(2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter (34 page)

Much had changed, and I wished Precious Auntie could see how good my life was. I was a teacher and a married woman. I had both a husband and a father. And they were good people, unlike GaoLing’s in-laws, the Changs. My new family was genuine and sincere to others, the same inside as they showed outside. Precious Auntie had taught me that was important. Good manners are not enough, she had said, they are not the same as a good heart. Though Precious Auntie had been gone for all these years, I still heard her words, in happy and sad times, when it was important.

After the Japanese attacked the Mouth of the Mountain, GaoLing and I climbed to the hilltop whenever we heard distant gunfire. We looked for the direction of the puffs of smoke. We noticed which way the carts and trucks were moving along the roads. GaoLing joked that we brought news faster than the ham radio that Kai Jing and Miss Grutoff sat in front of for half the day, hoping to hear a word from the scientists who had gone to Peking. I did not understand why they wanted the radio to talk back to them. It spoke only about bad things—which port city was taken, how nearly everyone in this or that town was killed to teach the dead people a lesson not to fight against the Japanese.

“The Japanese won’t win here,” GaoLing would say in the evenings. “They may be fast in the sea, but here in the mountains they’re like fish flopping on the sand. Our men, on the other hand, are like goats.” Every night she said this to convince herself it was true. And for a while, it was true. The Japanese soldiers could not push their way up the mountain.

While water couldn’t run uphill, money did. All kinds of vendors from down below sneaked past the barricades and brought their goods up the mountain so that people from the hill towns could spend their money before they were killed. GaoLing, Kai Jing, and I would walk along the ridge road to buy luxuries. Sometimes I filled my tin with
shaoping,
the savory flaky buns coated with sesame seeds that I knew Teacher Pan loved so much. Other days I bought fried peanuts, dried mushrooms, or candied melon. There were many shortages during wartime, so any delicacies we could find were always an excuse for little parties.

We held them in Teacher Pan’s sitting room. GaoLing and Sister Yu always joined us, as did the scientists—Dong, the older man with a gentle smile, and Chao, the tall young one whose thick hair hung in front of his face. When we were pouring the tea, Teacher Pan would wind his phonograph. And as we savored our treats, we listened to a song by Rachmaninoff called “Oriental Dance.” I can still see Teacher Pan, waving his hand like a conductor, telling the invisible pianist and cello players where to quiet down, where to come back with full feeling. At the end of the party, he would lie on the cushioned bench, close his eyes, and sigh, grateful for the food, Rachmaninoff, his son, his daughter-in-law, his dear old friends. “This is the truest meaning of happiness,” he would tell us. Then Kai Jing and I would go for an evening stroll before we returned to our own room, grateful ourselves for the joy that exists only between two people.

Those were the small rituals we had, what comforted us, what we loved, what we could look forward to, what we could be thankful for and remember afterward.

Even in wartime and poverty, people must have plays and opera. “They are the speech and music of the soul,” Kai Jing told me. Every Sunday afternoon, the students performed for us, and they were very enthusiastic. But to be honest, the acting and music were not very good, painful sometimes to listen to and see, and we had to be very good actors ourselves to pretend this was enjoyment beyond compare. Teacher Pan told me that the plays were just as bad when I was a student and performed in them. How long ago that seemed. Now Miss Towler was bent over with old age, almost as short as Sister Yu. When she played the piano, her nose nearly touched the keys. Teacher Pan had cataracts and worried that soon he would not be able to paint anymore.

When winter came, we heard that many of the Communist soldiers were falling sick and dying of diseases before they had a chance to fire a single bullet. The Japanese had more medicine, warmer clothes, and they took food and supplies from whatever villages they occupied. With fewer Communist troops to defend the hills, the Japanese were crawling up, and with each step, they chopped down trees so no one could hide and escape. Because they were coming closer, we could no longer safely walk the ridge road to buy food.

Yet Kai Jing and his colleagues still went to the quarry, and this made me crazy with anxiety. “Don’t go,” I always begged him. “Those old bones have been there for a million years. They can wait until after the war.” That quarry was the only reason we had arguments, and sometimes when I remember this, I think I should have argued more, argued until he stopped going. Then I think, no, I should have argued less, or not at all. Then maybe his last memories of me would not have been those of a complaining wife.

When Kai Jing was not at the quarry, he taught the girls in my class about geology. He told them stories about ancient earth and ancient man, and I listened, too. He drew pictures on the chalkboard of icy floods and fiery explosions from underneath, of the skull of Peking Man and how it was different from a monkey’s, higher in the forehead, more room for his changing brain. If Miss Towler or Miss Grutoff were listening, Kai Jing did not draw the monkey or talk about the ages of the earth. He knew that his ideas about life before and everlasting were different from theirs.

One day, Kai Jing told the girls how humans grew to be different from monkeys: “Ancient Peking Man could stand up and walk. We see this by the way his bones are formed, the footprints he left in the mud. He used tools. We see this by the bones and rocks he shaped to cut and smash. And Peking Man probably also began to speak in words. At least his brain was capable of forming a language.”

A girl asked, “What words? Were they Chinese?”

“We don’t know for certain,” Kai Jing said, “because you cannot leave behind spoken words. There was no writing in those days. That happened only thousands of years ago. But if there was a language, it was an ancient one that likely existed only in that time. And we can only guess what Peking Man tried to say. What does a person need to say? What man, woman, or child does he need to say it to? What do you think was the very first sound to become a word, a meaning?”

“I think a person should always say her prayers to God,” another girl said. “She should say thank you to those who are nice to her.”

That night, when Kai Jing was already asleep, I was still thinking about these questions. I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant “storm.” The smell of fire that meant “Flee.” The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about such things?

And then I realized what the first word must have been:
ma,
the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother’s breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

One spring afternoon, the students were performing a play. I remember it well, a scene from
The Merchant of Venice,
which Miss Towler had translated into Chinese. “Fall down on your knees and pray,” they were chanting. And right then, my life changed. Teacher Pan burst into the hall, panting and shouting, “They’ve seized them.”

Between broken breaths, he told us that Kai Jing and his friends had gone to the quarry for their usual inspection. Teacher Pan had gone along for the fresh air and small talk. At the quarry they found soldiers waiting. They were Communists, and since they were not Japanese, the men were not concerned.

The leader of the soldiers approached them. He asked Kai Jing, “Hey, why haven’t you joined us?”

“We’re scientists not soldiers,” Kai Jing explained. He started to tell them about the work with Peking Man, but one of the soldiers cut him off: “No work has been going on here in months.”

“If you’ve worked to preserve the past,” the leader said, trying to be more cordial, “surely you can work to create the future. Besides, what past will you save if the Japanese destroy China?”

“It’s your duty to join us,” another soldier grumbled. “Here we are spilling our own blood to protect your damn village.”

The leader waved for him to be quiet. He turned to Kai Jing. “We’re asking all men in the villages we defend to help us. You don’t need to fight. You can cook or clean or do repairs.” When no one said anything, he added in a less friendly voice: “This isn’t a request, it’s a requirement. Your village owes us this. We order you. If you don’t come along as patriots, we’ll take you as cowards.”

It happened that quickly, Teacher Pan said. The soldiers would have taken him as well, but they decided an old man who was nearly blind was more trouble than help. As the soldiers led the men away, Teacher Pan called out, “How long will they be gone?”

“You tell me, comrade,” the leader said. “How long will it take to drive out the Japanese?”

Over the next two months, I grew thin. GaoLing had to force me to eat, and even then I could not taste anything. I could not stop thinking of the curse from the Monkey’s Jaw, and I told GaoLing this, though no one else. Sister Yu held Praying for a Miracle meetings, asking that the Communists defeat the Japanese soon, so that Kai Jing, Dong, and Chao could return to us quickly. And Teacher Pan wandered the courtyards, his eyes misty with cataracts. Miss Grutoff and Miss Towler would not allow the girls to go outside the compound anymore, even though the fighting took place in other areas of the hills. They had heard terrible stories of Japanese soldiers raping girls. They found a large American flag and hung this over the gateway, as if this were a charm that would protect them from evil.

Two months after the men disappeared, Sister Yu’s prayers were half answered. Three men walked through the gateway early in the morning, and Miss Grutoff beat the gong of the Buddha’s Ear. Soon everyone was shouting that Kai Jing, Dong, and Chao had returned. I ran so fast across the courtyard I tripped and nearly broke my ankle. Kai Jing and I grabbed each other and gave in to happy sobs. His face was thinner and very brown; his hair and skin smelled of smoke. And his eyes—they were different. I remember thinking that at the time. They were faded, and I now think some part of his life force had already gone.

“The Japanese now occupy the hills,” he told us. “They drove off our troops.” That was how Sister Yu learned that the other half of her miracle prayer had not come true. “They’ll come looking for us.”

I heated water, made a bath, and washed his body with a cloth as he sat in the narrow wooden tub. And then we went to our bedchamber and I pinned a cloth over the lattice window so it would be dark. We lay down, and as he rocked me, he talked to me in soft murmurs, and it took all of my senses to realize that I was in his arms, that his eyes were looking at mine. “There is no curse,” he said. I was listening hard, trying to believe that I would always hear him speak. “And you are brave, you are strong,” he went on. I wanted to protest that I didn’t want to be strong, but I was crying too much to speak. “You cannot change this,” he said. “This is your character.”

He kissed my eyes, one at a time. “This is beauty, and this is beauty, and you are beauty, and love is beauty and we are beauty. We are divine, unchanged by time.” He said this until I promised I believed him, until I agreed it was enough.

The Japanese came for Kai Jing, Dong, and Chao that evening. Miss Grutoff was brave and declared that she was an American and they had no right to enter the orphanage. They paid no attention to her, and when they started to walk toward the rooms where the girls were hiding under their beds, Kai Jing and the other men came forward and said they did not need to look any further. I tried to follow.

A few days later, I heard wailing in the main hall. When GaoLing came to me with red eyes, I stopped her from saying what I already knew. For a month more, I tried to keep Kai Jing alive in my heart and mind. For a while longer, I tried so much to believe what he had said: “There is no curse.” And then finally I let GaoLing say the words.

Two Japanese officers questioned the men day and night, tried to force them to say where the Communist troops had gone. On the third day, they lined them up, Kai Jing, Dong, and Chao, as well as thirty other villagers. A soldier stood nearby with a bayonet. The Japanese officer said he would ask them once again, one at a time. And one by one, they shook their heads, one by one they fell. In my mind, sometimes Kai Jing was first, sometimes he was last, sometimes he was in between.

I was not there when this happened, yet I saw it. The only way I could push it out of my mind was to go into my memory. And there in that safe place, I was with him, and he was kissing me when he told me, “We are divine, unchanged by time.”

CHARACTER