The Ancient Ship

Xiaokui returned to the mill and caught Baopu’s eye. She stood calmly, blushing slightly, her dark eyes glistening. Not particularly tall, she had a slender figure. His eyes fell on her breasts, which were heaving rhythmically, as if she were in a deep sleep. The air was redolent, not with perfume, but with the smell of a nineteen- or twenty-year-old virginal young female, the unique aroma of a gentle young woman who knew what it meant to love and was instinctively good natured. Baopu stood up and went to look at the trudging ox. The aging animal shook its head in a strange fashion. Baopu fed mung beans into the eye of the stone, the ladle in his hand in constant motion, and it was all he could do to keep from flinging it away. But then it fell out of his hand and landed on the stone, which carried it along until it was opposite Xiaokui, where it seemed to turn into a compass needle and point directly at her. She took a step forward. “Baopu,” she said, “you, me.” He picked up the ladle, putting the millstone in motion again. “When you finish here, instead of going home,” she said softly, “can you meet me down on the floodplain? When you finish…” Sweat beaded his forehead; he stared at Xiaokui. The next bucket of liquid beans was full, and another young woman came in to remove it. Later that day, when it was time for the next shift, Baopu, finished for the day, left.

Breaking from his normal schedule, instead of crossing the river at the floodplain, for reasons he could not explain he decided to go around it. He walked slowly, his legs feeling unusually heavy. After a while he stopped. The sunset blazed across the sky and turned his broad back bright red. He shuddered in the sun’s dying rays and then took off running back toward the floodplain as fast as he could, muttering things no one could understand. His hair was swept back, he lurched from side to side, and his arms flailed out from his body. Deep imprints in the ground were created with each flying step. Then he stopped abruptly, for there in the densest part of the willow grove stood Xiaokui, her hair tied with a red kerchief.

Baopu stood motionless for a moment before walking slowly toward her. When he reached her he saw she was crying. She said she’d thought he was walking away from her.

As they crouched down in the grove, her tears were still flowing. Baopu nervously lit a cigarette; Xiaokui took it out of his mouth and threw it away. Then she laid her head against his chest. He put his arms around her and kissed her hair. She looked up at him and he wiped away her tears with his callused hand; then she lowered her head again. He kissed her, and kissed her again. “Xiaokui,” he said, shaking his head, “I don’t understand you.”

She nodded. “I don’t understand myself,” she said, “so of course you can’t. You sit there on a stool with that ladle in your hand, never saying a word. You look like a stone statue, but with energy bursting to get out. I have to admit I’m scared of anyone who won’t talk, but I also know that sooner or later I’ll be yours.”

Baopu lifted up her face and looked intently into her flashing eyes. He shook his head. “I’m part of the Sui clan,” he said. “Why…would you want to be mine?”

She just nodded. Neither of them spoke as they leaned against one another until the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Then they stood up and began to walk. When it was time to go their separate ways, Baopu said, “You and I are people who have little to say.” Xiaokui rubbed his rough, callused hand and raised it to her nose to smell it.

Baopu had trouble sleeping after Xiaokui had smelled his hand, he realized. He tossed and turned, and when he finally fell asleep someone came up and lifted up his hand. He held out both hands for her, his heart filled with happiness. She walked out of the room, and he followed. Moonbeams created a haze in the air. She was walking in front of him, but when he blinked she was gone. Then she leaped out from behind, her body as light as a bundle of grain stalks. Oh, it was Guigui. “Guigui!” he shouted “Guigui!…” He reached out, but pristine, pale moonbeams were all he touched.

He didn’t sleep that night, but that did not keep him from going to the mill the next day, where only her cricket cage remained; Xiaokui did not show up to carry off buckets. He fed the crickets some melon flowers. When he went over to the processing room, he saw that she was washing the noodles, her arms red from being submerged in water. He did not call out to her, since Li Zhaolu was sitting above her banging the metal strainer, chanting as he did: “Hang-ya! Hang-ya!” The people below said, “He sure knows how to bang that!” Baopu looked up at the coarse old man, who had his eyes fixed on Xiaokui on the floor below. Without a word, Baopu walked back to his mill, where the stone creaked as it made one slow revolution after another and the ox’s head swayed in concert with the sound.

Baopu forgot what it was like to enjoy a good night’s sleep. How had he gotten through the past twenty years? he wondered. He regularly stumbled into Zhao Family Lane and lay sprawled beneath Xiaokui’s rear window, where no one could see him. She had told him she was to be married to Li Zhaolu, and there was nothing she could do about that, since the decision was made when Fourth Master nodded his approval. Baopu lost hope. That nod of the head had sealed the matter. So he abandoned his fantasies and went back to sitting quietly on his stool in the mill. And yet, desire burned in his heart, tormenting him. When a splitting headache set in, he wrapped his head with a piece of cloth, which lessened the pain at least a little. This reminded him of when the old ship was excavated, since his uncle had worn a headband that day, and he now realized that the old man too had likely been suffering from a headache; he had taken the loss of his boat badly and had been in low spirits ever since.

Not long after Baopu started wearing a headband, Xiaokui married Li Zhaolu. Baopu collapsed when he heard the news and lay numb in his room. Then news reached town that Li Zhaolu had fled to the northeast and slipped into one of the cities there, where he planned to make his fortune and then send for Xiaokui. Sure enough, there was no trace of Zhaolu in town, and Xiaokui had moved back into the family home on Zhao Family Lane.

One stormy night, as thunder rumbled, lightning struck a tree near the old mill. Everyone in town heard the fearsome noise. Wakened by the thunder, Baopu could not go back to sleep and suffered the rest of the night from a headache so bad he had to put the headband back on. As the rain fell outside he imagined that he heard Guigui calling him from far away. So he threw his coat over his shoulders and ran outside, racing across the muddy ground and through the misty rain with no idea where he was going. But when he wiped the water from his face and out of his eyes, he found he was standing beneath Xiaokui’s window. His blood surged. He banged on the window. She was leaning against the sill, weeping, but refused to open the window. Baopu felt the blood rush to his head, turning his cheeks feverish; with a pop, the headband snapped in two, like a broken lute string. He drove his fist through the window.

Suddenly feeling cold, he held her in his arms and felt her heat burning into his chest. Unable to stop shaking or breathing hard, she held her arms crossed in front of her. When he pulled her arms away, she rubbed his rough, callused hands. She was breathing hard in the darkness, almost choking. “Ah, ah,” she said, over and over. Baopu loosened her long hair and removed the little clothing she was wearing. As if talking to himself, he said, “This is how it is. I can’t help myself. I’ve been like this every day. Lightning split something in two. Are you scared that you can’t see anything? Pitiful people, like this, like this. The cricket cage in the mill was blown brittle by the wind. It crumbled when I touched it. A poor, pitiful man. What can I do? You think I’m a terrible person. Like this, like this. Your hands, oh, oh, I’ve got stubble all over my face. I’m so stupid, like a stone. And you, and you. More thunder, why doesn’t lightning strike me dead! All right, I’ll stop talking like that. But you, your hands. What do we do? You, little Xiaokui, my little Xiaokui…” She kept kissing him, and he stopped talking. When lightning lit up the sky, Baopu saw she was sweating. “All I can think of is taking you back to my room, where we would seal up the door and never go out again. The millstone can turn on its own. And that’s how we’d be, in our own home.” Xiaokui did not say a word, it seemed; her eyes reminded him of the night beneath the willow tree that year, and he recalled what she’d said then: “Sooner or later I’ll be yours.” And he had whispered to her: “That’s good.”

For several days after the thunderstorm, Baopu slept through the night. He was also moved to go to his brother’s and his sister’s rooms in order to share his happiness with them. Hanzhang always looked healthy and happy, while Jiansu was in a permanently foul mood. As the circles around his eyes grew darker, he told his brother he’d been spurned, which didn’t surprise Baopu, who just sighed. Apparently, fate had dictated that this generation of the Sui clan could fall in love but that marriage was beyond their reach.

Several days later Li Zhaolu returned from the northeast. After a year of trying to make a living far from home, his skin had taken on a gray pallor and his cheekbones were more prominent. He said he planned to go back, and he’d only returned home to start a family. So he spent a month in Wali, after which he said, “That’ll do it,” and headed back to the northeast. This time he did not return. News of his death arrived six months later. He had been buried in a coal mine cave-in. His widow, Xiaokui, was no longer willing to step foot beyond Zhao Family Lane. Then one day Baopu spotted a woman in mourning apparel. Xiaokui.

Xiaokui gave birth to little Leilei. Meanwhile, Baopu’s health deteriorated, until one day he fell seriously ill. Guo Yun checked his pulse and his tongue, then examined his arms and his back. Lesions had broken out on the skin, he was feverish and thirsty, uncontrollably agitated, and his tongue had changed color. The old man sighed. “The unhealthy external heat has not dissipated,” he said, “and the unhealthy internal heat has risen. The outer and inner heats feed off each other, disrupting the state of mind and internal organs.” He then wrote out a prescription, which Baopu took for several days, improving his condition somewhat, although the lesions did not go away. So Guo Yun gave him a prescription for them: two taels of raw gypsum, three tenths of a tael of glycyrrhiza, three tenths of a tael of figwort, four tenths of a tael of bluebell, a tenth of a tael of rhinoceros horn, and a tael of nonsticky white rice. Baopu followed the healer’s instructions meticulously; once he was on the road to recovery he looked through some medical books. He discovered that Guo Yun had used a formula that produced only temporary benefits and was not a cure. When he asked if that was true, Guo Yun nodded and said yes, stressing the importance of serenity and a moderate use of herbs and tonics. What mattered was breathing exercises and a calm spirit. Baopu met this with silence, firm in his belief that any member of the Sui clan who contracted this illness had no hopes of ever being cured.

Every few days Baopu suffered from insomnia, tossing and turning restlessly, as he had for nearly twenty years. He would get up and walk in the compound, though now he avoided standing beneath Xiaokui’s window. In his imagination he heard Li Zhaolu banging the strainer, he heard the collapse of the mine, and he heard Li Zhaolu’s cries for help. He also saw a look of denunciation in the man’s eyes from beyond the grave. With Xiaokui’s mourning garments floating before his eyes, Baopu walked over to the bean trellis, sometimes recalling that it had been built on the floor of the main house in the estate; his heart would pound. As the only witness to the fire that had destroyed the main house, he had seen Huizi die, had seen the terrifying writhing of her body on the kang. He did not dare tell Jiansu any of this, though he worried that the boy already knew and that it was what burdened his mind. When Jiansu reached adulthood, he had the eyes of a panther searching for prey, and Baopu hoped he’d never see his younger brother pouncing to rip and tear with his teeth.

As the eldest son of the family, he could not rid himself of the feeling that he had failed Hanzhang in his responsibilities to her. She was now a thirty-four-year-old woman who, like her brother, had known love but not marriage. Her uncle had once arranged a marriage for her with Li Zhichang, to which she had agreed. But two days before the wedding she had changed her mind. Li had paced the drying floor for several days bemoaning his fate, assuming that what had happened beneath the willow tree that time had created resentment in her mind. But she begged him to leave her, saying she was unworthy of being part of the Li clan, which she revered. Over the days that followed she grew increasingly wan, until her skin was nearly transparent. She actually grew lovelier by the day, and frailer. From time to time she visited Fourth Master, returning home more obstinate and unruly than ever. She was a dedicated worker, never missing a day. When she returned home from a day on the drying floor, she wove floor mats from tassels of cornstalk to add to the family’s income.

Baopu sat in the mill gazing at the drying floor, thinking about his hardworking sister and growing increasingly melancholy. He was on edge for days after the blowup with his brother in the mill, and he felt as if something were gnawing at his heart. Then one afternoon he threw down his ladle in a fit of pique and walked over to the drying floor, where a chorus of women’s voices came on the wind before he reached it. One horse cart after another drove up to the racks, with their silvery threads waving in the air; the horse bells and the women’s voices merged. Baopu skirted the area of greatest activity and headed for a corner, where he saw his sister standing next to one of the drying racks. She did not see him coming. As her hands flew over the strands of noodles, she was looking up, a smile on her face, gazing through the gaps in the racks at the other women. The sight flooded Baopu’s breast with warm currents of joy, and he decided not to get any closer.

The noodles around her were as clean and clear as crystal, uncontaminated by a single blemish; the sand at her feet shimmered slightly. For the first time Baopu detected the harmonious relationship between his sister and the drying floor. He reached into his pocket looking for some tobacco but left it there as Hanzhang spotted him; by the look in her eyes, she was surprised to see him, and when she called out to him, he walked up. First he looked into her face, and then he turned to look elsewhere. “You never come out to the drying floor,” she said. He looked into her face again but said nothing. He wanted to tell her that he and Jiansu had had a fight, but he swallowed the words.

“Guo Yun says you’re sick,” he said. “What do you have?”

With a look of alarm, she pressed herself up against the drying rack and grabbed threads of noodles with both hands. “I’m not sick,” she said with a grimace.

“Yes, you are,” he said, raising his voice. “I can see it in your face.”

“I said I’m not!” she shouted.

Feeling hurt, Baopu lowered his head and crouched down to stare at his hands. “It can’t be like this, it can’t,” he said softly. “No more…everything has to start from the beginning, and it can’t be like this.” He stood up and looked off in the distance, where the old mills stood at the riverbank, dark and forbidding, like fortresses, and quiet. “The Sui clan,” he said, almost as a moan, “the Sui clan!…” He gazed off in the distance for a long while before spinning around and saying sternly, “You have to get whatever it is treated! I won’t let you turn into someone useless like me. You’re still young! I’m more than ten years older than you, so both you and Jiansu are supposed to do as I say, to listen to me.”

Hanzhang held her tongue. Baopu kept staring at her. She looked up at him and began to tremble.

In the same stern tone of voice, Baopu said, “Answer me. Are you going to have that treated or aren’t you?”

Eyes open wide, Hanzhang looked into her brother’s face without so much as blinking. She held that look for a moment and then stepped up and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She begged him not to mention her sickness again, never again.

SIX

“Another member of the Sui clan has died!” The news traveled stealthily through town for several days. At first no one knew who had died, but word slowly leaked out that it was Dahu, who had been sent up to the front. Half the town knew before anyone told Dahu’s family. Word came first from a mine prospecting team. A young worker’s elder brother who had been in Dahu’s team wrote home. Then Technician Li told Sui Buzhao, and the news continued to spread until one day people saw Dahu’s mother carrying a set of her son’s clothing as she ran wailing up and down the street. “My son!” she was crying, “my unmarried, teenage son!…” People stood around gaping at her. Now that she had been notified of her son’s death, she sat down on a rush mat and wept until she lost her voice. A pall settled over the town and did not lift all that afternoon. Even the workers in the noodle factory were silent. After Zhang-Wang closed the Wali Emporium, old men on their way to have a drink turned back and went home. When night fell no one lit lamps; people groped their way through the dark to sit with the old woman as she mourned her loss.

A tiny, three-room hut with incense curling into the air produced the smell of death familiar to all the town’s residents. Several chests were piled up to form a sort of pulpit covered by a mat and a bedsheet. Various bowls and cups vied for space with gray-yellow candles on top. The bowls were mostly filled with glass noodles dyed in a variety of colors, topped with slices of egg-filled pancakes and decorated with lush green cilantro. Behind were photographs of the only person qualified to enjoy the offering. The photos, all of them small, were fitted into a large frame. The one in the middle, in red and yellow, had been taken six months after Dahu left home. Dressed in an army uniform, he struck a handsome, commanding pose, which had drawn the admiration of nearly every girl in town. Under the flickering candlelight, old folks leaned on their canes and bent forward to examine the photo.

At midnight Zhang-Wang came over with a stack of coarse yellow paper and a bundle of incense sticks, which she handed to the old woman, who then told her young son to record the items in pencil. With a solemn look, Zhang-Wang mumbled something before taking a twig from the old woman to draw an oval shape on the ground. She burned the yellow paper in the middle of the oval. Still mumbling, she sprinkled liquor around the flames; a few drops fell on the fire, which leaped up suddenly. The smoke got thicker, making people cough and tear up. Zhang-Wang sat down on the largest rush mat, her eyes downcast, her sleeves and her shoulders drooping. Her dusty neck was slender but strong, and with her chin pressed inward, she began to chant in a low voice like the whir of a spinning wheel. The people around her began to sway to the rhythm of her chants, the range of their movements widening as they went along, as if they had been dumped into a giant washbasin and were being stirred rhythmically. That went on till daybreak; Zhang-Wang never wavered in her chanting, but some of the people fell asleep and slumped to the ground. The old folks held on to their canes with both hands, their heads drooping down between their legs, their purplish mouths hanging slack. Some of them dreamed they were in the old temple listening to monks reciting sutras; they barely managed to escape when the temple caught fire. It was daylight when they finally woke up. The windows were red from the morning sun and the candles had burned down. Zhang-Wang rose from the rush mat to leave but was stopped by the old woman and her son, who held tightly to Zhang-Wang’s sleeve. Mother and son let her go only after she told them what they wanted to hear.

The Sui clan moved to the yard in front of the hut when the sun was high in the sky and set up a rush tent. They placed a vermillion table and chairs inside and set the table with tea servings. It was late in the afternoon when all was ready, and Zhang-Wang brought in five or six strangers with musical instruments; they sat wordlessly at the table. Then, at a silent signal, they picked up their instruments and began to play. And that was the cue for Zhang-Wang to enter the tent, where she sat on a rush mat that was spread out on the ground. The music was indescribably moving; there were people in town who had never heard ancient music like that before, and others who had a vague recollection of hearing it in the past. People streamed over, crowding the tent until latecomers were forced to stand outside. The noodle factory was virtually empty; when Duoduo came over to find his workers, even he was captivated by the music.

The musicians, whose sallow faces were unfamiliar to the townspeople, had exhausted their emotions over a lifetime of playing and now performed their mournful songs with expressions that revealed no emotion. One of them, who seemed not terribly bright, was barely holding on to his instrument and playing nearly inaudible sounds, calm and unhurried. People sat on the ground, their eyes closed as they listened intently, feeling as if they had been transported, trancelike, to a mystical land of wonder. When the musicians stopped to rest and drink a cup of tea, the listeners, near and far, exhaled loudly. At that moment it dawned on someone to ask who had invited this musical group, and they were told that Zhang-Wang had made the arrangements. That surprised no one. A moment later the music started up again and the people once more held their breath and narrowed their eyes. But then a shrill noise cut through the music. All eyes popped open to search out the source. The music stopped.

Someone spotted Gimpy, who had slipped in among the others and was sitting tearfully on the doorsill. He had taken out his flute. Angered by his presence, they told him to leave, but he began to play his flute, undeterred even when someone in the crowd kicked him. Erhuai, the pier guard, walked up with his rifle and threatened to snap the flute in two. But Gimpy held on to it for dear life, rolling on the ground to protect his treasured instrument; finally, he managed to run off.

The musicians played till late into the night, when everyone’s hair was wet with dew; moisture on the stringed instruments altered their sound until they seemed to be sobbing. Then the shrill sound of a flute came on the wind from the floodplain, each note like a knife to the heart. There is nothing quite like the sound of a flute at night, and the full extent of its mystical power was felt by the townspeople that night. The sound was mistaken by some for a woman singing or a man sobbing, boundless joy pierced through with limitless sadness. The tune was as cold as autumn ice, constantly rising and falling like a barrage of arrows in flight. When and why had Gimpy decided to play the flute like that? No one knew. But the music quickly immersed the people in thoughts of their own suffering and their own pleasures. They were reminded of how Dahu had gone down to the river as a boy, naked, to spear fish, and how he had walked around tooting on a green flute he’d fashioned from a green castor bean plant. Once he’d climbed an apricot tree and tasted some of the sap, mistakenly assuming it would be much like one of Zhang-Wang’s sweets. As shrill notes from the flute continued to drift over, the people conjured up an image of Dahu lying on the ground in his tattered uniform, his forehead ashen white, blood seeping from the corner of his mouth. The musicians in the tent began to sigh; one by one, they laid down their instruments and, like everyone else, listened intently to the flute. And so it went until the music stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The sense of disappointment was palpable as people looked around helplessly. Stars hung low in the clear, bright night sky as the dew settled. Erhuai, still carrying his rifle, came running over, stepping on people as he went to clear a passage. Everyone turned to look.