Under Fishbone Clouds Read online

  I shrugged. ‘Your spy is correct. Well, how else could I pick from billions? At least I can now call it fate instead of preference. And my work is going very well, thank you – you ought to be getting nervous! For example, I have already found that no heart works alone: it take two hearts to make a story.’

  ‘Yes, the yin and the yang knotted together, each incomprehensible without reference to the other. Not bad. You are beginning to understand something of the heart. But can you explain it? After all, it is one thing to recognise something and quite another to explain how it works.’ His dark moustache twitched into a grin. ‘You will fail.’

  ‘You underestimate me,’ I replied. ‘I do this every spring, and I have never yet failed to find you a story. I collect lives, the little secrets spilling out in kitchens and whispered about by drunken men or middle-aged women. You may hold infinity in your grasp, but I have at least learnt what makes people tick. Plus, I know where the heart lives: between thought and action.’

  As I spoke, the stream before me dwindled to cobwebs, the humming rocks shrunk to swirling grains in dusty floorboards and I was back in a kitchen on earth; though somehow I sensed that the Jade Emperor was still grinning.

  4

  1947 THE YEAR OF THE PIG

  They had been travelling for two weeks, slowly trudging south as autumn drew down to its deepest earthen browns. Jinyi’s battered, second-hand plimsolls were already falling apart and his oily black hair stuck to his forehead. Two bags of knotted cloth were suspended from either side of a slim rung of bamboo fed across his shoulders, and his slack arms were slung over the top. Yuying’s stomach retained some of the extra padding from her recent pregnancy, and their six-month-old son, Wawa, occasionally wriggled and squirmed in the sling she wore across her chest. The baby babbled and his thick black eyebrows – his father’s eyebrows, great dark caterpillars that were already bushy and fully formed when he was delivered – danced over his chubby face. Yuying hummed to him as they walked, and Wawa lay grinning, trying to clench his tiny fists around the folds of his blanket.

  They had been married almost a year and a half. Jinyi was twenty-two and finally going back to the place his ancestors were buried; Yuying was almost eighteen and had no choice but to follow her husband. Her red cloth slippers squelched through scatterings of leaves, mulch, murky water and, once every few days, stray bullet shells.

  Even I was out of my element accompanying them into that immeasurable stretch of fields and thickets, without a kitchen in sight. Old Bian’s trusty coachman had dropped them at the outskirts of the city, saying he could go no further, not while the civil war was still raging, unless he wanted to get shot or be forced to join up – he had not been sure which option was worse. So the young couple stayed close to dirt roads to keep their bearings, though they never walked directly on them for fear of passing soldiers. Neither did they dare wander too far into the woods and ranges that dipped and drove around them.

  Towns and cities were not safe. Most villages’ allegiances were to the Communists and, therefore, they were often happy to bed travelling strangers as long as they were neither Japanese, Kuomintang, Russians, feudalists, landlords nor traitors. At the start of the walk, Jinyi had tried to teach his wife how to act more like a peasant.

  ‘It’ll make things easier that way, just in case we meet any Communists who mistake you for an absconding landlord or something. Talk with your mouth closed. As if each word kind of got stuck in your throat. As if you’ve got a mouth full of broken teeth. And try your best not to use your nose when you talk.’

  Yuying had pursed her lips together and mumbled incomprehensibly.

  ‘Well, of course you have to open you lips a little, but that’s a good start. And try not to walk so tall. Remember, you don’t want to be looked at. So slouch a little. Good. There you go! And head looking at the floor, remember, as though your feet are the most fascinating things you have ever come across. That’s right. And hug your body in a bit closer with your hands, like you’re protecting it in case someone should try and steal it any second.’

  He had stood back and observed her, standing awkwardly with her pale hands folded across the baby, her shoulders hunched up and her head thrust forward, peering down at the ground. She had looked like a myopic turtle. When Jinyi burst out laughing, Yuying’s smile had vanished back into the neutral face she had been taught to use to hide her emotions. Wawa had no such reserve, however, and mirrored his father, giggling with his eyes squeezed shut and thumping his arms against his sides.

  They walked on down a dirt track veering through patches of ragged trees, overgrown fields and slopes of slate and rubble, and though her common sense told her that they were moving forward, covering more and more ground, Yuying could not help but feel that they were only travelling in unending circles.

  ‘Today go to Yue but arrive yesterday,’ Yuying muttered to Wawa.

  She was quoting a paradox written by Hui Shi, an early practioner of linguistic logic games. Don’t get me started on those thinkers from the School of Names; they really tie my head in knots. But what Hui Shi’s paradox seems to suggest is the fact that the world is only observable through the curved lens of the eye. Both time and space are subjective concepts, kept constant only by the observer. Any objective measuring of these is impossible, for who can step outside their position as viewer and see the world from another viewpoint? That is the work of the imagination, the work that makes people human. There are no differences between yesterday and today, now and then, except for the experience and cataloguing of them. All of which made Yuying and Jinyi’s month-long journey more and more tedious.

  Jinyi tried to stay good-humoured, though things had not gone as planned. However, he had given his word, and he would stick by it. All he had wanted was a family, and giving up his name seemed a small price to pay for getting everything he had ever longed for.

  ‘How much further can it possibly be?’ Yuying said.

  ‘A couple of days. I think. Just try and relax, all right? I’m doing my best.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we find somewhere to sleep before it gets dark?’ Yuying asked.

  ‘We’ve got all afternoon yet. We could learn from Wawa here – he couldn’t care less about where he falls asleep. Anyway, we’ll come to a village soon. Don’t you know any old folk tales? The heroes always find shelter and hope right at the last minute. Didn’t I tell you I was going to look after us?’ Jinyi said.

  ‘Yes, I remember, I was just –’

  ‘Well, trust me. This isn’t the city any more. There are different ways of doing things out here. It’s too late to turn back now, anyway.’

  ‘I never said I wanted to turn back, Jinyi. I trust you. It’s just Wawa is tired, and –’

  ‘I know, I know. Look, don’t worry, all right? I promised I’d look after you, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’

  There was a long silence. Neither of them was sure that he was being entirely honest. Yuying wanted to believe that he was just trying to save his family from the bombs and shootings that had filled the city, yet she couldn’t help but wonder if he only wanted to take control – after all, despite the awkwardness of the first months of the arranged marriage, she had still been saddened to see this nervous young man hovering sulkily in undisturbed corners of the mansion. Jinyi wanted to believe that he was only trying to take his new family to the place where his ancestors’ bones lay to bring a blessing on their new life together, yet he knew deep down that he had to escape the stuffiness of his new home before it suffocated him.

  ‘It’s funny,’ he started again, to fill the quiet between them. ‘Everything looks a little different when you come at it from another side. Did you know, there are trees that uproot at night and rearrange their positions so as to confuse travellers?’

  ‘Really?’ she asked sceptically.

  ‘For sure. I came across some on my way up north. And ravenous birds which have stolen human voices and use them to call people from the tracks
so that they can tear strips from your flesh for food. I didn’t meet any of them though, thank the gods.’

  ‘You must have been protected by something.’

  ‘Maybe I was.’

  ‘When you left home, did you think you’d come back?’

  ‘No. Well, maybe – deep down. I always thought that I might return when I’d found what I was looking for.’

  ‘And what was it you were looking for?’ Yuying asked.

  ‘A reason.’

  ‘Is this the way you came when you were travelling up to us?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’ Jinyi struggled forward. For most of the journey so far, he had not dared to look back because he was afraid of seeing his wife’s face either pleading or worn-out. He worried that if he did so his heart would force him to give up and turn around. So he kept on until he found something to say. ‘But I do know where we are. Roughly. So don’t worry.’

  ‘It’s beautiful round here, isn’t it? The light, I mean. And the quiet. Did you ever learn that poem, by Liu Zongyuan? We had to learn it at school. You know, the one about an empty village?’

  Again he struggled on, and did not answer. He did not know the poem, and did not want to remind her that he never went to school. Was this place beautiful? It was barren and wet, with a mist descending from trailing peaks in the distance. Jinyi’s fingers were numb, and all three of their stomachs were grumbling.

  ‘It’s called “Travelling through an Empty Village”,’ she said, and began to recite the words she had learned by rote years before:

  The snaking dew smudges the grass with ice

  as the path slopes beneath my steps. I clear

  bridges over streams streaked with tawny leaves,

  and not a single person left living here.

  Flowers flare up between the weaving stream:

  my plans forgotten, the only thing I hear

  is the clatter and crunch of my restless stride

  scattering the startled, darting deer.

  And as she spoke, Yuying was suddenly struck by the similarities between the travels of the Tang-dynasty poet she had learnt about in school and their own journey. She remembered the teacher telling them that Liu Zongyuan’s career as a mandarin had been cut short, soon after the turn of the ninth century, when he was exiled from court after falling out of favour with the Xianzong Emperor (who, the teacher recounted with a certain relish, was allegedly later murdered by one of his own eunuchs inside the palace walls). The poet had travelled down from the imperial sheen of the north to the sparse and unyielding expanse of the southern provinces. As father, mother and baby made their way further from her hometown, Yuying felt a kinship with the classical poet who had been forced to leave his old life behind. But if the world seemed suddenly immeasurable, wild, and unpredictable to her, then it also seemed to shrink; save for each other, they were alone.

  And the exiled poet too, thinking he was leaving his whole life behind when he gave up his well-loved routines and pursuits, had searched through the feral beauty of the endless country plots only to find himself once more, stripped down to bones, heart, tongue.

  They had spent the first year of their marriage trying to work out what to say to each other, pinching themselves to make sure that this was really their life now. They had blushed and blustered. Yuying mistook Jinyi’s uncertainty of how to behave in the mansion as dissatisfaction, and spent months trying to work out what it was that a wife was supposed to do to make a husband relax – both in the long silences when they sat together in the evening, listening to the sound of gunfire in distant streets, and when the lamps were put out and they drew close for warmth. In the first few months of their marriage they had been tentative, stealing touches beneath the blankets, holding each other and nervously waiting, neither one wanting to be the first to move. Aside from gossip and jokes, they knew little of what was expected. And in the damp heat of those last moments before sleep, lying intertwined after fumbled, awkward sex, Yuying would ask Jinyi who he was, and hug him close to check whether he was real. And he would hold her tighter back, in answer.

  Life in the big house had not been as he had expected. The couple had been seconded in a crumbling corner of the building, left to listen to the mouse-like scurrying of the servants between the rooms. What’s more, he had been blanked by his former friends in the restaurant. After work, he had found, for the first time in his life, that thanks to the servants he had nothing that needed doing – he had spent his time cracking his knuckles while his wife shared jokes with her sisters, who came knocking throughout the evening. Yet most of all it was the bustle and noise of the house that had seemed strange to him, so unlike the huddled field-houses where the days were punctuated only by the colic howls of the dogs, where people went weeks without speaking to each other. He and Yaba had met in the garden whenever possible, smoking the few cigarettes they had managed to club together, trying to ignore the servants who were also trying to ignore them.

  Though the war with the Japanese had ended, the city had still been filled with soldiers. He remembered how, in the months straight after the troops disappeared, half of the city had been sick with constipation, heartburn or diarrhoea, their stomachs grown unaccustomed to the rice, meats and fish that they were suddenly allowed to eat again. First it had been the Russians, and then the Communists: scores of dirty-shirted peasant soldiers staking out the buildings the Japanese had deserted.

  Yuying had grown despondent in Fushun. Her college had closed down because of the civil war: students were fighting in the halls, and the classrooms had been turned into makeshift barracks for the ragged army of craggy-faced fieldmen and teenagers who had not yet started shaving. Those same troops had stolen her books and burnt them to stay warm: studying Japanese didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. At least the Japanese had brought order; after they had left, life only seemed to become more dangerous, with cars being overturned in the street, the sound of gunfire slipping through blocked-out windows and the bodies of deserters (identified by a single swirl of mangled red where the right eye should be) found lying in side-streets and alleys. She had spent most of her time in her room, knitting things for the baby.

  And then the baby came. Hours of sweating and moaning and cursing everyone in sight, and suddenly a slimy wrinkled pink thing handed to her as she lay back in the bed. As she took her crying son in her arms she also began to cry. The two of them were still crying when Jinyi was allowed in and, despite the speech he had spent weeks preparing he too began to cry. And so it was that the small creature with his mother’s round face and his father’s dark eyes and wild eyebrows bound them together; suddenly they had something in common that transcended the big house and the differences in their backgrounds, and they celebrated each gurgle, each laugh and each burp as though they were little miracles which only the two of them fully understood.

  The baby’s horoscope had been drawn up by an elderly man, as fat as the Buddha, with as many chins as he had fingers. He wrote painstakingly slowly, as if drawing a line too quickly might invite disaster upon the infant’s entire life. After every pristine brushstroke he would stare up into the distance, shaking his formidable jowls before he let the brush once more travel from the ink pot to the scroll. Perhaps this was a professional trick, perhaps an unconscious tic or eccentricity. From the dates and stars he culled for them a life. He had asked for the exact minute of the birth as noted from Old Bian’s antique grandfather clock, then named the child’s zodiac animals. Wawa would be quick-tempered, honest, and with great strength and resolve, his anxious parents were told. The new parents nodded eagerly and before the elderly astrologer had even finished speaking they were finding proof of his words in the way Wawa gurgled and blinked at them and flailed his podgy arms up and down against his sides.

  Not even the sleepless nights could stop their proud smiles and endless amazement at the chubby child who had appeared, as if by magic, in the middle of their lives – that is, until the day the roofs fell through the t
hree houses at the other end of the street. And then Jinyi was home, the restaurant closed and taken over as a temporary barracks and canteen, and all that was left were the rumours of what would happen to the people living in big houses if the peasant army won. The civil war was fought bitterly in the north, the Kuomintang forever launching counter-offensives against the Communists who, buoyed by a rural army trained in guerilla tactics, had no trouble taking over the whole region, and, once installed, did not plan to leave.

  The look on Old Bian’s face had been unreadable when Jinyi had told him he was taking Yuying and Wawa back to his uncle and aunt’s, but it was clear that it was a development neither of them had been expecting.

  Yuying caught sight of a thin curl of smoke rising above the trees and nudged her husband, desperate to be seen to be of some use. They made towards it and passed through the sloping line of firs, skidding and gripping each others’ wrists for support as they wound down between the knotted trunks, a dense tangle of branches blotting out all but a few lithe slivers of light. It took them an hour to descend little more than half a li, clutching the wailing baby tight. When they cleared the mass of trees, they saw the house. Backed up by a couple of vegetable fields, it was made of earth and stone, padded together with dry straw, the roof a cross-stitch of thatch. A small fire was burning in front of the porch, slowly heating a battered pail of water. Squatting beside the fire and feeding it twigs and leaves was a small girl, who Yuying guessed was about nine years old. The ash blew onto her bare legs so they looked like stone.

  ‘Hey there. You need a hand?’ Jinyi asked, his wife quickly slipping behind him. The girl looked up to take them in, then went back to teasing the fire.