“And make sure you wear a daylily pinned to your waist,” the diviner added. “It will help relieve the pains of childbirth and ensure the birth of a healthy son.”
With much jubilation, Ren, his mother, and the servants discussed the possibilities. “A son is best,” Ren said, “but I would welcome a daughter.”
This was the kind of man he was. This is why I loved him still.
But Ze was not happy about the baby, and her condition did not improve. She had no opportunity to encounter a musk deer, and the cook completely banned rabbit meat and lamb from the household, but Ze sneaked into the kitchen late at night to nibble on water chestnuts. She crumpled the flower at her waist and threw it on the floor. She refused to feed the child growing inside her. She stayed up late writing that the baby ( 1 9 0 )
was not hers on pieces of paper. Every time she saw her husband, she wailed, “You don’t love me!” And when she wasn’t crying, accusing, or turning away food, she was throwing up. Soon enough we could all see pink pieces of stomach lining in the bowls the servants took away from the room. Everyone understood the seriousness of the situation. No one wants a loved one to die, but for a woman to die pregnant or in childbirth consigned her to a terrible fate: deportation to the Blood-Gathering Lake.
The Autumn Moon Festival came and went. Ze stopped taking in even water. Mirrors and a sieve were hung in the room. Fortunately, neither of these things was pointed up to where I kept my vigil.
“Nothing is wrong with her,” Commissioner Tan announced, when he came to visit. “She doesn’t want a baby in her womb because she has nothing in her heart.”
“She’s your daughter,” Ren reminded the man, “and she’s my wife.”
The commissioner was unimpressed and left with advice and a warning: “When the baby comes, keep it away from her. That will be safest. Ze does not like to see eyes on anyone but herself.”
Ze had no peace. She seemed terrified by day—shivering, crying, hiding her eyes. The nights gave her no respite. She tossed from side to side, cried out, and woke up in pools of sweat. The diviner made a special altar of peach wood and set incense and candles on it. He wrote a charm, burned it, and then mixed the ashes with water from a spring. With his sword in his right hand and the cup of watery ashes in his left, he prayed:
“Purge this dwelling of all evil lurking here.” He dipped a sprig of willow in the cup and sprinkled it to the four compass points. To reinforce the spell, he filled his mouth with the ashy water and spurted it onto the wall above Ze’s bed. “Cleanse this woman’s mind of the spirits of darkness.”
But her nightmares did not cease and the effects grew worse. Dreams were something I knew about and I thought I could help, but when I went abroad with Ze in this way I found nothing frightening or unusual. She wasn’t being hunted or harmed in her dreams at all, which mystified me greatly.
The first snows came and the doctor visited yet again. “This is not a good child your wife carries,” he told Ren. “He is hanging on to your wife’s intestines and won’t let go. If you give me permission, I’ll use acupuncture to get rid of it.”
On the surface, this seemed like a logical explanation and a practical solution, but I could see the baby. He was not an evil spirit; he was just trying to survive.
( 1 9 1 )
“What if it’s a son?” Ren asked.
The doctor wavered. When he saw Ze’s writing scraps scattered about the room, he said sadly, “Every day I see it and I don’t know what to do.
Literacy is a grave threat to the female sex. Too often I’ve seen the health and happiness of young women fade because they will not give up their brush and ink. I’m afraid”—and here he put a comforting hand on Ren’s arm—“that we will look back and blame the lovesickness caused by writing for your wife’s death.”
I thought, not for the first time, that Doctor Zhao knew very little about women or love.
at t h i s m o st grim moment, as the Wu household settled in for the deathwatch, my adopted brother arrived. Bao’s appearance shocked us all, for we were all so focused on someone who was literally wasting away while he was abundantly fat. In his pudgy fingers he held the poems I’d written when I was dying and hidden in the book on dam building in my father’s library. How had Bao found them? Looking at his soft white hands, he did not seem the type to be commissioning or designing a dam.
His little eyes seemed too narrow and close together to find joy in reading out of intellectual curiosity, let alone pleasure. Something else had caused him to open that particular volume.
When he demanded money for my simple poems and I saw that this was no gift from one brother-in-law to another, I understood that things could not be well in the Chen Family Villa. I suppose I expected this.
They couldn’t ignore my death and not expect some consequences. Bao had to be dismantling the library and had come across the poems. But where was my father? He’d sell his concubines before selling his library.
Was he ailing? Had he died? Wouldn’t I have heard something if he had?
Should I rush back to my natal home?
But this was my home now. Ren was my husband and Ze was my sister-wife. She was sick, right here, right now. Oh, yes, I’d been angry with her at times. I’d even hated her on occasion. But I would be at her side when she died. I would welcome her to the afterworld and thank her for being my sister-wife.
Ren paid my adopted brother. Things were so bad with Ze that he didn’t even look at the poems. He selected a book from his library, tucked the papers inside, placed the volume back on the shelf, and returned to the bedchamber.
( 1 9 2 )
We went back to waiting. Madame Wu brought tea and snacks for her son, which he left mostly untouched. Commissioner Tan and his wife came again to see their daughter. Their harshness faded as they realized Ze was actually dying.
“Tell us what the matter is,” Madame Tan begged her daughter.
Ze’s body relaxed and color flushed her cheeks when she heard her mother’s voice.
Encouraged, Madame Tan tried again. “We can take you away from here. Come home and sleep in your own bed. You’ll feel better with us.”
At these words, Ze stiffened. She pursed her lips and looked away. Seeing this, tears streamed down Madame Tan’s face.
The commissioner stared at his intractable daughter.
“You’ve been stubborn forever,” he observed, “but I always go back to the night we saw The Peony Pavilion as the moment your emotions con-gealed to stone. Since that time, you’ve never listened to a single warning or piece of advice I’ve given you. Now you pay the price. We will remember you in our offerings.”
As Madame Wu showed the Tans back to their palanquins, the sick girl moaned the ailments she would not tell her parents. “I feel a floating numbness. My hands and feet will not move. My eyes are too dry for tears. My spirit is frozen by the cold.”
Every few minutes she opened her eyes, stared up at the ceiling, shivered, and closed them again. All the while, Ren held her hand and spoke softly to her.
Later that night when all was darkness and I had no fear of reflection from the mirrors, I let myself down into the room. I blew open the curtains so that moonlight illuminated the bedchamber. Ren slept in a chair.
I touched his hair and felt him shiver. I sat with my sister-wife and felt the cold piercing her bones. Everyone else in the household was wandering in their dreams, so I stayed at Ze’s side to protect and comfort her. I placed my hand over her heart. I felt it slow, skip beats, race, and slow again. Just as darkness began to give way to pink, the air in the room shifted. Tan Ze’s bones crumbled, her soul dissolved, and just like that she was flying across the sky.