It was the Easter holidays. After the lecture was finished, half a dozen Chinese students offered to take her around. There was the university’s ‘golden couple’, the boy apparently of Malay extraction, the girl with a slight limp. Tianyi immediately took to the girl who, she felt, looked positively angelic and put all the other students in the shade.
The pair took Tianyi around the Rocky Mountain University Museum and it was only because they were determined to see all four of the vast exhibition halls that they saw the most marvellous exhibit of alclass="underline" in the very last room, one complete wall was hung with four long black dresses. They all gasped at the same moment. It seemed almost unimaginable that four black velvet dresses could have such an unsettling effect.
The dresses were pegged high up on the walls and their hems trailed right down to the smooth floor. Each one was so long that the pure black velvet lengths were like four eerily silent dark cascades. The effect in this great space was utterly mysterious and reduced them all to silence. What a pity they had no camera with them, the girl lamented. In fact, Tianyi had a camera but you were not allowed to use flash in the museum and she only managed one dim image.
They had a rice and omelette for dinner. It was Easter so you had to have something with eggs in. The omelette, golden yellow, was covered in a layer of tomato sauce. Tianyi found it delicious, and ate with a good appetite. She had had a very good appetite this trip, enjoying everything people cooked for her, the way a child does.
By way of a thank-you, Tianyi got out some presents and presented her host with a cloisonné egg, appropriate for Easter she thought. It was skilfully engraved but the professor did not appear to appreciate it. She could not help remembering something rather astonishing that he had said that evening. ‘Do you know who the best woman writer is in China?’ he had asked. ‘Lu Bei!’ he had answered himself. Tianyi was startled, until she remembered that Lu Bei, who wrote low-grade political novels, was the professor’s partner. Well, he was a human being too, wasn’t he? It was not too surprising.
Tianyi did not get her pictures developed until she was back in China. The four dresses hung side-by-side in one photo, but the mysterious atmosphere, and its eerie power, were entirely gone, developed away in the processing.
22
Professor ‘Zheng Miaowu’ was a powerful figure at Rocky Mountain University and the news of the success of the lecture he had invited Tianyi to give quickly spread to the East Coast. Invitations from Pennsylvania and Maryland Universities followed in quick succession. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, she had become a travelling scholar. She travelled, she lectured, she earned a fee and that paid for the next leg of the journey. Most importantly, she was coming ever closer to the man she loved.
Finally one day she arrived in New York. As soon as she could, she took a boat trip and sailed under the huge hand of the Statue of Liberty. Looking up at the statue from below made her suddenly want to weep. She remembered reading a poem about it many years before: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore … Send these, the homeless, tempest-lost to me. The Statue, so familiar from photographs and painting, from her imagination and her dreams, finally appeared before her eyes. The oddest thing was that the fact that its colossal size in no way intimidated her the way Buddhas in the East did. Instead, it gave her a feeling of warmth and security.
Behind the State of Liberty lay New York, with its legendary sights: the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Centre, Madison Square Gardens, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Brooklyn Bridge and the Metropolitan Opera House, the splendour of Manhattan and the poverty of the Black areas, the yuppies, the rock singers and the punks, the gays and the migrants, people of every race and colour, the inherited rivalries, the dirty streets, the subways covered in graffiti, and the crime.
As far as Tianyi was concerned, the most important place was the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Arts. It was not only the paintings that she longed to see, it was also the place where she had arranged to meet Zheng.
When Zheng, an expat for five years now, appeared, she felt oddly calm. It was as if they had only parted yesterday. Of course, it dawned on her later, this was because their spirits had never parted, not for a single day.
Zheng was no longer the young man she remembered. He had arrived at middle age and, if you looked closely, there were signs of the struggle he had been through, that had worn him down and consumed him. It had left an indefinable mark on every pore of his body. Only his eyes were the same deep wells of goodness they had always been. Such great goodness, astonishingly still present after all his sufferings.
But Zheng clearly wanted to avoid saying a single word about that suffering, forestalling her with a barrage of words. She scarcely had a chance to get a word in edgeways. ‘Do you know when the Metropolitan Museum of Art was built? It was actually started in 1866 … right, and now it’s 1996, so it’s 130 years old this year. A group of Americans got together in a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, to celebrate ninety years since the Declaration of Independence, and at the banquet, the lawyer John Jay proposed building a “national institution and gallery of art”. This was to be America’s first museum and the proposal won unanimous acceptance …’
Zheng’s words came and went intermittently in Tianyi’s ears, as other visitors pushed by with muttered Excuse me’s. Instinctively, she took his hand and saw the corner of his mouth twitch. His hand was warm, but felt somehow petrified in hers. As she touched it, she wanted to cry.
At least she now had the opportunity to look at some of the paintings she most loved, and that helped to distract her. She suspected that Zheng had chosen this as a meeting place for that reason — she was unlikely to get too emotional and make a scene here. She caught sight of the painting by Henri Rousseau called Le Repas du Lion that had fascinated her since she was a young woman. Zheng helped her to push her way through and so that she could get a picture with the painting. She had first come across Rousseau at university at the beginning of the eighties. World Art, China’s most prestigious arts journal, had devoted an entire issue to his work. For the Chinese art world, closed off for so many years, Rousseau’s paintings were extraordinarily striking, and the artist had filled her dreams.
A forest of intense tropical colours, a white sun, just risen above the mountain, the tropical flowers and foliage, extraordinarily decorative, extraordinarily serene. A lion, half-hidden in the undergrowth, eating something. The whole painting was like a dreamscape, the branches and leaves so delicate they could have been cut out with scissors. She found it entrancing, too beautiful!