Ghostwritten (16 page)

I hobbled downstairs, the stairs and my ankles creaking. So intent are they on getting what they both want, they didn’t notice me until I was at the chicken coop. “Tea?”

They spring apart. Big Ears blushes like a tomato. Does she thank me for guarding her honor? No. She looks at me, arms folded, quite unabashed, though her legs are as wide apart as a man’s. “Yes. Tea.”

They come around to the entrance to the Tea Shack. She sits down, crosses her legs, and pulls lipstick and a mirror from her shoulder bag. He sits opposite her, and just stares, like a dog at the moon. “Radio,” she orders. He gets a shiny little box out of his bag, and slides out a long wire. She takes it, touches the side, and suddenly a woman’s voice is on the path, singing about love, the southern breeze, and pussy willows.

“Where’s she coming from?”

The girl deigns to notice me. “It’s the latest hit from Macau.” She looks at the boy. “Haven’t you heard it?”

“ ’Course I have,” he says, gruffly.

There are things I will never understand.

My father shrieked at me and the chickens squawked. “You little slut! You little fool! After everything I’ve done for you, after the sacrifices I’ve made, this is how you thank me! If it had been a boy, the Warlord’s Son would have showered us with gifts! Showered
us! We could have lived in his castle! I would have been appointed a dignitary with servants! Fruits from the islands! But why would anyone want to acknowledge that!”

He jabbed his fingernail into my baby’s loins. My baby howled. Only five minutes old, and already learning. “You’ve sold your chances of a decent marriage for a nightpot of watery shit!”

One of my aunts led him out.

The Tree was looking in, and smiling. “Isn’t she beautiful?” I asked.

The shadows and light on my baby’s face were leafy and green.

A few days later, it was agreed that my daughter would be raised with relatives living three days’ ride downstream. A large landowning household, one more daughter could be slipped in without much fuss. An uncle told me that the distance would conceal the shame I’d inflicted on our family’s honor. My chastity was gone forever, of course. Perhaps in a few years some widower pig farmer might be persuaded to take me in as a mistress and nurse for his old age. If I was lucky.

I resolved then and there not to be lucky.

These same uncles all agreed that the Japanese would never get this far down the Yangtze, nor this far into the mountains. And supposing they did? Everyone knows how Japanese soldiers need more oxygen than humans, so they could never get up the Holy Mountain. The war had nothing to do with us. Many of the village sons were conscripted by the Warlord, and sent to fight on the side of some kind of alliance, but that was beyond the Valley, where the world is less real. Places called Manchuria, Mongolia, and further.

My uncles never knew truth from chickenshit. I dreamed of a clay jar of rice in the cave. When I asked a monk what it meant, he told me it was a suggestion from Lord Buddha.

When the Holy Mountain is windy, sounds from afar are blown near, and nearby sounds are blown away. The Tea Shack creaks—my lazy father never lifted a hammer in his life—and the Tree
creaks. That’s why we didn’t hear them until they had kicked the windows in.

My father was climbing into the cupboard. I listened, nervous, but already resigned to whatever fate Lord Buddha had laid out for me. I wrapped my shawl around me. They didn’t speak Valley language. They didn’t even speak Cantonese, or Mandarin. They made animal noises. I spied through the cracks in the planking. It was difficult to see in the lamp light, but they looked almost human. My village cousins had told me that foreigners had elephant noses and hair like dying monkeys, but these ones looked a lot like us. On their uniforms was sewn insignia that looked like a headache—a red dot with red stripes of pain flashing out.

Lights were shone into our faces, and rough hands hauled us downstairs. The room was full of beams of lantern light, men, pots and pans being overturned. Our money box was found and smashed open. That headache insignia. A thing with wings swung above. The smell of men, men, always men. We were brought before a man with spectacles and a waxy mustache.

I was the breadwinner, but I looked at the floor.

“A nice cup of green tea, perhaps,” my father wrestled through a stammer, “sir?”

This one could speak. Strange Cantonese, squeezed through a mangler. “We are your liberators. We are requisitioning this wayside inn in the name of His Imperial Egg of Japan. The Holy Mountain now belongs to the Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity. We are here to percolate our Sick Mother China from the evil of the European imperialists. Except the Germans, who are a tribe of honor and racial purity.”

“Oh,” said my father. “That’s good. I like honor. And I’m a sick father.”

The door banged open—I thought it was a gunshot—and a soldier wearing a gallery of medals came in. Waxy Mustache saluted Medal Man, and shouted animal noises. Medal Man peered at my father, then at me. He smiled from the corner of his mouth. He made some quiet animal noises to the other soldiers.

Waxy Mustache barked at my father. “You have harbored fugitives in your inn!”

“No, sir, we hate that goat-fucking Warlord! His son raped my daughter here!”

Waxy Mustache translated this into animal noises to Medal Man. Medal Man raised his eyebrows in surprise, and grunted back.

“My men are pleased to hear your daughter provides comfort to passers-by. But we are displeased to hear your slur of our ally, the Warlord. He is working with us to purge the Valley of communism.”

“Of course, when I said—”

“Silence!”

Medal Man forced the mouth of his gun into my father’s mouth. “Bite,” he said.

Medal Man looked into my father’s eyes. “Harder.”

Medal Man uppercutted my father’s chin. My father spat out bits of tooth. Medal Man chortled. My father’s blood dripped to the floor in flower-splashes. He staggered back into a tub of water, as though he had rehearsed it.

The soldier holding me relaxed his grip as he laughed. I staved in his kneecap with a bottle of oil and sent the lamp in my face flying across the room. Whoever it hit screamed and dropped something that smashed. I ducked and ran for the door. Lord Buddha slipped a brass chopstick into my hand, and opened the door for me as my fingertips touched it, and shut it behind me. There were three men outside—one got a good grip, but I stuck the brass chopstick through the side of his mouth and he let go. The Japanese soldiers followed me up the path, but it was a moonless night, and I knew every rock, curve, bear path, and fox trail. I slipped off the path, and heard them vanish into the distance.

My heart had slowed by the time I reached the cave. The Holy Mountain fell away below me, and the windy forest moved like the ocean in my dreams. I wrapped myself in my shawl, and watched the light of heaven shine through the holes in the night until I fell asleep.

My father was black with bruises, but he was up and limping through the wreckage of the Tea Shack. His mouth looked like a
rotting potato. “You caused this,” he scowled by way of greeting, “you fix it. I’m going to stay with my brother. I’ll be back in two or three days.” My father hobbled off down the path. When he returned he had become an old man waiting to die. That was weeks later.

My daughter was blossoming into a local beauty, my aunts told me. Her guardian had already turned down two proposals of marriage, and she was still only twelve. The guardian was setting his sights high: if the Kuomintang forces took over the Valley soon, he could possibly arrange a union with a Nationalist administrator. He might even get himself a fat appointment as a clause in the marriage negotiations. A photographer had been paid to take her picture, which was being circulated among possible suitors in high places. When I wintered in the Village an aunt brought me one of these photographs. She had a lily in her hair, and a chaste, invisible smile. My heart glowed with pride, and never stopped.

My daughter’s father, the Warlord’s Son, never lived to see her blossom. This causes me no sorrow. He got butchered by a neighboring Warlord in alliance with the Kuomintang. He, his father, and the rest of his clan were captured, roped and bound, slung onto a pile at a crossroads down in the Valley, doused in oil, and burnt alive. The crows and dogs fought over the cooked meat.

Lord Buddha promised to protect my daughter from the demons, and my Tree promised that I would see her again.

Far, far below, a temple bell gongs, the surface of the dawn ripples, and turtledoves fly from the wall of forest, up, and up. Always up.

————

A government official strutted downbound out of the mist. I guessed he’d been driven to the summit. I recognized his face from his grandfather’s. His grandfather had scraped a living from the roads and marketplaces in the Valley, shoveling up manure and selling it to local farmers. An honest, if lowly, way to get by.

His grandson sat down at my table, and slung his leather bag onto the table. Out of his bag he produced a notebook, an account book, a metal strongbox, and a bamboo stamp. He started writing in his notebook, looking up at the Tea Shack from time to time, as though he was thinking about buying it.

“Tea,” he said presently, “and noodles.”

I began preparing his order.

“This,” he said, showing me a card with his picture and name on it, “is my Party ID. My identification. It never leaves my person.”

“Why do you need to carry a picture of yourself around? People can see what you look like. You’re in front of them.”

“It says I am a Local Cadre Party Leader.”

“I daresay people work that out for themselves.”

“This mountain has been incorporated into a State Tourism Designation Area.”

“What’s that in plain Chinese?”

“Turnpikes will be placed around the approach routes to charge people to climb.”

“But the Holy Mountain has been here since the beginning of time!”

“It’s now a state asset. It has to earn its keep. We charge people one yuan to climb it, and thirty yuan for the foreign bastards. Traders on state asset property need a trading license. That includes you.”

I tipped his noodles into a bowl, and poured boiling water onto the tea-leaves.

“Then give me one of these licenses.”

“Gladly. That will be two hundred yuan, please.”

“What? My Tea Shack has stood here for thousands of years!”

He leafed through his account book. “Then perhaps I should consider charging you back rent.”

I bent behind the counter and spat into his noodles, stirring them around so my phlegm was good and mixed. I straightened up, chopped some green onions, and sprinkled them on. I put them in front of him.

“I’ve never heard such nonsense.”

“Old woman, I don’t make the rules. This order is direct from
Beijing. Tourism is a prime thrust of socialist modernization. We earn dollars from tourists. I know you don’t even know what a dollar is, and don’t even try to understand economics, because you can’t. But understand this: the Party orders you to pay.”

“I’ve heard all about the Party from my cousins in the Village! Your bubbling baths and your flash cars and your queue-jumping and stupid conferences and—”

“Shut your ignorant mouth now if you want to make a living from the People’s Mountain! The Party has developed our Motherland for half a century and more! Everyone else has paid! Even the monasteries have paid! Who are you, or your chicken-fucking country cousins, to dare think you know best? Two hundred yuan, now, or I’ll be back in the morning with the Party’s police officers to close you down and throw you in jail for non-payment! We’ll truss you up like a pig, and carry you down the mountain! Think of the shame! Or, pay what you owe. Well? I’m waiting!”

“You’re in for a long wait then! I don’t have two hundred yuan! I only make fifty yuan in a season! What am I supposed to live on?”

The official slurped up his noodles. “You’ll have to shut up shop and ask your country cousins to let you pick fleas from their sows in the corner. And if your noodles weren’t so salty you might sell more.”

If I’d been a man I’d have thrown him into my cesspit, Party official or no Party official. But he had the upper hand here, and he knew it.

I unfolded a ten-yuan note from my apron pocket. “It must be a difficult job, keeping track of all the tea shacks up and down the Mountain, who’s paid what …”

He swished out his mouth with green tea, and sluiced out a jet that spattered against my window. “Bribery? Corruption? Cancer in the breasts of our Motherland! If you think I’m going to agree to postpone the victory of socialism, to smear the bright new age that is our nation’s glorious destiny—”

I unfolded another twenty yuan. “That’s all I have.”

He pocketed the money. “Boil those eggs, and pack them with those tomatoes.”

I had to do as he said. Once a shit shoveler, always a shit shoveler.

Two monks ran out of the mist, upbound, gasping.

Running monks are as unusual as honest officials. “Rest,” I said, unfolding a fresh cloth for them. “Rest.”

They nodded gratefully and sat down. I always serve Lord Buddha’s servants the best tea for free. The younger monk wiped the sweat from his eyes. “The Kuomintang are coming! Two thousand of them. The Village was being abandoned when we left. Your father was climbing into his cousin’s cart—they were going into the hills.”

“I’ve seen it all before. The Japanese wrecked my Tea Shack.”

“The Kuomintang make the Japanese look civilized,” said the elder monk. “They are wolves. They loot what food and treasure they can carry, and burn or poison what they can’t. In a village down the Valley they cut off a boy’s head just to poison a well!”

“Why?”

“The communists are gaining momentum all over China now, despite the American bombs. The Kuomintang have nothing to lose. I’ve heard they’re heading to Taiwan to join Chiang Kai-shek, and have orders to bring what they can. They scraped the gold leaf off the temple Buddhas at Leshan.”

“It’s true!” The younger monk shook some grit from his sandal. “Don’t let them get you! You have about five hours. Hide everything deep in the forest, and be careful when you come back. There might be some stragglers. Please! We’d hate to see anything happen to you!”