He shook his head. ‘Many fluids,’ he said. ‘Increase secretions. Also certain herbs are very helpful. Come — this stone is perhaps near south of compound.’
We rushed through the halls at great speed, and only after a hot and sweaty thirty minutes did I think to mention to him that the Triple Sounds Stone was part of the Temple of Heaven. ‘I know it’s here,’ I said. ‘I just don’t know where. The stone is somewhere in the temple.’
He groaned and pressed his small hands together. ‘Temple of Heaven?’ he said, his voice rising in real anguish. ‘Not Triple Sounds Stone — you are looking for Triple Echo Stones, in temple — is not here, is across city, twenty minutes at least by car, and how you will get a cab …’ With that he rushed me back to the main gate. There were taxis parked there, but all of them were spoken for, and after a long argument with two lounging drivers he dashed into the streaming traffic of Changan Avenue and tried his hardest to flag down one of the passing cabs. Finally he went to the white-coated policeman who stood on an island above the traffic, and by the time he’d finished shouting and throwing his arms about he’d convinced the policeman to step into the traffic himself and commandeer a cab. The driver resisted, pointing to me and then shaking his head, but he gave in when the policeman bundled me into the back seat.
‘Temple of Heaven?’ my rescuer said. ‘You are sure?’ I nodded and he gave directions to the driver. ‘How can I thank you?’ I asked.
‘You will get there,’ he called, as the car eased into the traffic. ‘No thanks are needed. But you must be more careful.’
Careful wasn’t high on my list just then. If I’d been careful I would have spent the day in bed, tending to my bronchitis; I wouldn’t have left the hotel, unarmed with guides or books, in search of Dr Yu. All week I’d been listening to the humming voice of caution: Don’t drink the tap water; don’t even brush your teeth with it. Don’t eat any fruit or any street food. Don’t lose sight of the tour bus. Don’t go out without your passport. Don’t buy jade without an expert’s advice. That voice didn’t belong to Lou, our guide — it was the voice of breakfast, all the scientists and their spouses gathered at the long tables in the hotel dining room, exchanging warnings before they split up for the day. Don’t, don’t, don’t — the list was endless and expanded each hour, and it brought out the worst in me. It made me want to stick my head under the faucet and gulp the water down, to sink my face into one of the smoked ducks that hung by their twisted necks in the smeared shop windows. Our hotel room — large, clean, privileged — had come to seem like a cage, and even when I ventured outside I carried it on my back like a turtle’s shell.
I wanted to leap from the cab and find my own way across the city, but instead I sat and watched the back of the sullen driver’s head. I was late, I reminded myself; I was an hour late already. I let the driver drop me off near the Triple Echo Stones, and I tried not to notice how he hovered until he saw Dr Yu reach out for me. She moved through a rushing stream of people, and she laughed when I apologized for being late and told her what had happened.
‘You must have been meant to go there,’ she said. ‘The places are separate, but also connected. In the old days, the Emperor marched out of the Forbidden City each October with his elephant carts and lancers and musicians and high nobles, and all of them headed here. The Emperor meditated in the Imperial Vault of Heaven, stayed all night in the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, and made a ceremony next day at the Round Altar, which decided the future. People hid behind their shutters and prayed again and again for everything to go well. It is an ill omen if anything goes wrong here.’
‘Have we done anything wrong yet?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Why?’
I closed my eyes and clicked my heels together three times, a gesture left over from a time when I thought ruby slippers and a good witch could fix my life. My future, the one I’d been waiting for, seemed to lie just around the corner, and what I wished for was that it would hurry up.
Dr Yu smiled at my antics. ‘Is your husband still angry?’ she asked.
I leaned against a pillar and coughed. ‘Still,’ I said. Walter’s behavior at the banquet last night had broken down some of the barriers between Dr Yu and me, and I felt I could tell her the truth. She’d already seen him at his worst. ‘Madder, now, since I told him I was coming to meet you. He went with all the others to the Exhibition Hall, to see some singers and acrobats and stuff.’
Dr Yu made a face. ‘That’s so boring,’ she said. ‘It is only for tourists. Why does he stay mad so long? Is this typical of those from North Dakota?’
I laughed. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘How did you know where he’s from?’
‘I read it somewhere,’ she said. ‘I remembered it because my own father was trained near there — he got his PhD in Minnesota before the Anti-Japanese War. Physicist. After Liberation, he returned here to aid his country.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Dead,’ she said simply. ‘They put a high dunce cap on his head and paraded him through the streets of Shanghai during the early part of the Cultural Revolution. They called him an American spy, a counterrevolutionary, a capitalist roader. His hat said, “Cow’s ghost and snake’s spirit” — do you know this saying?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘My great-uncle used to tell me stories he learned here when he visited, about plants and rocks and snakes who could turn themselves into people and do remarkable things and then turn back to their original shapes.’
‘Different story,’ she said. ‘Cow’s ghost and snake’s spirit are demons who can assume human forms for the making of mischief. Mao said intellectuals resembled these — that they pretend to support the Party, like humans, but they revert to demons when criticized. They were called “cows” for short; they were locked up in places called “cowsheds.” My father was put in a cowshed at his institute. He died of fright, or shame, or anger — who knows? He had a bad heart.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said; I didn’t know what else to say. I’d hardly stopped to consider what her life had been like during those years, any more than I’d considered what she might want from me.
She smiled quietly. ‘It is in the past,’ she said. ‘I only remember my father said people from cold places have cold hearts. Your uncle visited with us?’
‘My great-uncle,’ I said. ‘He visited many times before Liberation — it must have been around the same time your father was in the States.’
‘Such coincidence,’ she said, and then she waved her hand at the buildings behind us. ‘Do you like the temple?’
‘It’s lovely,’ I said. She showed me the sacred altar and the enormous vault and the main hall’s painted, swirling ceiling, and then we stood on the Triple Echo Stones and clapped our hands together, listening for the sound to return — another thing, I knew, that Uncle Owen had done. We were interrupted by a group of Japanese tourists, led by a woman with a bullhorn and an umbrella crowned with a yellow streamer. Video cameras sprouted like snouts from the faces of the men. Dr Yu and I moved away and examined an ancient tree and a garden of roses, all the time talking easily. I forgot about her family, waiting at home, and I remembered only when Dr Yu looked at her watch and said, apologetically, ‘It’s almost seven now — perhaps we should go?’
‘Of course.’
‘We’ll take the local bus to my home. It’s very crowded, but not very far. You have ridden on one?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. The bus was one of the things we’d been forbidden.