Everything Under the Sky (16 page)

“Don't you remember what I told you in Shanghai about Shi Huang Ti's royal mausoleum? I said that everyone who knew where the mausoleum was located was buried alive with him: hundreds of childless imperial concubines and the seven hundred thousand workers who'd been involved in construction. This is confirmed by Sima Qian, the most important Chinese historian of all time.
¹⁸
All the more reason, then, for the man who was foreman on that great project to die. Sai Wu was the very person responsible for thirty-six years, as he explained to his son.”

“Which makes Sai Wu the best engineer and architect of his time.” It was Fernanda who blurted out this comment, surprising us all. However, before I had time to respond, Mr. Jiang was speaking again. What he had to say was not very nice at all.

“Too much knowledge in girls is pernicious,” he declared. “It ruins their chances of finding a good husband. You should teach your niece to be quiet, madame, especially in the presence of adults.”

I opened my mouth to tell the antiquarian in no uncertain terms how absurd his assertions were, but—

“Auntie Elvira, please be so kind as to tell Mr. Jiang on my behalf,” Fernanda said, her voice dripping with resentment, “that if he would like his traditions to be respected, he must also respect the traditions of others, especially as regards women.”

“I agree with my niece, Mr. Jiang,” I added, staring straight at him. “We're not used to the way you treat the other half of your population, those two hundred million women who aren't allowed to speak. Fernanda didn't mean to offend you. She simply made a valid contribution to the conversation we were having, exactly as she would have done in Europe.”

“Pa luen
.
¹⁹
I'm not going to discuss this matter with you, madame,” the antiquarian declared, so coldly that the blood froze in my veins. He immediately rolled up the bamboo slats, wrapped them in the yellow silk scarf, and placed them back in the box. Then he stood with his usual agility and walked away. It was unbelievably rude.

“Well, Biao,” I said, standing up as well, though not quite as easily as the antiquarian, “what's to be done in a situation like this, where two cultures have unintentionally offended one another?”

Biao looked at me forlornly, more like a small child than ever.

“I don't know,
tai-tai,
” he replied, apparently unwilling to take a stand.

“I didn't do anything wrong!” Fernanda fumed.

“Calm down. I know you didn't. Mr. Jiang is going to have to get used to us, whether he wants to or not.”

I'd had a magnificent idea once when I was young. I was sketching a little vase the teacher had set on a table as a lesson in how to work with light and shadow, when I suddenly decided that I not only wanted to be a painter when I grew up, but I wanted my own life to be a work of art. Yes, that's exactly what I thought: I want to make my life a work of art. Much water had passed under the bridge since then, and when I looked back on that childish goal, I was proud of myself for having achieved it. True, I didn't earn much as a painter, and I was still far from realizing my dream; my marriage hadn't exactly been exemplary, because, like Rémy, I wasn't predisposed to married life; I had never been close to my family; the men in my life had always been deplorable (Alain, that idiot of a pianist; Noël, the opportunistic student; Théophile, my lying colleague); and, above all, my youthful courage had disappeared with age, leaving me defenseless when faced with the simplest of setbacks. But regardless of these many deficiencies, I was still proud of myself. My life was different from that of most women of my generation. I had learned how to make difficult decisions. I lived in Paris, in my very own home, and painted in my studio, where the perfect southeast light streamed in the windows. I had pulled myself out of many a slump and had known how to preserve my friendships. When all is said and done, if that wasn't creating a little work of art, let God come down and judge for himself. I was confident it was. Looking on the bright side, perhaps this miserable trip through China was just another brushstroke in a picture that was acquiring beauty, errors, pentimenti, and all. At least that's how I felt the morning of the day we arrived in Nanking, as the breeze off the Yangtze caressed my face and fishermen dressed in black sent their cormorants out to explore the river.

The Chinese have a very unusual way of fishing, without poles or nets. They train those big aquatic birds with vibrant necks to catch the fish and regurgitate them into baskets on the boat, alive and undamaged. That morning I painted several cormorants along the margins and in the corners of already used pages in my notebook, intending to include them in the picture I wanted to paint of the whirring fan blades in my cabin on the
André Lebon.
I hadn't yet decided on all the elements for the composition, but I knew there would be cormorants and fans.

We arrived in Nanking before sunset on the afternoon of Wednesday, September 5. By this time I could hardly believe I'd been in China for only a week. It was as if I'd been there for months, and my departure from Paris began to feel like a distant memory. New experiences and journeys can exert a powerful, amnesiac influence on you, like painting one color over another, making a third that's even more vivid than its predecessors.

The Yangtze was so wide in Nanking that it could easily have been mistaken for an ocean. At some point we lost sight of the northern shore and never saw it again. The slow passing of muddy water in one direction was the only indication that this endless expanse was actually a river. Massive steamers, cargo ships, tugs, and gunboats moved up and down the river or remained docked, while barge caravans like ours and hundreds of family sampans—true houseboats—filled with men, women, and scantily clad children amassed, tacking back and forth in search of a clear stretch of water. The smell of fried fish was overpowering.

We left the river, crossed a wharf crowded with people, boxes, baskets, ducks and geese in cages, and headed into the city. We needed to find somewhere to stay that night and, though I didn't say it, somewhere to bathe as well—some of us stank like oxen. But Nanking was no Shanghai, with its modern hotels and night lights. It was a city in ruins; a big city yes, but in ruins. Nothing remained of its former splendor as the old Southern Capital (which is what Nanking means, as opposed to Peking, which means “Northern Capital”), founded in the fourteenth century by the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. The crumbling walls of the old city were visible here and there as we walked through wide, filthy streets in search of an inn. Paddy stumbled along with puffy, red eyes, waking up slightly in the somewhat-less-than-torrid night air.

Mr. Jiang walked confidently, happily ahead. Nanking brought back good memories of his youth; it was here he had taken his literary exam and gotten the highest possible mark. It seems the Southern Capital was a little like one of our European university cities, and scholars who studied here were viewed in much higher regard than were those who studied anywhere else in China. There were still huge Ming monuments in the city, mostly on the outskirts, since it had once been a metropolis of considerable political and economic importance with a large, educated population.

“Nanking,” the antiquarian proudly commented, “is where the most beautiful books in the Middle Kingdom are published. The quality of the ink and paper made here are unrivaled.”

“Chinese ink?” Fernanda asked distractedly as she stared at the poverty and desolation on the streets.

“Well, we're not in India,” Paddy replied disagreeably, obviously still suffering from a hangover.

We finally found lodging in a sad
lü kuan
(a sort of cheap hotel) between the Catholic Mission and the Confucius Temple in the western part of the city. It was nothing more than a square patio that looked as if it had once been a pigsty, partially covered by a thatched overhang with rooms around four sides. In the back, faintly lit by lanterns and oil lamps, was a dining area crammed with tables full of people eating or playing a strange board game I'd never seen before.

Mr. Jiang soon struck up a conversation with the owner, a stocky, young Celestial with a high forehead and an old-fashioned Qing queue. The antiquarian stood next to a big wood-fired stove gathering information from the owner in an attempt to supplement what little we knew about where the physician Yao had hidden the second piece of Sai Wu's
jiance
over three hundred years ago. Meanwhile, the rest of us ate rolls stuffed with shrimp and pieces of seasoned meat, and a dish of sweet and sour pork. I had gotten much better at using chopsticks,
kuaizi,
over the last few days on the barge, and it was as if Fernanda had never eaten with anything else in her life. Just as we were finishing, the owner of the
lü kuan
said good-bye to Lao Jiang with a nervous smile, and the antiquarian came back over.

“What if he tells the Green Gang we're here?” I asked anxiously as Mr. Jiang sat down and picked up a big piece of pork with his chopsticks.

“Oh, I don't doubt he will,” he replied pleasantly. “But not tonight; not now. So let's calmly have our tea, and I'll tell you what I found out.”

Biao, who had eaten in a back patio with the other servants, still dirty and smelly, appeared with a pot of hot water for tea. Everyone seemed content that night. Perhaps I was worrying too much.

A blind old Chinese man came in and sat down next to a pillar. He set a case on the ground and pulled out a sort of small violin with a long neck and a sound box made from a turtle shell. Holding it vertically, he pulled a bow across the strings and began to sing a strange, melancholy song in a shrill falsetto. Some of the diners banged the table in time to the music, delighted with the entertainment. Both the antiquarian and the Irishman had big, happy smiles on their faces as they watched the musician.

“Here's the situation,” Lao Jiang began, demanding our attention. “The names of most of the gates in the old Ming wall that circles the city have changed since they were built. That's why I didn't remember any Jubao Gate, as it's called in the Prince of Gui's message. The innkeeper doesn't know of one either, but he's sure it must be
Nan-men,
the City Gate, also known as Zhonghua Gate or Zhonghua Men. It's the oldest gate in all of China, and there's a small mountain called Jubao in front, across the Qinhuai River that used to be the moat around the wall. It would have been the main gate into the old city of Nanking, the south gate, built during the second half of the fourteenth century by order of the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuan Zhang.”

“How many gates are there?” Tichborne asked.

“Originally, there were over twenty. During the Ming era, Nanking was the largest fortified city in the country, and there were two walls, the interior and the exterior. Nothing remains of the exterior wall. The interior wall, the one we're talking about, was almost sixty-eight
li,
²⁰
or twenty-three miles, long, of which only about thirteen remain. Just seven or eight gates are left. There were still twelve when I took my exams, but recent riots and uprisings damaged several of them. Zhonghua Men, however, is in perfect condition.”

“But we're not sure this Zhonghua Men is Jubao Gate, are we?”

“It must be, madame. The fact that it's across from a mountain called Jubao is very significant.”

“And what, exactly, did the Prince of Gui's message say? I'm sorry, but I don't remember.”

Paddy snorted. His face was pale, and he had big black bags under his puffy red eyes.

“The Prince told Physician Yao to ‘find the mark of the artisan Wei from the region of Xin'an, province of Chekiang’ in order to hide his fragment there. In China, bricks are the most common building material after wood, and the artisans who manufactured them for the government were required to write their name and province of origin on them. That way they could be found and punished if their bricks weren't of good quality.”

“And the Prince of Gui knew all the suppliers?” I asked in disbelief. “It seems strange that of the many artisans who must have manufactured bricks for the walls and gates in Nanking, the last Ming emperor would know this anonymous laborer Wei from the region of Xin'an, dead three hundred years before.”

“Obviously there's more here than meets the eye, madame,” Lao Jiang replied. “Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Everything will become clear once we solve the riddle. Right now it's important for you to learn to identify the Chinese characters for Wei, Xin'an, and Chekiang. We sons of Han use the same syllables to name many different things. Only our intonation differentiates them. That's why the
yang kwei
say our language has such an unusual musical quality to it: If they pronounce a syllable-word with the wrong intonation, the word means something entirely different from what was intended. The only way we can be precise is in writing; there is a different ideogram for every concept. We can understand one another in writing even if we're from different regions in the Middle Kingdom. We can even understand the Japanese and the Koreans, though they speak different languages, because they adopted our writing system many centuries ago.”

“That was quite the oration!” Tichborne mocked. “It took me three years to speak your damn language and learn what few characters I know.”

The antiquarian set our dinner bowls to one side and reached into his pocket for a small rectangular box covered in red silk, containing a smaller version of what Celestials call the “Four Literary Treasures”: animal-hair brushes, a block of ink, a mixing bowl, and paper. He unfurled the little roll of rice paper and secured each corner with one of our dinner bowls, then rolled up his sleeves and poured a few drops of water from the kettle into the mixing bowl. Next he took the block of ink and methodically rubbed it until the bright black emulsion acquired the appropriate density. Then he held the brush upright with all five fingers of his right hand. With his left he pulled his right sleeve back to keep it from dragging over the strokes and smudging them. He dipped the brush in the ink and held it over the white surface. Oh, the unction in his every move! It was as if he were a priest performing a sacred ritual. What he drew looked something like this: