Inheritance (12 page)

“I’ll take ten of them,” she said.

She had never been able to swallow pills. Some terrified reflex always throttled her, flushed their bitterness up into her mouth. But she paid the ten silver coins without a word. She went home and ground up two pills with a mortar and pestle, hid the powder in a sweet red bean paste bun, and forced herself to eat it.

That night, while they made love, forbidden words streamed out, words that she had overheard long ago, in some dark and terrible time: “I love you. Don’t you leave me. Don’t you ever, ever leave me.”

“I’m your husband,” he said back to her, weary, patient.

Soon he departed for the west. On the morning of Christmas Eve, Japanese soldiers entered the city and Hangzhou was fallen territory.

WINTER RAINS CLOSED IN.
Every day, Junan struggled to procure the offerings for her father’s weekly memorial service. The curfews and sudden seizures made even a trip to the market dangerous. The flood of Japanese soldiers had depleted local supplies and driven up prices; variety was hard to find. There was nothing but overripe pears and raw grapefruits, hard pale pomelos from the south. Junan bargained for dried mushrooms, ginger, and bean threads to make steamed dumplings suitable for the monks. She helped make up a great plate of elaborately shaped, molded tofu meats. She knew that afterward the monks devoured everything, and that if they were satisfied, they would think favorably upon her and her family.

She stood next to Yinan in the temple for the sixth weekly ceremony. Behind her, the servants wailed and mourned. The smell of incense and the fusty odor of the monks sickened her. She had not been able to eat that morning, and her body quaked with emptiness. Now she swallowed hard against the low, harsh drone of chanting.

Se bu i kong

kong bu i se

se chi shi kong

Kong chi shi se

Shou xiang xing shi

Life does not differ from nothingness, and nothingness from life; the same is true for emotions, thoughts, desires, and consciousness.

Through the wavering incense smoke, she watched Yinan make her obeisances. When they had finally learned of Mao Gao’s death, Yinan had taken the news quietly. Following the death of her father she grew even more subdued. It would be difficult to marry her after this sequence of bad luck. Even Chen, the neighbor boy, was now out of reach, and the most promising local men had left to build the wartime capital. Meanwhile, Yinan was growing up. Her long braids swayed gracefully as she approached the altar. She was old enough to pin them into a bun. Yinan chose three sticks of incense, waited for the sticks to flare and light, and pushed them carefully into the brass holder. What kind of woman would she become? Would she grow more odd than ever, or would this tragedy settle her, make her into a more suitable wife?

As Junan walked to the altar, she remembered the services she had attended for her mother. Then there had been three of them, plus Hu Mudan, to mourn for Chanyi. Now there were only two, herself and Yinan. Fewer and fewer people who were able to remember. Junan held the frail sticks of incense to the candle. After they took on the flame, she blew on them until each was tipped by a glowing red nub, then placed them one by one into the pile of ash. As she gazed upon the gray dust in the brass holder, the burned remains of a thousand sticks of incense, she felt fear coming over her. It was a selfish fear, she knew: an overwhelming dread that had to do not with her father, who had died respectably, but her own life. She prayed for enough courage to be responsible for the family. Her dread lingered on the slow ride home. It stayed with her even after she received a telegram from Li Ang, letting her know he had arrived in Changsha and she need not worry.

In the next few days, she was taken by an overpowering lassitude. A new queasiness, a tickle in her stomach, convinced her she had succeeded. But she could not relax. Her fear continued on for weeks, even after she knew for certain that she was pregnant.

A MONTH AFTER
the temple service, Junan walked into what had been her father’s office. She wore a black tunic tied with a rough hemp belt of mourning and carried a pile of business letters. She shut the door behind her quickly, impatiently.

Ever since she had grown old enough to read the newspaper fluently and long after she had mastered basic mathematics, she had desired to be alone in his office. She had watched the pleasure her father took in money and had known somehow that she would find the same. For years, she’d wanted to trace the thread of profit through the tables and figures in his accounts. She had longed to work on his black abacus.

The office was as he had left it, filled with boxes of ledgers coated with a light veil of dust. She went straight to the desk and began to wipe it off with a rag that she had brought for that purpose. But she did not move anything; she wanted to preserve whatever she could of the order in which he had left it. This order was the only map she would have to follow into the maze of his finances.

She forced her eyes to the page and sat very straight at his desk, moving only to return a ledger to its place or pick out another one. Her father’s chair was large, but she was as tall as he had been. She went carefully and slowly through a page of figures. The page described, she gleaned, the expenses and profit made on cotton in his warehouse. She was familiar with his messy and occasionally inaccurate characters, but she had never tried to decipher his numbers: neat, cramped, and strangely luxurious, with knotty flourishes in the 2s and 3s, and careful commas. It was like learning to read a new language. The first page took all her energy, but she kept on, following and following, and the second was easier, and the third yet easier, until it was possible for her to run her eyes across a page and understand what she saw there.

The pale sunlight filtering through the leaves of the mulberry tree made a lacy pattern on the paper. Then it moved onto the desk before shifting away entirely. As she read she could almost hear the rhythmic clicking of the paigao tiles. A string of interest payments had come due and had to be repaid. Their household costs had eaten into the remaining income. He had sold pieces of land, steadily, until there was nothing left but that warehouse loaded with cotton that the Japanese had confiscated.

In the safe, she found only a bag filled with odds and ends of currencies once widely accepted, but now virtually useless. There were silver coins from the end of the Qing Dynasty, bowl-shaped from being endorsed repeatedly by merchants with their steel-die chops. There were Mexican eagle-serpent dollars. Silver taels from many years ago, both a standard Shanghai tael and irregular local liang. Scattered through this were innumerable pieces of the old imperial square-holed cash.

In the back of the safe was a pile of chips, scrawled with the names and numbers of debts and money owed. They were enormous, shocking sums that could have come only from gambling. Finally, a single sheet of paper, a more formal IOU, one of two copies drawn at a notary: “The deed of the house shall be given to Li Ang upon his marriage to my daughter Junan. The property shall be transferred to the Li family and its male heirs. If my daughter bears no male heir, this house becomes the property of Charlie Kong.” The paper was marked with both their chops, and dated 1930.

At dinner she sat unable to speak. The ghost of a page, brightly dotted with her father’s cramped figures, hovered before her eyes. Her sister and the servants left her alone. She understood that they believed her to be overcome with grief. She didn’t try to talk them out of their opinions, but sat at the hushed table, turning the facts over in her mind. There was no money. There was no house. She was alone. Behind the white mask of her face, she planned. Had Li Ang known of this? She suspected he had not. He had not the guile to keep such facts from her. It would be best to say nothing. She would economize. She would call on her father’s friends and demand something in payment for their IOUs. That night she asked Gu Taitai to bring the largest brass kettle from the kitchen. She placed a heap of ledgers in the bottom of the
kettle, twisted one thin sheet into a taper, lit a match, and carefully touched the flame to the paper’s edge.

SHE WAS ONE
of many women who struggled to feed and clothe a family under occupation as the merchants’ shelves grew bare. Supplies dwindled to the bottom of the bin; grains were sold mixed with mouse droppings. Yinan was no help. She was devastated by the disappearance of the pet chicken, Guagua, which Junan suspected had been stolen and sold on the black market. Charlie Kong, like most shopkeepers, was not allowed to close his store despite the lack of stock. His shack was converted into a distribution center for Japanese-made goods. There were odd excesses and shortages; there were mandatory purchases. Everyone was required to turn in their shortwave radios and purchase Japanese-made radios with limited range that rendered most stations, save those approved by the new government, inaccessible. She and the others hoarded food and clothes. They avoided holding on to paper money. They met to talk and joke and play mahjong, but when their doors were closed they were like brooding hens, moody and anxious, hiding in their rooms, clutching their jewelry and their gold and silver coins.

Most of these women were older than she, or seemed older somehow—plump and indifferent with their brows plucked into thin crescents, or bone-thin, sour, and quick. Either type missed nothing. They were the channels through which Junan learned almost everything she knew about her husband. She had heard little from Li Ang since his transfer. She should have guessed that he would be a poor correspondent. It was through talking to these women that she first learned that the government would soon move the capital farther west, to Chongqing.

That afternoon they played mahjong. Junan thought of how she should have moved the family west, over his objections. He had once mentioned the possibility of a transfer to Sun Li-jen’s Tax Police in Chongqing. She should have known.

Around her, the women were discussing the way that so many men who’d left were taking concubines. This news had come gradually, trickling in by rumor. It had just happened to an acquaintance of Pu Taitai’s. The first wife had tried to strangle herself with the cord of her silk robe.

“She’s a very young girl.”

“She hasn’t learned.”

“Peng.”

The lamplight, making a circle over the table, barely lit their faces. They were women whose men had long ago ceased to want them. Yao Taitai’s big green mole cast a shadow over her sallow forehead. Wen Taitai slumped in her qipao, with her small, blinking, myopic eyes and flat nose reminding Junan more than ever of a reptile. But Junan could not take her eyes away from Wen Taitai’s mother, with her mannish face and great, old ears, the skin a pale tissue fitting loosely over her sagging features. They said she had once beaten her husband when he had tried to take a concubine. Now a widow, she took solace in her grandsons and her mahjong. With a loud crack, she whacked her tiles into line with her stick.

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT
there was no more money brought one freedom: there was no business to look after, and the family could leave. Junan paid a visit to Charlie Kong’s shabby shop. Charlie maintained his cheerfulness, although he was a little thinner, as the shortage of wine was making itself known even to the most devoted. Now he made a few extra yuan by working an illegal telegraph transmitter in the back room.

DEAR HUSBAND. I WILL BRING THE FAMILY TO

CHONGQING. JUNAN.

He wrote back almost immediately.

JUNAN. STAY THERE, FOR SAKE OF OUR FAMILY.

YOUR HUSBAND.

That night, she found spots of blood in her underpants. She took a breath. She should not have moved around so much. She would have to be more careful.

She kept off her feet for days. She lay immobile, furious; although her mind was as relentless as a bamboo trap, her body had failed her once again. In the next few days, the smallest anxieties, tiny exertions—bending, angling, staircases—caused her to bleed. She had her room moved downstairs. The baby was slow to come, and by late October, when the Generalissimo relocated to Chongqing, she was still imprisoned in her room.

This forced passivity was more than she could bear. Li Ang had left behind a few things to be mended and refurbished. One afternoon, she began to work on a jacket. She thought that it might soothe her mind to focus on a task, something simple and repetitive, such as fastening on a button. She found her sewing box and took the jacket to the seat below the window, where the pear tree with its ripening fruit moved slightly in the wind. It was a bright autumn day, so clear that each veined leaf, each frost-killed vine, lay bare and etched itself upon the eye.

He had left the jacket rolled into a ball; it was rumpled and covered with dust. She put her finger into her brass thimble, shaped like a ring, and threaded her needle with the familiar grasshopper-colored silk. She found the right place, then pushed the needle through the fabric and picked up the button.

Ever since Li Ang’s first promotion, she had felt a vague threat; now the uneasy feeling, so long denied, breached her calm. The promotion, although a welcome one, had brought about a change between them, a lowering of her status, and although she might continue to bear him healthy children, bear him a son, the son would only cement her present position. Soon he’d be promoted again. She could see no way of reclaiming her old status.

Now the veil was pulled from her eyes. It was like being a new bride, stepping out of the jolting, terrifying ride of the marriage palanquin and seeing, for the first time, the agent of her fate. She thought of how Li Ang had appeared to her in the early days of their marriage: charming, pleasing, the graceful span of his dark shoulders outlined against the pillows. He had seemed so easy to get along with, sleek and smiling, like a happy guest. A man to be viewed with fondness and a little disdain. She had come to see her husband as sweet and vulnerable—a little clumsy at home, somewhat under her power, and desiring her approval. Now she knew her own perceptions had eroded from misuse. She had come to factor her power into everything they did, into the way she saw herself. She had not known that her belief in her influence would backfire, that she would become so attached to the effect she had over him.