The bowl of the shadowed mountain was no longer in orderly lines. White rocks were spread in wedge-shaped lines down the hillside. They rested at crazy angles like eggs in the mud. The treasured and nurtured earth had escaped, wasted itself in bursting down the hillside.
'It may not look too different to you,' said Mae. 'But yesterday it was covered in snow. There was snow on the high hills, and today, looking at the hills across the valley, there is no snow. That is the first time I have seen that.'
She swallowed. She traced the two parallel streets of Kizuldah with her eyes.
'It will not look different to you, but our stone bridge was washed away from Upper Street into Lower Street. I can remember…'
Mae had to break off, and swallow – she felt her eyes swell and heat up. But this was real time; she could not afford mistakes.
'I can remember when the Chinese engineers visited, to volunteer to make the bridge. They came with trowels and concrete because Kizuldah had none. We were too poor.'
Her voice, like a carpet, was worn thin. It straggled away like torn thread. Mae swallowed and continued.
'We loved the Chinese because they were told not to be snobbish, to mix in, and they did, and they worked hard, and they left that bridge behind. And those of us here who are Chinese, thought of them every time we walked across it. The big handsome men, the happy women, who lived in our homes and praised the food. How we all admired them and their bridge. And see the house next to it? Oh!'
Mae had to stop again. She hauled back in moisture and sadness, for she had to keep talking.
'That was Mr and Mrs Kosal's house, but it was the house on the square, and on its benches we spent our lives sitting. Old men played dominoes, our Haj would talk about his travels, and Old Mrs Kosal, now gone, would come out and give the children bonbons. In the square we had the harvest. We would pile up the hessian sacks full of rice, and build bonfires for barbecues. Year on year we would lay out rugs and hire a band, and all of us – the old women, the boys, the little girls – danced and ate our fill of roast and yams and new rice. We sat under the tree. We called it the One Tree. It had been planted there so long ago and was big and huge; it was like a friend, it was like all our fathers taken root. And it's been washed away. It had a swing on it, and all the children – the children of the 1950s, and the 1960s and '70's, '80s, '90s – all of us swung on that swing. So high, so hard, I think some of us must have tossed our spirits into the air. And they are still in the air. The spirits of the children, playing.'
Mae had to wring the moisture out of her eyes.
'The gully is where we kept our ducks and geese. Maybe some of those lived. And the house that has fallen across Upper Street, that was my friends' house, the Dohs' house, and they have lived there for one thousand years. The Dohs were Chinese warriors who stayed, and the house is older than the One Tree. And just above it, that was our new mosque. Every morning our Muerain would sing, and he sang so considerately in the early morning – soft and low and sad, as if he was sorry to wake us, wanted to let us sleep, sorry that we would have to wake up to empty bellies, or cold, or scorching sun. We all built the mosque. We all paid for it, even those of us who were not Muslim, and all the children ran to help with hammers, and the dogs barked, like when the trucks come to take the harvest.'
Mae broke down. She couldn't speak. Her face was not her own. It was like the laundry she saw in Old Mrs Tung's hands, wrung clean.
She wiped her face and her mouth, and swallowed and kept on.
'That's the roof of the mosque in what is left of Mr and Mrs Ali's house. They are a fine old couple, of our Party of Progress. And there is the Okan house; they are as old as the hills. And I am so happy, because their house is whole, it isn't touched, and all the circular rugs that Mrs Okan weaves herself, with old hands, over candles at night, they will have survived. We can wash them. We can wash them and put them on her floors and it will all be as it was. And next… next to them.'
Mae drew a breath and grew grim. 'Next to that is the house of my dear friend Mrs Ozdemir. You cannot see it. But I can. I can see it as if it had never left, was still there, as if a girl called Sezen still drew at a table, and still fumed at her mother, for being sad and frightened, as if it were still full of corncobs that the family used as furniture because they were too poor to have anything else, with beautiful naked babes and words from the Koran written in crayon on the walls. I can still see it, but that girl died, and they have lost their home. But Mrs Ozdemir's heart is broken and so is her head, and she just sits and rocks and weeps.
'And there is my house, too.
'My house in many ways, because it was my husband's house, and in that house I gave birth to three children. One whole side of it is gone. I can see inside it; it's so familiar, even flooded with sunlight, my bed, and my kitchen. I think I see my own TV in part of the loft, sunning itself. But the barn is full of mud, so I think my beautiful weaving machine will be gone.
'But look at the beautiful new sea. Look at it sparkle. Look how full of hope it seems; look, it has seagulls, who could hate such a beautiful sea? Even if it covers houses – houses where you played as children – even if dear friends are trapped inside, their mouths full of mud. Even landscapes die, and give birth to new ones.
'And here comes the sun.
'See it? It is creeping over the hills, and the terraces, and the terraces are gone. Every spring after harvest, up we all would go, men and women and children with levers and stakes and hammers and pulleys, and all of us, even the ones who hated each other, would stand together and pull up the rocks and hammer in the stakes, to repair the terraces, to hold the earth.
'And that earth, what it did not contain? Our blood and sweat, our shit, our stillborn babies, anything to make it rich and keep it rich. What you see spilled is not mud. It is our blood, our blood of two thousand years – that is why it is so red, and that is why it seems to me that the earth screams. For it is lost now, like a beautiful child that bursts free into danger. It will be washed away, washed away down into the valley, and so much of what we are, will go with it.'
The corner of the room was dark, and Mae was swaying, and the constant fire in her belly gnawed at her. She saw the school high on the hill swamped with mud.
She saw its open door.
Farther down the hill, stumbling over the ruin of Mrs Doh's house, she saw people walking.
'It's Shen!' Mae shouted. 'Oh, the people you see walking – see, that is our Schoolteacher, Mr Shen! We thought he was dead, surely – look at the wreck of our school – but look, he is there. Oh, tell the Haj, tell our pilgrim, that one more of us has lived, and lovely Suloi, she lives, too – beautiful Suloi and her daughters!'
Shen shambled as he walked, everything shaking: legs, arms. But his head was held erect, stupidly high, dumbly proud, as if he had been proved right, as if he had defeated history.
The littlest child – too young to understand, except to wonder – her mouth was open. In the beautiful sunlight, she held out her arms and began to spin.
'She dances,' whispered Mae. 'The daughter dances.'
Mae turned to tell someone that Shen lived. She turned and saw that crowded and silent in the doorway were Kwan and Wing and Sunni and Kuei and Joe and Mr Pin and Mr Ali and others looking over their shoulders.
The room was going darker. Mae heard the sound of children playing in a courtyard. She heard the Muerain, year on year, and the harvest festival and the winter party, and the spring replanting with its songs, and the late-night barking of the drowned dogs.