentence or two. I was surprised that after being away for about six years, Ah Yan had already won the trust of these women. They seemed to have forgotten all the ugly things the Japanese had done to her and even the embarrassing child and the mystery of her father’s identity.
My mother had said that when Ah Yan returned to Sishiyi Bu, she hung the doctor’s sign outside her door. At first, no one believed her, so the doorway remained empty. Later, a child in the village came down with malarial fever. The parents saw many herbalists and fed the child many tonics, but nothing worked. Seeing that the child was dying, they carried the little one to Ah Yan to let her try. To their surprise, she took a few white things, no bigger than a bean, from a bottle with strange words printed across it and told the child to swallow them, and the fever was suppressed. From then on, the whole village saw her as a miracle-working doctor.
When Pastor Billy left, he’d left behind enough money to support Ah Yan for several years. She put that with money from the sale of the tea garden and found someone to change it on the black market into US dollars. She was far from being in dire circumstances. When she hung out her doctor’s sign, it was actually with an ulterior motive. She didn’t charge a fixed price for the medical consultation, leaving it to the patients, collecting only the cost of any Western medicine that was required. As a result, all sorts of items started to appear at her door. A bucket of polished rice, a bag of eggs, a basket of freshly harvested melons, or even the offal that was saved after a pig had been slaughtered. She’d used her abilities to win over the hearts of the women of Sishiyi Bu, bit by bit, allowing them to see her goodness and thereby forget the rumors. She only cared about the women, not the men. She knew winning over the men was the women’s job. If the women were on her side, their entire families would be too, even the livestock. She quietly won over the hearts of the people so that she could provide Ah May with solid ground to stand on. I’d never imagined that Ah Yan could conquer this ground, nor that it also offered me a lifesaving path. I couldn’t help expressing wonder at her great skill, which allowed her such flexibility even in the deepest of mud pits. She told me, “If you catch hold of a patient’s illness, you’ve caught his heel. He can’t turn around and kick you then.” Of course, I didn’t know it then, but the idea had first come from Pastor Billy. Ah Yan built vivid extensions on Pastor Billy’s foundation.
When I was in my dark square box of a room, I spent most of the day sleeping. When I had slept enough, evening became my morning. I would wake in the early twilight and stare at the ceiling with eyes wide open, bored, counting my heartbeats and breaths. Humans are strange animals. When it’s light, we have only one pair of eyes. When night comes, though, it gives rise to ten thousand eyes. In the darkness, my nose, ears, and every pore of my skin all became eyes. My nose could tell the hour. The scent of the early morning was night dew, which was tinged with the scent of grass, which carried the smell of insects, which in turn smelled of the branches, which were brushed with the scent of the birds perched there. Around four in the morning, these smells remained, and the smell of dogs and chickens starting to stir was added to them. Later, over all the smells was laid the smell of humans. Human smell was strong, masking all the others so then the nose handed the task of keeping watch over to the ear.
The earliest sounds in the front part of the house were swishing noises. That was Ah Yan getting dressed. Then there was a squeak. That was her opening the door. After that was the sound of water being splashed on the slate. That was her emptying the chamber pot. Then there was a clattering sound. That was her dragging the wooden sign to the door. She dragged the sign out very early. I knew she was silently saying to the neighbors, “You can come anytime you’d like. I have nothing to hide.” Though she hadn’t been trained in espionage, she found the most natural way to seal each telltale hole, even those smaller than the eye of a needle. Then came the sound of the bellows. Ah Yan was lighting the fire to make rice soup. My ears always perked up like rabbits’ ears in a breeze around this time, because I knew the sound I was waiting for would soon emerge from the numerous other noises and creep into my ear. That was Ah May’s voice. As soon as her voice appeared, all the other sounds immediately fell away. Her voice could stop the turning of the world. It was the sound of heaven, crawling from my ear into the tip of my heart, washing away all the filthy things I had seen, heard, and smelled over the past twenty-three years and making me as pure as a baby just emerged from its mother’s womb.
Of course, the sounds didn’t always appear in this order. Sometimes the sequence was disrupted, one of the links lost, or something new inserted. One morning after the squeaking of the opening door and the splashing of the night’s chamber pot, the sound of the bellows followed, replacing the clatter of the wooden sign being carried out. After the clinking of the pots and pans, I heard the door being locked and the clang of metal against slate, followed by a silence that was rare at this time of day. I knew that Ah Yan had gone out with Ah May, riding the battered bicycle that Pastor Billy had left and that still hadn’t fallen apart completely. I guessed she’d gone to get medicine. It’d been almost four years since Pastor Billy had left China, and there had been no news, but his friends remained faithful, and they supplied Ah Yan with medicine for daily use at low prices. Even bandits have codes of conduct, and Pastor Billy’s lifesaving grace was something they credited to Ah Yan’s account right up until the great upheaval.
Another night, when the air was still thick with the smells of night dew, grass, insects, branches, and birds, and before the sparrows, chickens, and dogs had started their predawn stir, I heard a sharp cry in the front rooms, so loud it felt like it drilled a hole in my eardrums. “Don’t cut his head off!” Then, the cries were smothered with a hand and turned into a muffled whimper. I immediately realized I had broken into Ah May’s dreams. My heart jerked, feeling the pain of it. I shot up, not bothering to put on my shoes, and jumped out the window. The moonlight in the courtyard was very weak, and a layer of ominous purple washed over the treetops and the eaves. I stubbed my foot on a stone, bringing me to my senses. I couldn’t break into Ah Yan’s rooms like that.
The next day, Ah Yan knocked on my window at the regular time. She always brought me water and food after Ah May fell asleep. She handed them through the window, gave some simple instructions, then turned to go. I knew the newspaper clipping with my divorce statement still bit into her flesh and refused to let go. But that day, I couldn’t help it. I grabbed her sleeve to keep her from leaving.
“What’s wrong with Ah May? I heard her crying last night,” I said.
“Children forget easily. Don’t worry about her. She’ll be fine after a couple of days,” she said.
A thought rushed up like a burp, and my mind didn’t have time to stop it.
“I don’t want her to forget,” I said.
Even before the burp was out, I realized my abruptness.
“I just . . . I miss Ah May.” I explained in a stutter.
Ah Yan didn’t respond. There were a thousand hurtful things she could have said, but she didn’t. She just told me to hand her the bowl and chopsticks I’d used the night before through the window.
“Can I . . . see Ah May?” I asked hesitatingly.
“No,” she said firmly. “She’s asked for you several times. Once she even said it in front of
someone else. Thankfully that woman is a little slow. She didn’t catch it. It would have been terrible if she did.”
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t accept this kindness from Ah Yan and harm her and her child at the same time.
“Do you think you could ask my mother to come here so I can see her?” I said.
This time she was a bit slow to reply, as if choosing her words carefully.
“We haven’t spoken in a long time. If she suddenly came here, it would attract too much attention,” she said, hesitating.
An inexplicable fire welled up in the depths of my heart. Halfway up, it took a sudden turn and went to my legs. Furiously, I kicked the water bucket. Startled, the water jumped up and splashed onto my shoes.
“I can’t do this. I can’t do that. Do you want to suffocate me? Let me go. There’s no one out at night to see me. And if they do see me, just let me be shot and get it over with. It’s better than being imprisoned here!”
Saying nothing, Ah Yan turned and left.
I slapped my forehead, regretting every word I’d said. We’re always most hurtful to the ones closest to us. It’s convenient, lashing out at them. I replayed all the damned things I’d just said to Ah Yan. I suddenly gained a bit of clarity. It was true that I couldn’t stay in that room, waiting for the darkness to drive me crazy and for me in turn to drive those who had rescued me crazy. I’d told Ah Yan the thing that I’d come to say, and now I could go in peace. I knew every corner of this compound intimately. I could wait until the middle of the night, when it was dark and quiet, and escape directly over the backyard wall, avoiding the front door altogether. There was a stool in my room that would be a sufficient substitute for a ladder. With the skills I’d learned in camp about how to move lightly and climb obstacles, I should have no problem landing on this soft ground. As for beyond the courtyard, it was a vast wasteland. There would be no sampan, but I could walk. I wasn’t afraid of walking in the dark. I’d traveled through terrain ten times darker than this.
