Under Fishbone Clouds (67 page)

Jinyi’s eyes crumpled open. He did not see the two butterlies
fluttering
towards him. He saw two snags of a colour he could not name in a place he did not recognise in a room that was blurring in and out of focus. He saw things. Things and other things; their names and purposes beyond him. He saw things he thought he ought to know, things he thought he should recognise but could not, no matter how hard he grasped in the darkness. Like the old woman sitting at his bedside, snoring lightly, with an open book laid across her lap. Wasn’t she that … that …that. He felt nervous, and so cold that he was shivering; he felt scared, and so hot that his eyes were on fire. He felt afraid, and the fact that he was not sure what it was that was so frightening only served to make him even more terrified.

His lips were sheets of sandpaper, grating against each other. Pain slithered through his body, sinking its teeth in harder whenever it grew restless. But there was something else also, some dull, deeper ache, that was knotting his body. Perhaps if the surgeons had been able to cut in that deep, they might have found the promise that bound the coronary arteries to the thumping muscle and kept it wringing life through the broken-down body. Jinyi managed to raise his eyes once more to the old woman keeping vigil beside his bedside and, for a second, before he slumped back to his fitful sleep, felt a little less scared.

Yuying opened her bag once more and pulled out a ravel of twine and a pair of needles. She would knit. This would be enough for now, she thought. To do something useful. To knot these days into
a pattern she could recognise. To keep going. That was all she had ever done, she reflected, knitted, unpicked and knitted again,
turning
herself into whatever she needed to be. She would tie herself to the future; after all, people were always growing out of old clothes, and new babies were always being born. She would weave herself into the fabric of their lives, so that something might remain once Jinyi and she were gone and the whole sorry last century had been forgotten. She would do what her mother had done, and what her daughters now did, and fill the time with the skipping clicks of long needles.

As soon as she began, she started to feel strangely comforted. She remembered knitting for the hoped-for baby in her father’s house when the schools had shut down during the civil war and she remembered burying those knitted blankets with her first son. She remembered embroidering clothes in the shack in the country, in order to make money to buy her way out of a nightmare. She remembered knitting for a house of wailing toddlers after returning from the bread factory, while Jinyi stood at the stove waiting for dumplings to rise to the top of a bubbling pot. She remembered sewing clothes for herself and the other women being re-educated with her in the endless fields. She remembered knitting for her granddaughter Lian while Jinyi told the little girl stories about his journeys north, and how lucky she was to have a family who loved her. She remembered a thousand and one other little details that added up to make a life. She would carry on, because that was what she had always done.

Jinyi’s eyes opened once more a few minutes before midnight.

‘I love you,’ whispered the old woman hunched at his bedside.

‘Where am I?’ he rasped.

‘You’re right here, with me. Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right,’ she said, and clasped his hand tight in hers.

‘Who are you?’

So she told him. She started at their wedding day with the sound of the hooves clattering against the street outside the Bian
mansion
, and worked her way forward through the years. And as each story took flight from her tongue Yuying realised the same thing that I had long ago learnt in my bet with the Jade Emperor, that the
heart survives on the tiniest details – driven by hunger, hardened by hope. Hearts are made, piece by piece, forged in the furnace of our feelings and fears and doubts and longings. Jinyi and Yuying had set their hearts against history, and they had won out. Without love, we would be lost among dreams. Truth, history, socialism, revolution – all are illusions. Love is the only thing that sustains, that keeps people moving, that ties them to the earth. This is what I would tell the Jade Emperor, and I realised that I did not care whether or not he would understand.

I left Yuying and Jinyi in the small hospital room. As I began my homeward journey, I thought of my old friend Chang Tzu, who, waking suddenly in the night, wondered whether he had dreamt that he was a butterfly or whether a butterfly was now dreaming that it was Chang Tzu.