‘Come here, Nannan. I will draw one for you.’ I put down my brush, walk to the washbowl behind the door and clean my hands.
‘You have a spirit, I know you have.’ She leans over the desk and purses her lips.
I open the drawer, take out a stone I picked up on a beach, stroke Nannan’s silky hair and switch on the lamp. ‘Look, Nannan, this is where my spirit lives. This is her face, this is her red skirt, and this is her long black hair.’
She holds the translucent stone to the light and studies it in minute detail. At last she says she cannot see her, only heard her whisper something.
‘The spirit is waiting for you to finish your homework.’ I watch Nannan carefully lower the stone into her pencil box. ‘When your homework is done, she will come out and take you flying around the room.’
The apartment blocks outside my window seem to merge into a single black wall. Lights shining from a few rooms glint like the eyes of a wolf. The government has unleashed a new campaign against ‘Bourgeois Liberalisation’ and my name has come up. My leaders at the foreign propaganda department have labelled me a ‘questionable youth’.
I hear people pass through the wind outside. Men and women. The women’s steps are lighter, but when the soles of their shoes crush against the sand, it sends needles through my skin.
On my way to fetch supper from the staff cafeteria this afternoon I bumped into Zhao Lan, a colleague who belongs to my art discussion group. She told me the security department called her in yesterday to ask why she visits my house and who she has seen there.
I retreated behind a heap of cabbages, and whispered, ‘Don’t mention the dance we went to, and whatever happens, don’t tell them about the life drawings I did at Da Xian’s house.’ Last month, a group of friends clubbed together and hired a model for two yuan an hour. I left my easel at home and just took a sketchbook. The model had soft skin, large eyes, and thighs as smooth as glass. She sat in the middle of the room cracking sunflower seeds between her teeth, gazing at the men circled around her. Now and then, a husk fell from her mouth and landed on the black hair between her legs.
I heat up the meatballs I brought back from the cafeteria and serve them to Nannan. The room smells of pork and coriander. I glance at my unfinished painting: pale vertical branches cover half the canvas, a cloud moves through the black sky behind.
Nannan’s picture hangs beside it. Last month, we walked down the lane to paint a tree bathed in sunlight. Nannan splashed green leaves onto her canvas and dotted them with specks of white light. The picture was small but much more alive than mine. She finished it in a matter of minutes, and when people stopped to take a look she said, ‘Don’t look at me, look at my father. He is the painter.’ We worked until dark, then traipsed off to a dumpling restaurant and ordered two large bowls of egg soup.
When I return from the latrines, I hear Nannan whispering to the stone.
There are just a few coriander leaves left in her bowl. ‘Where have the meatballs gone?’ I ask her.
‘I’ve eaten them,’ she says, gazing at me with wide eyes.
There were two meatballs in her bowl before I left. The room still smells of pork. She must have hidden them somewhere. I sniff around and trace the smell to its source behind the bedside table. When I pull the table out, two squashed meatballs plop onto the cement floor. She opens her mouth and stares at mine in terror. I tell her to throw the meatballs in the bin, and she starts scuttling about the room like a frightened chicken.
Her body is so small and fragile, I feel helpless. I am sure her mother knows what to feed her.
‘What does your mother give you to eat, Nannan?’
She looks up through her long tangled fringe. ‘Fried bean sprouts and tofu.’
‘You won’t get fat on that. Come on, put your coat on and I’ll take you out for some lamb hot-pot.’ I check my pockets and stand up.
An hour or so later I turn off the main light and put my daughter to bed. The lamp on my desk shines on a heap of unfinished manuscripts, contact sheets and some stamps I am collecting for Wang Ping, a friend who writes for the Hangzhou Daily. The lampshade I made from cinema film smells of burnt glue. Below it lies the letter I have written to Guangxi Film Studio, and a Jushilin Temple textbook open at page ten: ‘Sentient beings, lost in the red dust of the world, come to the Western Paradise of Amitabha, Buddha of Infinite Light. .’ I have attended weekly ceremonies at the temple for a while now. I spend hours memorising the sutras, but when the time comes to recite them I can never remember a word. Still, in the quiet of the temple I can forget myself. I watch the incense smoke drift to the sky and I follow it through the white clouds and see that above the clouds there is blue sky everywhere. I trail behind the disciples as they circle the shrine chanting sutras to the beat of a wooden fish drum. I fantasise about taking the Buddhist vows one day and roaming the country as a mendicant monk. When I leave the temple afterwards and see the crowds in the street outside, my stomach turns.
‘Daddy, is Mummy coming this week?’ Nannan’s head peeps above the quilt.
‘Call me Jianjian — Daddy sounds silly.’
‘All my friends say Mummy and Daddy. Why can’t I?’
‘Because I’m not like a proper daddy. My life is a mess.’
‘Daddy — I mean, Jianjian — when is Mummy coming to fetch me?’
‘Saturday, as usual. You want your mummy, don’t you? You don’t want daddy any more.’ I think of Guoping’s face under her new perm. The tight curls make her chin look bigger. Sometimes she arrives on the back of her boyfriend’s motorbike. The night before our divorce came through I went back to see her in Yanshan. I lay in bed beside her, breathing the warm scent of her hair. In the three years since I had moved to Beijing, we had slowly drifted apart. I knew she had a boyfriend called He Nong and she knew about my friendship with Xi Ping. The passion had gone, but when I thought that the next day this woman would no longer be my wife, I could not help feeling sad.
‘I want you both. When is Xi Ping coming?’
‘She won’t be visiting any more.’
Xi Ping will never come here again. But she is still inside me, like a stuck fishbone rotting at the back of my throat. Why did it go wrong? Although I dared not believe in love after the failure of my marriage, she was the only woman I cared about. Her voice cut through the numbness in my heart. I loved her still features and quiet forehead.
I first noticed her last year in the cafeteria. She was standing in front of me in the queue for lunch. I asked her which department she worked in, and she said, ‘Accounts. You should know. I’ve helped you twice with your expenses.’ When we started going out together, I felt my life take a new turn. Sometimes I hated her, but the hate came from within me, it was a boil that grew from my despair. She understood me. When I told her I was considering giving up my job to go travelling around the country, she kissed my ear and whispered, ‘Wherever you go, you can always come back to me. My body is your sunset.’
I can almost see her now, sitting on the orange sofa reading her book, then leaning over to pinch me with her damn little hands. I hated that. Women should be as gentle as water — warm water, of course. When we kissed, she waited until I was fully relaxed, then dug her teeth into my tongue like a mousetrap, biting harder and harder. She thought it was funny. When it was over she would giggle and kiss away my tears.
I put up with her bites and pinches. After all, what kind of girl can you hope to find in this mixed-up country? Clever girls are too busy opening restaurants and trying to make money. University graduates expect their men to be like the heroes in romantic novels who explore the wilds of Tibet. All the nice girls are in the countryside, but when they move to the cities they are too preoccupied with the cosmetics counters to have any time for you. Xi Ping was different though. She liked music and art, and her classical Chinese was better than mine. We both liked the colour brown and shared a recurring dream of being chased by a huge rock while our feet were glued to the ground. And neither of us liked to wash — we would only visit the public showers once a month.