(2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter (32 page)

“It’s the same for me,” I said, and began to cry.

For we both knew we were speaking about the effortlessness with which one falls in love without intending to, as if we were two stalks of bamboo bent toward each other by the chance of the wind. And then we bent toward each other and kissed, lost in the nowhere of being together.

EFFORTLESS

The first night Kai Jing and I tried forbidden joy, it was summertime, a bright-moon night. We had slipped into a dark storage room at the abandoned end of a corridor, far from the eyes and ears of others. I had no shame, no guilty feelings. I felt wild and new, as though I could swim the heavens and fly through waves. And if this was bad fate, let it be. I was the daughter of Precious Auntie, a woman who also could not control her desires, who then gave birth to me. How could this be bad when the skin on Kai Jing’s back was so smooth, so warm, so fragrant? Was it also fate to feel his lips on my neck? When he unbuttoned the back of my blouse and it fell to the floor, I was ruined, and I was glad. Then the rest of my clothing slipped off, piece by piece, and I felt I was growing lighter and darker. He and I were two shadows, black and airy, folding and blending, weak yet fierce, weightless, mindless of others—until I opened my eyes and saw that a dozen people were watching us.

Kai Jing laughed. “No, no, they’re not real.” He tapped one. They were the painted-over theater of hell, now converted to Merry Christmas.

“They’re like an audience at a bad opera,” I said, “not so pleased.” There was Mother Mary with a screaming mouth, the sheepherders with pointed heads, and Baby Jesus, whose eyes stuck out like a frog’s. Kai Jing draped my blouse over the head of Mary. He covered Joseph with my skirt, while Baby Jesus received my slip. Then Kai Jing put his own clothes over the Three Wise Men and turned the sheepherders around. When all their eyes faced the wall, Kai Jing guided me to lie down in the straw, and once more we became shadows.

But what happened after that was not like a poem or a painting of the fourth level. We were not like nature, as beautifully harmonious as a leafy tree against the sky. We had expected all these things. But the straw made us itch and the floor stank of urine. A rat stumbled out of its nest, and this caused Kai Jing to roll off me and knock Baby Jesus out of his crib. The frog-eyed monster lay next to us, as if it were our love child. Then Kai Jing stood up and lighted a match, searching for the rat. And when I looked at Kai Jing’s private parts, I saw he was no longer possessed. I also saw he had ticks on his thigh. A moment later, he pointed out three on my bottom. I jumped up and was dancing to shake them off. I had to try very hard not to laugh and cry as Kai Jing turned me around and inspected me, then burned off the ticks with the tip of a match. When I took back my blouse from Mary’s head, she looked glad that I was ashamed, even though we had not fulfilled our desires.

As we quickly dressed, Kai Jing and I were too embarrassed to talk. He also said nothing as he walked me to my room. But at the door, he told me, “I’m sorry. I should have controlled myself.” My heart hurt. I didn’t want to hear his apology, his regrets. I heard him add: “I should have waited until we’re married.” And then I gasped and began to cry, and he embraced me and uttered promises that we would be lovers for ten thousand lifetimes, and I vowed the same, until we heard a loud “Shhhh!” Even after we quieted, Sister Yu, whose room was next to mine, kept grumbling: “No consideration for others. Worse than roosters…”

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 millet 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.”

“I need to go back and find her bones. I want to bury them in a proper place.”

“You’ll never find them,” GaoLing said. “The cliff broke off again last year during the rainstorms, a ledge the length of five men. Collapsed all at once and buried everything along that side of the ravine with rocks and dirt three stories deep. Our house will be the next to go.”

And I mourned uselessly: “If only you had come and told me sooner.”

“What a pity, I know. I didn’t think you’d still be here. If it weren’t for Mr. Wei’s gossipy wife, I wouldn’t have known you were a teacher here. She told me when I came home for a visit during Spring Festival.”

“Why didn’t you come see me then?”

“You think my husband gives me permission to take a holiday when I want? I had to wait for the way of heaven to throw me a chance. And then it came at the worst time. Yesterday Fu Nan told me to go to Immortal Heart village to beg more money from his father. I said to him, ‘Didn’t you hear? The Japanese are parading their army along the railway.’
Fff.
He didn’t care. His greed for opium is greater than any fear that his wife could be run through with a bayonet.”

“Still eating the opium?”

“That’s his life. Without it, he’s a rabid dog. So I went to Wanping, and sure enough, the trains stopped and went no further. All the passengers got off and milled around like sheep and ducks. We had soldiers poking us to keep moving. They herded us into a field, and I was certain we were going to be executed. But then we heard
pau-pau-pau,
more shooting, and the soldiers ran off and left us there. For a minute, we were too afraid to move. The next I thought, Why should I wait for them to come back and kill me? They can chase me. So I ran away. And soon everyone did, scattering every which way. I must have walked for twelve hours.”