Inheritance (8 page)

THE HOUSEHOLD BEGAN
preparations for the Year of the Rooster. It was the first time Junan had been in charge of New Year, and she was abashed to learn how little money there was to spend. She compensated for the short funds by choosing the brightest, noisiest red azaleas and the largest lanterns. She piled the few dozen tangerines in such a way that the stack appeared larger than it actually was. She made Gu Taitai save money by buying the pig at the market and roasting it herself. The traditional chicken would be prepared by Gu Taitai. Hu Mudan said she had a source for chickens, promising Yinan that Guagua would be spared.

A week before the holiday, she set three dozen eggs to steep in tea leaves, salt, and anise. She bought red paper and set Yinan to work with her calligraphy brush. Later, when she walked past Yinan’s door, she caught sight of her sister sitting on the floor folding a paper bird, surrounded by finished banners she had spread out to dry.

On New Year’s Eve, their father called the sisters into Mma’s room.

“Mao Gao has approved the photograph,” he said.

From her bed, Mma muttered, “An older dog will jump at the chance.”

Junan found herself unable to speak. She opened her mouth and closed it. Despite her preparations, the news had taken her by surprise. Finally, she thought of a question. “When will the wedding be?”

“After the Harvest Festival.”

Junan realized how soon Yinan would leave. She turned to her father and grandmother. Mma stared straight ahead with her clouded, almost unseeing eyes. Her father averted his gaze. She turned to Yinan. Yinan was pumping her head back and forth, back and forth, violently and soundlessly, as if she had swallowed something and could not breathe. Then she ran from the room.

Somewhere in the house, the infant Hu Ran was crying.

Junan excused herself and followed her sister. She struggled to collect her thoughts. It was a warm day and the air was filled with the odor of melting earth. She felt intoxicated, floating, and beneath this queer feeling there was an undertow of helpless grief.

The door to Yinan’s room was closed. She knocked, but there was no answer. “Meimei,” she said. “Meimei, it’s me.”

She bent toward the door. “Meimei,” she said, ”It’s me, Jiejie.”

She pushed the door open.

Yinan sat at her desk, head bent onto a pile of red New Year signs. Her shoulders shook.

“Meimei, let me help you move these signs. You don’t want to get them all wet.”

Still shaking, Yinan nodded. “Yes—Jiejie—”

“Meimei, don’t cry. You still have almost nine months at home. Nine months is a long time.”

“Don’t—make me—leave—”

The room blurred for one dizzying wing beat. Junan struggled to collect herself. “I—will miss you too, Meimei, but Nanjing isn’t terribly far. You need to get married, you must be married—”

“But Jiejie—”

There was a knock on the door.

Junan looked up. There was something familiar in the knock, peremptory, and loud. Both sisters straightened, turning toward the door, and in the next moment it opened, revealing a tall, lithe, handsome man wearing a khaki uniform. He stood there, holding back a little to assess the situation. Junan started. It was her husband. She hadn’t seen him since his visit in the fall. Now he looked very much like a stranger, and yet somehow alarmingly familiar and welcome. She felt her fingertips pulse and her cheeks begin to glow. She had a sudden, fierce desire to run to him and throw her arms around him with relief.

Instead, she nodded and asked if he had eaten.

THAT NIGHT, WHEN
they were alone, Li Ang put his hands on Junan’s shoulders. In the dark she couldn’t see his body, nor did she reach for it, but she knew it by its shape and weight: his torso long, his shoulders strong and sleek like those of the man who pulled the ice wagon. She turned her face away. Although his skin was very warm, she suddenly shivered—she didn’t know whether it was from fear or desire, or perhaps from anticipation of this avenue to forgetfulness. She could smell their evening meal on his breath: chicken and ginger, sulfurous eggs, fish, and sesame oil. Beneath it all, there was his scent, familiar now, and when she detected it, she felt an involuntary loosening in her spine. As if he could somehow feel this, he began kissing her fervently on the mouth. She pulled away.

He stopped. “What is it?” His voice frightened her; it was so low and kind.

She couldn’t answer him.

He put his hand on the back of her neck and stroked it; kindly, as one might stroke a miserable child.

“What is it?”

“Stop it—stop—don’t—” She couldn’t speak. If he didn’t stop touching her, she would cry.

She had never thought of what her life would be like without Yinan: without the blink of her eyes, without her narrow, shuttered face, without the still gravity of her body as she sat to read or draw, without her clear voice always asking impossible or childish questions, without the smell and sound of her breathing, and the trusting beat of her heart.

“What is it?”

“It is Yinan—” She shuddered. “Yinan—”

“What about Yinan?”

His hand kept moving on her neck, gently and with patience. The touch spread through her and she found it difficult to keep herself from shaking.

“Her engagement. She will be married—and then she will be gone—”

Her voice broke. Ashamed, she looked away and fought to hide this from him. But now he was comforting her, stroking her hair. She must not give way. He was stroking her hair. He was caressing her neck and back. Now they lay close enough that nothing could have passed between them; she felt the heat under his skin, felt his ribs swell, then contract, with every breath. Around the bed, the ceiling and walls loomed darkly.
Xiaoxin
, she thought.
Xiaoxin
. Below, his knees and hands guided her legs apart. She could not see the square-cut top of his head. She searched his face for its expression, but she only saw the slice of white under his irises. She felt the mainspring of her body loosening. She fought to keep the sobs out of her breaths; she took huge shuddering gasps; she returned, again, to her sister, her sister’s head moving helplessly back and forth. Asking, what is it like to be wanted?

She pressed into him, seeking his weight, wanting to be buried.

LATER SHE SLEPT,
head heavy, mouth open, taking long, deep breaths. A lock of hair lay wet against her teeth. Li Ang lay next to her, watching the smoke unfurl from his cigarette. Sometimes he didn’t know what to make of her: such a private woman, so unwilling to lose control. At the sound of her involuntary cry of pleasure, so raw, so unexpected, some channel had been opened within him. He was a boy again, an errand boy, light-footed, filled with energy, fighting to clear a path for Corporal Sun. He lay and remembered it all: the glimpse of the grenade, the quick knowledge of what he must do, the moment of possibility, of fate lying open. His own surety, pushing Sun out danger. The flash of dazed gray light when the grenade exploded. Then the sensation of weightlessness, of his empty back. The corporal shouting for the medic. Then the corporal’s words: “That was meant for me, boy. Stay alive, and I’ll always help you after this.”

Now the scars in his shoulder itched but he didn’t move for fear of waking her. He thought of his brother’s glance, affectionate, contemptuous, on the day when he had first come home in his lieutenant’s uniform. He wondered how Li Bing was getting along at the university in Beijing. He thought of Junan’s ragged voice, “and then she will be gone—” It seemed to him that Li Bing had never been more far away.

“Wife,” he said. Then, “Junan.”

There was no answer. For a moment he waited, feeling oddly bereft. Eventually, he reached over and put out his cigarette.

Meanwhile, my mother’s limp and sleeping body held a secret: in this moment of weakness I had been conceived. When she let down her guard, her womb had opened and my father’s seed rushed into her. I was carried to full term and born in the early spring of 1933, the Year of the Rooster, only days after my great-grandmother Mma—sparing herself from the disappointment of the birth of yet another girl—drew her last resentful breath and let her soul depart from her body in a blur of bat-like wings. High above the house it hovered, before vanishing, with her last breath, into the other world.

BECAUSE I WAS BORN SO CLOSE TO MMA’S DEATH, MY MOTHER
feared that my great-grandmother’s dark and stubborn soul might bind itself to me and follow me forever. And so she gave me a name unrecognizable to Mma, a character used in neither the Li nor the Wang families. She called me Hong: a word meaning the color red, the color of life. A word to separate me from Mma and all of her concerns. A simple word to give me my own strength—so common, and so plain, that I might have been a peasant girl. My mother’s naming plan succeeded. I didn’t suffer from nightmares or hear echoes of Mma’s crabbed voice. Moreover, I didn’t take after my great-grandmother. Of Mma’s most difficult qualities—such as her pettiness, constipation, and solitary anger—I inherited only her insomnia.

Even in those peaceful years, I had trouble falling asleep. Every evening, I went up to my room and began a long ritual my mother had designed to send me to my dreams. First came story time with my beloved ayi, Yinan, who read translations of Grimm’s fairy tales while orange rays lit up the pages of her manuscript. Through the room’s only window, which looked over the courtyard, I could see the colors of the sky deepen and fade over the wall, throwing the garden into shades of violet and indigo. I was not yet four years old, a little too young to understand her stories, but still I begged for them. I loved this time with Yinan. I loved the way she included me in everything, holding the manuscript where I could see it even though I didn’t know any of the characters. She read slowly, allowing me to float inside her quiet voice and listen to the sounds of the words.

“Once there was a poor widow who lived in a cottage. In her garden stood two rosebushes, one white and one red. Her two daughters were like the rose-trees, and so one was called Snow-white and the other Rose-red. They were very good, happy girls, industrious and cheerful, although Snow-white was gentler and more quiet than Rose-red. Rose-red liked to play outdoors, picking wildflowers and catching butterflies; but Snow-white kept her mother company inside, and helped her with the housework.”

Here she paused and laid her hand thoughtfully upon the page.

“Go on, Ayi,” I urged her.

“Snow-white and Rose-red loved each other so much that they held hands whenever they left the house. Snow-white would say, ‘We’ll never leave each other,’ and Rose-red would reply, ‘Not as long as we live.’ Then their mother would say, ‘Whatever one of you has, she must share with the other.’”

There was something special about Yinan. She knew my silliest fears and my most selfish daydreams and loved them all. On these evenings I felt closer to her than to anyone in the world. By the time she finished reading it was almost dark. We sat together, safe within our tent of yellow lamplight.

We heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs before she entered the room, tall and severe.

“Xiao Hong.” She frowned. “Little Hong, you’re still awake?”

Yinan smiled. “I could read the sutras and she would stay awake.”

In those days, Yinan and I were always trying to make my mother laugh. I had learned to amuse her by describing my observations of the servants and of my playmate Pu Li, whose father, Lieutenant Pu Sijian, was my father’s best friend. Pu Li was a pleasant boy with a monotonous mind, and we all thought him funny. Yinan would egg me on. “What did Pu Li do today?” she asked me. “Did he have to tie a thread around his finger again in order to remember which hand to put his chopsticks in?”

After we had smiled at this, my mother remarked, “You’re always making fun of Pu Li. Why don’t you tease Hu Ran?”

“I don’t want to tease Hu Ran.”

She claimed to think it comical that Ran called me “young miss,” when each day we played and fought together like brother and sister. But I sensed that she expected such formality. She’d once told me that he had the complexion of a peasant.

Now she glanced sideways at my aunt. “Perhaps she is in love with him?”

“Don’t make fun of me!” I cried.

Then my mother did laugh. She threw back her head and laughed from deep inside herself. Despite my pique, I had the pleasure I’d been waiting for, the sight of her white throat and her lovely, straight teeth—the pleasure of knowing she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Yinan thought so as well. I could see it in her eyes. Afterwards we sat still, listening to the night. “Don’t be angry, Xiao Hong,” my mother said. “Not when you go to sleep. It’s bad for your digestion.” They tucked me into bed and sang to me.