Lost in Translation

9

It was time for Adam Spencer to admit there was nothing at Shuidonggou. He knew what he was doing: he was a former Leakey Fellow, a full professor, a published scholar of the archaic cultures of western America. But this time he’d been wrong.

Because there was nothing here.

He took his book from his patch pocket and wrote rapidly. One, where did Teilhard put Sinanthropus?

He sighed. He felt lately that this question was strangling him.

Two, he wrote. Whom did he tell about it?

The Mongols, the Mongols, it should have been the Mongols. He sighed and rubbed his chin. It was itchy all the time now, dusty and sticky like the rest of him in this desert sun. There was no wind yet. It would come up later, in the afternoon, as it did every day.

Where did he put it? What clue had they not yet followed?

There was Eren Obo, of course, Spencer thought; the village at the foot of the Helan Shan range. He wrote it down. They could go out there and find the petroglyphs. Though how many monkey sun gods were carved into boulders in the Helan Shan? Dozens? Hundreds?

And could they really obtain permission to cross the missile range, and the mountains, to get to Eren Obo in the first place? According to Kong and Lin it was a godforsaken spot in the most remote western part of Inner Mongolia. Closed to outsiders, because of the military. Closed even to Chinese.

Alice had told him that Kong and Lin were working on it. He had to rely on her; he couldn’t understand a frigging word they said without her. Though he felt he caught the essence of the Chinese men. Kong was a walking flurry, all faxes and phone calls and excited conversations. Lin was quiet, removed.

And Alice. Such a strange woman. Smart as a whip. Would obviously have had some kind of hugely successful career if only she weren’t so held down by her life.

But she was doing a great job. Tonight, for instance, that Mr. Guo she’d hired was supposed to take them to Abel Oort’s grave.

Though it didn’t look like Peking Man was here at Shuidonggou. They’d already found the one thing they’d known to look for-the Mongol homestead-and it was as dead as skittering leaves.

Still, they had the petroglyph. The monkey sun god. Had that been what was in Teilhard’s thoughts, his secret mind? Spencer continued to write. As usual, the act of forming the words, the scratching sound of the ballpoint on the page, made things clearer for him. Eren Obo. That was the next place. They had to get visas for Eren Obo.

"Can’t you whores get anybody who speaks English?" growled the man everyone addressed as Lieutenant Shan. "What am I supposed to do with this foreigner? Eh! Little Wang! Drag your lazy legs back to the base and get pockface Wu! He graduated high school." Shan took another pull on his fat, strong-smelling Chinese cigarette. As he smoked on the other side of the rough wooden table she could see little distinction between his breathing in and breathing out, so that when he talked smoke leaked and eddied constantly around his tobacco-stained teeth.

"Wu studied Russian in high school, not English. Sir!" The little man named Wang stood at terrified attention, trying not to look at Alice, with her unnaturally red hair and her green eyes. Eyes of a ghost. Eyes of a demon.

"You whores have twisted everything up!" the lieutenant barked. "Why did you bring her in here! I only told you to watch her! Now look what you’ve done. We can’t detain an American like this!"

"But, sir, she resisted-"

"Shut up," Shan said darkly. "Why didn’t we get a background report on these people from Beijing? Where’s my briefing? We don’t know anything except that they’re Americans and they’re doing something with archaeology. All right, so they’re both archaeologists. And now they’ve got two of our Chinese archaeologists from Henan hooked up with them. That’s not enough! We should know everything Beijing knows before we even make a move! And now"-his voice shook with anger-"you’ve dragged one of them in!"

"Sir-"

"Do your mother’s smelly delta," the lieutenant snapped, switching to Cantonese.

Alice’s eyes widened. She didn’t know much Cantonese, but every Chinese speaker who’d ever passed through Canton or Hong Kong had heard this phrase. It was the stock obscenity of the streetwise Cantonese-speaking male. The Cantonese were known for their earthiness, and this was one of their favorite knee-jerk vulgarities. She had already deduced that this lieutenant was southern-he spoke Mandarin with an accent-but this crudeness was still a surprise, for he was a man of considerable military rank. Clearly, he didn’t know she understood him. It was obvious he thought she was an archaeologist, not an interpreter. She had to keep this illusion going.

She forced out normal-sounding words in English. "Look, I don’t know what the problem is." She looked around nervously. Where were they? Some Army office, a cement block building on the outskirts of the city. Please don’t take away my life in China. "I’m just a tourist."

"If I may, sir," said a man she had heard called Zhao. He was a squat man with a broad face. His uniform was smartly cut, the belt around his thick waist real leather. He looked higher in rank than the others, though not as high as Lieutenant Shan, whose uniform was of the finest, softest tropical wool and whose pockets, collar, and shoulder seams were expertly detailed. "We’ve got the trace on the last call. It was to a private residence in Washington. Of course, there is nothing unlawful-"

"Do your mother," Shan hissed.

God, she thought, tracing my call. Is it about Horace?

But the lieutenant continued: "You should have let her talk on the phone. We were taping. Don’t any of you whores have brains? How can we know now whether she was going to make arrangements with her government to remove Peking Man? How can we even know how close they are to finding it!"

Jesus, she thought, it’s the expedition.

Shan was jabbing his brown finger at a sheaf of densely charactered pages in front of him. "The penalties for smuggling antiquities out of China are very-oh, very severe. We might have had a case that could turn into some true political currency. No. Oh, no. You dog bones have to bring her in before she even gets on the phone. Zao-le, Now it’s all exposed!"

Take Peking Man out of the country? she thought. They can’t be serious.

Shan, disgusted, was lighting another cigarette.

The men stood silent, watching him. Finally the one called Zhao spoke: "Sir, permit this lower man to speak, but what is exposed? She cannot understand a word we say."

"You brought her here, didn’t you? Does she think this is a tourist diversion? Look at her!"

They all shifted their gaze to her, not daring to speak.

"Look at her," Shan said, and suddenly his voice was slow, almost thoughtful. "Do you suppose her hair is red down below?"

"I personally wouldn’t want to find out," Zhao said primly.

"Actually, she’s not bad," Shan said. Smoke curled around his mouth.

Oh, God, not this, she thought desperately. It took all her self-control not to scrunch up, cross her legs, or do something else that showed she understood.

"You know, their women do it with everybody," Zhao remarked. "That’s what I’ve heard."

They all looked raptly at him, then at her.

Stop, she thought miserably. Out loud she spoke English: "I wish I’d brought my passport today. Sorry. I left it at the hotel. But I’m an American, you see-here-I have an idea. Give me a pencil and paper." And she made writing motions with her hands.

"See that!" said the emaciated underling named Wang. "She wants to write something."

Shan looked at him witheringly. "Wang, you little whore, I don’t know why I continue to expect intelligence from you. One can’t get ivory from a dog’s mouth, can one? Do your mother! Get her some paper and stop up your mouth!"

Little Wang yanked open the table drawer and shoved paper and a leaky-looking fountain pen in front of her.

"Thanks," she said, careful to stay in English, laboring to keep her voice steady. Quickly she sketched a creditable outline of the United States. Should she put a mark on Houston, Texas, her hometown? Hell, no. No mark. She pushed the paper back toward them.

"What fun," Shan said dryly. "The little oily mouth gives us a geography lesson. Zhao, Wang, listen. I’d like to lock this little west-ocean slut up and teach her a lesson, lock the other American up, too, but they haven’t done anything yet and it would bring too much bitterness down on my head. We’re all supposed to be friends with them now, can it be believed? The imperialist fucks. Eh? Who would have thought now I’d have one of their whores in my office and I’d have to play polite! Enough, I’m wasting too much time." He turned to Alice and stretched his mouth in a phony smile. "Mistake!" he shouted in English, the word barely comprehensible. He raised his palms. "Sorry! Mistake!"

She drew her brows together. Had he said "mistake"? Was he backing down? "Oh," she said in English. "Okay. No problem."

He glared at his men. "All right, you whores. Take this baggage back to downtown Yinchuan and let her off. Courteously. And then keep an eye on all of them. If they find the bones, I want to know it. Good and fast! Understood?"

"Sir!" Sharp salutes from Zhao and Wang.

"Diu neh loh moh, " Do your mothers. Shan waved them out.

When she finally stepped down from the back of the van on the back street behind the Number One, her knees were like water and she wasn’t sure where she was, what had just happened, or even what language she was thinking in. She tried to start walking. The pillared entrance to the guesthouse blurred in front of her.

Then there was a hand under her arm. "Xiao Mo."

She looked up. Dr. Lin.

"Are you all right?" He steadied her, eyes wide. "What happened?"

"I got picked up by the PLA."

"What!" His composure fractured. "Zenmo keneng!" Could this be? Meiyan had been picked up by the PLA too. But Meiyan was gone and this woman was alive, she was here, in front of him, unhurt. And they had taken her-questioned her-what? He felt the hammering of fear. Out of concern for her he made his voice soft. "Tell me all that happened."

"I went to the phone hall to call my father. My father’s office"-she looked half destroyed-"ah-perhaps you remember, it is a high government office. A soldier took me from the booth and into a van, but you see, he thought I couldn’t talk, and I let him think so. They drove me to some building, out of town, I think, and a man everyone called Lieutenant Shan talked. He was-very rude."

Lin tensed. "Rude how, exactly?"

"Just…" She paused. "Crude."

"What?"

"He was Cantonese. I’ve heard talk like that on the street before, in Hong Kong. You know."

"Of course," Lin said, exhaling hard. "But for him to speak that way in front of you-it’s unimaginable! You’re an outsider. Especially a man of authority-"

"Oh, no!" Alice cried. "He thought I couldn’t understand! He was complaining about not getting a briefing. He doesn’t know much about what we’re doing, just that it’s about archaeology and Peking Man. He didn’t know I was an interpreter. He thought I was another archaeologist. He’d never have talked that way if he thought I spoke Chinese."

Comprehension dawned in his chest as he looked down at her. "So they spoke freely in front of you?"

She rolled her eyes. "God, yes. Completely."

A sense of wonder started up in him, side by side with his fear. "You are brave! It takes courage to do such a thing." So she has more than intelligence, he thought, looking down at her-she has inner strength. "Now tell me. What did you learn?" He was still holding her arm. "Why did they take you in?"

"You won’t believe this."

His eyes notched into a more brilliant, deeper black.

"They think if we find Peking Man, we’re going to smuggle it out. They think that’s why I called Washington."

"But that’s-that’s…"

"Insane?" she suggested.

He closed his eyes, shook his head slowly. "At least we know now, the four of us. We must be careful. Though"-he paused-"I am sorry beyond words for this. It should never have happened."

"I’m all right," she insisted. "Really, I am."

"And ingenious too," he said softly. "Do you know, Xiao Mo, that today you were successful at jia chi bu dian? To pretend to be stupid when one is smart. It is one of the classic ancient strategies."

"It is?"

"Yes. And a difficult hand to play. I salute you."

"And I you," she returned.

He felt her open intelligence all the way through him. Again like Meiyan. Meiyan who had never returned, whose fate was unknown, who was still his wife. Meiyan was always there between him and anyone else. Would it be so with this outsider Mo Ai-li? Her hands were the pale color of nephrite, speckled, jittery. Her face a triangle, constructed differently from all faces he had known. Her hair.

"Dr. Lin?"

"You make me think of the legend of Mu-lan," he told her. "She’s a famous Chinese heroine. She was very brave, like you."

"Yes. Mu-lan." Mo Ai-li smiled up at him. "I know the story. But I must disagree. I am not like her. In order to go to war, and express her duty to her father, Mu-lan posed as a man. I’d never do that."

The yawning rush of yin came from her and he felt his face warming. He looked down and saw that he was still holding her arm. He let it go. "No," he had to agree, "I think you would not."

Lin went directly to Kong Zhen. "The PLA picked up the female interpreter!" he shouted, as soon as he had closed Kong’s door behind him. "They questioned her, they were rude to her-is it not unthinkable!"

All color drained from Kong’s face. "Did they let her go? Is she all right?"

"Yes. All right. But it’s a disgrace!"

"Speak calmly. What happened?"

"A soldier approached her at the phone hall. She was calling her father-you see, he’s an official in the U.S. Government-and the soldier ordered her off the phone and into his truck. They took her somewhere, she doesn’t know where. None of them knew she could speak, so they talked in front of her-"

"Oh!" Kong said. "Very good."

"She said their language was crude. The leader argued with his men-he hadn’t wanted her brought in. They said they thought the Americans might smuggle out Peking Man if they found it. Then they apologized to her and let her go."

"Aiya, " Kong sighed.

"This cannot happen," Lin said firmly.

"I know, I know. Ten thousand years of stink! All right, Shiyang, don’t worry. I’ll take care of it."

"Elder cousin," said Kong Zhen into the phone barely an hour later. He had gotten a call through to Vice Director Han as quickly as he could. "We have had a small problem. The Army detained one of the Americans-the female. They frightened her." He paused, listening to the flood of indignation on the other end. "Yes. I know you never intended it. Yes. Yes, they let her go. But this sort of thing cannot be permitted. Consider the potential for guoji yinxiang," International repercussions. "Elder cousin." Kong took a deep breath. "I truly believe these particular outside people will not smuggle out Peking Man. The possibility is as remote as a needle at the bottom of the sea. Yes, I know this is only my humble opinion. Yes. I know you must be careful. But, elder cousin"-he swallowed-"my lowly suggestion is this: You should remove the surveillance."

"Here is buried Abel Oort," said Guo Wenxiang, kicking lightly at the small, moss-eaten headstone in the weeds.

Alice watched Spencer drop to a squat and lay his hands on the pocked, lichen-molded surface. She had told him right away about being picked up by the PLA. He’d been pissed. Good and pissed off like a friend should be. Then she told him the rest, that they thought he meant to steal Peking Man if he found it, and she saw him frightened, pale for the first time. He had turned around and walked away from her, and closed the door of his room. An hour later he emerged, in control of himself again, and said he was ready to go and meet Guo at the graveyard.

Now Guo and Alice stood watching Spencer bent over the gravestone, writing in his notebook. "I understand you ran into some trouble today," Guo said.

She froze.

"It’s so, isn’t it? I told you my connections were top level."

She swallowed. "Yes," she said. "You did."

"You must move carefully." He threw each syllable at her emphatically. "There seems to be suspicion that your group will smuggle national artifacts out of the country. Now, Interpreter Mo. If I am to be your consultant, you should explain your business in China." He waited.

Tell him. "Dr. Spencer is an archaeologist. He has an idea he may be able to recover the remains of Peking Man."

Guo’s eyebrows flew up in abhorrence. "He would take Peking Man out of China?"

"No, no. That’s crazy."

"Are you certain?"

"Certain."

"Really. Do you know the true face of this man?"

She looked at the middle-aged American in the weeds. "No," she said honestly. "But I know that’s not what he’s after. It doesn’t fit-not in the world he comes from. He’s a scholar. He wants academic success. Were he to smuggle an artifact, he’d lose unimaginable face. It would ruin his career." To her it all seemed so clear that she was sure Guo Wenxiang must perfectly understand it. An American would change his expression, say, Ah yes, I see, you are right. But Guo was Chinese. He stonewalled, staring across the graves and weeds, as if she had said nothing of import.

Then he answered: "Of course, the PLA is basically business, do you understand me or not? The business of holding the plate of sand together. This is China." He stopped and lit a cigarette, sucked hard, and blew out smoke. "Also, Mo Ai-li. The place Dr. Spencer is talking about in Inner Mongolia is even more sensitive than here. Don’t do anything that might be wrongly interpreted."

"You mean near Eren Obo?"

"Yes. That’s Alashan County. It’s a military area-most classified. Missiles. Mo Ai-li, be more careful. Think back and forth."

She nodded, pushing down anxiety.

"If there are things you want to know, come to me," Guo advised.

"Perhaps you’re right." She closed her eyes. The advanced Chinese, the command of colloquialisms, the slang: at a certain point, when you got close to things that were neibu, Inside their damned private bubble, it was all worthless. "There is something"-she sighed-"a most delicate matter."

"No problem."

"And no one is to know of it."

"You will trust me," he said. It was a cold observation, a twist of the knife that said, Face it, you’ll trust me, you have no choice. He sucked on his cigarette. "Shenmo shi?" What is it?

"A colleague of mine is searching for his wife. She may be dead. Her name is Zhang Meiyan."

"Zhang Meiyan?"

"Yes. Originally from Zhengzhou, but interned here in the laogai. Early seventies, I think."

Guo blew a smoke ring. "Interned where? Which camp?"

"I don’t know. But I believe there were a lot of camps on the Nei Meng side, over the Helan Shan, in the desert-"

"I know that," Guo cut her off. His tone said: I know because I live here and I lick crumbs out of the gutter for my living, but it’s something you are not supposed to know. He studied her strange green eyes.

She stared back.

"Did he hear from the wife after she was sent away?" As Guo spoke his lips came apart around the cigarette, revealing small, pointed teeth.

"I don’t think so. Not for a long time, at least."

"Boundless is the bitter sea." Guo exhaled one last blue cloud, then ground the butt under his shoe. "Well. The women’s camps were all closed. In 1980, all the women still alive were released. Some were given housing registrations in villages on the Ningxia side. Others were assigned in Inner Mongolia, across the mountains. What’s the husband’s name?"

"Lin Shiyang."

"And the wife, again?"

"Zhang Meiyan."

"All right."

"See what you can find."

He nodded.

She felt the sick tug inside her that told her she shouldn’t be doing this, she had no right to invade Lin’s life in this way. It was wrong. Ah, but maybe in a way it wasn’t wrong. He wanted to find his wife, didn’t he? She could help. Help him find her; or if she was gone, help him forget her. Everyone can change, she thought. Even him. The axis and leading shoot ofevolution.

Spencer had covered the yard and was walking back toward them. "Nothing here."

She glanced at Guo. "It’s too bad you couldn’t find anyone who remembered the Dutch priest, only this grave. It’s a dry end."

She lowered her voice. "Better luck with the Chinese archaeologist’s wife."

"Look," Spencer said. "I think we’re going to need some more help. Ask Mr. Guo if he’ll do another assignment. Get him together with Kong and Lin for a briefing. See what he can find out about the Mongol family."

When they got back Alice sat in her room, looking at the paper spirit-objects she’d bought from Master Tang. The bed, the wedding chest, the upright paper man. These were the things she would burn and send to the women on the other side. A barb of discomfort went through her.

What was she doing?

Guo Wenxiang went to the apartment of his friend Hu Bin, a fellow Sichuanese who, like him, enjoyed undocumented status here in the oasis city. Both came from mountain villages where there’d been no money to be made, no future to be had. Both were men who were young and strong, who had to get out.

In China that meant leaving organized society and floating, living by the wind and one’s wits. People who belonged to the floating population had no assigned apartment, no danwei, no iron rice bowl. But Guo didn’t really need those things, not at this point in his life anyway. He was a man approaching his prime during capitalism’s fin de siecle. There were plenty of things he could do.

"Old Hu," he called, rapping at the door. "Old Hu!"

"Lower the noise," Hu Bin grumbled, opening up.

Guo pushed into Hu’s room, a congenial concrete-walled space with large windows open to the desert breeze. Everywhere were local oil paintings, landscapes, city scenes, desert roads, all framed by rough, handmade wood. Hu liked paintings. He traded any service he could come up with for works by Yinchuan artists.

"I have a job." Guo grinned. "Americans."

"Americans! You’ll line your pockets."

"It’s so! With dollars." Guo tried to say the English word and they both laughed. Guo listened to Voice of America and the BBC. His ambition was to learn English. That would be the ticket, to learn English. Unfortunately he had little formal schooling, and it was rough going.

"What’s the job?" Hu asked.

"Search for some Mongols who used to live out to the northwest in Hetao County, across the river-that’s in the foothills of the Helan Shan."

"It can be done. What else?"

"Find out what happened to a woman who disappeared here in the laogai."

Hu Bin sucked in his cheeks, his wide, poetic mouth puckering into a circle. "You must watch over your shoulder, making inquiries like that. The people who know those things cannot be crossed."

"I know," Guo said dismissively. He paused, looking at his friend, assessing mood, warmth, receptivity. Just launch the question, he thought. "Hu, my good friend. Can I stay here for a few days?"

It was July twenty-third. Alice seemed to recall that this was the day of the Great Heat by the Chinese lunar calendar. She stood nervously at the intersection of two lanes behind the hotel. Nearby there loomed a Ming dynasty fortress tower. She supposed this had once been some critical defensive cog in the old city walls; now it sat useless in a grassy, neglected lot.

Do I have to do this here, she thought desperately, out in the middle of an intersection? Couldn’t I do it in my room, behind closed doors? Though, of course, that would bring the fire alarms and the hysterical, shouting staff. Kong and Lin and Spencer would be crowding into her room with questions. Maybe outside was better after all. And this was how Master Tang had told her to do it. At the intersection of two streets.

She took out the paper replicas, the tiny figure of a man. She settled him in the dust at her feet. He had a heroic air. Teilhard. Lucile. Mother Meng. Help me. She arranged the bed, the chest, the linens, around the man.

"Jiao-hun, " she murmured, trying to sound formal to herself and also to the spirits of the dead. "I call back your soul."

She knelt quickly, struck a rickety match from the cardboard Double Happiness box, and lit the miniature bridal chest.

"Waiguoren!" a boy chirped, Foreigner! An army of other boys thundered up behind him, stumbled together, and froze.

She sighed. How strange she must look to them-a five-foot-three chestnut-headed blue-jeaned creature, in a squat on the sidewalk lighting matches.

Ignore them. She trained her eyes doggedly at the ground.

The flame ate eagerly to the edge of the elaborate little box-for-hopes, and fell panting on the folded pile of paper linens. The little man was still a few inches off, at the end. The last thing. The most important thing she had to send.

Mother Meng, may you never want for anything in the placeof spirits. Lucile, you too.

The flame lit onto the paper bed, pulsated up its sideposts. The man would be next.

"Eh, foreign lady guest, are you ill? Are you lost?" It was the strident voice of an officious older woman, the kind who dominated every Chinese neighborhood.

"Woman Liang, how can you expect a foreigner to talk?"

Alice fanned the flame along the bed, her mind divided now, half of her trying to envision, and hold, this ballooning reverence for the dead, and half of her nervously following the Chinese babble around her.

"Woman Liang, he’s right. They can’t any of them talk." This was another voice, a man, careless. She made no sign of hearing.

For a minute they watched in silence; now finally the man figure caught. Tiny breaths of smoke circled upward and dissipated to nothing.

Mother Meng. Lucile. Please be my ancestors.

"Aiya, burning spirit-objects, my great-aunt used to do that!" one of the boys hooted. He was instantly hushed. The small crowd murmured disapproval, embarrassed like most modern Chinese about older customs, loath to even admit that such customs had once existed. These days it seemed to Alice that the masses had their eyes on only one direction, forward.

The pyre was down to ashes now. She rose in a single movement and ground them out under her shoe. Then a sideways kick brushed them away.

A coolness swept over her, the suck of air when a door closes.

Good-bye for now, Mother Meng. Good-bye, Lucile. She brushed her pants clean.

"Zou-ba, " one of the boys hissed, and the pack of them moved off.

"Eh, she’s crazy," came the voice of the neighborhood woman, smaller now, retreating in the darkness down the alley.

"The west-ocean people-huh!" another one said.

Only one man was left. He watched her from under a low forehead and a thicket of hair. He stared at her fixedly. They stood alone on the street.

She couldn’t resist speaking to him.

"What is it," she said in friendly Chinese with a solid urban east coast accent, "-you don’t approve of the doings of ghosts and gods? Is it not a clear and deep way for releasing sorrow? And haven’t you heard it said?" She leaned a few inches closer to him and softened her voice. "Ai mo da yu xinsi." Nothing gives so much cause for sorrow as the death of one’s heart.

He flushed. "Deeply excuse me. I never would have thought you could…"

"Talk."

"Yes." He gazed openly. "Talk."

She felt her mouth part into a smile. She felt powerful, she felt like Mu-lan. Hadn’t Dr. Lin compared her to Mu-lan? Lin Shiyang. Thinking about him brought a wave of happiness. A tiny breeze eddied the ashes at her feet. "May your road be level and peaceful," she said to the man, turned, and walked away.

Dr. Lin Shiyang left his room, where he had claimed to be suffering from fever, and where he had stayed until the others left in the jeep, and walked out of the Number One and around the corner to the bicycle rental. The old man looked up at him pleasantly. "The gentleman will ride today?"

Lin nodded.

"I kept this one for you specially," the old man lied, presenting a wreck of a wine-red three-speed. "Three people tried to rent it this morning. But I felt you might come."

"Old uncle"-Lin smiled knowingly-"you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble."

"It was nothing-for you." The man swiftly pocketed the five-yuan rental fee. Five yuan! A scholar from the eastern cities-rich, obviously, money flying from his fingers.

"I thank you," Lin said formally, and took the bike. Poor old uncle, he should have been dozing in some teahouse and here he was scratching a living in small change. "May I depend on your discretion?" he asked the old man carefully, and handed him another one-yuan note.

The man took the note, shrugged, and looked away. "I never remember anyone."

Lin walked the bike away from the stall and carefully swung one leg over the seat. He steered onto Sun Yat-sen, turned left, and pedaled toward the drum tower. That was where the West Road began. Over the past week, from time to time, he had asked directions to the outlying villages of people chosen at random along the street. Never too much of any one person. He didn’t want anyone remembering him. This was an art many Chinese of his generation had perfected: absorbing as much as possible, while escaping the notice of others entirely.

And the Americans, how much did they notice? It was an interesting question to him, one he had pondered at some length. The main thing about the two Americans was the way they constantly emanated. Talking, exclaiming, explaining. Especially explaining. They seemed obsessed with making themselves understood. On the other hand they seemed to take in rather little.

Of course, until now he had never actually had dealings with an American. They were what he’d expected, although Spencer and Mo Ai-li were different from each other, maddeningly individual. This in itself he found confusing. In his own world each one had his thoughts and dreams, his private life- but in a group endeavor, especially one which involved outsiders, this would be concealed in favor of a united front. Factions and disagreements hidden. Truths evaded.

He would never do what the woman interpreter had done that night they had met in the courtyard, for instance-ask him straight out if he wished his life had been different. Remarkable! And yet this forthrightness was what excited him. She kept saying outrageous things-first about the Chaos, then about his wife being sentenced to the laogai, and then asking him rudely whether he had put aside his wife and taken someone else. Surely she had some idea how shattering it was when a man was forced to denounce his mate on government orders. Yet that night she had baldly demanded to know if he had done this, as if she was asking no more than what he had eaten at his last meal. Each time she had come at him this way, he had been momentarily numbed by disbelief, then pinpricked by excitement. Mental. And yes, sexual. Even though he was forty-six years old and the women he met who stirred him this way now were few. He shook his head slowly. The drum tower. Left turn.

Perhaps she will be my wound story, he thought. He’d had a peculiar aversion to Wound Literature, though this popular fiction movement of the late seventies and eighties had captivated many of his friends and colleagues. They had eagerly devoured every unbearably sad novel and short story collection that came along, each man reliving his own Cultural Revolution tragedy in the reading. Lin hadn’t been able to do so. To open these books, read them, and close them again would be to put Meiyan behind him. And he preferred to hold on to her.

Even though he knew-a part of him knew-that this was wrong. It prevented him from loving again. His closest friends, even his mother, who had adored Meiyan and longed for the grandchild he and Meiyan never gave her, had advised him, finally, to stop. "You are bottled up in the past like a turtle in a jar, my son. The years are passing: the sun and moon fly back and forth. Don’t continue on this way."

"But there’s always a chance, isn’t there? Some people return from the laogai. Like Little Yan’s uncle. Remember? The family had given him up for lost? And then they found him again, his teeth gone, his health ruined, but alive, he was alive…"

But that had been years ago. He knew of no one who had been gone as long as Meiyan had been gone, gone without letters or messages, and come back.

And now a surprise, Mo Ai-li, Little Mo-not so little, clearly a woman past thirty who should have been married long since. There was no doubt he felt drawn to her. And she seemed to feel the same way. At least she prodded him with her questions, stared at him when she thought he didn’t see, even sat next to him in the vehicle and at meals. None of this had escaped Kong’s notice. Kong had even joked to him one day that he must let him know whether Western women were really different, as was said. "Bie shuo-le," Lin had replied curtly, Don’t talk like that, but his answer only made Kong laugh and he regretted, later, having responded at all.

Yet she was different. She didn’t retreat, didn’t defer, didn’t laugh behind her hand like a Chinese woman-in spite of her reasonable grasp of the language and her constant, often ridiculous attempts to follow Chinese manners. Despite all that she spoke to him with a bold intelligence. She might, he thought, be a woman with whom he could talk of the many things he considered in private: linguistics twisting back three thousand years to the scapulimancy of the Shang dynasty; the magical jumble of stories and legends that remained from the dawn of Chinese history; the faint picture-which he often reviewed in his mind-of Homo erectus roaming this land half a million years ago. Then north China had been fertile, wet, a green jungle, not the arid ocean of alluvial silt it was today. There Sinanthropus had not made his own shelter, but had taken refuge where he could, in caves and under outcroppings and in groves by the side of the river…

It had been Meiyan’s field, too, Homo erectus. He pedaled harder, thinking of the afternoon they got married in Gao Yeh’s room in Zhengzhou. They had got the go-ahead from the danwei, months after requesting permission from the university Party boss to "talk about love." It had been winter. The other students crowded in, padded blue jackets and stuffed-up trouser legs jostling for space. Gao Yeh shouting, drunk, how lovely their life together was going to be, and singing the children’s song:

As the sun rose over the mountain

A student came riding along.

He sat on a dapple-gray pony

And sang a scrap of song.

To the home of his bride he was going

And he hoped that she wouldn’t be out.

He saw as he pushed the door open

The girl he was thinking about.

Her cheeks were as pink as a rosebud.

Her teeth were as white as a pearl.

Her lips were as red as a cherry.

Most truly a beautiful girl!

How strange he could remember that, he thought now, pedaling past the patchwork of open fields, the wind off the Helan Shan whistling by. He remembered, too, the laughter that had exploded at the nursery rhyme’s end, everyone nodding, yes, yes, wasn’t it so, and the bowls of hard candy going around and around the room-Happiness Candy, the politically correct substitute for the then-forbidden wedding banquet. Nineteen seventy-one. Meiyan had worn a blue cotton suit like everyone else, except that it was her sharply ironed best. He remembered how her milk-white oval face had radiated joy.

Then after they were married, there was the single memory that had become a well-marked door in his mind: lying in bed with her afterward in the small room on Renmin Road in Zhengzhou, the sheets crumpled on the floor, talking about Lantian man, the Homo erectus find in south China to which she had devoted her study. Playing with the Homo erectus tooth she wore on a cord around her neck, never took off, not even when her entire naked length was smothered beneath him. She had stolen it from the vault where the Lantian County fossils were kept. Strange. Had she been caught stealing and wearing such an important cultural relic she’d have earned herself a PLA bullet in the head. Yet this had never been discovered and she had been sent to prison for a political misstep in a scholarly essay, a trifle, chicken feathers and garlic skins.

How she had loved that piece of bone. Davidson Black, the Canadian doctor who headed the group Teilhard had worked for in Peking, had worn a Homo erectus tooth around his neck, and Meiyan would do the same. Nothing Lin could say could convince her to bury it somewhere until the Chaos ended and she could safely reclaim it again. No, she would wear it. And just before he entered her, when he had her gasping and pulling his hips frantically down to her, he liked to pick the tooth up off her sweat-glistening chest with his lips and take it in his mouth and play with it, a gesture she found unbearably intimate, and a way of making her wait another few moments…

Ah, a millennium ago-he’d been so young then. West Road, Tibet Road. He soared down the hill, away from the heart of the city, through the flat oasis suburbs.

It was in 1973 that her article had been submitted. Why hadn’t she just lied in the article? Why did she have to be so heroic? A resounding silence had followed. Fear crept in and ate at all their thoughts and words until it smothered everything. Finally they heard she was going to be arrested. So many others they knew had already been taken. They had offended someone else, or had a "bad" job before liberation, or had owned land, or their parents had owned land before them. All someone had to say was that you were fan geming, Counterrevolutionary, just those two words, then the death grip at your throat.

"Eating bitterness won’t kill me," she had said, sitting beside him on the bed, affecting bravery. "And I should have expected it. How often have you heard it said? When a rat scurries across the street, kill it! Kill it!" She’d smiled slightly at this overused maxim of the Chaos. All he could think of were the nights when she was writing the article, the hot July nights without air, the heat-muffled shouts and traffic sounds rising from Renmin Road. He had told her: Invent something about class struggle among the ancient hominids. Make something up. He himself had done it. Everyone did it.

But she refused. Ah, Meiyan. So faithful to something higher. She had been a better person than he. He had lied easily in his scholarly papers. It had seemed easy and obvious to him-of course, lie, why get arrested? He had made up whatever drivel about class and capitalism seemed necessary to stay out of trouble. Had told himself it didn’t dilute his basic work. Not Meiyan. She would not do it. So the people struggled against her.

After she was taken Lin learned, through the human net that spreads news like a fire through tinder grass and can never be quite contained, that she was sent out to Inner Mongolia. Camp Fourteen, it was whispered: a cluster of loess huts in a flat yellow plain-across the Helan Shan Mountains from the city of Yinchuan.

He’d had one brief smuggled message from her. Then nothing.

The years dragged by. Things started to get better. Chairman Mao died, the nation pinned all its hate on the Gang of Four, and the era of Wound Literature began. He held himself apart from it, buried himself in his obsession with the ancient human ancestor, clung to Meiyan in his mind. How could he live with himself otherwise? He’d only survived because he’d been willing to lie. Then came the open door with the 1980s, a rush of money and relaxed thinking and new culture from the outside. He started teaching at the university; he published work on Homo erectus. All his colleagues pretended he had never been married. Some of them did not know. Some knew, of course-Kong knew, he had once made a reference to it, not unkindly. But Lin never talked about it.

During these years Lin had not been completely without women. Now, decades later, riding his bicycle out from Yinchuan, he recalled them. There had been Ping, the reedy woman mathematics professor with the terse little mouth, who had lost her husband; she had discreetly been his special friend for some years until, finally, she said she could endure his impermeability no longer. Ping and then Lan-zhen, the shy, bespectacled graduate student who had sat mesmerized through his every class until finally he’d approached her. She’d come to him gratefully, completely open, mad about him, so much younger than he, yet through a year of physical intimacy he never let himself love her, never opened his door, never forgot he was married to Meiyan. He saw how deeply Lan-zhen was hurt by this. She wanted desperately to hold first place in his heart. They finally parted, after defeat and resentment had destroyed her love. Her pain brought him even more shame. But he did not know how to stop loving his wife, even though she was gone. And Lan-zhen simply was not like Meiyan. Neither was Ping. Though Little Mo was, wasn’t she? She had the courage and the mental alacrity-do not think like that, he admonished himself. She is an outside person. A joint-venture colleague. American!

He left the main road behind now as he had been directed and pedaled off on a dirt track to the north. He crested a hill, broke through the pass, and there was little Laishan Village spread out in the yellow dust below him. He knew, in his first snatch of breath and his first glimpse of the jumbled settlement, that Meiyan was not there. Her energy, her intelligence-these things were simply missing from the landscape. This realization was like a powerful voice in his ear, and it nearly made him falter off the path. He was not used to instincts. Lin Shiyang was an educated man, from a modern city; he would never willingly concern himself with forebodings and premonitions. Yet this instinct was so powerful, he almost felt he could trust it. Meiyan was not present.

As any careful man would do, though, having come so far, he locked up his bike and removed the precious photograph from his pocket. Meiyan, 1972. Young eyes shining with intelligence, black hair pulled back. The children’s song bounced around in his brain.

Her cheeks were as pink as a rosebud.

Her teeth were as white as a pearl…

He shook his head. Too many years had flown. What did she look like now? Nothing like this, certainly. If she was alive.

But the picture was all he had.

He approached the first of the dozens he would speak to that day, an older man with a wiry body and gently bowed legs, hurrying now down the dirt-packed lane with a bundle of dirty sheep’s wool.

"Elder uncle, forgive me-"

"Eh?" The man bolted back in alarm.

"No, don’t fear, uncle, just a question, forgive me. Have you seen this woman?" Lin thrust forward the small square picture with its ghostlike, girlish smile.

The old man narrowed his eyes and fired a single glance at the photo. "No!" He walked away.