A Mind of Winter (14 page)

Han Shu was wearing a newly laundered tuxedo with a starched white shirt and he smelled, as always, of floral-musk cologne.

“We have to find her.” His voice was strangely sweet, the way one talks to a child to whom one is promising a treat. He leaned down to the bed and took my chin in his hand.

“You were right, when you said that Ma Ling is not a goat. But let’s be frank. Like a goat, she is worth something. To me and to others. To you too, if you consider where your livelihood comes from. I’ll find someone else to take her over, I can promise you that. There will be others willing to pay even more than that scoundrel has been paying.”

Han Shu patted my cheek. “Let us salvage my dreams—dare I say,
our
dreams? Let us do it together. You found Ma Ling—you can find her again. She trusts you. I have complete faith that you can bring her back.”

I pulled myself up from my cot. I looked at Han Shu. Through the mud in my brain I could see it, something I’d not seen before in his face. Wistfulness.

I nodded. “Yes, Han Shu. I’m sorry, I—”

He took me into his arms. I allowed myself to be held, aware of the useless, fleshless feel of my limbs.

At this hour, the bay was a conspiracy of silence. Old boats rocked on the water, oozing decay into the depths. Ma Ling had never spoken to me of any family, but for a handful of ever-less-valuable paper currency, one of the girls had told me where I might find a relative of Ma Ling’s, a distant cousin. I walked around the bay, surveying the lean-tos across from the water—haphazard structures of old board and corrugated tin. Even from that distance, I could see where heat and rain had caused the paint to hang in ragged strips.

I ducked into an alley, rehearsing in my mind the landmarks the girl had described to help me find my way: a blue shack, wire chicken coops, a rickshaw chained to a fence. The drizzle turned to rain. My throat burned for want of smoke.

The further I went inland, away from the lights of the bay, the darker it became. Wire chicken coops, I said to myself. Six of them tied together with twine, beside a blue shack. My eyes scanned from side to side. The sound of chirps, I thought: that would be a signal. But no, at this hour, the chickens were probably asleep.

A man appeared in my path. “Chicken coops,” I said in Chinese. “I’m looking for six chicken coops.”

The man laughed, drew twice on the stub of a foul-smelling cigarette and tossed the butt onto the street. “I’ll find you some chicken coops,” he said, taking me by the arm.

He walked briskly; I stumbled on the hem of my dress. A gentle rain fell.

One alleyway led into another. I started to think we were going in circles; everything had begun to look the same.

“A blue house,” I mumbled.

Again, the man laughed. I was feeling dizzy, and paused to regain my balance. The man waited at my side.

“Smoke. Do you have any smoke?” I asked.

“Sure,” the man said in English. “Chicken coops and smoke. I have them both.”

I put out my hand, hoping he would set a pipe in it, but the man just tapped my palm lightly in the rhythm of a waltz,
one two three, one two three
.

“We’re almost there,” he said, pulling me back into motion by the arm.

We must have been moving even further inland, for it got darker and darker until I could no longer see more than six feet in front of me. As I walked, my sodden dress flapped against my thighs.

“We’re here,” the man finally said. I had already forgotten about the chicken coops, so it didn’t much matter that there wasn’t a coil of wire in sight. I stood shivering at the man’s side, my hair dripping onto my shoulders.

After the blackness of the wet night, the candlelight inside hurt my eyes. I stumbled alongside the man through a hallway, listening to the simultaneous creaking of the floorboards underfoot and the wet slapping of our shoes. Through a doorway, an old woman shrieked something to the man, who shouted something back in a hoarse, disgruntled voice. We climbed a narrow staircase with no railing. One thought only pierced the dense static of my mind. Light, I thought. Yellow afternoon light splashing through green leaves onto a polished floor, static to the eye but slowly moving, like the fugitive and determined motion of a planet. The thick, heavy warmth of the sun through a pane of glass. And music floating in from another room.

“A pipe,” I said almost desperately. This man was as good as any, I thought. He would give me a pipe. “Do you have a pipe?”

I looked at his eyes, at the water streaming from his hair, at the pixielike triangle of his jaw. He was not a cruel man, I could see that. He shook his head.

“No pipe,” he said apologetically, leading me to a cot in a corner of the room. “I’m sorry, I have no pipe.”

I lowered myself onto the cot. It was made of wood and had no mattress or padding of any kind, covered only by a worn sheet. The man fumbled in a box by the bed, then withdrew a roughly rolled cigarette like the one he had been smoking earlier. He placed it between my lips.

The sound of male voices and clacking tiles suddenly filled the room, followed by a wedge of wavering candlelight that angled onto the ceiling. One voice rose above the rest: a flat voice. But I could not quite hear what it was saying.

I knew it was no good. I would never find Ma Ling. Perhaps I could find another child to bring back to Han Shu who would take the girl’s place.

The flat voice grew louder. I watched the shadow of a man move in the candlelight along the wall. When it came to a stop immediately beside me, I turned my head and found myself looking into a face with pasty white skin and deep pockmarks. The owner of the flat voice. He repeated whatever it was he had said before. I heard a door slam. The room lurched, I lurched, the hard palette beneath me lurched. And in all the motion, a memory of Ma Ling, seated before her art deco dressing table (it had arrived not long after the first crate of books), pulling a comb through her dark hair. I sit on the bed, watching the fluid movement of the girl’s arms. Ma Ling wears a pure linen dress that reaches to mid-calf and is bordered at hem and throat with Irish lace.

“Does he treat you well, your gentleman friend?” I ask. Ma Ling meets my gaze in the mirror and smiles.

“I am lucky,” she says simply. “And I have you to thank for everything.”

Ma Ling seems as if she is about to say something, but only continues to look in the mirror, her eyes now focused back on her own reflection, silently combing her hair.

“What does he want? Your gentleman friend. What does he want from you?”

“We speak English, we read out loud. I read to him, he reads to me.”

“And love?” I ask. “What about love?”

Ma Ling’s jaw tightens. I try to catch her eyes again in the glass, but she fixes her gaze on herself.

He’s still there, the man, lurching with the room. He says something to me in that same indecipherable dialect. From the tone of his voice, I can tell that he is saying something nice. With the passing seconds, his voice becomes more cheerful. It reminds me of someone calling out at a picnic—“More wine. Would you like some more wine?” I see the banks of the River Cam. Young men in white suits and straw hats, rowing a boat. A woman strolling by the water, book in hand. Another sitting on a blanket spread on the grass, earnestly making a point; a male companion pours something frothy into her glass. A cloud rolls overhead, rolling somewhere very fast.

The man with the pockmarked skin is on top of me now and he grunts. I know this is happening, I can feel him inside me, but it is distant, as if I am remembering the moment rather than living it. He seems to be taking a very long time. His face is clenched with a look of great effort. A child’s face floats above me. I am surprised to see that the child is not Chinese, but a blond boy with ruddy cheeks. He is crunching an apple. The child waves something over my head. It looks like a fishing rod. He wears a serious expression. Lying in the fog of putrid-smelling smoke, I wonder what the boy is doing here, and feel a wave of shame. I try to say something to him, but find I am unable to move my jaw. He seems to be studying my face; he is crisscrossing my face with his steady blue eyes.

“Do come with us,” the child says. “I’ll do the worms. I promise to do the worms.”

The room spins giddily. Then, for an instant, my mind clears. The fog is gone, and in its place, a crystal light.

I know I won’t find another girl to replace Ma Ling. I haven’t the heart.

“The chicken coops,” I say.

The boy has disappeared, and the man does not seem to have heard me. His grunting escalates for a short time and then abruptly ceases. A weight is lifted from my body, and I draw in a lungful of stale, smoky air.

“My friend,” the man is saying, in English now. A horrible smile breaks his face into two slabs of scaly rock. “He wants too,” and he points first to my crotch, then to a man towering above the cot, a man with the indigo tunic and short baggy trousers of General Piao’s raggedy army. “For Englishwoman, my friend give pipe.”

The recent arrival is clutching something. I reach up, snatch the thing, and find in my trembling fingers an oilskin pouch. I open the drawstring and pull out a pipe and a second, smaller pouch. I fumble at the tiny oily strings of the second pouch but they are tightly knotted and will not give.

“Damn it,” I say, feeling hot tears in my eyes.

Both men are grinning now. The new arrival is stroking himself through his baggy trousers. Neither makes a move to help me with the pouch but watch, as if my struggle amuses them. I prop myself up against the wall, concentrate on the strings, and slowly manage to loosen the knot. The pouch open, I carefully remove a small piece of opium.

“The lamp. Where is the lamp?” I ask desperately.

Again, the men laugh. “Lamp. Yes, lamp.”

One of them produces a box of some kind, crudely made, and filled with something that gives off a rank odor. With one hand still on his groin, the man pulls a match from somewhere and draws it across the wall. He teases me for a moment, holding it just out of reach, and then, laughing, sets the flame to the stuff in the box and throws the spent stick to the ground. A small flame leaps from the box, giving off an odious stink. Shoving it before me, I realize he intends me to heat the opium over the burning stuff. I have nothing to use as an instrument, so I just hold it over, feel the flame bite my fingers as the opium loosens to slime. I paste it over the hole in the stem of the pipe and with all of my strength, suck in the smoke.

An awful sound brews in his throat as he mounts me.

I suck again at the pipe, only vaguely aware of his coarse movements.

The feel of the yellow chiffon as I leapt from Robert’s divan, the swish a frothy sound that matched the heightened girlish joy I felt. Yes, I would find a note card or leaf of stationery—it didn’t matter what. If I could not bring myself to say those words, I would simply write them down.

I had thought myself barred from such pure happiness.

We each have our birthright—mine was the legacy of the cramped Manchester flat: paste stones, watered-down cologne, counterfeit declarations of love, and me, succumbing to the fool’s gold, a child desperate to please.

Later, the crash from grace, my eyes opened onto the truth. And then, the stark knowledge—that above all else, my birthright was this: a denial of the possibility of ever really loving.

Until that moment.

Me, in yellow chiffon, my bare shoulders prickly with cold and thrill both; me, rummaging in the tiny drawers and slots at the back of Robert’s rolltop desk, which typically he took care to lock, but which he had, in the fluster of his own desire to make some kind of declaration, left open. Rummaging for the note card or sheet of engraved stationery on which I’d write words I never thought would be possible to utter in truth. My heart sang with it, I’d taken flight—unaccountably, at last—on a love that Robert shared. I was more certain of it than anything I’d ever known.

Letters and documents, their seals broken, all kinds of papers and neatly arranged bills, snug in their slots and little wooden drawers. He
must
have some writing paper somewhere, I thought. In this last drawer, surely he must. But no, only stamps and sealing wax.

This slot? Something jammed in here, at the back. Too tight to properly reach.

Some premonitory sentiment. I pulled back my hand, cradled it with the other, as if it were hurt. The girlish excitement at the idea of finding the paper I was looking for suddenly froze to something else.

Do we know when the perilous moment is upon us? When the great hand is readying to slap us forward, into the maw?

The search for paper forgotten, I worked my two fingers into the space, tugged and jostled and poked until I was able to draw out the desperate contents wedged deeply within.

The man has finished with me. He rolls off the cot, reclaims the candle from where he set it down on the floor, and disappears.

“Mama,” I croak aloud. To nobody. To everybody. “Are you proud of your girl?
Have I made you proud
?”

Aware of the smoke—and then, of a sickening realization that spreads like the rays of a black sun. It was for this that I had ached and yearned. Not for Ma Ling, not for anything human, but for this.

“Robert,” I whisper, my voice brittle. “Don’t you see?
We were made for each other.”

Not sleep, but a blank dissociation from light and sound; a ghastly taste of the grave. A faint slapping noise penetrated the airtight seal. A sensation of something impossibly heavy, a slab of marble ten feet thick sliding open and, in the crack, that soft slapping sound: fervent little waves lapping at the shore. I opened my eyes. The room was dark and filled with a stench of fish oil and human grime. The sound, coming from the corner, growing louder. I raised my body tentatively, swung my feet onto the floor, and squinted through the darkness. My eyes adjusted quickly, revealing the outlines of a human form rocking unevenly back and forth. An old woman with stringy gray hair, her crinkled face and opaque, bleary eyes arranged into an expression of idiotic glee. Her toothless jaws gummed noisily; this was the sound that had roused me. As I drew nearer, the old woman clapped her hands merrily; a channel of drool formed at the corner of her working mouth and made its way down her stubbly chin. I stumbled toward the door.