My whole body is on fire. I feel sick. I scream in horror.
Someone grabs hold of my body as I fall. Who has arms long enough to fish me from the depths of the ocean? I stop moving. I mustn’t move, so he will be able to pull me from the darkness. Firmly but gently he leads me back out of the depths, towards life, like a midwife guiding a baby to its birth. The warmth of his palms spreads through me. I am naked, creased, red, huddled. I am intimidated by the light, by the rustlings of the world. I shudder with pleasure.
When I open my eyes I look straight into the eyes of a stranger, and leap to my feet. He stands up too, but I grab my bag and run away.
The sunset has thrown its crimson cloak over the hills. Yesterday I still couldn’t face the flaming red of twilight; it reminded me of that red sun suspended in the mist on the morning of the execution. Now I look at it defiantly.
It takes me a long time to find a rickshaw. The sun is shrinking on the horizon, and crows launch themselves into the wan darkness. Soon I am swallowed up in the night. The road goes through a huge field of wheat where fireflies zigzag back and forth.
The moon looks like a line of chalk drawn on the sky.
The Stranger is following me, and I am both frightened and delighted by the sound of his footsteps. Will he catch up with me?
I’m no longer afraid of ghosts: Min and Tang went back to their graves last night-may they rest in peace! I am a different woman now and I carry my name the way a cicada carries the memory of the ground in which it slumbered before its metamorphosis. I am not afraid of anything anymore.
The man is keeping his distance.
Finally a rickshaw passes and I call it. I climb in alone and the boy starts to pull away.
“Wait!” The Stranger puts out his hand, holding the boy back. “Wait,” he says again in a trembling voice.
Under the streetlight, he looks oddly tall and solitary. He seems to caress my face with his eyes.
I lower my gaze and stare at the rickshaw boy’s back.
The rickshaw swings into motion, and the voice fades behind me.
“You will come and play tomorrow, won’t you?”
I look up. Through a fog of tears I look hungrily out onto the black countryside. I feel ridiculous to catch myself crying. The shadows of passersby stumble on the pavement, all the houses are lit up and hundreds of lives unreel through the windows.
80
In my exhaustion I decide to go to bed without supper. On my bed I find the mail that arrived in the afternoon.
With the unfailing fluency and calm of the cultivated woman she is, Mother records the event of the month: Little Brother has set out for China.
“At first I was amazed by the silence in the house,” she writes. “To stop myself thinking about the fact that we are all apart, I have busied myself tidying up. Organizing things helps me forget that you’re not here. When I came across the kimonos you wore as children, I could scarcely believe that you were both already fighting for the Emperor.”
In his letter, Little Brother begs me to forgive him: he had no time to ask my permission to leave our mother.
“We will see each other soon in China, at the front. You’ll be proud of me!”
I would have preferred this naive boy stay where he was, safe from the cruelties of war. But how could I deny him the chance to put his country before his own life? As a child he idolized me, but after Father’s death he rebelled against my authority. Now I am his example once again.
My poor mother; all her men have left and the gods have condemned her to live alone. I can’t bear to imagine the pain she will suffer when she will receive two urns of ashes.
Through the wall I can hear a game of cards in full swing.
“Double my stake!”
“Me too!”
Every soldier has his own way of defying the future.
I think of my mother’s slender frame wrapped in a widow’s kimono. Then I see the Chinese girl curled up on the grass. They are different but share a common fate: the insurmountable sorrow of an impossible love.
Women are the offerings we make to this vast world.
81
Mother grills me when I return home.
“Where were you? Why are you home so late?”
I lie badly, but for some strange reason she pretends to believe me. Father is reading the paper, an enigmatic smile on his lips. He doesn’t say a word to me all evening.
I gobble down the leftovers in the kitchen-my appetite is back, and for two days now I have been better able to tolerate smells. Mother comes in silently and sits down facing me. In the half-light the red lacquered table looks almost black, polished meticulously, smooth as a mirror, by the cook. Unable to avoid her gaze, I count the grains of rice on the ends of my chopsticks.
Descended from a line of Chinese nobility whose women breast-fed the Manchurian emperors, Mother has seen all her ancestors’ pomp and splendor eradicated, and her heart has hardened. She seals memories away in chests, and now she watches the world deteriorate with the cold dignity of a woman wronged.
In England she grew disenchanted with China. In fact my sister often used to say that, had it not been for Father, Mother would never have come back. Unlike most Chinese women, who overflow with maternal love, Mother maintains a courtly distance and eschews any show of affection. Her anger, too, is provoked only by formalities: being a few minutes late, a lack of courtesy, a crumpled book…
“You’ve lost weight,” says Mother.
My heart sinks: what is she saying?
“You don’t look well. Let me take your pulse.”
I slowly extend my left arm to her, and carry on eating with my right. Might she discover my secret?
“Weak and irregular,” she says after squeezing my wrist awhile. “I must take you to see my doctor. Girls your age are weakened by the changes in their bodies. That’s why the ancients used to marry them very young, to stabilize them.”
I don’t dare argue with her.
“You must have some swallows’ nest soup,” she says, getting up, “it warms the blood and the intestines, it harmonizes the ebb and flow of energy. And tomorrow we will go see old Master Liu for some medicinal infusions. Perhaps I’ll take you to the American hospital as well. The holidays start at the end of this week. Your sister is coming home, and I’ll keep both of you under my roof to get you both back to health.”
Panicked, I tell her that I won’t have time to go to the doctor tomorrow.
“You don’t have lessons at the end of the afternoon,” she replies.
“I have to finish my game of go. It’s very important.”
Mother is angry, but her voice stays calm.
“I have given you too much freedom, you and your sister. It does you no good. Forget your game,” she says, heading from the kitchen, then she turns in the doorway and says, “That dress belongs to your sister, it’s too long for you and the color doesn’t suit you. Where are the dresses I had made for you a couple of months ago?”
Back in my room, I slump down onto my bed. I lose less blood in the night, but I still sleep fitfully. Huong, dressed in red and covered in jewels and embroidery, bows to a horribly ugly man. She is in tears and she looks like a goddess who has been banished from the heavens. A stranger notices how sad I am, and takes my hand. His hand, rough as a pumice stone, soothes my agitated nerves. Behind him I can see Min under a tree before the Temple of the White Horse. He smiles at me before disappearing into the crowd.