Under Fishbone Clouds (32 page)

The spring of 1951 quickly settled in, hurried by the latest accounts of the army pushing hard south on the peninsula, helping out the neighbours in Korea. Yuying found she slept better when she knew there was a war happening. It was not the symphonic noise of breaking glass, men scuffling frantically through rubble or
jamming
rifles being cursed and thumped that calmed her – for, after all, the latest war was hundreds of miles away – but the feeling that her problems were small again, dwarfed by the scale of the chaos that existed outside her bedroom. She was comforted by the reminder that life was fragile, precious and threatened. Lives shrink, and so do troubles. Yuying stood in queues and markets and canteens straining to overhear snippets of conversations about local boys who had gone to Korea, about stealthy advances and unexpected counter-attacks. Soon she had memorised the names of the northern cities that their armies had taken, the foreign syllables muttered under her breath as she tried to get to sleep. This was how time passed.

The collection of ancient Chinese ideas on waging war, attributed to Sun Tzu, depicts war as a delicate art form. And just as art forces people to confront the borders and peripheries of their knowledge of themselves, so war provides them with the endpoint against which the rest of their desires and experiences can be measured. And to escape the horror of mass slaughter, mutilation, torture, pain and death, whole systems of belief are slowly pieced together. Sun Tzu stressed the stupidity of seeking rules that would explain or
dictate
any outcome, and yet this is what people have always done to survive. The paradox is this: people need war, because without it they do not know who they are, they do not know what it is to be human. The world is made up of close and faraway, wrote Sun Tzu, of danger and safety, of open plains and hidden paths, the
possibilities
of life and death.

Rain was slinking across the tops of the old mansions that had recently been converted into Party headquarters and hospitals, and Yuying’s bicycle was thudding through puddles, splashing the wet and dour faces queueing outside a food hall. She joined the hundred other bicycles wobbling from the factories and work stations towards the bridge, back over the river to the crammed tenements and new apartment buildings. She steered with a single hand,
zigzagging
with the rest of the storm-lashed commuters, using her other hand to push her matted hair from her eyes.

Her clothes were sodden, sticking to her skin, by the time she got home and dismounted to haul her bicycle through the gate and into the courtyard.

‘Yuying.’

She turned, instinctively into the storm. He was standing, umbrella-less and barefoot, the short collar of his dark jacket clutched high around his neck, on the other side of the street. Behind him the line of trees bent double in the wind. For a minute, perhaps longer, she simply stood staring at him, before she collected herself and beckoned, then turned to pull her bicycle up into the entrance hall.

Bian Shi was eating from a pile of sunflower seeds on her lap when her daughter entered, followed sheepishly by her soaked husband. As Yuying hunted through the nearby rooms for a dry towel, or at least a clean sheet, Bian Shi cracked the seeds between the teeth she still had left, pulling the salty kernel back with her tongue, and watched her son-in-law as he bit his nails. She was not going anywhere.

‘Have you eaten?’ Yuying asked.

‘Yes, don’t worry.’ They both knew he was lying to be polite.

‘Are you staying?’ Yuying surprised even herself with her
forthright
second question.

‘Yes. I mean, if you, well, I mean, yes. Yes,’ Jinyi said.

‘Good.’ They stood face to face, awkward and unsure whether to move closer. Yuying rubbed her hair with a damp towel, the only one she could find that the moths had not shredded, and then handed it to him. The sound of her mother crunching seeds echoed off the stone walls.

‘How are you?’

‘I can’t complain. I see not much has changed round here,’ he replied, obviously ignoring the bombed-out shops down the street,
the flags and banners on every building and the air of
disappointment
and neglect seeping through the musty old house.

‘Not too much. Well, I’d better make a start on dinner.’

And that was all that was said about his absence. Yuying moved to the kitchen, and added another hunk of wood to the little fire beneath the stove. She did not ask how he had travelled back, how he had survived the eighteen months, though something in her
calculated
that it might have taken that much time simply to cross provinces now that borders were controlled and communes strictly regulated. It shamed her to think that while she had sat here
doubting
him he might well have been trying to get to her, forced to avoid every big city and to stop and work in tiny village farms for a month or two every so often to earn enough to keep going. Indeed, with so many sent to the countryside and plans for the issue of urban-residency cards to curb the large exodus of people to the cities, it was exceptional that Jinyi had been able to move so freely. He would never mention how he had managed it.

‘Do you want to go back to the restaurant, Bian Jinyi? Yaba is still there. He’ll be back in a couple of hours and he’ll be delighted to see you, I’m sure. He would be glad to have the company in the kitchen, now that so many of the old faces are gone,’ Bian Shi said, following them into the dining room as Jinyi settled at the table.

He shrugged, and Bian Shi nodded as if she understood.

Yuying did not ask about the money from the box. She did not ask if he had missed her – the blisters on his feet, the scars on his hands and the tired smile he wore for her were proof enough. He had returned; that was all that mattered – returned with only a pair of trousers and a frayed jacket to his name. They both resolved never to talk of the separation, the seventeen months, one week, two days and five hours that she had counted out while her hands carried red-hot trays of bread from the oven.

‘I dreamt that my bicycle could fly,’ she said, as if to herself, as they lay squeezed in her childhood bed. They had not dared to return to the honeymoon room, for fear of both bad luck and any nasty
surprises
the departing servants might have left. They were pressed tight against the wall, but not quite touching, not quite ready yet.
The rain slid xylophonic across the roof and rasped at the cardboard now pasted over the window.

‘Maybe you knew, deep down, that I was on my way,’ Jinyi replied. ‘The truth wears such strange disguises.’

They remained like that, lying on their backs with only an inch of warm air between them, until they fell asleep. They woke up in the morning with their hands entwined.

Within a couple of months they were allocated a little house near the factory – where Jinyi had been given a job manning an oven by Comrade Wang, who had remembered the words of the
inspector
. They left Bian Shi and Yaba to the big house, to a past they were happier to erase. Their new home was two square rooms with bare brick walls, the smoke from the wood-burning stove caught by a flue and sent around the house, warming the clay
kang
bed on which they often sat and talked. It was a good allocation, they were told by their new neighbours: space for lots of cots in the bedroom, a water pump round the corner, and only a short walk to the recently built toilet shack, though admittedly this was nothing more than a hut containing wooden slats criss-crossing over a river of sewage, where local men came to chat and share cigarettes as they squatted above the filth. When the northeast wind blew, they could smell it from their new home.

This was where they would begin again, three
li
from the house where Yuying was born, in the city that Jinyi joked was a city of a thousand winters – each time one appeared to finish, another, colder and harsher than before, suddenly began. Jinyi felt childlike again, amazed by the snow now it no longer affected his livelihood, amazed by the cold northern city hazed in white. Together they learnt to look at the world around them anew, to draw from the thousand winters a thousand possibilities. They pointed out to each other the thousand forms of snow: the crystal flecks that inflicted tiny grazes on those braving the streets; the
Catherine-wheel
fingerprints of thin ice; the haze of dragon’s breath swelling the morning; the thick frosts that claimed the whole horizon; the tangy, tongue-tasted snowflakes; the crunchy duvets of snow that slurped up army boots; the snowmen wandering lost and bemused
between parks and communal gardens; and the dry-ice puffs of pale fog with aimless snowballs flitting by. This was to be their thaw.

Bian Shi visited when the black ice had been swept away and the streets were safe for her tiny feet, in order to tut at the cramped flat and the scrawny sofa they had set between the table and the stove. She brought round a grandfather clock as a gift, to catch their time, and an old ink painting of a pair of cranes to hang on one of the bare stone walls. The three of them sat at the table, discussing Yuying’s sisters and their errant husbands, one hen-pecked and flustered, the other large, stoic and silent, and passed between them a
zealous
leaflet handed out at the factory.

‘Will you teach me to read?’ Jinyi plucked up the courage to ask her again.

This time Yuying did not even think of laughing.

‘I would be delighted to.’

‘I mean, if I can’t read, how am I going to know what’s happening? Everyone is talking about the things in the papers, like what we should be doing or the new rules or how we should be helping the country. I’m part of this too – I’ve lived in the countryside, I know what it means to know injustice. If anyone knows about righting old wrongs, it’s me. If everyone is equal now, well, I should be equal too. But without words I’ll be lost in this city soon,’ he explained.

‘Don’t worry. Within a year you’ll be flying through the
newspapers
. We can start after dinner.’

‘I always wanted to read,’ Bian Shi chirped, though husband and wife paid her little attention. ‘There were a hundred books in my father’s house, but not one that we were allowed to touch. Books that could bring people back from the dead, dictionaries that had the names of all the animals that lived in this country thousands of years ago, and huge tomes that would slurp the marrow out of winter, he used to boast. But I never even saw a page.’

‘Well, you can listen too,’ Yuying sighed.

‘Oh no! I’m far too old, and anyhow, some things are better left as wishes. Oh, look, it’s snowing again.’

Winter seemed to last for years, with its long underwear and the sight of small children swamped in their father’s coats, with its hibernation and huddled nights. Winter is a bet, a challenge, a test of strength. Winter says endure or else give in, for there is no other choice. Winter says give way to death and be born again, that every
story must begin with an ending. And if the noise they heard as they drifted to sleep on those long winter nights was not the sound of a hungry demon hitching a ride on the thick clouds, then it must just have been the braying wind easing the hinges a little.