As the Earth Turns Silver (15 page)

‘She's taking your soul away.'

Yung looked up from the tub where he was washing excess soil from the potatoes. He did not reply.

‘Nothing good can come from this. You should stop it now.' When his brother still gave no response, Shun said, ‘If a woman is married to a rooster, she is married to him all her life.'

In his mind, Yung completed the proverb: If a woman is married to a dog, she is married to him all her life; if she is married to a washing stick, she must carry it all her life. He kept scrubbing the potatoes. ‘In the New Gold Mountain,' he said, ‘a virtuous woman is widowed and may marry again.'

His brother spat into the cabbage trimmings. ‘And what luck is this, to take a dead man's wife? You want the bad luck too?' He waved the trimming knife in his hand. ‘You think the piss on the door's a coincidence?'

Yung did not look up.

‘I don't know what you see in her. Your wife was a beauty.'

Yung remembered his wife's pale, clear skin, her small hands with their long fingers, the way she walked on her tiny feet like a light wind blowing through willow. Now his memories were like a dream, or perhaps a vision of what might have been. This he remembered: his wife laughed like bamboo yielding, like its leaves rustling in the wind. Her figure was slender and her feet like tender bamboo shoots. And yet what he'd treasured most was talking with her. Sometimes she argued with him. About poetry. He chuckled, remembering her furrowed brow, the intensity in a woman who was usually so compliant. He preferred Tu Fu, but she loved Li Po because there was so much space, she said, so much room for the spirit and the imagination. Like a chapter from
A Floating Life
, they had a game where they composed couplets, one after the other, until their rhymes degenerated from works of beauty into foolishness and laughter.

Mrs McKechnie – Katherine's skin was freckled and her mouth large. She wore large black boots like other western women and did not sway as she walked. She knew nothing of Chinese poetry, and sometimes even simple communication was fraught with misunderstanding.

Once in the early days when he delivered her vegetables, she'd offered him a cup of tea and he, being polite, declined, as is the custom. But she had taken him at his word and did not offer again, and then again. In hindsight he realised this was not rudeness, or even a lack of generosity. It was the foreigner's way. He had to bite his lip and receive quickly, or not at all.

Yung looked across at his brother, who had a little wife to share his bed each night. He looked down at the dark, brown water. His hands were cold, the skin ingrained with dirt like the patterns on bamboo, like the ripples of waves on sand.

Mrs McKechnie. Yes, she bore a dead man's name; yes, she was a big-nosed, red-haired foreigner; and yet the words of Po Lo came to him now: ‘To find a good horse,' he said, ‘you look at its shape, you look at its muscle and bone, but to find a great horse, you forget all these things.'

Shun had never read Lieh Tzu, and at times like now he envied, no, resented his brother's learning – learning that he, by hard toil, had paid for. But Yung didn't look up, didn't see his brother's anger. He continued oblivious. ‘When you look at a horse,' he said, ‘there are more important things than horses.'

Shun sighed. It was never easy to talk to his brother. To admonish or advise him. Yung always quoted from the classics or some revolutionary like Liang Ch'ichao or Sung Chiao-jen or Sun Yat-sen, or else he came out with brilliant, sickening words of his own.

Shun tried again. ‘Look at Yue Jackson,' he said. ‘Do you think it is easy for him? Do you think the
gweilo
treat him like one of their own? Do you think it was easy for him in China? Or for his mother?'

Yung thought about the English Secretary at the Consulate, the son of a Scottish mother and a Sei Yap father. He would see him at community meetings or when they met new arrivals off the ships. And these days he would see him each Sunday afternoon at the Consulate.

Yung had had difficulty choosing which class to go to: with his brother to the English class taught by Yue Jackson or the Chinese class taught by Consul Kwei. Of course he wanted to improve his English, but now did he not have Katherine? Really, what he longed for was his own language. His own literature, history, philosophy – to have Consul Kwei write the first line of a couplet so that he could complete it.

Yung looked at his older brother, the strands of black hair now mixed with white, his tired, bloodshot eyes. Shun Goh did not understand poetry. Yes, he wanted the overthrow of the Manchus too, just like every patriotic Chinese, but he did not love to play with words or ideas, to play with life.

Yung thought about the paleness of Yue Jackson's skin, the lightness of his hair, his Chinese eyes – and wondered what a child borne with Katherine would be like. A child falling between two worlds. A child belonging nowhere . . .

When Shun saw he could not persuade his brother, he told him to bring Katherine back at night. It was dangerous to wander about late.

‘Remember Joe Kum-yung,' he said. ‘Winter is coming. What if you get pneumonia? Do you expect me to hire that Cousin Gok-nam? Useless ghost! Do we have to have his wife making trouble in this house? What if you die of cold? What will I say to Mother and Father?

‘Tell her to come here at night. Take her to your room. I don't want to see her.'

Sometimes as he waited Yung imagined entering her bedroom, watching her let down and brush her hair, the long, slow strokes through red-brown waves. He imagined lying between her sheets, surrounded by the smell of her, his face upon her pillow. Sometimes an ache grew from the centre of his being – a shiver of pain that threatened to overwhelm him.

He understood about her children. The judgements of
gweilo
society. Yet deep within he recognised her shame. And he felt the heat of it move through his face and take his whole body.

What had brought them together? What did they share?

They had walked at night and gazed at the bright flare in the sky. She'd told him the same comet appeared in 1066, just before a battle he'd never heard of. ‘Some people say they signal the end of the world,' she said, hunching into her coat.

He gazed at her profile as they passed under a street lamp, the illumination of her nose, cheek, the fullness of her lips, the drift into darkness, the slow drift back into light.

Yes, he thought. Not the word itself, because there is nothing as simple as a universal yes or no in Chinese, in their stead a multiplicity of expressions, each turned to its purpose. Yes, Chinese astrologers also believed this – that a comet foretold disaster – and yet there was another meaning.

‘What is this?' he asked. It was 1 a.m. and there he was standing in a pale pool of lamplight, as if gripping something in his hands, making short pushing, pulling motions in front of him, from side to side.

Katherine frowned. ‘You mean sweeping?' she asked. ‘With a broom?'

‘Yes, yes.' He was smiling now. He pointed at the patch of brightness in the sky, like the straw head of a broom set on fire. ‘Broom stars,' he said. ‘We call broom stars.'

He wanted, tried to tell her, that a comet in the south swept away the old and introduced a new order. He wanted to tell her many things. But sometimes in English the words caught in his throat, thickened on his tongue.

They were lying in his bed, her face tucked into his shoulder, when Katherine asked why the long face.

‘Long face?' He was puzzled.

‘Sad,' she said. ‘Why are you so sad?'

He did not know what to say. He stroked the hair from her face. How could he tell her about Hung-seng? How could he even begin to explain?

They had played on the bank near the bend of the stream, just outside the entrance to the village – Hung-seng and Yung and the other children. There were banana palms, and trees they climbed, sunlight filtering through the branches. They gathered seed pods that fell to the ground, crushed them with stone and dipped the ends of long grass stalks into the sticky liquid. They caught dragonflies, waiting for them to come in to land, creeping up and touching the wings – there – with the sticky ends. He and Hung-seng and the others.

Hung-seng was four years younger. A village cousin, like a little brother. Yung had shown him how to skip stones in the stream. At low tide they waded into the mud and lifted broken crockery, trying to catch shrimp before they darted away. They caught crickets for fighting and kept them in tobacco tins that old men brought back from the New Gold Mountain. How different the vision of a child – a small street back then seemed large; a man not ten years older than Yung had seemed old.

After his marriage, Yung moved to Canton, then on to the New Gold Mountain. He and Hung-seng wrote. They exchanged poetry, debated how best to modernise China. Hung-seng, with a growing number of young people, went to Japan for study. And stayed. He met Sun Yat-sen and helped found the
People's Newspaper
, the journal of Sun's Alliance Society. He sent Yung every edition. And despite the rivalry, he also sent Liang Ch'i-chao's
New People's Miscellany
. ‘So that we can have informed debate,' he'd written. ‘Liang may be conservative, but he also wants reform. I think he's right that we should study the strengths of other nations and so create a new culture.'

And then Hung-seng returned to Canton. His letters suggested something was planned. Nothing specific.

The letters stopped. Until today, when a letter had come from Hung-seng's brother. Hung-seng had been one of over a hundred killed in a failed uprising. The government had left the bodies in the street. As warning. Days later his brother risked his life to help gather up the dead. They found seventy-two and buried them together at Yellow Flowers Hill.

Hung-seng was never found.

Yung looked at Katherine, her long copper hair swept over his pillow, and didn't know what to tell her. How could he speak of foreign domination – Manchu, British, French, German, Russian, Japanese – the struggle for liberty – with a foreigner?

‘My friend died,' he said at last. ‘He was like my brother.'

When she asked how, he stared up at the ceiling. The pansies, violas, polyanthus he'd stolen from night-time gardens and placed in a bowl on the dresser cast flickering shadows on the pale plaster sky as the candle burned down.

The comet had come a year too soon. He thought of words he'd looked up in his Chinese-English dictionary and on nights when he'd lain alone spoken into darkness, practising the feel on his tongue, the sound of a foreign language.

‘Liberty, equality, fraternity,' he said. And he knew she didn't understand.

Months later bombs exploded in Hankow. In Wuchang a soldier killed his commanding officer. The Revolution had begun.

Yung could not help but laugh, words of explanation spilling out, drenching Katherine with a heady mix of English and Cantonese.

Province after province declared its independence from Manchu rule. Negotiations began. Finally the Empress Dowager abdicated and Sun Yat-sen was declared the first President.

In Wellington, in Sydney, around the world there were fireworks, banquets, myriad celebrations. Yung gave a rousing speech and raised his glass to the new Republic; he cracked jokes and told long and twisted tales that had everyone holding their bellies in raucous laughter. And yet something, someone, was missing.

They had come to send remittances home. To return as wealthy men. Yet always wealth eluded them. Now, back home, there was so much to be done. Hung-seng had died for this, but what had
he
done except debate with his countrymen and raise money for Sun and the Revolution?

Wasn't this the time to go home?

Shun Goh would not understand. How could they go home? he'd say. Where was the money? There were carrots to be washed, cauliflowers to be trimmed, debts to be repaid.

When she came to his door, he pulled her into his body, his face in her hair. He knew Chinese hair – smooth and black and strong – its gift for spiking the eye at intimate moments, but even now Katherine's surprised him – soft baby hair tickling his nose, so full of air.

He knew he
loved
her. Though he could never utter that word. It was not that
Tongyan
didn't feel affection, need, desire – something more than duty, which seemed to flow with the breast milk. But love was a word that only
gweilo
spoke. Something you might feel but never utter.

As he held her in his arms, he did not know what to choose – the homeland he had waited for, worked for, prayed for; or this never-ending ache, this last sigh of breath at the end of the world.

‘You know where she goes, don't you?'

Robbie looked up, stared at Edie in the doorway and went back to writing.

‘If you don't tell me, I'll tell Mum who you're writing to.'

‘So who am I writing to?'

‘Isn't it obvious?'

Robbie stabbed at the letter with his pen, swore under his breath. The nib had gone through the paper, and now a blot of ink seeped into the cover of the book underneath: Whitcombe & Tombs'
Children's Atlas
. His mother would be furious.

‘If you're so smart, then why don't you know where she goes at night? Isn't it obvious?'

‘She visits someone, doesn't she?'

Robbie stared at her.

‘But why does it have to be a secret?'

‘Because it's disgusting, that's why!'

In one movement he hurled the book, letter, pen – an arc of ink drops – through the air. The book smashed against the wall and slumped to the floor, the pen left an ink stain on the wallpaper, rolled back and hit the mat. A torn sheet of paper drifted down.

‘If Dad was here this would never have happened!' Robbie burst into tears.

The only time Edie remembered him crying was when their father died. If he was still here . . . if their father was still here, how different would it be?

Edie felt the urge to stroke Robbie's back, his hair, but he seemed so far away, so very far away, the distance between them unsurpassable.

She stared at his shaking body, felt tears form in her own eyes. She did not know who she was crying for. She turned and walked into their mother's room, looked out the window at the street below. She should start dinner. Peel potatoes and carrots, chop cabbage. Their mother would be home.

Soon.