Under Fishbone Clouds (2 page)

Bian Yuying had been thinking about the story of the dancing cranes all morning – how so much can turn upon a single act of kindness, how so much might depend upon the whims of history. How nothing is ever as you expect it. She thought of her husband
lying in the hospital, then picked up her bags and started
moving
again. Cranes are a symbol of fidelity, she thought; they mate for life. She could not recall how many times she had heard the story of the dancing cranes, half sung by storytellers in teahouses to the rhythm of squat drums when she was a child, then in the confines of the stone-walled bedroom where her husband had told it to their children, and later their grandchildren. Each time, the story changed a little, though this had never bothered her. It was in the differences that she located the tale’s restless heart, which, like the cranes, would not allow itself to remain still. The cranes represented karma, the delicate balancing act of the universe that rewards good acts with rewards and evil acts with punishment. Everyone gets what they deserve in the end. Yet after all she had been through, Yuying was not sure that life was ever that simple.

Her back ached from leaning against the wall for so long. She enjoyed wandering through the older, narrow streets, on her way back from the hospital. They reminded her of the house she had been born in seventy years before, the house where she was
married
, the house she fled from and returned to, the house where her father died, the house her mother was thrown out of after the revolution. A house of hopes and hopelessness. She always had to remind herself to turn left towards the main road, to head back to her daughter’s third-floor flat near the massage alley instead of wandering on towards the courtyards and houses guarded by stone lions, deeper into the past. Yuying soon came to the bridge over the murky river which sliced the city in two. It looked to her like the discarded skin of a huge water snake, shimmering where the light fell with the flow. She was nearly there.

Climbing the stairs was a slow and precise operation, and when Yuying first reached the apartment her hands were shuddering too much to direct the keys into the lock. Finally in, she sat down on her grandson’s bed and stared out of the window. She pulled open the wooden drawer, and, from beneath her neatly folded winter layers, extracted a small album. It fitted perfectly in her lap. Only a couple of hours to kill, and then she would return to the hospital, with a plastic box of fresh dumplings, to resume the bedside vigil. She pushed the door closed and flitted quickly through the album to the penultimate page, on which there was a black-and-white print no bigger that her palm.

Around three thousand years ago, the Shang kings turned to their dead ancestors for help at times like these. The dead, they believed, were powerful. Evidence of this was all around them – storms gathered from frothy clouds, drooping and meagre crops, victories in vicious frontier wars: all could be attributed to the
unpredictable
justice of the dead, moving between the seen and the unseen. To appease their ancestors, the kings offered sacrifices,
slaughtering
scores of convicts and slaves, and transforming fields of oxen into seas of cloying blood and wild flies. Yet this did not always solve their problems, and, when rains continued, battles stalled and queens became barren, they sought to commune more directly with the dead, to ask them how much sacrifice was enough. They turned to animal bones in order to learn how to tame the future. Their questions, for which one of the first written examples of Chinese was created, were inscribed on these oracle bones and were answered by the cracks that appeared in the bones after they had passed through fire – for everyone knows that the dead do not speak the same language as the living. These writings have survived them, and so another exchange with the dead has been achieved, though even today it’s impossible to fathom answers to their dark and blood-soaked questions.

Hou Jinyi, his cropped mass of curly black hair plied into a messy side-parting over his horsy face, scrubbed up and shaved and dressed and smiling especially for this, his first visit to a photographer, stared up at Yuying. She traced a finger over that familiar lopsided smile. She too talked to those who could no longer answer, though she did not expect a reply. This is how she wanted to remember him, not as the wrinkled thing wheezing fitfully in the busy ward. She leaned forward to study the small portrait, and slowly let her memories carry her back to where she always travelled when she was alone, to the summer of 1946.

By now you may be wondering who it is telling this story, who has been listening in on this old woman’s thoughts. So let me get the introductions out of the way. I have lived a long time amidst woks and greasy chopsticks, beside chicken feathers and plump dough ready to be fisted down into dumplings. In short, I am a god.
But not the storm-bringing, death-doling type – rather a common household deity: the Kitchen God.

The truth is, however, that being immortal has its drawbacks. The almost infinite pleasures of the many heavens begin to lose their appeal after the first millennium or two, and no matter how much they try to resist, most gods find themselves creeping back down to earth whenever they get the chance. We cannot help
ourselves
. I am not alone in returning time and time again, although I have not as yet disguised myself as a white bull or a swan, or started whispering in the ears of would-be prophets. My powers do not stretch much further than being able to dip into people’s thoughts as easily as you might trail your fingers through the lazy flow of a river. And until lately I was doing this as much as
possible
. In fact, I could have been star-bathing by the bright rapids of the Milky Way or attending the most lavish of celestial soirées over the last fifty years, and yet instead I followed Bian Yuying and Hou Jinyi, trying to understand what it is that enabled their love to survive the separations, the famine, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and even death.

It would be easy to say that I did this simply to win a bet I made with the Jade Emperor about the workings of the human heart. However, that would not be quite true. As soon as you glance into a person’s thoughts, you’re trapped. If I stayed with these two people for so long, it is because I once had a heart myself, although I never learnt how to keep it from destroying me. But we will come to that later – once again, I seem to be getting sidetracked. After all, this is not my story: it’s theirs.

‘Bian Chunzu – come here! Quick! I have something for you.’

She heard her father’s shout rumbling through the house. She was sixteen, and he was the only person who still called her Chunzu. Everyone else called her Yuying, the name her Japanese teacher had given her and which she had recently decided to take in place of her own. Chunzu – ‘spring bamboo’ – was too pretty, too
artifical
, too delicate. When I am an adult, she thought to herself, I will be a suave Japanese translator and no one will think me delicate. Her Japanese teacher was a petite woman whose every word she had hung on to for the last few years; the last time Yuying saw
her, however, she had been placed in a wooden cage after the other Japanese had left, and the locals were shouting about revenge for the occupation. Yuying tried not to dwell on this image.

Her father called again, and his hoarse voice rattled through the large house. It was the type of place where echoes were still heard days after the words were first uttered, slowly winding through the cold stone corridors. She fought the urge to shout back. I am not that type of daughter, she told herself as she placed her pen in the book to save her place. By the time she would return to her bedroom, a dribble of ink would have spread from the stunted nib and blotted out an intricate point of advanced Japanese grammar. As she passed her servant outside her door she blushed, knowing that she too had heard the shout.

Yuying had once overheard the two younger servants whispering about her father’s nocturnal journeys to visit one of his many other women in the city. They had giggled as they recounted how they had heard him slipping past their rooms late at night. Now, when she could not sleep, Yuying’s imagination conjured up the sound of padded slippers gently slapping against the stone hallway, the bamboo in the courtyard rustled by the breeze his creeping form created.

As she reached her father, she pushed these thoughts from her mind and chastised herself. She loved her family more than
anything
she could imagine.

‘Father.’

‘Sit down. I have found a way to grant both our wishes, Chunzu.’

She stole a glance directly at her father as she sat. He looked exhausted. Below his pug nose, his thin moustache twitched like the bristly mane of a regal dragon, and, when she dared to raise her head to look more closely, she saw that his pupils had melted to eclipse the rest of his eyes. She had no doubt as to where he had spent most of the day: the Golden Phoenix, the priciest opium lounge in the city.

‘Come on then. Take a look.’ He let his hand fall to the slim bundle of papers on the table between them. ‘I have made most of the arrangements already. The rest should be simple enough,’ he said as she slowly furrowed through the bundle to find a small grey photograph within a milk-white frame. It showed a wild-haired young man.

‘In a little under one month, this will be your husband.’

She felt her throat tighten.

‘He has agreed to let you continue your studies. You will both live here, of course, and so our family need not be broken. He will even take our name. Well?’

She tried to stop the tears slipping down her face. Her father banged his fist on the table.

‘Ungrateful daughter! Everyone told me that educating a girl was the most foolish thing a father could do, but did I listen? No, I heard only your pleas. And now I have worked so hard to find a suitable match, and you do not even give me thanks! Get your tears out now, then, but be sure your eyes are not red in one month, when we will have a joyous wedding. Do not bring shame on your family, Bian Chunzu!’

She sniffed and nodded.

‘Leave me now. Go tell your sisters.’ He waved his hand towards the door.

She stood, hesitating. For months she had looked over photos of prospective grooms, sending messages through matchmakers and her father. Yet their unusual demands had meant that the
family
had already turned down a large number of young men. If one finally agrees to everything, her father had reasoned, there will be nothing else to consider. She would soon be seventeen, and no one would want to marry an old woman.

‘Can I keep it?’

He said nothing, but stared across at where dust swirled in the solitary slice of sun falling in from the window. He tapped his
fingers
lightly on his temples.

‘Thank you, Father.’

Yuying left him studying a fly that had found a way into the room but not yet a way back out. She was never quite sure what he was thinking. She stepped over the mute’s large black dog dozing in the hallway, and tried to concentrate on the dizzying image of a swelling red wedding dress snug against her skin, suddenly
transforming
her into someone else. She did not dare look at the photo again, but instead held it tight against her side.