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The Blood-Gathering Lake
z e ’s s ou l b r o ke i n to t h r e e. o n e part b e gan i t s journey to the afterworld, one part waited to enter its coffin, and the last part roamed until it was time to be placed in its ancestor tablet. Her corpse submitted humbly to the rites that had to be performed. The doctor cut the baby from Ze’s stomach and threw it away, so it wouldn’t go with her to the Blood-Gathering Lake and would have a chance at rebirth. Then her emaciated body was washed and dressed. Ren remained at her side, refusing to take his eyes off her pale face and still-red lips, seemingly waiting for her to waken. I waited in the bedchamber for the roaming part of her soul to appear. I was convinced she would be relieved to see someone familiar. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The moment she saw me, her lips drew back and she bared her teeth.
“You! I knew I would see you!”
“Everything will be fine. I’m here to help you—”
“Help me? You killed me!”
“You’re confused,” I said soothingly. I too had been disoriented upon my death. She was lucky I was here to ease her mind.
“I knew even before my marriage that you would try to harm me,” she went on, in a no-less-furious tone. “You were there on my marriage day, weren’t you?” When I nodded, she said, “I should have smeared your tombstone with the blood of a black dog.”
This was the worst thing a person could do to a dead soul, since this ( 1 9 4 )
type of blood was believed to be as odious as a woman’s monthly excre-tions. If she’d done that, I would have been set on a path to kill my natal family. I was surprised by her bitterness, but she wasn’t done.
“You haunted me from the very beginning,” she continued. “I heard you crying in the winds of stormy nights.”
“I thought I made you happy—”
“No! You made me read that opera. Then you made me write about it.
You made me imitate you in everything I did, until finally there was nothing left of me. You died from the opera, and then you made me copy you copying Liniang.”
“I only wanted Ren to love you more. Couldn’t you tell?”
This calmed her somewhat. Then she looked at her fingernails. They’d already turned black. The harsh reality of her situation crushed her remaining anger.
“I tried to protect myself, but what chance did I have against you?” she asked pitifully.
So many times I’d said the reverse of this to myself: My sister-wife didn’t have a chance against me.
“I thought I could make him love me if he read the commentary and believed the work to be all mine,” she continued, reproach creeping back into her voice. “I didn’t want him reading about your lovesickness. I didn’t want him believing I’d continued your project as a way of honoring the
‘first’ wife. I was the first wife. Didn’t you hear my husband? You two were never married. He cares nothing for you.”
She was ruthless in death.
“We are a match made in Heaven,” I said, and I still believed it to be true. “But he loved you too.”
“You were sick with cleverness. You made me cold, kept me in darkness, and hunted me in my dreams. You made me careless with my meals and careless with my rest—”
That this line came from The Peony Pavilion didn’t reassure me, because I had made her careless.
“The only way I could escape you was in the safety of the pavilion on the pond,” she went on.
“The zigzag bridge.”
“Yes!” Her lips drew back again, showing her dead-white teeth. “I burned your copy of The Peony Pavilion to exorcise you from my life. I thought I’d succeeded, but you never left.”
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“I couldn’t leave, not after what you did next. You let people believe our husband wrote the commentary.”
“What better way to show my devotion? What better way to prove I was an ideal wife?”
She was right, of course.
“But what about me?” I asked. “You tried to make me disappear. How could you do that when we’re sister-wives?”
Ze laughed at the stupidity of my question. “Men are the flowering of pure yang, but ghosts like you are all that is deathly and sick in yin. I tried to fight you, but your constant interference killed me. Go away. I have no need or want of your friendship. We are not friends. And we are not sister-wives. I will be remembered. You will be forgotten. I made sure of that.”
“By hiding the missing pages that describe the true authorship—”
“Everything you made me write was a lie.”
“But I gave you credit. Almost everything was about you—”
“I didn’t pick up the commentary out of a desire to continue your work. I did not write from the heart. You made your obsession my obsession. You were a ghost and you wouldn’t admit what you’d done, so I tore those pages out of the book. Ren will never find them.”
I tried again to make her see the truth. “I wanted you to be happy—”
“So you used my body.”
“I was happy when you got pregnant—”
“That child was not mine!”
“Of course he was yours.”
“No! You brought Ren to my bed night after night against my will. You made me do things. . . .” She shivered with anger and disgust. “And then you put that baby inside me.”
“You’re wrong. I didn’t put him there. I only watched that he’d be safe—”
“Ha! You killed me and the baby too.”
“I didn’t . . .”
But what was the use of denying her accusations when so many of them were true? I’d kept her up all night, first with her husband and then with writing. I’d made her room cold, closed her in the dark to protect my sensitive eyes, and sent breezes with her everywhere she went. When I forced her to work on my project, I’d kept her from joining her husband and mother-in-law for meals. Then, when she retired to her room after burning my original work and giving all credit to Ren, I hadn’t encour-
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aged her to eat because I was so dispirited. I’d been fully aware of all this even as I’d denied what I was seeing and doing to myself. I started to feel sick with the truth. What had I done?
She pulled back her lips, once again revealing her ugly essence. I turned my eyes away.
“You killed me,” she proclaimed. “You hid in the rafters where you thought no one could see you, but I saw you.”
“How could you?” All my earlier confidence was gone. Now I was the one who sounded pitiful.
“I was dying! I saw you. I tried to close my eyes to you, but every time I opened them you were there, staring at me with your dead eyes. And then you came down and put your hand on my heart.”
Waaa! Had I truly played a part in her death? Had my obsession for my project made me so blind that first I had died and now I had killed my sister-wife?
Seeing the horror of understanding on my face, she smiled triumphantly. “You killed me, but I’ve won. You seem to have forgotten the deepest message of The Peony Pavilion. It’s a story about fulfilling love through death, which is exactly what I’ve done. Ren will remember me and he will forget about the foolish unmarried girl in her inner rooms.
You will waste away to nothing. Your project will be forgotten and no one— no one—will remember you.”
Without another word, she turned away from me, left the room, and went back to roaming.
f o rty - n i n e day s later, Ze’s father came to dot her ancestor tablet, which was then set in the Wu family’s ancestral hall. Since she’d died pregnant and married, one part of her soul was sealed inside her coffin, which would remain exposed to the elements until her husband’s death, when the family would be reconstituted through simultaneous burial, as was proper. The last part of her soul was dragged to the Blood-Gathering Lake, which was reputed to be so wide that it would take 840,000 days to cross it, where she would experience 120 kinds of torture, where she would be required each day to drink blood or be thrashed with iron rods.