Dream of the Blue Room (21 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

In the morning, a thick mist hangs over the city. Doors stand open, but the businesses are gone. In the apartments above the shops, bright curtains flutter through open windows. A plastic cup skitters toward me on the breeze. At the base of a sycamore tree, a rusty bicycle wheel rests on a crate of kitchen sundries. There are no voices, no jingling of bicycle bells. Here and there are relics of the old life left behind: a pot perched on a stove, burnt black; three bowls of half-eaten rice on an outdoor table; laundry hanging stiffly from a window; a set of mahjong tiles atop a cardboard box. From the arrangement of the tiles I can tell that a game was stopped midway. I am reminded of photographs of Chernobyl, of the abandoned homes on the island of Destiny. It is as if life, one minute, was in full swing. Moments later, the people stood up and walked away.

I bend to dislodge a pebble caught in my sandal. As I rise a figure comes into view—an old woman standing at a tea stall. She is dressed in loose blue pants and a blouse. Her short hair is the same silver as the baiji we saw in captivity in Nanjing. I believe at first that I have imagined her, but then the apparition calls out to me. Although I can’t understand the words, the gesture is familiar. With one hand she tends her stove. With the other she beckons me over.

She points to a wooden chair in front of her stall, and I sit down. In front of us, the river. Behind us, the empty city. To our right, terraced hills rise toward the deep green pleats of mountains towering in the mist. In the air, the sweet fragrance of paddy fields mingles with the ancient smell of the river. The old woman fills two cups with steaming tea, then sits down beside me. She begins to talk. She talks for some time, her voice rising and falling, occasionally laughing at some joke she has made. All the while she looks straight ahead.

I can’t understand a word she is saying, but she goes on weaving her stories, every now and then lifting her arm to point this way or that, or to make a sweeping gesture with her hand, indicating a wide expanse. I imagine that she is telling me the story of her childhood, how, as a girl, she played in these very streets. My mind is set adrift on her stories.

In those days, there were children everywhere. We skipped stones down by the river. We wore yellow dresses. My mother ran this tea shop, which before had been run by her mother, and her mother before her. My father worked the fields. I had two older sisters and a younger brother, whom we called Little Panda, because he had dark circles beneath his eyes. In those days we woke early to climb the tall steps to the temple, where we burned incense and said our prayers. Before Little Panda came, we went there with our mother to pray for a baby boy. Can you see the temple? Maybe it is gone now. For a long time I have not heard anyone saying prayers
.

In the morning we went to school. We practiced calligraphy
with paintbrushes on the street. On our brushes there was only water, and when the sun emerged from behind the mountains our characters disappeared. Teacher Li said that it was a good thing to paint characters in this way. “Everything vanishes,” he said. “All things go away.” But I drew beautiful characters, and
I
was angry to see them fade. So one day I secretly dipped my wet paintbrush into coal. When Teacher Li saw my characters on the street long after the sun had dried the rest, he gave me a long lecture. He was angry at my disobedience, but it was worth it!

On that street over there I met my husband. He was a tracker. He came here from Fuling, upriver. He was the tallest man in the village, and strong like an ox. The muscles of his legs were like iron from climbing the hills and pulling the junks through the rapids. He had a deep groove around his waist from the rope that was fastened around him. I was so afraid for him. Sometimes I would walk to the end of the street and look down and see a line of trackers staggering up the hill above the river, the heavy ship laboring behind. Every day we would hear about a different tracker, or several, who had died. Each day and night I waited for him to come home. When word came to the village, “Two trackers died today,”
I would line up with the other young wives to hear the names. But my husband only died last year, after our children and grandchildren moved into the new settlement
.

The old woman talks on and on, and I wonder how disparate are the stories I imagine for her and the stories she really tells. As I listen, the threads of the stories wind around themselves in my head, old stories unraveling as new ones take shape.

The old woman pauses, as if waiting for me to say something. Then she speaks again, and from the tone of her voice I can tell she is asking a question.

“Wo bu hui shuo zhongwen,” I say.
I don’t speak Chinese
.

For a long moment she is silent. She drains the last tea from her cup, then, with much effort, stands and walks over to me. She puts a hand on my shoulder, then feels my face, my hair. Although her eyes are trained on me, she seems to be gazing through me rather than at me. A look of recognition crosses her face.

“Aaah, Gweilo,” she says slowly. And then, again, as if by saying it aloud she can make herself believe it: “Gweilo.”
White ghost
.

That is when it occurs to me: this old woman is almost blind. She is only now discovering that I am not Chinese. For weeks she has been sitting alone in her abandoned city, tending her tea shop, waiting for another human to appear. Early in the morning she wakes, heats water to bathe in the little basin in the courtyard. She hoists the awning on her tea stall, sets the kettle on the fire, spoons loose leaves into a mug, and waits for her first customer, as she has been doing for many years. But no customer comes; everyone has moved to the new settlement high in the hills across the river.

In the past, I imagine, she had many customers. The men would come every morning. They would read the paper and tell bawdy jokes to one another before heading to work. The young women would come by to rest their feet on their way to the butcher, or before going down to the river to sell rice and figs to passing junks. Sometimes children would congregate at her tea stall after school and beg for toffee peanuts and sesame snaps. The schoolchildren had neat haircuts and carried books in brightly colored satchels.

Several years ago the government people came through and held mandatory meetings to tell the villagers about the new dam. They talked about how the dam would bring power and prosperity, how it would save many lives. They promised the villagers beautiful new apartments with gleaming white tile façades, in a new city high above the old one. “Why do we need new apartments?” the old woman remembers saying. “I was born in this house. Many generations of my family have lived in this house.” She could not imagine life without her courtyard, without the familiar voices of children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews.

“Your house is too old,” one of the young men said gently. “You have to go down the street to use the toilet. You have to heat your bathwater on the stove. Your new apartment will be a better place to enjoy your old age.”

“My house is old but it is sturdy,” she said. “I will stay here.”

The government man laughed at her. “This village will be underwater! Are you a fish? Do you propose to live at the bottom of the river?” Even she got a good laugh at this. She imagined herself sitting underwater at her tea stall, little sea creatures flitting past, nipping at the tea leaves. She imagined swimming side by side with the baiji. When the meeting was over she went back to her tea stall. She stayed open later than usual, because that night the village was bubbling with energy. People sat at the tables outside her stall and talked late into the night. But the old woman was not concerned. “Nonsense,” a friend assured her. “A city underwater? No such thing will ever happen! Our village has been here for two thousand years.”

Soon, young men from upriver came with big buckets of red paint and drew numbers on rocks high above the village. It was a lovely shade of red but the numbers meant nothing to her. In this village things were always coming and going. The Red Guard had come many years before, when she was a young woman, and on the few temples that they did not burn to the ground, they made big red signs proclaiming angry slogans.

The new red marks are different, though. Her eyesight is too poor to read them—she can only see a vague splash of bright red on buildings and hillsides—but her son explained that the red marks indicate the level to which the water will rise after the dam is built.

Some nights she dreams of the bright red numbers, she sees the river rising, first soaking the streets, then covering the floor of her tea stall. In these dreams she is always standing at her stall, and she looks down and sees that her feet are immersed in water, then her calves, her knees. The loose cotton of her pants billows as the water fills them, and then her blouse pillows out. Tea leaves rise on the water and float away. She is concerned at first for her porcelain teapot, but it is heavy and does not float away. She feels the water creeping up her chest, her neck. It is very cold. The children coming home from school are small, and the water has already risen over their heads. They walk slowly, instead of running, their little round knees pushing against the weight of the water. “Grandma Sweetcakes!” they say, holding out their hands, but their words come out garbled. Bubbles rush from their mouths. Their skin is bluish and tight. The girls’ long braids float above their heads. And still the water rises. It fills her mouth, her nostrils. It is cool and coarse against her eyeballs. She had always imagined the river as a smooth presence, like silk, but no, it has a texture to it, a roughness. The river is not like other water. It is Jiang, The River.

I try to imagine what it must be like for her to be sitting here with me. For months, perhaps, she has not sold a cup of tea. And then one day, in the midst of all this loneliness, she hears footsteps. She can tell from the lightness of the steps that it is not a man, and from the quickness of the steps that it is a young woman, not an old one. Elated, she bids the traveler to rest. The traveler is very quiet, so the old woman assumes she must be tired. The old woman talks and talks, saying everything she has been saving up in her mind since the last time she saw her son. She does not have many more years, and she has plenty she wants to say.

Later, perhaps embarrassed for talking so much, she says to the girl, What is your name? Do I know you? Have you come to retrieve things you left behind? Tell me, is the water rising yet?

Something strange happens. The girl speaks to her in an unusual voice. The words are vaguely familiar, but they have no meaning. Her tones are wrong, her words too round, as if she is blowing them through a fishnet. The woman thinks about the words, strings the sounds together. Ah, the girl is saying that she cannot speak Chinese. But this is impossible! The old woman has never met anyone who cannot speak Chinese. For years she has seen the big ships passing on the river, headed upstream to Chongqing, or downstream to Wuhan and Shanghai. She knows that these boats carry the
waiguoren
. She has heard of them, with their skin so pale, like ghosts, as if they had been laid in the sun and bleached.

“Gweilo,” she says again, touching my face, my neck. She leans down and smells my hair. Perhaps she is at a loss as to what to do with this strange creature at her tea stall. Perhaps she has taken a liking to me. Perhaps she simply doesn’t know what to do. She goes to her chair and sits in silence, as if she is waiting, and because she has told me so much, I begin talking to her.

I tell her about Demopolis River, how it was warm and clear on hot summer days, how it was cool and brown after a rain. I tell her about the oak trees that lined its banks, dripping pecans into the slowly moving water, and about the kids who would float on inflatable rafts, and how, late on a Saturday afternoon, Amanda Ruth and I would ride inner tubes down the river, and all along its banks families would be cooking out: boiled lobster, fried catfish, shrimp kebabs. There would be picnic tables piled high with corn on the cob and potato salad, cucumbers and cantaloupes, tall clear pitchers of sweet iced tea sweating in the afternoon heat. Sometimes we’d float by at just the right moment to see Mr. Seymour split a watermelon over his knee, the black seeds would go flying, and he’d toss chunks of the watermelon out to us in the river. Sometimes we’d paddle up to the little beach behind the Stonehouse, an abandoned mansion that was named for Mr. and Mrs. Stone, who had been dead forever, and we’d walk up the tottering steps of their back porch and sit on the wooden swing, and we’d swing back and forth for hours, talking, holding hands, listening to the river, and when it was late we would take our inner tubes around to the road and roll them all the way back to Amanda Ruth’s, where her mother would be waiting with dinner.

I tell the old woman about Amanda Ruth’s passion for China, how she borrowed Chinese language tapes from the library and covered her closet walls with maps she’d traced from the atlas, how she saved all her birthday money and babysitting wages for the trip she planned to make. I tell her how I scattered Amanda Ruth’s ashes over the river.

“She’s home now,” I say. “Amanda Ruth finally made it home.” The old woman nods and smiles, as if she understands.

After some time I look at my watch and realize that I’ve been sitting here for nearly an hour. A strange peace has settled over me. I have traveled hundreds of miles up what is perhaps the most important river in the world. I have visited temples and pagodas, factories and antique shops. I have seen mountains of unimaginable height, their bases shrouded in mist so that they seem to be rooted in heaven rather than in earth. I have passed through the biggest construction project on earth. But it is here at this tiny tea stall in an abandoned city that I have found the secret heart of China. This woman has seen governments come and go. It is likely that she has borne children who have given her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Like the river, she is patient. The Yangtze may be tamed for a time, but here is the bare fact of the matter: it is still The River. Like this woman, it is patient. In the end, one cannot help but believe The River will win.