The next morning, I felt like a different person, happy but also worried. Sister Yu had once said that you could tell which girls in the lanes were prostitutes because they had eyes like chickens. What she meant by this, I didn't know. Did the eyes become redder or smaller? Would others see in my eyes that I had a new kind of knowledge? When I arrived in the main hall for breakfast, I saw that almost everyone was there, gathered in a circle, talking in serious voices. As I walked in, it seemed that all the teachers lifted their eyes to stare at me, shocked and sad. Then Kai Jing shook his head. "Bad news," he said, and the blood drained from my limbs so that even if I had wanted to run away I was too weak to do so. Would I be kicked out? Had Kai Jing's father refused to let him marry me? But how did they know? Who told? Who saw? Who heard? Kai Jing pointed to the shortwave radio that belonged to the scientists, and the others turned back to listen. And I wondered: Now the radio is announcing what we did? In English?
When Kai Jing finally told me, I didn't have even one moment to be relieved that the bad news was not about me. "The Japanese attacked last night," he said, "close to Peking, and everyone is saying it is war for sure."
Maku polo this, maku polo that, I heard the radio voice say. I asked: "What is this maku thing?"
Sister Yu said, "The Maku Polo Bridge. The island dwarves have captured it." I was surprised to hear her use this slur for the Japanese. In the school, she was the one who taught the girls not to use bad names, even for those we hated. Sister Yu went on: "Shot their rifles in the air-just for practice, they said. So our army shot back to teach the liars a lesson. And now one of the dwarves is missing. Probably the coward ran away, but the Japanese are saying one missing man is enough reason to declare war." With Sister Yu translating the English into Chinese, it was hard to tell which was the news and which were her opinions.
"This Maku Polo Bridge," I said, "how far away is it?"
"North of here, in Wanping," Miss Grutoff said, "close to the railway station."
"But that's the Reed Moat Bridge, forty-six kilometers from my village," I said. "When did they start calling it something else?"
"More than six hundred years ago," Miss Grutoff said, "when Marco Polo first admired it." And as everyone continued to talk about the war, I was wondering why no one in our village knew the bridge had changed its name so long before. "Which way are the Japanese advancing?" I asked. "North to Peking or south to here?"
Everyone stopped talking at once. A woman stood in the doorway. With the bright sun behind her, she was a shadow, and I could not make out who she was, only that she wore a dress. "Is Liu LuLing still living here?" I heard her say. I squinted. Who was asking this? I was already confused about so many things, now this as well. As I walked toward her, my confusion turned into a guess, then the guess into a certainty. Precious Auntie. I had often dreamed that her ghost would come back. As in dreams, she could talk and her face was whole, and as in dreams, I rushed toward her. And at last, this time she did not push me away. She threw open her arms and cried: "So you still recognize your own sister!"
It was GaoLing. We spun each other around, danced and slapped each other's arms, taking turns to cry, "Look at you." I had not heard from her since she wrote me the letter four or five years before. In minutes, we were treating each other like sisters once again. "What's happened to your hair?" I joked, grabbing her messy curls. "Was it an accident, or did you do this on purpose?"
"Do you like it?"
"Not bad. You look modern, no longer the country girl."
"No flies circling your head, either. I heard rumors you're now a high-and-mighty intellectual."
"Only a teacher. And you, are you still-"
"Wife to Chang Fu Nan. Six years already, hard to believe."
"But what's happened to you? You look terrible."
"I haven't eaten since yesterday."
I jumped up, went to the kitchen, and brought her back a bowl of mil let porridge, some pickles and steamed peanuts, and little cold dishes. We sat in a corner of the hall, away from news of the war, she eating with much noise and speed. "We've been living in Peking, Fu Nan and I, no children," she said between thick mouthfuls. "We have the back rooms of the ink shop. Everything's been rebuilt. Did I tell you this in my letter?"
"Some."
"Then you know that the Changs own the business, our family owns only the debt. Father and our uncles are back in Immortal Heart village, churning out ink till it sweats from their pores. And now that they're home all the time, they have bad tempers and argue constantly among themselves about who is to blame for this, that, and the weather."
"What about First Brother and Second Brother?" I asked. "Home, too?"
"The Nationalists conscripted First Brother five years ago. All the boys his age had to go. And Second Brother ran off to join the Communists two years after that. Big Uncle's sons followed, then Big Uncle cursed that all three should never come back. Mother didn't speak to him until the United Front was formed and Uncle apologized, saying now it didn't matter which side they were on."
"And Mother, how's her health?"
"Remember how black her hair used to be? Now it's like an old man's beard, white and wiry. She no longer dyes it."
"What? I thought it was naturally black from working with the ink."
"Don't be stupid. They all dyed their hair-Great-Granny, the aunts. But these days Mother doesn't care what she looks like. She claims she hasn't slept in two years. She's convinced the tenants are stealing from us at night and rearranging the furniture. And she also believes Great-Granny's ghost has returned to the latrine. She hasn't had a bowel movement bigger than a bean sprout in months. The shit's hardened to mortar, she says, that's why she's distended like a summer gourd."
"This is terrible to hear." Though this was the same Mother who had kicked me out, I took no pleasure in hearing about her difficulties. Perhaps a little bit of me still thought of Mother and Father as my parents.
"What about Precious Auntie's ghost? Did she ever come back?"
"Not a wail or a whimper, which is strange, since that Catcher of Ghosts turned out to be a fake, not a monk at all. He had a wife and three brats, one of whom was the assistant. They were using the same vinegar jar to catch other ghosts, just opened the lid, sealed it up, over and over. They caught a lot of foolish customers that way. When Father heard this, he wanted to stuff the crook in the jar and plug it up with pony dung. I said to him, 'If Precious Auntie's ghost never came back, what does it matter?' But ever since, he's been muttering about the two ingots he lost, tallying their worth, while according to him was enough to purchase the sky."
My mind was a sandstorm: If the monk was a fake, did that mean Precious Auntie had escaped? Or was she never put in the jar? And then I had another thought.
"Maybe there never was a ghost because she never died," I said to GaoLing.
"Oh, she died for sure. I saw Old Cook throw her body in the End of the World."
"But perhaps she was not entirely dead and she climbed back up. Why else didn't I find her? I searched for hours, from side to side and top to bottom."
GaoLing looked away. "What a terrible day that was for you… You didn't find her, but she was there. Old Cook felt sorry that Precious Auntie didn't get a proper burial. He pitied her. When Mother wasn't looking, he went down there and piled rocks on top of the body."
And now I pictured Precious Auntie struggling up the ravine, a rock rolling toward her, striking her, then another and another, as she tumbled back down. "Why didn't you tell me this sooner?"
"I didn't know until Old Cook died, two years after Precious Auntie. His wife told me. She said he did good deeds that no one even knew about."