The dusk seemed to last forever; the sun hung over the western horizon, a sharply outlined pale red globe, its lingering rays very soft while the colours reflected in the clouds glittered brilliantly. Tianyi and Mo walked down to the stream, to capture the last moments of the sunset. Dense layers of clouds were reflected in its waters, an array as gorgeous as one of Levitan’s landscape paintings. The locals said that elephants relished salt, and on dark, windy nights when they came for water, they would eat up salt left to dry in the sun on its banks. Tianyi was captivated.
As night fell, they sat talking on the wooden veranda. There was no lighting so they each had a torch to guide them back to their sleeping quarters. Tianyi’s room was built in the branches of an enormous, ancient tree. Inside, it was primitive but clean. There was a bed, a small table which held a lamp and a thermos, and a separate toilet. She put the padlock and the torch down on the table and her handbag by the pillow. Then she pulled back the blue-and-white batik curtains. From here she could just see the stream, glinting in the darkness.
It took her a long time to get to sleep, but very soon after, she was shaken awake from a dream that she was being chased by a black bear by a terrific trumpeting. She was instantly alert: it was a wild elephant! It must be! She jumped out of bed and pulled back the curtain. A gigantic elephant stood beside the stream. The beast was bigger than she could have imagined, and in the darkness, its sensitive ears gleamed like carved moonstone. As she watched, it was joined by another, then another. My god, there were four of them!
She turned on the torch and ran down the steps, shouting: ‘Elephants! Come quick!’ but by the time she had roused Mo and the driver, the elephants had melted away in the darkness. The two men calmed their shaken nerves by teasing Tianyi. She was just hallucinating, they insisted. There could not possibly have been any elephants. And Tianyi was never able to produce any proof. Perhaps she had dreamed it all.
Tianyi now took in young Mo for the first time: he was tall with the physique of a body-builder or, as the Yunnan TV station editors put it: ‘a fine figure of a man’. Apparently he was also the son of a famous local painter. However, she found he made her uncomfortable. He had a lecherous look about him, and avoided her eyes.
Mo took her to visit the White Bird Garden, or rather, ‘peacock garden’ as Tianyi felt it should be called, because that was mostly what it contained. The birds were quite fearless. When a male displayed, you could walk quite close to one and have your photo taken next to it, with no fear that it might wander off or suddenly close its fan.
That day had a strange feeling about it, as though she had walked into the sort of fairy tale kingdom she used to long to enter as a child. You could communicate with all the birds and the beasts here. She even thought of having her picture taken with a peacock in her arms, but the young man looking after the garden would not let her. ‘It’ll peck you,’ he warned.
She understood that. What these beautiful birds most prized was their freedom. They ambled around among the flowering bushes, uninterested in contact with any other creatures. She supposed all wild creatures were the same in that respect. In fact, surely all humans were too. In the west, when you were with strangers, you avoided physical contact like the plague. If you accidentally brushed against someone in the street, you both backed off immediately, saying ‘Sorry’. That way, you maintained your freedom. When people came close, physically and emotionally, especially with those they loved, it was a trap, no matter how beautiful a trap.
One of the highlights here was when the peacocks were ‘released into flight’. At ten o’clock in the morning, they gathered on a distant hillside, and were released into flight by their feeders. It was spectacular! One by one they took off in the distance and flew to the garden where they landed and the males displayed. One … two … three … Tianyi had never seen a dozen peacocks all displaying at once. It was splendid. The gorgeous, shimmering colours clustered together like so many rainbows, were indescribably beautiful. She was unable to take her eyes off them, did not dare even blink, as if she did, the whole scene might suddenly vanish. As she stared, she felt Mo leering at her, his eyes as usual half-closed, very close, and flickering.
She was astonished when Mo followed her back to Beijing. First he made a very long phone call to her. He told her that life was short and he needed some variety, otherwise he would have wasted his life. People who were truly in love, he said, did not need to marry, for instance the 1930s avant-garde lovers, Zhang Daofan and Jiang Biwei never did. Tianyi was familiar with that argument, having heard it once from her old university boyfriend Jianyu. There was nothing more beautiful than making love, Mo said, and asked her: ‘Have you seen lovers making love on the grass, on river banks? Their bodies make the most beautiful shapes. When they’re making love, that’s when a man and a woman then are at their most beautiful, most vital.’
Mo certainly had a fine turn of phrase but what he said was hardly new, in fact, Tianyi found it appallingly clichéd. But clichéd or no, his words still stirred Tianyi’s physical feelings. As Mo talked, there floated before her eyes scenes of green grass and seashores, and writhing naked people. Tianyi felt she was sinking ever deeper into a swamp of seduction.
Thinking back on it, it was Xi who started her on the slippery slope with those porn videos she brought over. Tianyi may have told her they were obscene, but those images set her body on fire. One evening she could not sleep, and the female porn stars came into her mind. How could they strip stark naked before the cameras and allow the male stars to violate them? Or maybe they did not feel it was violation but pleasure. As these thoughts went through her head, her hand crept downward. She was soaking wet. She made an effort to divert her energy to the chakra below her navel, but her hand was busy between her legs and it was no use. She brought herself off.
There had been so little real sexual joy in her life. The best she could manage was the brief thrill of fantasizing and masturbating, but that always left her feeling horribly ashamed, and feeling physically unwell. Her head swam and her loins ached. She wanted nothing more than to take herself off to another world, to get some peace and tranquillity. The three meals a day she shared with her husband and child were torture.
Chastity, loyalty, honesty … the words, so familiar from childhood, began to have a bleak ring to them. She felt like she was falling apart. At the same time, Mo’s imminent arrival in Beijing filled her with a new spirit of initiative. It was very different from her encounter with Peng, when he had forced himself on her. Everything was taken care of. Her husband was off on business, his parents had Niuniu at weekends, and she had cleaned the house from top to bottom. And all this while waiting for a stranger to burst in on her.
But Tianyi still harboured a fear of sex. As young people, her generation had been sexually shackled, and it had destroyed them. Tianyi still had no real understanding of sex, only of her own needs. She tried to encourage herself to follow Xi’s example. They were both women, and Xi wasn’t afraid, was she? And she got pleasure from it too! Xi and the art student Lang had broken up in the end, and she and Tong were divorced, but her increase in sex, far from decreasing, grew. She was now living with a poet. They had been together for two years, but it seemed their ardour was undimmed.
So Tianyi was going to let herself feel some pleasure. She went through all her drawers until she found a sexy nightie, one she had bought a long time ago and had only worn once. It was made of purple silk, with a deep, revealing, V-neck. She was startled when she looked at herself in the mirror and quickly took it off again. When Mo arrived, she was just wearing ordinary clothes, without even her neck showing.