‘No,’ her son said. ‘Who can remember stuff like that?’
Yongshan stared at the half wall still standing. She looked for the roof, but there was none. Nor was there a door. She saw the cement steps that led up to the front door, but they were swallowed in the debris. Yongshan looked and looked, and suddenly she was angry with her son. ‘You can’t remember anything? Your grandma looked after you here till you were three. Right up until her heart attack, when she had to go to the hospital, she was the one who cared for you. Don’t you remember that either? You don’t recognize this, you can’t remember that — you’re not human, you’re a pig!’
Her son discovered, to his surprise, that his mother’s eyes were shining with the glow of furious overreaction. ‘I remember grandma, but that doesn’t mean I remember the house,’ he uttered quietly in his defence, then he said nothing more; for though he understood that he had provoked his mother’s wrath, he felt guiltless. And it really was true that he had no recollection whatsoever of Licheng, or of the old house in Cabbage Market.
Besides Yongshan and her son, the vast rubble of Cabbage Market was completely empty. Sunset glowed over the main street not far away, and the sound of people and cars would occasionally subside, then a fragmentary, hardly discernible, rustling would drift across the rubble, a sound like a subterranean sigh. A pigeon flew in the face of dusk towards the rubble and circled over mother and son for a while. Then, panicking, it flew to the parasol tree. It was probably somebody’s domestic pigeon, lost a long time ago, and now that it had finally found the way back to its shed, both shed and owner had vanished.
There was only half a wall left of the old house, and in it half a window. Yongshan walked up to it. The window-frame had had many layers of red paint, and the long years of sunlight and rain had given the surface stripy wrinkles, like the wrinkles on an old man’s body. The glass was broken, but the frame was still firmly set into the broken wall. Yongshan stretched out her hand to give the window a push, and it opened with a creak. Something fell down off the windowsill. Yongshan looked in and found that it was an ink bottle, which had fallen into the debris inside without breaking.
‘It’s your grandfather’s ink bottle,’ said Yongshan. ‘He used it to correct his students’ homework. He liked to keep it on the windowsill.’
Her son, standing behind her, peered inside; perhaps he was trying to remember the brief time he had spent in this house as a child. Maybe he couldn’t recall, or maybe he wasn’t trying, but he said, ‘It’s like an earthquake zone. It’s as if we’re earthquake victims.’
Yongshan touched the window; the greasy frame was covered in a layer of dust which came off on her hand. ‘When I was small, I liked to stand by this window and play the accordion,’ she said. ‘Your grandpa could read music, and sometimes before recitals he would make me practice, then he’d stand next to me and turn the pages.’
‘I never knew you played the accordion,’ her son said. ‘What happened to it?’
‘I gave it to your uncle,’ she said. ‘Your grandpa wanted him to learn it, but he didn’t take to it. Your uncle’s a good-for-nothing; later your grandma told me he sold the accordion to a scrap collector for twenty bucks.’
The pigeon on the pagoda tree flew back towards them, so low they could see its grey feathers, which looked as if they’d been dipped in water. The pigeon stopped on the remaining wall of the old house, paused for a moment and flew off again.
‘That pigeon can’t find its way home,’ Yongshan said.
‘Maybe it’s a homing pigeon?’ Pigeons were something her son was interested in and his eyes brightened. He followed the pigeon’s flight path with his eyes and said, ‘A homing pigeon can fly five hundred kilometres and come back home. A homing pigeon can find its way back home no matter how far it goes.’
‘Even people can’t find their way back home these days. How can a pigeon?’ said Yongshan.
She stopped following the pigeon with her eyes and bowed her head to look for something. ‘Let me see,’ she said. ‘Maybe I can find your grandma’s flowerpots. We could take one home as a memento. Do you remember how grandma made a flower terrace outside the door? She planted lots of flowers and the pots were all made from Yixing clay. They were very good pots.’
‘What’s the use of bringing pots home? You never plant flowers.’
‘We don’t have to plant flowers. It would be a memento, don’t you see?’
It was obvious that her son was trying to suppress his irritation; he picked up a tile fragment and threw it far away. It happened to land on a piece of glass, which made a crisp and resonant bang.
‘Can’t you behave like a decent human being?’ Yongshan said. ‘How old are you, anyway? It’s time you grew up.’
‘If you take me to a trash heap, how can I behave decently? Do you have some master plan or something? It’ll be totally dark in a second. Are we going to look for Uncle Yongqing or not?’
Yongshan looked blank for a moment, then turned to look inside the house, supporting herself on the windowsill. It was obvious that she had been avoiding this question. While Yongshan had been pondering the old home in the dusk, her heart, too, had sunk into the shadows. ‘I’ll take you there in a moment. Don’t worry, Licheng is my hometown; I won’t make you sleep on the street no matter what.’ She spoke to her son, then suddenly craned her neck to look into a corner. Her son assumed that this was her final glance and was surprised when Yongshan called out loudly, ‘The cabinet. Our five-drawer cabinet’s still here!’
Only half believing her, her son quickly climbed in through the window, and there against the broken wall was indeed a cabinet, covered in plastic film and a few newspapers, standing crookedly in the rubble. It was a style of cabinet that had been popular in the south in the seventies, and though it didn’t have five drawers, that’s what it was called. In any case, it looked like it might serve as a small wardrobe. Carved, symmetrical woodwork was inlaid in the dark red drawers.
The sight of the cabinet made Yongshan nostalgic. Her son was prepared for this, and having helped her through the window, he kept his peace. He sat on an abandoned plastic stool, and looked up at the dusky sky over the rubble of Cabbage Market, remembering, no doubt, the graphics from some computer game. He gave a giggle and said, ‘It’s like I’m in the Infinite Magic Castle. Do you know what that is? You go into the castle and forget everything, but you have all these powers, so you can walk with your brain, or talk through your nostrils!’
Yongshan tried to open the cabinet door, but saw that somebody had hung a little lock on it, so the door could not be opened. Yongshan went over the wood carvings with her hands and said, ‘I’m sure you don’t remember this cabinet, but I used it every day. I had to put the clean clothes in it and take out the stamps to buy rice and oil. You couldn’t possibly understand those things; you don’t know anything about what it was like.’
‘What good would it be if I did?’ her son said. ‘What’s the problem, as long as you know yourself?’
‘I wonder who put the lock on. Must be your uncle. How could he have forgotten to take the cabinet with him?’ Yongshan held the lock in her fingers, then contradicted herself, ‘Maybe it’s not your uncle. He’s a good-for-nothing; he’d throw it out or sell it. Maybe some scrap collector locked it. If we hadn’t come, he would have sold it.’
‘So let him. It’s not new and it’s not antique. Who would want it in their home?’
‘You’re a good-for-nothing, too.’ She gave her son a vicious glance and said, ‘When you grow up, you’ll be even more useless than your uncle.’
Forced back into silence, her son gazed around the rubble and saw that the lights of evening were turning on in Licheng. He looked past the ruins of the house and saw an even greater expanse of rubble, hazy with dust, shrouded by the colours of the gloaming. This was his mother’s city, his mother’s rubble, and her son didn’t feel any close connection to it. He felt exhausted and, bending down to hug his knees, he curled up like a cat. He spoke to his mother in an attitude of great passivity, ‘Just call me when you’ve seen enough, and you’re tired of wallowing in the past. I’m going to have a nap.’