Under Fishbone Clouds (29 page)

Yuying turned to the embarrassed driver.

‘How long?’

She moved quickly through the bedroom, searching for the things she had brought with her. There was nothing from the first journey that hadn’t been traded or pawned for more practical clothes and blankets. She took her two warm jackets, both
mud-stained
and patchy, and the child’s jacket she had been decorating, a half-finished tiger crawling towards the pocket, and left the rest. From beneath the furs on her side of her bed, she retrieved Wawa’s blanket, moth-holes dotted across the hem. It was the only thing of his saved from the burial; the only thing she had left to remember him. ‘There can be no loss,’ Chuang Tzu had written thousands of years before. Everything must continue. Embarrassed at the lack
of possessions bundled up in her arms, Yuying followed the driver from the house.

While he yoked the horses, she strode across the plots to her husband, who was resolutely facing the other way.

‘Jinyi,’ she whispered so that no one would overhear. ‘Come with me. Please.’

‘I can’t.’ His voice was cracked. ‘Yuying. I can’t leave them.’ He was pleading.

‘We have to leave them. We have to choose. The past or the future. And I know our future is together, Jinyi, if we want it. Look, I know this is fast, it’s difficult. We will start again, just like you said. As equals. But not here. Let’s leave all the bad bits here, all the bad luck and the ghosts and the angry little gods that govern this place.’

Jinyi shook his head. She did not seem to understand that it was not that simple.

‘Jinyi. I love you,’ her mouth was so close to his face that he could feel her breath tickle across his neck. She felt awkward saying this: it was not the type of thing people should have to say in real life.

He nodded, still not turning to face her. I love you too, he wanted to say. But the words got stuck in his throat. He ran a hand under his nose and sniffed, a slobbery canine sniff, before nodding again.

‘Jinyi, I’m going. I can’t live here. You must have known that, even if we didn’t talk about it. I’m going now, and I’m not coming back. Please.’

‘I can’t leave them.’ That was all he could say. And he knew, even then, that he would regret that day for the rest of his life. But still he could not say it.

‘We’ve still got the rest of our lives. I can’t spend another fifty years here. I’m sorry. This is the only chance to go back. Please.’ There was silence.

‘All right. Take these, please,’ she sniffled, and pressed ten of the silver coins, exactly half, into his palm. ‘They are yours now. If you change your mind, you can use them to come and find me. You know where I’ll be. I’m not giving up, Jinyi. I’ll be waiting for you.’ She was crying now, unashamed of her tears. ‘I’m still your wife, and I’m not going to stop being your wife. I’ll be waiting for you …’

She wiped her face. ‘Be careful, Jinyi.’

Yuying turned and strode, as calmly as she could, to the coach.

‘I love you, Yuying. Please, stay.’

She was too busy climbing into the carriage to hear him. By the time the eager horses had strutted off and she could bring herself to look back at the fields, he was already slinking away in the other direction.

Jinyi stayed because he wanted more than anything to hold on to the memories buried there; Yuying left because she could not forget.

She spent the return journey half asleep, her head lightly buzzing against the coach’s frame, her legs tucked underneath her on the wooden seat. They stopped a couple of times for bowls of wontons bobbing in broth, then ploughed onward, covering a greater
distance
at night than by day. They took the main road, a straight line untangled from the swoop of hills and forests, the land
patted
flat from the retreats of many different armies. They passed small road-side villages that had been left abandoned, scores of deserted hideouts, and shadows quickly disappearing behind the side of buildings. The journey back took only two days. How much easier it was to undo than to do, Yuying thought, knowing that the opposite was really true, that even the clumsiest of knots are easier to loop than to loosen.

The money she had left him ought to be enough to bring him home, when he came to his senses. Forgetting was, after all, an expensive commodity, one that few could afford. Yuying could not quite believe that he had taken the money and not called her back, though she did not once consider asking the driver to turn the horses around. She chewed her lip and prayed to the warring gods of the fields. Suddenly she realised how much she would miss him. If Jinyi did not return, then there would be no future for her except to grow old among her childhood toys, for no man would want a hand-me-down with the whiff of shame.

The river wind, scraped off the paddies and pens, whispered through the cracks in the carriage, toying with her skirt. Was that the demon’s breath, panting behind her? She shook her head; demons do not enter cities.

‘Nearly there,’ the driver shouted back to her.

As if she would not recognise her hometown. And yet it was different; the buildings wore their spray of bullet scars like medals. Tatty banners, hastily scribbled in smudged ink, hung from the bank, the post office and the sprawling mansions of those
associates
of her father that she thought would have had better taste. She did not yet know that those houses were no longer filled with the family friends she once saw at lavish parties. The red flags told her that the war was over, and though she had already heard this, it was a shock to think of a city still working without it, as if its clockwork mechanism had depended on the music of gunfire and fear to keep it turning. Fu Lions grinned from the restaurants and rickshaws were heaved through the streets, dodging the afternoon drinkers and the old couples leaning on each other for support as they walked towards the reopened park.

When the coach drew up on the paving stones outside the family home, Yuying looked down to see Yaba smiling up at her, just as he had when she was young. As she stepped down, Yaba brought a hand to his face in mock surprise, and mimed clutching armfuls of the air around him. What, no bags for me to carry?

‘No bags this time, you’ll be pleased to know. Only me. I bet you’re thinking I’m looking old, no?’

Yaba shook his head. Then, as he saw her walking into the house, he ran to stop her. He was too late.

As Yuying entered the house, a sour, dry scent enveloped her. She turned to Yaba with a sob bobbing up through her throat as he pulled two fluttering hands across his face like curtains, miming death.

Her father had died the day before, on 1 October 1949. It was only months later that Yuying realised the significance of the date, and in later years, with the rest of the country (though for different reasons), she made a habit of dividing life into two separate eras: those of before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

Old Bian had died in the morning, bedridden and silent, choking on his own breath. And at that same time, as he had slipped from the room towards the bottom of the world, a slight, crinkly fog had begun to clear from Tiananmen Square, which brought a sense
of relief to the official artists and cameramen and photographers eagerly gathered there. The recorded footage would not be seen, of course, for only a few millionaires had even heard about the strange magic known as television, and anyway, those foreign
electric
boxes were signs of bourgeois corruption, so people would not want them even if they were being given away.

Standing on a rostrum raised above the crowd, surrounded by high-ranking officials, was a short man wearing a blue jacket,
knotted
up to the neck with looping cotton toggles. He was a little portly, though as yet lacking the sagging gut that would mark him out in later years while half the population starved, and his
pasted-back
black hair was already beginning to recede at the edges of his forehead. A dark mole stood out from on the round chin of his full-moon face. He was standing in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, at the entrance to what was once the emperor’s private celestial city, ready to proclaim peace and revolution to the nation. He gripped his notes in his hands, and leaned toward the bulky black microphone.

‘The Chinese people have stood up!’ Mao Zedong began. His voice buzzed and echoed from the bulky loudspeakers, and the men flanking him nodded, some stern and patriarchal, others showing their crooked teeth in wide grins.

As he announced the establishment of the new state, of the ‘democratic dictatorship’ led by the people, the thousands crammed into the square feverishly shouted and clapped, and the whole centre of the city seemed to become a foamy sea of fluttering red flags. People were shoving, shoulder to shoulder, up on tiptoe for a better view – and why shouldn’t they have been happy? This was the end of war and feudalism and repression and injustice and poverty. This was their country now. This was the beginning of the future. Some even slapped each other on the back, unable to keep still. When the speech finished, the crackly feedback from the speakers gave way to gunshot salutes, spasmodic drumming and the bangs of a thousand reels of firecrackers, leaving trails of red paper littering the streets like the first crinkly gifts of autumn.

A few days later Yuying sat in her childhood room in the east wing, a white robe wrapped around her shoulders. Death clothes are snow
made thick, her mother had said; they are possibilities made hard and real. But the white was not the white of winter fields,
mountain
peaks or expensive panda fur. It was the symbol of an absence, like the scorched landscape of nuclear fallout, the fuzzy albumen of slow-growing cataracts.

Leaving the room, Yuying had to navigate around stacks of boxes and bags. The house was emptying itself out, preparing for grief: her younger sisters now tended to their new husbands’ needs, and the servants were quitting in hope of fresh lives in the newly socialist state. Yuying’s mother would be left alone with Yaba, each in
separate
wings. Between them, all the things that the inhabitants could never say rattled around the dozen abandoned rooms, jostling for space with the dust and mildew.

The wake had been going on for days, the body lying in the silent main hall. Yuying almost expected her father to rise up at any second, and stroll from the house, shaking his head. At the foot of the coffin was a portrait of Bian, younger than any of the gathered friends and relatives could remember him ever having looked in real life. The household gods had been packed away, all the mirrors covered. Yuying moved beside her father and took his cold hand, remembering how he had gripped hers whenever he had taken her to a showy banquet as a child: a small girl facing the upturned noses of the eldest sons of other businessmen, the only female in the room. If her father had possessed countless flaws, then he had also had strengths. Either he had never cared what anyone thought of him, or he had been canny enough to know that few would risk his wrath by bad-mouthing him.

The hired mourners that sat behind the regular guests provided a great spectacle of grief. They wept and howled and tore at their clothes, all for a very reasonable price. The dead nibble on these showy sobs, still trying to save face, even in the underworld. And it is there, incidentally, that the more hearty meals of the gods are provided: screams and guttural wails, tears lashed from flayed skin. I’ve never been down there myself, of course, but word gets around.