Lost in Translation

8

The walls of packed loess had looked like a natural desert outcropping until they were right upon them. Yet these were certainly structures built by man. They were too symmetrical for nature. The two Americans stared open mouthed at the rambling house, the storage sheds, the animal pens, and beyond all that the arid patch that once had been a garden. Nothing but dust now. Empty, abandoned.

Spencer froze for a long moment, rearranging his hope, his optimism, his faith, in a way that would accommodate the vast disappointment in front of him. "I guess this was it."

Definitely, she thought. This was it. She sat heavily on the ground.

"They’ve been gone a long time," he whispered.

Yes, she thought. It looked like decades since this place was alive with the racket of dogs and horses, men working, children calling out, the smoke curling up, and the slapping sound of grain in the baskets.

And it wasn’t even the physical homestead Spencer was hoping for. It was the Mongols themselves. They were the ones who might have known. Because Teilhard had to have told somebody-the Mongols. Lucile. Both.

But none of them is here. She scanned the place. Nothing but old yellow walls and sheep pens.

Spencer stood in silence. "Okay," he said finally. "Let’s look around."

Hours later Alice was back in her room, trying to read, when she heard a knock. "You are Mo Ai-li?" said the wiry man in the ill-fitting green suit.

"I am," Alice said.

He produced a card.

She read it aloud. "Guo Wenxiang, Happy Fortune Consulting." Damn, why hadn’t he just called? She was exhausted from the afternoon, going over the homestead, sighting down every inch of it in the broiling sun and finding nothing, nothing. She dug out a business card and handed it to him.

"Mo Ai-li, Interpreter," he read, strolling past her.

"I’m so sorry, my employer is not in right now." And Lin and Kong were still out at the Bureau of Cultural Relics. She’d have to talk to this guy alone.

She left the door open, pointed to a chair, and poured tea. "It’s put you to too much trouble to come over here. I thought you might telephone."

He smiled a car-salesman smile, which dragged his sharp extruding cheekbones almost up to his eyebrows. Pomade glimmered on his sculpted head. "Ah, no, it wouldn’t do. One must call on a new friend in person. Don’t you think? Tell me, Miss Mo. How do you find Yinchuan?"

"Interesting."

He looked disconcerted. "Interesting? Well…"

"I like history."

"Ah, yes, history. Have you been to the Xi Xia tombs?"

"Not yet. We’re working. We’ve been busy." She had heard about the tombs, of course. For a few improbable centuries Yinchuan had actually been the capital of northwest China under the Xi Xia, or western Xia, dynasty, until Genghis Khan had roared in and toppled everything. Now the tombs of the last Xi Xia emperors still layout in the desert, eroding in the wind, and Yinchuan had slid into obscurity.

"I’ll take you," he proposed. "Whenever you have time. What about this evening, if you’re not working? Or maybe tomorrow."

"Mr. Guo, I wouldn’t want to trouble you-"

"No trouble."

"No, really, Mr. Guo. Please. Listen to me. I want to ask you about the building your office is in-"

He raised a nicotine-stained finger. "Not one more word about business, until you read this! It’s all prepared." He whipped out a four-page document densely printed with Chinese characters.

She read the title. "Contract for Consulting Services." Oh, damn, she thought, and started plowing through it. Reading Chinese was never effortless, even after all this time. She still went character by character. There were always ideograms she couldn’t recognize.

The client therefore and in confident mind agrees to pay aretainer of 5,000 yuan for services rendered in the first three months… She put it down. "Mr. Guo. Among friends, one should put one’s heart in one’s mouth and say what one thinks. Tell me. Have you ever had an outside person for a client before?"

"No, but I have many important clients. I know someone whose second cousin is fourth Party vice-chair for Ningxia Province, and I have connections within the police. So, you can see"-he leaned back in his chair and smiled his chatty smile-"I know where all the back doors are."

"I understand. Well. We outside people don’t use contracts. They are unnecessary between real friends." She handed it back disdainfully.

"I quite agree." He stuffed it in his pocket.

"Good. As the words go, the actions will follow. I require one service, a simple one. It concerns the building your office is in."

"Ah, the building-I can arrange for you to buy it! You know it was the Number One Jesus Church at one time, architecture very distinctive. First class. Total price two point three million yuan. That’s just a trifle, you know, when one talks of such a fine building."

"Mr. Guo-"

"I know, it’s not legal for outside people to have more than a forty-nine percent ownership in real estate, but that can be handled, I can set up a false proxy company for the other fifty-one points, I would be the director, maybe a cousin as trustee, everything in the family, but it would all be controlled by you, of course-"

I’ll bet. "Mr. Guo, duibuqi, it is entirely my fault, but you misunderstand."

"If you are worried about recovering your U.S. dollars upon resale, put your heart at rest, we can put the funds through a textile mill and then give you quality cotton, the best, good resale value, and you’ll pay only a third of the price, do you see? I can get the quota fixed, special for you. Export’s no problem. Guaranteed. I have contacts in the Textile Ministry in Beijing."

"No."

"No? But Miss Mo."

"I don’t want to buy the building. I want information. That’s all."

"Information?" His smile evaporated, eyes narrowed, calculating.

Alice weighed her options rapidly. She didn’t know enough about this Guo Wenxiang to reveal everything to him, but she could probably start him off with research on Abel Oort, the Dutch missionary. If he proved resourceful, they could all decide what to do with him and how much to tell him. "Mr. Guo." She cleared her throat. "In the nineteen twenties that church was operated by a Dutchman. Abel Oort. I want to know what happened to him, if he died in Yinchuan where he is buried, if he left anything, any letters, any diaries -especially, I want to know if there is anyone still alive who remembers him."

Guo sat silent for a moment before he spoke. "You are his relative?"

She sighed. Stretch it. "My employer is a friend of the family."

"Ah, a family matter." His smile returned.

"Yes."

"Eh, well, since we are good friends and this is a family matter, I will see what I can do. But I remind you, many years have flown."

"I know."

"You’re sure you’re not interested in getting into the Shanghai stock market? I can arrange-"

"No. But you must name your fee for the service I require."

He looked crestfallen. "So sorry, Miss Mo, between good friends like ourselves, how can I face you when I mention the price? Expenses are very high these days. Inflation’s a river, out of control."

"Yes, I know." She kept her face patient and polite. God, she hated this. "What would be fair?"

"I will need at least a thousand yuan, up front."

Outrageous! Three months’ salary for the average Chinese. "Mr. Guo," she said, touching her forehead as if she had just remembered something, "in fact I do have another small problem. I brought U.S. dollars with me on this trip, and stupidly forgot to exchange them in Beijing. I’m afraid I don’t have such a large amount of renminbi." This was disingenuous, as they both knew, for any local bank-to say nothing of black market currency privateers, a few of whom still lurked in every city-would gladly convert U.S. dollars.

His eyes gleamed with delight. "I believe I could help you with that problem."

"Tai hao," Wonderful.

"Shall we say, eighty U.S. dollars for the whole job?"

"Thirty."

"Forty."

"Hao-le, " Done. She counted out the American bills.

"Thank you. I’ll return in a few days with the information. May I say, Miss Mo-oh, no, no, don’t see me out, I’m quite all right-may I say with what exquisite subtlety and scholarship you speak. Since you’re an outside person, it’s most unexpected."

With effort she said, "Nali," nonsense, and shut the door.

Lin Shiyang was walking behind Alice on the way to the dining hall that night, and he stared down at her striding along the tiled courtyard path in front of him. He was taken by her dark red hair, its gloss, the alive way it moved around her head. And she had a way of pushing back a strand of hair that was bothering her, a way of twirling it around her finger and then tossing it aside. Meiyan used to do that, exactly the same way. Yet how different this woman was from Meiyan! He had never seen hair like Ai-li’s, except in pictures. And he had never seen a woman smile the way she did. He forgot all that was strange about her face when she smiled. Because then, pleasure just burst out from somewhere inside her. He liked that. It was uncontrolled, it was un-Chinese, but he liked it.

At the public phone hall Alice called her father’s office on Capitol Hill. He wasn’t there, of course-she hadn’t expected him to be. But Roger was, and a secretary went to pull him from a meeting. Alice waited.

A thousand miles away in Beijing, Supervisor Ling saw a light on her board; she pressed a button and activated the preset wiretap authorized by the PLA. She pushed another button; this would inform Commander Gao’s office.

In Yinchuan, Alice gripped the phone. "Roger. Be straight with me. What’s wrong with Horace?"

"I don’t know if I should-"

"Come on, Roger, I’m in frigging Mongolia." Almost.

He sighed. "He had his routine physical. The bloodwork showed an elevated PSA. Prostate-specific antigen. It was, uh, rather sharply elevated. That can mean various things. It can mean the prostate is infected, in which case it’s a simple course of antibiotics. Or…"

"Or?"

"Or else it means prostate cancer."

"Oh, my God." She swallowed. "How bad is it?"

"They don’t know yet. It might be quite far along-or it might be the kind that advances very slowly. But, Alice, often the cause of the elevated reading is merely infection. So right now they have him on an antibiotic."

"Oh." Relief flooded her. Her father, her only family, her sole living ancestor-despite all he did that was barely forgivable. "So everything’s fine."

"Well, dear-we don’t know yet."

"But he’s on the antibiotic."

"Yes."

"Then he’ll be okay."

Silence.

"Roger?"

"Yes?"

"I’ll call in a few days."

"Do that. And, Alice-naturally-not a word to anyone, hmm?"

"Roger, please." She glanced through the glass booth-window at the unruly swarm of waiting Mongols. "If you could see where I’m calling from, you wouldn’t waste your breath."

"Heh, heh." He emitted his humorless cackle and hung up.

It’ll be okay, she told herself on the way out of the phone hall. It won’t be cancer. Horace will go on like he always has. Horace has always been there, he’ll never leave me. She held her breath. And I’ll never be free of him either.

She boxed it up in her mind, and within minutes managed to hide it away as she walked, fast and hard, away down the baking, dust-shimmering Yinchuan street.

She pulled her one pair of black underpants up slowly and then tied on the antique stomach-protector. Outside, the streets were vibrant with life, the evening warm and soft. The long, pleasantly yellow light, which she knew would linger till nearly eleven, streamed over the city.

She had drawn the sheer undercurtains and now watched herself in the mirror. The phoenix, its wings a riot of color, spread beautifully across her, its small, graceful head raised in an attitude of love. The female principle, enfolding. The phoenix which sought the dragon, the sign of the male.

She sighed at her reflection. Her hair was a neat, burnished wedge. Her makeup, invisible, the way she liked it. Nothing showing but copper lip gloss. She looked good.

But why look for a stranger?

She ran her hands through her hair, adjusting it.

Why not Lin?

She examined her high Irish cheekbones, her gold-flecked eyes, her freckles. Did Lin find her appealing? Did his thoughts drift to her? Was he thinking about her now?

She turned from the mirror. The only thing she knew for sure was that he was a man she couldn’t toy with. A closeness with Lin would not be for one night, for pleasure; it would pull in her real self. Only, what was her real self? Again the question hung over her.

This, she thought in a prepatterned flood of resignation, the makeup and the silk stomach-protector and a night out, looking. This is me. And if Lin knew who I really was, he wouldn’t have the least interest in me. He’d be repulsed.

She sighed and turned to her clothes. The black dress- no. Not in Yinchuan. Here in this tu provincial town she was conspicuous enough. It would be better to wear jeans. Her second pair of jeans, which were pleasingly tight. And a black T-shirt.

She tucked away her room key and money, renminbi. Checked her look one more time. Now. Where should she go?

There were bars in Yinchuan, only not the kind she wanted. She’d slipped into one a few evenings before, a karaoke bar, just to check it out. She’d known immediately she wouldn’t come back. It was full of Mongols, high flat faces staring sullenly into space, none of them willing to get up onstage and sing along with the blaring Madonna songs. She had heard other foreign women say that Mongol men were fabulously virile, but she had also heard that they all wore daggers at their belts, and though they approached women confidently, they tended to be dangerously possessive once the deed was done. It was a little too tu for her.

Anyway, maybe it was time to move forward. She should try to meet the type of man she could be herself with-not be Yulian. The very idea that her real life and her sexual life could come together seemed strange, yet ever since she met Lin she’d been thinking about it. To be all of herself, together, to feel as Lucile felt when she wrote in a private note: I am so happy andfeel so completely yours.

Yes, Alice thought. Tonight would be different. She would try the local college.

She took a pedicab to Xibei University. Normally she avoided pedicabs, there being something feudal and horrible about being pulled around in a cart by a sweating, brown, sinewy man. On this evening, though, Alice did not want to be observed. She pressed herself all the way to the back of the cracked leather seat, and the ancient awning made her all but invisible to those who passed by.

She got off at the campus, a forest of low concrete buildings. She had watched through the awning cracks as best she could while they crossed the city, and had not seen anyone tailing them. She glanced around quickly as the man pedaled away. Nothing unusual. She walked onto the campus.

Like most Chinese universities it was mainly a clump of buildings, with none of the academic-village atmosphere for which Western institutions strived. In China, of course, colleges did not have to please students. Violent competition raged for the privilege of attending at all. Once in, the lucky few took what they got. Because unless one had a key to the back door through family connections, it was the only way up and out.

And that’s how it’s been here for thousands of years, she thought, it’s just a new version of the imperial examination system. And today’s students, these pinch-chested, pimply-faced kids, here because they won the top scores on the national exams, were the new incarnations of the Ming and Qing mandarins.

But they’re all too young for me, she thought bitterly, too young and too awkward. Weren’t there any older men around -any professors?

She watched the girls and boys on foot, back and forth, carrying their books.

Somebody like Dr. Lin.

She parked herself on a bench and waited.

It was almost an hour before a man near her own age walked up and sat next to her. He was not like the men in the bars. He was faintly disheveled, with a high, sparsely fringed forehead and a bulging briefcase.

He looked at her sideways. "Dong Zhongwen-ma?" he asked softly, Do you understand Chinese?

"Dong, " she said simply, I do.

His eyes widened and a kindly chuckle bubbled up. "I never thought I’d sit here on a bench on this campus with an outside woman who was able to talk. I’m surnamed Wang." His grin was controlled, intelligent; it made his middle-aged face seem pleasantly companionable. "How are you called?"

"Yulian," she answered, Fragrant Lotus. She noted his slight confusion.

"But what are you surnamed?"

"Bai, " she lied. Usually the men in the bars didn’t ask for a surname. In China, to allow someone to call you by your given name was in itself an act of intimacy. When she introduced herself in these encounters with the name Fragrant Lotus, no surname, it was like honey in her mouth, and the men in the bars always understood. Their usual response was a sly smile. However, this was Yinchuan. The provinces.

"My wife was surnamed Bai," this man Wang said slowly.

Oh, no. "Is she-"

"She died in the Cultural Revolution."

"I’m sorry."

He shrugged. "Years pass like water."

"Did you have children?"

"One daughter. She was raised by my parents in Shanghai. That was after I was assigned here."

"And you remained here after the Cultural Revolution ended?"

"Yes. That’s how it was." His look revealed his clear surprise that she appeared to know all about the Chaos, the forced reassignment of workers, the tearing up of families.

"It’s a bitter road," she said softly.

"Yes. But now it’s not bad. The university is a good danwei. You know what they say. A brave man bows to circumstances as grass does before wind."

"So now you’re a teacher?"

"Administration."

She thought it over for a minute, and then laid her freckled hand over his smooth brown one in sympathy.

He stared at it.

She did not remove it.

"Yulian," he said slowly, wonderingly, "would you like to return to my place for tea?" He looked at her, everything in his face certain she would say no.

"I would." She smiled.

"Zou-ba, "he said with an amazed crack in his voice, Then let’s go. He stood with his briefcase.

They walked in silence. He lived behind the university, in an expressionless block of high-rises. They climbed up six flights of gray concrete, lined with a plain metal rail, to his apartment. Yet once he opened the door they were in another world, for like the carefully maintained interiors of so many private spaces in China, it was spotlessly clean and pleasingly fitted out. A scroll painting and a Xinjiang carpet of surprising quality dominated the room, and brilliantly colored cloths were spread over the table and the bed. In the window above the sink hung an ornate wooden cage with a twittering brown lark.

Wang put down his briefcase and turned to her, his eyes soft. "Do you like flowers?" he said. He drew a red peony from a porcelain jar on the table and cupped it in both hands.

"Yes," she said.

"I do too." He touched the flower to his cheek, then to hers. Just for an instant. She closed her eyes at its softness. She felt his fingers gently seeking hers.

They stood for a moment, their hands joined, and then she turned her back to him and began to remove her T-shirt. She liked to do it that way. From behind they would see nothing except the red silk strings. Then she would turn around, and watch their faces when they saw the phoenix spread across her middle-nude above, nude below-

This time, though, in Mr. Wang’s gracious little room, she stopped, with her T-shirt almost to her armpits. This was not her. Not really her. She dropped her shirt.

"Yulian," Wang said.

All she could think about was Dr. Lin, Lin Shiyang, the tall man from Zhengzhou who seemed to be watching her all the time.

He stepped close to her. "Shenmo?" he whispered, What is it?

She put her hands up to her face. "I can’t."

He touched her arm. "Yulian."

I feel so completely yours. She could almost hear Lucile’s voice, speaking to Pierre, the man she loved. Lucile had found real love in Chinese rooms like this. Even though she agonized over the one thing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin could not give her, and this thing ballooned in importance until it all but obsessed her. Still she returned his love. Why couldn’t Alice make that commitment? Even half that commitment?

"I’m sorry," she said to Wang. "It’s not your fault."

"So you will come another day?"

"Yes. Of course." Though she knew she would not.

"I will call you, then." He fetched a paper and pen from the table and held them out to her. She scrawled the name, Yulian, and a nonsense phone number.

"Remember where I live," he said. "Come anytime."

She walked heavily to the bottom floor and back into the fading light. Beating in her ear like a faint night insect was the drab awareness of life. Her life. She was still alive and Mother Meng was dead. If only she could connect with Mother Meng one more time, talk to her… maybe she should go see the yin-yang master. Maybe, through him, she could reach the old lady again. Because Mother Meng had said to find a man. And it was impossible.

On Shanxi Avenue, in front of the university, she found another pedicab. "Number One Guesthouse," she said.

"Eh," he agreed, glancing back at her. He noticed the tight press of her mouth, and the way she sat with her fist pressed against her forehead. He pulled out into the street, straining against the pedals, picking up speed.

He saw a man jump into a pedicab and follow them, never deviating, never veering away, staying behind them no matter how many twists and unexpected turns he added to the route as he pulled the foreign woman across town. When they stopped, he meant to tell her. But when he turned and he saw her strange, freckled, tofu-colored face streaked with tears, he said nothing. He accepted her money, let out another monosyllable, and pedaled away.

She squeezed onto the polished stool in the booth at the public phone hall. The signal came from the operator and she picked it up. Come on Horace, she thought, be home. Please be home. She swallowed. Eleven in the evening in Washington. Come on.

The burping disturbance to the ring, and then his recorded voice mail. She listened to his greeting: calm, smooth, businesslike. When the tone sounded and the inert void of the recorder came on, she spoke in a thin, childish voice, made tight by worry: "It’s just me. Wondering how you are.

"Bye," she said, and reluctantly hung up.

Lieutenant Shan, Army commander for the Ningxia-Inner Mongolia region, snapped the report he’d been given back down on his desk. "So the oily-mouth from the Golden Country only stayed inside the man’s apartment ten minutes, eh? Ten minutes! What could they do! Are the west-ocean ghosts not strange!"

His men looked at each other.

"Did you find out anything about her yet? The other American’s a scientist, what about her? She’s a scientist too?"

"No, sir. We don’t know."

"No? You dog bones! You have to be clever. Now, listen. If she calls that number in Washington again I want her very closely watched. Is she stupid? No! She’s a crafty barbarian."

"Yes, Honorable Sir!" the line of men barked.

"Move! Diu neh loh moh, " Do your mothers.

The men did not flinch at this Cantonese obscenity their commanding officer from the South was so fond of throwing around. They were used to it.

"Report back to me!"

They hurried out.

"See this?" said Dr. Lin, and handed it to her, a polished bone, familiar, twin knobs at its end. "It’s a human femur."

She gasped and her fingers came out, then stopped. "Can I really touch it?"

He laughed. "Of course. Gei."

She took it and almost seemed to stop breathing as she held it, studied it, felt it. "Can you tell how old it is?"

"Not here, not now. In the lab we could, since it’s organic material. But when you have this kind of site you can’t date things in the field. The shifting sand mixes the ages together. You see." He glanced, to illustrate, at the chalky, fine-grained dunes of the Ordos that rolled away in front of them. They had climbed to the ridge after lunch and stepped over the Wall, and now sat, sifting through sand with their fingers. Almost immediately he had found this bone. It was just a few inches down. He had been rolling his hand through the sand, and had suddenly drawn it out, smiling, ecstatic with the discovery. When he turned to her he saw her staring, not at the bone but at his face. Quickly she’d looked away. There’d been something so unguarded in her eyes, so open-those strange agate eyes, the like of which he had never seen before on a woman.

"Just think," she said softly. "It was part of a person in Stone Age times-someone who lived, hunted, grew food. Yet he or she must have thought. Must have spoken somehow." She touched the bone wonderingly.

"You surprise me so," he said. "You are a Westerner-yet you are drawn to what is old."

"You said that before. Let it go. It’s just a prejudice. When I see something this old-when I hold it-I feel the connection of the past and future. It gives me hope, though I am only one small being. Do you understand my words?" To write thetrue natural history of the world, we should need to be able tofollow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlockingsuccession of structural types replacing one another, but asan ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidatedinstincts.

"I’m not sure if I understand you or not," he said quietly. "But I want to, very much."

She lowered her eyes. They both returned to shifting sand.

Lin focused on the sand trailing from his fingers. It was so hot. The other part of the Ordos, the rocky dirt cut by canyons and shallow steppes, fell away behind them at the bottom of the ridge. This was the dune region of the Ordos, the subdesert called Maowushu. Sand rolled away over the pattern of hills in front of him, rose and fell until it ran into the blinding sky. Lin stared off to the horizon as far as he could. It was hard to believe he was here, at last, in the place he had dreamed of coming for so many years to look for Meiyan. She seemed gone, vanished. And now he sat here talking to another woman. He was not a man who was completely free to engage with a woman, yet this woman-this outside woman… He looked at her. There was something about her. When he was with her he felt happy, excited; when he was apart from her he found himself wanting to be with her again.

But she was a Westerner. What did such a woman take, what did she give? He had heard Western women were superficial, that they were interested in diversion, not love. That they could not be trusted. Was it true with Mo Ai-li? As he considered this he watched his hands, and her hands. With a jolt he saw that they were playing with the sand, in unison, a dangerous physical harmony between them. Did she notice?

Ah. She did. Because suddenly she looked up at him, reddening. "We’d better go back."

He couldn’t stop himself from smiling as he got to his feet. "All right. Zou-ba."

"Mr. Tang," Alice said, reading the name of the yin-yang master off of his card, "I have come to you about the death of someone I love." She glanced around his cluttered reception room. In addition to the stacks of well-thumbed almanacs there was, on every shelf and counter, a bizarre jumble of paper objects meant to serve the dead in the underworld. Small reproductions of horses, grain carts, wine pitchers, rice bowls, stacks of play money, paper clothing and linens, miniature chests and beds and tables, and even tiny models of servants and concubines and family members, all cleverly fashioned and folded and printed in a riot of garish paper colors.

"Mo Ai-li, Interpreter," he read from her card. "This is most uncommon. No waiguoren has ever come to me before. Even among Chinese, only the old ones still come. You are perhaps researching feudal culture?"

"No. I require your services, that’s all."

He raised his scanty white eyebrows and laid her card carefully on his desk, then focused his lidded, rheumy black eyes. "Please explain."

"A woman has just died who was like a mother to me, though she was Chinese and not my real mother. I fear she has not been properly mourned."

"What of her children?"

"One son. He does not follow the old ways."

"Husband?"

"Died a few years ago."

"Eh! A bitterness. But this is a Chinese family. Not your own."

"It’s so…"

"You are not Chinese," he reminded her.

"Yes," she said heavily. "I know."

"Yet you wish to observe the rituals. What about your own ancestors? Do you serve them?"

Alice thought of Horace. This was her Fall-just being born with the Mannegan name. "Yes," she evaded. "I have ancestors." But I need new ones, she thought.

"If you are sure you wish to proceed…" He lifted his shoulders in the classic Chinese attitude of disavowal. "A few questions. At the time of the woman’s death, was an auspicious object placed in her mouth-a pearl, or a coin? Were mirrors placed about her body?"

"I was not present."

He paused, cleared his throat. "Was notice of her death given to the local gods? Was a geomancer engaged to determine the proper siting of her grave?"

"I’m sorry, Master Tang, I don’t know, but I believe none of this was done. She lived in the city-in Beijing. They don’t do these things there anymore." She didn’t want to say aloud what they both also knew: that when people died in the big cities now their bodies were disposed of quickly, quietly, through routine cremation.

"The date of her death, please?"

"July fourteenth." Alice closed her eyes and pictured Meng and Jian. "Her son-he loved her. But I don’t think he will worship her spirit." I could, she thought. I could be the worthy spirit child of Meng Shaowen.

And Lucile Swan too.

Why not? The practice of filial piety was one of the many things about old China she’d always found appealing. She had just never had the right kind of parent. Now, though… She cleared her throat. "Is it possible-may I make this woman my ancestor?"

Avoiding her eyes, Master Tang tented his gnarled fingers and regarded them. "It is sometimes done. But only by Chinese. And always when the departed one is childless. You say she has a son?"

"Yes."

"One must consider him."

She saw Jian in her mind with the open-faced wife, the perfect baby. "He will never follow the rituals."

He pondered. "Xing. I will prepare her ling-pai, the spirit tablet. We will meet again in seven days for the rituals of ci ling and an-zhu, which will call her spirit back to the tablet and then enshrine it in your home. This makes her your ancestor and a part of your family forever. You understand the responsibilities?"

"I do."

"You’ll make regular offerings? You’ll honor her every year on Qing-Ming?"

"I will."

"Good. I will come to your room one week from today. In the meantime, you must go to the temple and complete the bao-miao ritual. This will announce her death to the neighborhood gods. Yet you can’t-you say she lived in Beijing…" He stopped and considered the problem.

"Master Tang, I know nothing, I am an outside person of low intelligence, but may I humbly suggest we use a local temple to the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin?"

"It will suffice, I suppose." He prepared his inkstone, took up a brush, and with perfect form, despite the swollen joints of his long fingers, wrote a few characters. "The temple address," he said, and pushed it across the desk. "Now. So I can prepare the ling-pai, your friend’s name?"

"Meng Shaowen."

"Which Meng?"

"Mengzi-de Meng, " she clarified, and he wrote the characters down.

"There is one more matter, Mo Ai-li. You must choose some spirit objects to send on to Meng Shaowen. Things that would have meaning to her and ease her life beyond the Yellow Springs. These objects are to be burned in the next seven days, preferably at the intersection of two streets. This is jiao-hun, Calling back the soul. Well?"

She stared helplessly around her at the welter of paper symbols crowding the room.

"I see you do not know. Most people select spirit money, food vessels, wine cups-such things as these."

"Ah," Alice said. She rose and circled the room, scanning the miniature world of flawless, loudly colored paper replicas. For Meng she chose kitchen goods, a tiny chest for wardrobe, and a paper Victrola. Then there was Lucile. The women were connected now in her mind. Every prayer, every ritual, would be for both of them. For Lucile she selected a tiny bed, a pile of paper linens, and a little paper man. He was meant to be wearing old-fashioned Chinese robes, but it could have been the raiment of a priest. It could have been Teilhard.

"These things," she said, and handed them to Master Tang.

The Temple to Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy, was on the edge of the old Chinese quarter. It was a Qing-era building with elaborate red-and-blue frescoes painted along the curving eaves, ornate but run down. Inside Alice found no one except a novice monk, a boy no older than fifteen with a saffron robe and a close-shaven black fuzz covering his head.

"Wo lai bao-miao, " she said to him tentatively, I’ve come for the ritual of reporting a death at the temple.

He looked at her blankly.

"My friend has died," she explained.

He removed a packet of incense wrapped in red paper from a pile of supplies on a side table, and handed it to her. "Simao san," he said absently, Forty-three cents.

She counted out the coins.

He waved her toward the altar, a bank of Buddhas rising up behind a sweet-faced, larger-than-life statue of the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin.

She lit the incense, stuck it into one of the sand-filled bowls, and bowed three times. "Meng Shaowen," she whispered, "on July fourteenth of this year, you drifted away from this world and went to the Yellow Springs. There you met Old Woman Wang, who gave you the wine of forgetfulness to drink. In this way you could go on to your next life with your sins, your memories, wiped away…" Another start, Alice thought. It was what she needed too.

She stood silent, staring up at the statue. Guanyin had a beautiful face, shaped like an almond, narrow black eyes, and a rosebud mouth. She stood with her hands outstretched, her colored robes swirling gracefully around her.

It occurred to Alice, for the first time, that Guanyin looked exactly like the Virgin Mary.

Strange she’d never noticed.

A note from Guo Wenxiang was slipped beneath her door at the Number One:

Mo Ai-li, I am happy to inform you that I have obtained some information about the Dutch missionary Abel Oort.

He died in Yinchuan in 1934. Tomorrow evening, if you are free, I will take you and Dr. Spencer to his grave.

She wrote the English translation beneath the spidery characters and slid the note under Spencer’s door.

Back inside, her door locked, she removed all her clothes and stood in front of the mirror. Too boyish, that was her problem. A spare, narrow-hipped frame that rose from slim, wiry legs. Not much of a waist. Her breasts swelled out only slightly. Well shaped, though, she thought, twisting her body to put one of them into silhouette. And she had a reasonably good-looking bottom. She turned and looked at it over her shoulder. Her pigu, as the Chinese called it. Round and white and no droop. Not yet. She faced front again. Her eyes trailed down her pale belly past her legs to her feet, knotty and curiously strong looking. Too long for her small body, not soft and white as they should have been, but at least they were not all wide and splayed out.

Feet were important to Chinese men, or at least they had once been. Alice, as yet another way of achieving separation with herself, had often imagined herself with bound feet. Three inches long, that had been the ideal, and the helpless woman with soft pleading and submissiveness in her eyes would sway above them in that lotus-foot gait. Take me. Alice had read that the most profound sexual act in old China was when a woman actually allowed a man to remove her foot bandages and do things with her deformed foot. She knew that many women were married to men all their lives, bore them many sons, and never let them do it.

Often Alice had imagined it: the soft-eyed woman finally saying yes, the yards and yards of white bandage spiraling into a heap on the floor, the tiny wrinkled hoof, bare, the smaller toes bent under, sometimes fallen off. The strange smell of decayed flesh mixed with sweet talcum. The foot, pitiable, longed for, lifted at last in the man’s ivory hands.

"Horace," she said, glancing at her watch in the dim flickering public phone stall-it was four forty-five in the morning where he was, "-why didn’t you tell me there was a problem?"

"There is no problem," came back the sleepy, insistent voice.

"But Roger told me there was a chance it might be-" She stopped, not wanting to say the word, cancer. "He said it might be something serious."

"Did he? Well, it’s not, though I love hearing from you. Alice darling, you haven’t called me so much in years! Not since your first week at college."

"I got a little scared when I heard your message, Horace. And then when I talked to you and Roger. You can understand that." She pressed her lips together, holding back the words and the thoughts. To be any kind of person she needed, desperately, to stay away from him. With him, she was Alice Mannegan. The Alice from the Alice Speech. Prejudice and revulsion clung to her like a smell. And it was her own personal curse that she lacked the authority to tell him so, bluntly. She just couldn’t. He was too powerful, too in control. All she could do was stay away.

And yet Horace was all she had. She was in so many ways his issue: the auburn hair, the small frame, the high intelligence. There was a confused stream of familial commitment between them that-despite everything-still survived and still had love in it. It was an alliance Alice couldn’t imagine living without.

And she knew Horace couldn’t imagine it either. "Come back, sweetheart. Please. Come back and visit me."

"I can’t right now. Soon maybe, but not now. I’m on a job."

"I miss you so much."

"I know. Me too. Horace, come on. Tell me what’s going on."

He coughed. He had stopped smoking years ago, at her urging, but he still coughed, especially in the morning. "I’m just on the antibiotic, sweetheart. Really. It’s okay."

"Are you taking care of yourself? Are you getting enough sleep?"

"Are you coming home?"

She sighed. "Horace…"

"Seriously," he continued. "It’s a big country, America. There’s lots of room. You could come back. You don’t have to be anywhere near your old dad."

"Oh, Horace," she said, instantly moving the conversation away from the word Dad, as she always did.

"You could come back and live somewhere else," he insisted.

"It’s not that. It’s just that this is my life-working-you know." She didn’t want to say what she felt, what she knew to be true: that he had ruined America for her, that she could no longer be there, that for better or worse she was entwined here in China. Though what would her life be like after-if-Horace was gone? She tried briefly to imagine a world without him. His dominance, his paternalism, vanished. Would she be free, then? Could she be herself, could she love someone?

These thoughts, first shafts of light in darkness, made her wince; she quickly closed them off. No, she thought, taking a deep, jagged breath. Losing Horace would be awful.

Her father was still talking, a stubborn edge to his voice. "Well, then, just come and visit."

"I’ll try."

"Okay."

"Horace, be sure you get enough sleep, and vitamins, and everything."

"Of course, my darling."

Please don’t die, she thought desperately, hanging up. Don’t leave me.

All through the next day she was able to think of nothing but Horace, and the possibility that he was seriously ill. By the time they got back to Yinchuan in the afternoon she had decided to call Roger. That was it. Get hold of Roger, and just demand that he tell her the whole truth. How sick was Horace? What exactly had the doctors said? She lined all this up in her mind as she walked up Sun Yat-sen.

At the public phone hall they kept her waiting. Forty-five minutes, then an hour. It was outrageous. She had never waited this long before in a public phone hall, anywhere.

She plodded back to the counter again.

"Qingwen, " she said politely to the fuwuyuan. "I’ve been waiting such a long time-"

"Destination?"

"United States. Washington, D.C."

"Oh, yes," the woman said. A sudden light flooded her eyes. "Calls to Washington take a long time."

No, they don’t, Alice thought, but she returned to her seat.

"Yi bai wushi hao!"

Finally. Her number. She walked quickly to the booth, slid inside.

The phone rang.

Jesus, about time. "Wei!" she said.

"Phone call to America?"

"Yes."

"Wait a moment." The line went dead.

What? thought Alice-

Now a man was tapping sharply on the booth window. Sharp faced, authoritative, narrow eyes, and a crisp PLA uniform. With a brusque wave of the hand he ordered her out.

She stood up too quickly, caught the belt loop of her jeans on the edge of the tray that held the telephone. She heard a small ripping sound, felt her body restrained for an instant. A moment of confusion swirled around her. "What the hell?" she said to herself, reverting to English. Then she saw the snag. "Oh, it’s this thing." She leaned over and unhooked it.

But the soldier had heard her English words. "Western cow," he muttered in Mandarin. "Supposed to be an archaeologist! But she makes phone calls to sensitive numbers-top diplomatic status-"

He thinks I don’t understand him! she thought. He thinks I don’t speak Chinese.

’’Lai, " the soldier said gruffly, and motioned toward the door.

She knew instantly that it was to her advantage to play dumb. So she answered in English. "Okay, okay. What’s the problem?"

All conversation in the high-ceilinged hall had stopped. The Mongols all stood silent, staring at them.

Now the soldier took her arm and attempted to pull her away from the booth.

She planted her feet, resisting.

He responded by signaling aggressively, exaggerating it, using his hands.

"All right, all right. Take it easy." She had to cooperate, she knew that. Keep calm, she told herself. Use only English. It’ll be okay. She let him prod her outside.

A van waited there, in the hot glassy light. People rushed by, all careful to look away from the soldier and the foreigner.

The rear doors of the van lay open.

"Shang che," he ordered softly, Get in, and gave her a gentle push.

She looked inside to see two rows of soldiers, seated. In one motion they brought their rifles up, click, pointing straight to the ceiling.

"Okay," she shook out. "Cool down."

She climbed into the van like a remote movie image of herself, a bad dream, a sheet of water over everything. It can’t really be. But it is. Somebody bolted the van doors from outside and the motor turned over, howled to life.

She grabbed for something to stay steady on her feet as the van lurched into the street.

The soldier on the end moved down to make room for her. He pounded on the seat and made wild eye motions, as if communicating with a gorilla.

A searing Chinese reply came automatically to her throat -Idiot! Do you also look at the sky through a bamboo tube and measure the sea with a conch shell?-but she bit it down. She nodded in silence, then sank onto the bench.

"Waiguoren, " she heard one of them murmur in amazement. Foreigner.

"Hao chou-a," another one swore in the soft accent of Shanghai, What a stinking mess.

"Ta yiju hua ye tingbudong, " She doesn’t understand a word.

Don’t let on you understand.

Her eyes were barely adjusted to the dark, her heart still battering; but she could see around her. There were eight of them. PLA greens. Recruits. Kids-no more than nineteen, twenty. Driving somewhere, bouncing over the city streets, at lurching, slamming speeds. She wrapped her arms around her torso and squeezed down the trembling as hard as she could. Jing tian dong di, Terror startles the heavens and rattles all the earth.