The Middle Kingdom (5 page)

‘Prick?' asked Dr Yu.

‘Schmuck,' I said helplessly, knowing my meaning was still lost. ‘Asshole!' I said much too loudly, sure Dr Yu would get this phrase despite my confusion of body parts and metaphors. ‘Not ass-face, ass
hole
.'

Dr Yu smiled. ‘Ah,' she said. ‘Yes.' She scribbled another character on her palm and flashed it at me. ‘Hard to miss,' she said.

‘Hard to miss,' I agreed.

‘You will come to have dinner at my home tomorrow night?' she asked. ‘We would be most happy – you can meet my husband and my son. My husband is a doctor and maybe he can fix your cough.'

I hesitated; the idea was impossible. We had some presentation scheduled for the next night, some show or dinner or entertainment, as we did every night. All we were ever going to see of China was the thin, thin skin, creamed and powdered and rouged and depilated.

‘Please,' she said, watching me think. ‘It would be a great honor for us.'

I looked back for Walter but he was gone, vanished the way all of this, the singing and dancing and drinking and talking, the eating and proud hospitality, would vanish if he had his way. Already a dark yellow, sulfurous cloud hung over the city and made my lungs sting, as if I were manufacturing acid rain inside my chest. I coughed, then coughed again. I looked out the window and saw Walter near the bus, clicking his index finger against his teeth and sheltering his head with a newspaper. He stood all alone.

‘I'd be delighted to come,' I told Dr Yu, making my mind up that instant. I liked her face, and her curiosity. And even if she'd approached me only because of my connection to Walter, it was me she'd asked to visit. ‘Can I come alone?'

‘Of course,' she said. ‘That's what I meant.' Quickly, while the waiters turned the lights off and the other guests left, she gave me directions. ‘Come to the Temple of Heaven,' she said. ‘At five. Take a cab. I will meet you there at the Triple Sounds Stone and take you home – otherwise you will never find it. Is that all right?'

‘That's wonderful,' I said. She ducked into the courtyard and vanished, and I crept through the warm rain to our packed, polyglot bus. The lights inside the bus were on and the tired white faces of my companions shone starkly through the windows, mouths open in gaping yawns and eyes closed in irritation at the thought of the half-hour journey to the isolated splendor of our hotel in the Fragrant Hills.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I retraced some of my great-uncle Owen's footsteps. He had visited China several times in the 1930s, traveling all around the country before the Japanese occupation; he'd returned twice in the late 1940s, after the end of the war. The place he'd visited most often was Beijing, where he'd stayed for months at a time in a house he rented from a friend of his, a British journalist who periodically toured the southern cities, gathering information on the student movements and the rumblings of rebellion. In her absence, Uncle Owen had cared for her house and had tried to recreate a way of life that was already obsolete.

Uncle Owen had entertained me with his China tales since I'd been old enough to listen, and after he died his companion had sent me his Beijing diaries when I'd learned that I was to make this trip. From these, I'd formed a hazy picture of this city Uncle Owen had loved. The house he'd rented had belonged to a palace eunuch before it passed to the Englishwoman, and was very old-fashioned: no plumbing, no electricity, no central heat. He read by kerosene lamps, and at night he slept on a
kang
– a raised brick platform heated from within by a small stove. His rooms were heated by pot-bellied stoves in which he burned balls of coal dust mixed with clay. From the peddlers who came to his door, he'd bought iced bitter prune soup and steamed stuffed dumplings, and he'd struggled, as I had, with the melodic tones of spoken Mandarin.

In winter winds so cold that he'd worn two padded jackets beneath his robe, he'd strolled through the gardens of Beihai and sipped tea by the shores of the lake. He'd befriended the servants who cared for the house, and he'd thrown parties in the courtyard, under a mat roof raised on bamboo poles. Beijing was crumbling then, its palaces and fine homes being broken up, and he'd haunted the local curio shops, training his eye and buying fabrics and brass, copper and pewter, ivory and rugs and scrolls and lacquer and small exotic carvings. When he left Beijing for the last time, just after he'd seen the new government parade past the Gate of Heavenly Peace in 1949, he said the destruction and chaos had broken his heart.

Despite that, he'd managed to profit from the confusion. ‘Upper-class people sold Ming furniture by weight,' he'd told me. ‘Porcelains and paintings and bronzes went by the crate – everyone wanted to get rid of the things that betrayed their class status.' He'd packed up his treasures and sent them home to Massachusetts, where they'd kept his business going for the rest of his life and had sustained me as well. Still, he swore his treasures were nothing compared to what had lain within the gated walls of the Forbidden City. He'd spent days in those dusty palaces, and had described them to me so many times that I'd dreamed of them. He'd once said something that made me sure the Temple of Heaven lay within the Forbidden City, so when I broke away from Walter and hired a cab to bring me to Dr Yu, I didn't even check my guidebook.

At Tiananmen, I dismissed my cab like a fool. The great gate guarding the grounds was still intact, as were the watchtowers guarding the corners, and after I paid my ten
fen
I stood inside the gate, right where Uncle Owen had been a score of times. I had a picture of him standing here, dressed in scholar's robes and holding a sprig of flowering plum, and I had forty-five minutes in which to see some of what he'd loved.

Only when I entered the first building did I remember the rest of Uncle Owen's tale: the palaces had been looted twice, once by the Japanese and then again by the Kuomintang. Nothing was the way I'd pictured it. In the Three Great Halls, the surviving Ming and Qing relics were jumbled with treasures brought from all over China to fill the gaps. Song and Yuan paintings, water clocks, jade seals, cooking vessels, archeological finds; none of the rooms were intact, and they had the feel of a junk shop or of a museum exhibit hastily arranged by an amateur. The things were only things, dusty and out of place, and I couldn't recapture Uncle Owen's rapt appreciation.

As I wandered past the Dragon Throne and the great bronze turtle whose mouth had once billowed smoke, I tried to feel the ghosts of the emperors and empresses, the eunuchs and the concubines, but the rooms were dead for me. I put my lack of interest down to tiredness and overexposure: I had seen too much in the past week, too much, too fast, too false. I turned away from the turtle and then I heard Zillah's voice again:
Of course you don't like it
, she said.
The whole place is a lie.

Seven days since I'd last heard her; her reappearance frightened me. I knew my bronchitis was getting worse and that the waves of heat and cold flooding me weren't a good sign, but I wanted so much to see Dr Yu that I willed my hands to stop trembling and refused to acknowledge what I'd just heard. So I'd heard a voice; it was only a voice. Maybe I was starved for English words.

‘Where's the Triple Sounds Stone?' I asked out loud, as if someone might answer me. ‘It's almost five.'

A group of women stared at me warily.

‘
Ni
jiang Yingyu ma?
' I asked. ‘Do you speak English?'

The women shook their heads and moved away.

‘Triple Sounds Stone?' I said to everyone who passed. No one knew what I meant. I walked from hall to hall, up steps, down ramps, past carved pillars and painted dragons and another large bronze turtle, and still I couldn't find the stone or Dr Yu. Five o'clock came and went, and then quarter past. I was trembling and weak and beginning to get concerned.

A man with a black and red eye and a strangely twisted mouth approached me near the Dragon Throne, after I'd circled past for the third time. ‘You are lost?' he said in English. ‘I may be of help?'

I was so glad to hear his voice that I reached out and shook his hand. ‘I'm supposed to meet a friend,' I said. ‘At the Triple Sounds Stone.'

‘You have no guide?' he said. ‘You come here alone?'

I nodded. I couldn't help looking at his mouth, and he caught me. ‘My mouth twist from sleeping near open window,' he said. ‘A draft. Please excuse this way I look. My eye – I have acupuncture for curing this mouth, and instead comes this coloring. You are American?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Your friend you meet is Chinese?'

I nodded. ‘And I'm late. Already. And actually, I haven't been feeling so well.'

He looked at me gravely. ‘This is visible,' he said. ‘You appear to have a deficiency of
yin
– your nose and throat feel dry?'

‘All the time,' I said.

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.'