Peking Story (20 page)

Someone asked if there were any water outlets, and Aimee answered that there were.

“Then we could make this room into a laundry,” the first man said. “We could put sinks against those walls and cut down those trees outside the windows to make the room brighter.”

I didn't like this idea at all and was pleased to hear Aimee say that the trees were old and valuable and that it would be a shame to cut them down. At the other end of the house, she told them, there was another building and courtyard, which would make a much better laundry. “Let me show you,” she said. There was a bustle of moving people, and the voices faded away.

I waited a while and then put down my book and looked out. The sitting room was empty. Crossing it, I stepped out onto the terrace just in time to hear a rumble and clatter from someplace in the rear of the house. The noise lasted three or four seconds, and then, after a short silence, there was the sound of excited voices.

After some hesitation, because the buyers were still in the house, I started off to see what had happened, and had gone halfway down the flagstoned gallery leading to the rear courtyards when I met Third Sister's little boy running toward me. “What happened?” I asked.

“The house is falling down!” he yelled, and passed without stopping.

In a few moments, I met Aimee, coming at a slower pace from the same direction. “What happened?” I asked again.

“The back wall of Aunt Chin's sitting room just fell down,” she said.

I pictured Aunt Chin buried under tons of bricks. “Is she all right?” I asked.

“Oh, she's fine,” Aimee said. “She's still playing solitaire. We were taking the buyers through the courtyard behind her rooms when suddenly there was a big noise, and the whole wall fell right down in front of us, and there was Aunt Chin sitting inside at her card table and playing solitaire as calmly as if nothing at all had happened.”

“What did the buyers do?” I asked.

“Fifth Sister is seeing them off at the gate now. They said they had no idea the house was in such bad condition. It's too humiliating.”

Aimee turned and we walked on to Aunt Chin's courtyard. Most of the family was there ahead of us, milling about inside her rooms and out. At first I couldn't see her, and then when I did, I found that Aimee had been right. She was sitting at her card table, and at the same time giving directions to one and all.

“That old radio of mine is under there somewhere,” she said, indicating the collapsed wall, “but it doesn't matter. I never listened to it, anyway.”

“Didn't you have a desk sitting against the wall?” one of the sisters asked.

“Yes, I did,” Aunt Chin answered, “and there is something in one of the drawers I would like to have, too.” I could see chair legs sticking out of the rubble at the back of the room, but the radio and desk were nowhere visible. I walked over to the open space and looked out into the back courtyard, where there was an even larger pile of rubble. Second Sister and her four young sons were there, poking about among the bricks. This was the second part of the Yu mansion to collapse since I lived there. It looked like the start of an ominous pattern.

“Do you think there's danger of these other walls falling?” I asked the eldest son. He said he didn't think so. He said one reason the back wall had fallen was that some of the roof tiles above it were missing, so that the water, instead of draining off, had seeped down into the wall until, thoroughly soaked after weeks of rain, the mortar had finally given way.

“Madame Wang's book of Long Life Elixir Recipes is in that desk drawer,” Aunt Chin said. “I borrowed it from her last week, and she'll be wanting it back.”

Second Sister, looking in through the space where the wall had stood, said, “We can get that out, at least.” She turned to her sons. “Surely the four of you can find the desk.” It seemed absurd to search for a book of Long Life Elixir Recipes at just that moment, but because there was nothing much more practical any of us could do, we sat down and waited while Second Sister's sons dug among the bricks. Someone brought them a shovel, and after a while one of them called out, “We've found it!”

Aunt Chin got up and walked over to them. “That's not the desk. That's the top of the radio,” she said. Then all of us except the four sons settled down again and someone made tea. It almost seemed to be a party.

“What kind of recipes are in that book?” Fifth Sister asked.

“They're quite impossible,” Aunt Chin said. “They all call for freshly fallen cones from a five-needled pine tree, which must be gathered either at dawn or at sundown. That isn't too difficult, I suppose, but the other herbs and berries named in the recipes simply can't be found nowadays. It's unfortunate, too, because the book guarantees that if the recipes are followed exactly, elixir pills can be made that prolong life many years.” Most of the family tolerantly considered Aunt Chin's interest in such matters as part of her old-fashioned charm; a credulous few took everything she said as the purest gospel.

I was drinking a second cup of tea, when one of the sons called in to us, “We found it, again.”

Aunt Chin looked out once more. “That's it,” she said. “The book is in the top right drawer.” There was a sound of ripping wood, and in a few moments the book, looking disappointingly ordinary, was passed in to Aunt Chin.

“Don't you want these, too?” the boy asked, offering Aunt Chin a handful of what appeared to be shoes of gold.

“Aunt Chin!” someone exclaimed. “Why didn't you tell us you had gold in the desk? Don't you think that's more important than Madame Wang's book?”

“This isn't my gold,” Aunt Chin protested. “The little I have is in the bedroom. I never saw these pieces of gold before. They certainly weren't in the desk.”

“That's right,” the boy said. “They're just scattered around out here.”

“Is it real gold?” someone asked. Aunt Chin weighed a piece in her hand, while Elder Brother pressed his thumbnail into another. The pieces were pure gold, they declared.

By noon next day, it was decided, amid much rejoicing, that the shoes of gold — there were nine altogether — had been a forgotten cache of old Mr. Yu's, or perhaps even of some earlier ancestor's, which had lain concealed all these years in some chamber of the wall other than the empty one Elder Brother and I saw before the wall fell. And no wonder it fell, everybody said, because in doing so it had yielded up, at the last moment, a treasure that rightfully belonged to the mansion. It was unanimously agreed that the gold should be used to help pay the cost of repainting the main gates and buildings, making broken roof tiles and rotten beams whole again, and re-erecting the garden pavilion and, of course, the wall itself.

During the first weeks following the rainy season, there was great activity in the mansion as carpenters were followed by masons, and masons by tile-setters, and tile-setters by painters who, day by day, slowly restored to the faded pillars and balustrades the fresh glitter of colors — in particular, a beautiful vermilion of great clearness and depth — that no member of the family had ever thought to see again. When the last touches of gold and turquoise and peacock blue were added to the bracketing under the outspreading eaves, the work was completed and the house was transformed into a palace of old, through whose glittering courts we wandered bedazzled by the miracle we ourselves had brought about. But our raptures were soon cut short. Perhaps because the old house had become so beautiful that no one could resist it, or perhaps for some more utilitarian reason, the Yu mansion was sold the week following the renovation, and the Yu family was given one month to vacate.

The Ministry of Finance bought the house. (The Communists could, of course, have simply appropriated the mansion, but in the big cities, at least, they went through legal channels. At that time, 1950, two years after the Communists had taken control, the government was less secure and hesitated, in centers of culture and tradition such as Peking, to estrange China's old intellectual class completely. The horrors of the Cultural Revolution still lay fifteen years in the future.) The price paid the Yu family was the yuan equivalent of fifteen thousand dollars. At any time previously, this would have been only a fraction of the true value of the mansion, but in 1950 it was a good price, and the Yu children considered themselves fortunate to have got so much. They were told that Po I-po, the minister of finance himself, intended to use the house as a city residence, and they were further assured that the rocks and trees of the garden would be cared for just as they had been in the past.

Within the month, both Elder Brother and Second Brother bought small, two-courtyard houses in the eastern part of Peking, and offered to take in First, Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Sisters, who were all unmarried. Elder Brother invited Aunt Chin to make her home with him, too, but she refused, saying the house would be too small and that both she and her cats were too old to learn to live under other people's feet. Instead, she told the family, she was moving to a temple in the countryside near Peking, to which her husband had made large donations during his life, with the understanding that any member of his immediate family would always be welcomed there.

Aunt Chin and Auntie Hu were the first to leave. She had given most of her heavy furniture away to various members of the family, and as she sat waiting in a pedicab, an old knitted hat pulled tight around her head, with her cats in a basket at her feet, she looked old and poorer and sadder than I had ever seen her before. Just as she left, she leaned out and pushed a shoe of gold into my hand. “I saved this for you,” she said. “You and your wife must promise to come and visit me. No one in the country will be able to play cards.”

That night, I showed Aimee the gold and told her what Aunt Chin had said. Aimee looked at it carefully. “Aunt Chin had ten ounces of gold. I remember, because she tried to give it to Elder Brother that afternoon in her room, before the wall collapsed,” Aimee said. “If she says she saved one ounce for you, that means she must have already used nine ounces. Then the nine ounces of gold the boys found after the wall fell down must have been hers, and she must have put it in that hole behind the desk so that it would be found if the wall ever did fall down.” It seemed a logical enough explanation for the all too fortuitous presence of the gold in the wall, and when the story was told to Elder Brother, he agreed that Aunt Chin had had her own way, after all.

Second Sister and her husband and children were the next to leave, amid a fever of packing and tears. They had decided to join her husband's family at Wuhan, in Central China, where he had been offered work. Sixth Sister, married to an agricultural engineer, was moving to a research farm near Peking, while Seventh and Third Sisters both bought small houses in the city. Aimee and I were to live with Second Brother until we completed arrangements to leave China. Aimee, of course, intended to travel to America with me. We looked forward to discovering what a society endowed with human rights and personal freedoms would make possible for us. We had already applied for exit permits, and I had started making inquiries about ships to Hong Kong. Almost every day someone left, and there always seemed to be a horse cart or two at the main gate being loaded with personal belongings.

We would all have felt a good deal sadder about the breakup if we had not been so busy. On top of everything else, there was the division of the family porcelains, bronzes, paintings, furniture, and jewelry. Since Aimee and I intended to take with us as many as we could of the smaller objects of her share (one-eleventh of the total contents of the house), we had the additional task of making quintuple lists for presentation to customs on leaving China. A tentative listing of the contents of only one of a pair of red lacquer chests included, among other things: five bronze incense burners, twenty-five ink sticks (five with pearls), six mounted fans, eight unmounted fans, two cut-velvet jackets, one yellow silk gown, six brocade strips, two bolts of gold-and-purple silk, and thirteen black-and-white paintings (Ming).

When the main body of the furniture at last began to move, carts departed from the street gate day after day in an endless train, loaded with cabinets, books, chests, candlesticks, lamps, bric-a-brac, stoves, mirrors, carpets, tables, and chairs — the almost overwhelming accumulation of four centuries. Practically as much was discarded or sold by weight out the back door as was carted away from the front, and still, as the days passed, the flow seemed only to increase.

Elder Brother estimated that some two hundred horse-drawn cartloads left the house in the space of two weeks. Then, one day, Second Brother and those of us who were to go with him found that the house was nearly empty. Several chairs and tables, our beds, our clothes, and a few cooking utensils and dishes were all that was left, and it was time for us, too, to go. At that moment, in the sudden quiet, we thought of the house, its rooms vacant, its doors and gates standing ajar, waiting, it seemed, for some final clarifying gesture to be made. But there was no gesture. We simply left, one after another, in pedicabs following the carts loaded with our personal belongings, and the great double doors of the main gate were closed after us by the ministry's new caretaker, who had already moved into the gatehouse. I never saw the mansion again.

Bound for the new house on the other side of the city in East-Kuan Yin Temple Lane, our little cavalcade of beds and dishes and pots and pans seemed a poor ending as we crossed, at twilight, the great marble bridge spanning the waterway between the imperial North and Central Sea lakes. Strings of electric lights outlined the palaces beside the north shore, and, to the south, red flags whipped in the wind over palaces that were now converted into government offices. Spotlights played on the black waters, and the music of a military band blared through loudspeakers from the far shore. But despite all this, some part of the old splendor still remained, and I felt, with a sudden lightening of the heart, that the Yu mansion, the lakes, and the ancient city itself shared a resiliency and a strength to do battle with whatever time and fate had in store for them.