Peking Story (12 page)

Elder Brother came back in. “It's lucky I had those lights put on a special fuse,” he said. “I was expecting they might blow it.”

“What about the pavilion?” one of the family asked. “Can we put it up again?”

“It doesn't matter,” Elder Brother said. “We'll be losing the house soon anyway.”

For a while, immersed in the behavior of the lights and the collapse of the pavilion, the rest of us had forgotten the police. Finally, one of them asked in an urgent whisper, “Is it safe to go back out through the garden?”

Elder Brother assured him that it was.

“Then we must be going,” the other said, and both of them gathered up their papers. “We'll come back tomorrow.”

Elder Brother led them out, and that was the last we saw of them. They never came back, and nothing more was said to us about our illegal meeting — the reason being, we surmised, that what they saw of it had struck them as such a miserable example of reactionary merrymaking that they decided not to risk the perils of the garden to investigate further.

When they had gone, that night, the family began to drift off to bed. Intending to follow, I first bent over to retrieve my hank of hair, which had slipped onto the floor. Lying beside it was a silver butterfly pin, crushed flat, its wings broken. Pins like it were on sale in all the junk-jewelry stalls in the Peking markets for about fifteen cents. Many of the guests had probably used them to hold their costumes together. But despite the fact that it was a very ordinary object, I found myself remembering the pin of Aunt Chin's poem, and the butterfly ghosts she had invoked, and I shuddered to think of the conclusions she would have drawn if she had found it. I picked it up and dropped it in the garden well on my way to bed. Unlike the Ming empress, who had, no doubt, made a very loud splash, my broken butterfly made no sound at all when it hit the water, but I felt I had done the right thing.

W
HEN OLD
Mr. Yu died, his name tablet, a plaque of carved wood about a foot high and four inches wide, joined the tablets of his dead wife, his parents, and his paternal grandparents and great-grandparents on a simple large altar that stood in the Yu mansion's main hall. Before it, the family performed daily rites, including the offering of food, wine, and incense.

These tablets were more than mementos of the dead; they were believed to be the dead, each containing a part of the dead person's spirit. They were made of cypress or Chinese juniper, and were unpainted and unstained, except that on some of them the name of the person had been painted rather than carved. The older ones, varying from four inches to a foot or so in height, were covered by cases of the same wood, which could simply be lifted off if one wished to see the tablet. Near the top of each case was a small opening of carved grillwork, through which, when the light entered from just the right angle, the upper part of the name tablet could be seen. Without their outer sheaths, the tablets were just straightforward-looking pieces of wood, but hidden behind their latticed windows they always gave me the feeling that they did contain some kind of presence, which knew when I was looking at it.

When my father-in-law's tablet was put on the altar, I was told that, by Chinese custom, it would be worshiped for three generations. Not until his last great-grandchild died might his and his wife's tablets be removed to the family's ancestral temple, where those of all the more remote Yu dead reposed. During his lifetime, Mr. Yu had faithfully worshiped the tablets of the three generations preceding his, but now his children were not obliged to continue to observe the rituals before the tablets of their great-great-grandparents, and they decided that these (now over a hundred years old) should be removed to the temple. I had never visited this temple, and I was curious to see it. As a matter of fact, it was quite unusual for a private Chinese family to have an ancestral temple at all, other than the one maintained in the house itself. In a large Chinese house these ancestral altars usually occupy a room in the northeast courtyard.

The temple was situated, I was told, on the shore of the northernmost of Peking's seven lakes. No tablets had been taken there for several decades. It had been the duty of old Mr. Yu to make periodic visits to it, but during his last years he had been too weak to do so, and the temple had fallen into disrepair, owing partly to the children's changing attitude toward ancestor worship and in a good measure to the dwindling of the family's funds during the troubled times.

As a matter of fact, none of the living members of the family seemed really to care about the ancestors, but they were compelled, by pride and the wish to exercise good faith, to fulfill the minimum terms of the contract that bound the living to the dead. They were determined that if Great-Grandfather Yu had died, as he had, in the belief that he would be honored and remembered according to custom, their generation, at least, would not be the one to let the rituals lapse. I think it was pretty much understood, however, that theirs was to be the last generation responsible to the ancestors; although the contract had not yet been broken, notice was being served.

One bright morning in early summer, Aimee told me she would take me to see the ancestral temple that afternoon if I cared to go. She wanted to visit it and bring back to the family a report on its condition, though actually it wasn't necessary to see it to know that it would need repairs. Any Chinese building left untended for even a few years needs extensive repairs, yet somehow, when none are forthcoming, it is likely to manage to go on standing for centuries.

After lunch that day, Aimee called a pair of pedicabs and gave me a string of jangling brass keys to carry, saying they were the keys to the temple. Aimee and I were lucky to get fairly fast pedicabs, and after we had left the narrow street on which the mansion gate opened, we sailed north on the great street running north and south through the west side of the city. In less than fifteen minutes, we reached the point where the street turned westward. Abandoning it there, our pedicabs continued north, bumping through a labyrinth of dusty alleys and streets that became increasingly narrow. Aimee, who was in the lead pedicab, wrapped a scarf around her hair and the lower half of her face.

Suddenly, after crossing a low stone bridge, the street we were on widened, and we found ourselves going along the shore of a lake, on the far side of which rose the gray brick north wall of the city. We went on around the lake, and as we approached the wall, its huge slope seemed to rise higher and higher, until it blocked out all the northern sky. Reaching the base of the wall, our pedicabs turned east onto a path that ran between it and the lake.

This part of the city interested me, although I had never seen it before. Now I realized, as we crossed another stone bridge, that it was here that the cold, clean water from the Jade Fountain — a natural spring about ten miles northwest of Peking — entered the city. The Fountain is the main source of water for all the canals and moats and decorative lakes of Peking (the drinking water comes from other sources), and its water flows through these and, far underground, through the city's ancient stone sewers, to empty, at last, dark brown and thick as soup, into a ditch outside the southwest wall.

At that time, the Communists were already boasting that because of their repairs of the countless water gates and sluices in the old hydraulic system, and because of their dredging of the lakes and canals, Peking's water changed completely every four days. The lakes and moats did seem cleaner, although I had no way of knowing whether any particular patch of water I happened to be looking at was more than four days old. Certainly this water in Peking's northernmost lake was the cleanest I had seen. Fresh from the countryside, and still smelling of moss and lichen, the spring water boiled into the city through an iron grille in the base of the wall and, forming deep black whirlpools, entered the lake under the bridge our pedicabs had just crossed.

Presently, our road narrowed to pass between the city wall and the wall of a compound built on a piece of land jutting out into the lake. The pedicab men threw on their brakes, and we came to a halt on the narrowest part of the road, before a dilapidated roofed gate in the compound wall. Aimee asked me to give her the keys, and while I paid the pedicab men, she opened the gate.

Entering most Chinese gates, one can see only walls and more walls, but when I went through this one, I found myself with an unobstructed view of the lake. To my right, facing south on a raised terrace, stood a large temple in great disrepair and wearing an air of complete abandonment. “That's our temple,” Aimee said.

We walked to the front of it and onto a large tiled terrace, badly pitted and overgrown with grass. Aimee turned and studied the temple. Its eaves had rotted away in a number of places, leaving great holes, and its windows — latticed in a design of interlocked swastikas, the Buddhist symbol of eternity — looked as if cannon balls had been shot through them. Everywhere around the base of the building lay bits of decayed wood and broken roof tiles. Aimee sighed. “It certainly needs repairs,” she said. “I can remember when we used to come here on summer nights, years ago when Mama was still alive, to watch the moon and feel the lake breeze. We drank wine and told stories and sang songs, and we didn't go home until the moon went down.” She thought awhile, and then added, “During a siege, it's very safe here, because shells high enough to pass over the city wall will also pass over this temple.”

We tried the main double doors. Though there were no visible locks on them, they would not open, seeming to be held shut by some kind of bar inside the temple. But one of the smaller doors, alongside these, had a lock of the kind that Westerners sometimes call a “Chinese puzzle lock.” It looks like an ordinary Chinese lock, but there are two keys to it, and it must be unlocked twice. Aimee, applying herself to this one — there is a special knack to undoing these locks — mastered it in a short time. Then she pushed the door open on its creaking wooden hinges, and we stepped into the temple through a shower of dust.

My first impression was of funereal chaos. A tiered altar, rising to the ceiling and covering almost the whole of the north wall, was crowded to overflowing with spirit tablets hung with dusty cobwebs and leaning giddily in all directions. Many lay on their sides or had fallen to lower tiers and had come to rest upside down. The altar looked as if it had been shaken by an earthquake. On a long table stood a number of sacrificial vessels — incense burners, candlesticks, vases, and other receptacles — but few even of these were upright. Aimee said that the wind, blowing through the broken windows, was responsible for the disorder.

Standing against the walls were several large black-and-red lacquered chests covered with debris — fragments of lanterns and staffs, dismembered Buddhist statuary, stringless harps, and a great number of brass bells. Tatters of what had once been a brocade canopy hung from the ceiling, and the floor was covered with a thick gray-yellow carpet of dust that puffed up underfoot in sluggish clouds whenever we moved, and then settled quickly.

I asked Aimee what the chests contained, and by way of answer she handed me the keys. While she busied herself lighting incense on the altar table, I tried key after key in the lock of the nearest chest until I found the right one, and then, after clearing away pieces of the plaster halo of one of the statues, a broken plaster arm, and some bells, lifted the lid. The chest was packed to the brim with tightly rolled red scrolls, each marked with a name written in black on a strip of gold paper. I lifted out a scroll and, unfastening the bone clasp, allowed it to unroll onto the floor.

The scroll was an ancestor's portrait, painted on silk. The silk had once been white, I knew, but had dulled to a smoky brown background for the still bright golds, reds, and blues of the picture, which was that of a very stern old man who resembled Aimee's elder brother and, for that matter, Aimee herself. The man was dressed in full mandarin costume and sat in a thronelike chair on a strip of intricately patterned carpet. The picture was minutely detailed. Even the hairs in the old man's sable hat were painted with individual brush strokes.

There were at least two hundred scrolls in the chest. Aimee had come over, and I asked her if all the chests were filled with paintings. She answered that probably most of them were. “Why don't you sell them, then, since the family needs money?” I asked.

Aimee laughed. “Who wants pictures of someone else's ancestors? They aren't worth anything, except sometimes for the old silk in them and the brocaded borders.”

I began to roll up the painting. “Who is he?” I asked. “Do you know?”

Aimee glanced at the face. “I don't know,” she said. “All I know is, his name is Yu. Everyone here is named Yu. They're all related to each other, and I'm related to all of them.”

I closed the chest and locked it. The day was growing late, and I was glad when Aimee completed her inspection and her incense-burning, and we could lock up the temple and leave. The truth was I was beginning to feel increasingly ill at ease among my ancestors-in-law, all of whom seemed to be peering out at me from their tablet cases, in the gathering shadows.

That night, Aimee reported to the family on the condition of the temple. Major family conferences always took place at night, because that was the only time the whole family could be together. Besides, Aimee said, people were able to think better at night. The family decided that despite the cost, the temple must be repaired, as a last token of respect to the ancestors.

I didn't go back to it for several weeks. Although I knew that its roof had been mended, its windows restored, and its terrace weeded, I was taken by surprise when Aimee told me, one day, that the family had arranged for a special Buddhist ceremony, called the Feast of the Dead, to be held there the following night in her father's name. This ceremony is not primarily intended for the welfare of comfortable, well-cared-for souls, such as we trusted old Mr. Yu's to be, but is really an act of charity done on behalf of the person in whose name the ceremony is held, in order to increase his merits in the other world. It is a kind of mass for the ghosts of all the forgotten people who have died leaving no one among the living to worship them and weep for them, to feed them and look after the needs they have in that vast, shadowy place, where, it is believed, the dead, like babies, are helpless — always demanding and always hungry. This particular ceremony was also to be a sort of farewell to the ancestors, and, indeed, to the temple itself, because, Aimee explained to me, it was highly unlikely that the family would ever again be able to raise enough money to keep it in repair or hold ceremonies there for the dead.