Under Fishbone Clouds (64 page)

13

THE YEAR OF THE CAT

Where the gnarled peak meets the low-hanging shreds of cloud, shards of ice begin to melt, to crackle and spit, and slowly trickle down the vast slopes of Geladaindong Snow Mountain. The lower tracks of snow turn to slush further down, and join the dribbling drips, until soon the trickle has become the smallest of streams. It pulses down through the Tanggula Range that provides the sharp spine of the border between Qinghai and Tibet, slipping down cliff faces and ravines until it has traversed the six-thousand-metre drop to sea level; until it has become the Great River, Chang Jiang, the Yangtze, the third longest in the world, set on its eight-province journey toward Shanghai and the East China Sea. It is a river that toys with life and death as if they were flotsam, driftwood.

Halfway through its journey east, where junks and sampans would once have begun loading up grain and tea leaves to carry through the Three Gorges to distant coastal cities, it passes Fengdu, the City of Ghosts. Fengdu sits on top of a hillside overlooking the swelling river and, clustered on the opposite bank, the refilling cruise ships and the neon strips of seafood restaurants and office blocks of modern-day Fengdu City. One can only hope that the
restless
souls who make their way here, for this is where all the dead must go, are not confused as to which side of the river to alight.

It would be tedious to list the numerous demons, devils and
other
hellish apparitions that reside there, and what’s more, it would only serve to further inflate their already gargantuan egos, so I will merely point out that it is a place of darkness and despair, a place where groups of long-dead scholars spend their time thinking up new and ingenious tortures, and yet never manage to think of as many as do the generals and presidents back in the land of the living. It is a place where the potential uses of flesh and bone are most celebrated.

After the trek up the steep hillside, after the first gates and skinny pagodas, the recently deceased will reach the Unavoidable Bridge. If the arriving soul crosses the bridge holding the hand of his or her lover in exactly nine steps, then they may progress together, their hearts safe; if they arrive alone, or cross the bridge in a step more or a step less, the soul will forget everything it ever knew of love. There are then fearsome judgements at which the dead are given a last chance to tell the truth of their lives, to ask those they have wronged back in the land of the living for forgiveness. There are five-cloud pagodas and snake-like dragons, vampiric women and other wretched, contorted beasts that may once have been human. However, it is at the highest point on the hillside of the City of Ghosts that the most important tower stands. It is a tall, narrow structure resembling a lookout post, painted a faded blue and topped with weather-worn eaves. This is the Tower of Distant Homelands. It is one of the last stops for the dead, who must climb to the top and, from the great height, locate their former home somewhere in the distance below. Their bodies have already been broken by death; seeing for one last time the homes they can never return to serves to break the spirit. After this, the soul is
unrecognisable
. I shall say no more about where they go next, for I do not wish to give you nightmares.

Jinyi might be spared some of these trials, for he had already lost much of his past, his home, many of the little moments of comfort and love that sustain us, and close to a quarter of his body weight. He was propped on his side because of the bed sores that drew a dark patchwork over the sharp ridges of his back. One of his eyes was plum black and shrunk shut from where Yuying had smashed the bedside lamp into his face after she had woken one night to find him screaming and strangling her. It had been the only thing she could do to make him stop. The doctors had warned Yuying and her daughters that it would not be long before he would be making that infamous journey. Their exact words were, ‘Why on earth didn’t you bring him here sooner?’

There was no simple answer. The slowness of his decline had meant that they had been uncertain when to bring him in, especially since he had become increasingly afraid of venturing outside his daughter’s flat. Yuying had been forced to sell the house – which she first had to buy completely from the government using borrowed
money – to pay for hospital fees and cabinets full of medicines, and they had been living in their grandson’s old room in Liqui’s flat for the last year and a half. The family had felt that to enter the hospital permanently would be to admit two things that they did not want to acknowledge: first, that they could no longer cope with looking after him, and second, that there was little chance of him recovering. So much better to let him die peacefully in a familiar bed, surrounded by the loving faces of his family. However, his violent fits and terrors had now precluded that possibility.

Yuying traced her finger over the photograph of her husband, his black hair wild and manic as it had been throughout that hot summer of 1946. Then she closed the album, placed it back in the drawer in her grandson’s bedroom, and arranged a few winter clothes over the top. It was time to go.

She rubbed her eyes. She registered a dull numbness, an ache in her sloped back from slouching too long on the wooden chair beside her husband’s hospital bed. She made her way to the kitchen and filled a plastic box with dumplings. He would miss her if she did not go back soon, she told herself.

Without him, she thought, I will only be half a person.

How do we go about dealing with death? The first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, decided that death would not stop him. When his hunt for the elixir of immortality stalled, he thought of another idea. He had perfect stone facsimiles created of his entire army, man for man, from archers and swordsmen down to the horses that trotted with them. And beside his army he replicated his court, from
mandarins
and musicians through to jesters and even birds. Once the likeness of every man, the moustaches and eyebrows and fish lips and dimpled chins, had been chiselled into the stone, they were to be sealed deep beneath the imperial capital of Xian, part of the emperor’s giant tomb, of which only a tiny proportion has yet been rediscovered. Did he imagine, perhaps, that with an imperishable army he might conquer whatever world awaited him with the same ease with which he had proved his mastery in life? Or was he instead convinced that the relationship between a thing and its double would reveal the duplicitous nature of the fabric of the world?

It seems more likely he believed that if he might control
perceptions
and beliefs, he might change the world: if only a handful of people believed in the stone army, then that might be enough to animate them. This is, after all, the same emperor who started work on the Great Wall and who ordered the burning of ancient books, declaring that history began anew with him. Yuying would have said that this was unnecessary, as was the book-burning ordered by Mao, since she believed that every generation had only a short-term memory: they remembered just enough of the past few years and of their parents to measure themselves against them and resolve to be different. Surely that was the only explanation for the circular nature of revolution and capital, the reason that the new century resembled the time of her birth more than any other period in between.

Yuying walked back to the hospital, past the snaking river, past the old mansion where she had been born, past the factory where she had worked, with her thoughts buffeting her flesh like a hurricane. They tugged her, needled her, shook her through.

Both her husband and her eldest daughter were asleep, one on the rickety old bed, the other on the small wooden chair beside it. There was a small bedside cabinet topped with a few magazines, an empty bed across the opposite wall and a bedpan waiting on the cold stone floor. The rattling window looked out onto a
workyard
where circular saws cut through strips of metal. The bloody remains of mosquitoes dotted the flaking white walls. She woke Manxin and sent her home.

Jinyi was slick with sweat. He was asleep on his side, rasping and dribbling with his mouth open, the IV drip taped to his forehead, as it had been since he had scratched and torn it from his hands. His eyes were shut, his chest rocketing up and down. From her bag Yuying removed the box full of warm dumplings, and waited for him to wake. She would wait as long as it took.

The little parcels of dough reminded her of the previous year, when Liqui had brought home a variety of dumplings from a small café, and Jinyi, still just about able to feed himself, had wolfed all of them down as though he might never see another meal, saving only those filled with pork and green onion.

‘Can I have some of those?’ Yuying had asked him.

‘No!’ he had shouted, and thrown his arms around the dumplings, his eyes darting round the room to catch out possible thieves.

‘Please? Go on, Jinyi, share one with me,’ Yuying had said.

‘No! No one can touch!’ he had spat. Yet a second later he had softened, his eyes sunk down, and he had whispered, ‘I am saving them for my wife. This is her favourite kind.’

Yuying had not known whether to start laughing or crying. She had simply decided to eat later, waiting for her husband to either recognise her or forget about the dumplings, whichever came first. He had forgotten about the dumplings.

A few hours later, Yuying felt a hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her from her sleep. She looked up to see her youngest daughter’s pinched face slowly creeping into focus above her.

‘Ma, it’s me. Why don’t you go home and get some rest?’ Xiaojing said.

‘No no, I want to help,’ she replied, with a light wave of her hand. Her daughter pulled up another wooden chair and sat beside her.

‘You won’t do much good like this, Ma. If you try and lift him or feed him yourself, you might get hurt. Liqui will come by in the morning, and then Jingchen after his nightshift, so there’ll be plenty of people here,’ Xiaojing said.

‘I know, I know. I’m useless now, I know.’