Lost in Translation

2

Alice and Adam slid into a vinyl booth in the coffee shop of the Empire Hotel. They had spent the afternoon walking around the Forbidden City, now acres of empty, windswept, magnificent courtyards and silent palace chambers. The Great Within. Then the two Americans had plunged back through the massive gates into the congested, overpopulated present, walking north through the chaotic, shouting shopping district of Wangfujing. As they walked Alice explained that this had been the Tartar City, the sector of the Manchus and the place where the artisans and merchants and bureaucrats who had served the court had lived and worked. She told how the intersections and alleyways had often been named for the outdoor markets they’d housed-here was the place where for centuries decorative lanterns were sold for a particular autumn festival, there was the lane where a hundred years ago one purchased freshly caught water-insects as feed for prized pet goldfish. Adam Spencer tried to take all this in, but to him the city was a seething, homogeneous labyrinth of people walking, pedaling, driving, buying, carrying, talking, eating. And if he raised his eyes from the human herd, then as far as he could see there was nothing but clear white sunlight washing over the graded steppes of gray-tiled roofs.

"But behind those gates," she told him, pointing down one of the hutongs into the warren of stone walls, "the courtyard houses are still there. Very quiet. Very sane."

"Sane? Really?" To him, used to working alone in the desert, Beijing was an exhausting crush.

Then they pushed through the hissing doors of the Empire Hotel, and in that instant entered an abruptly different world: a three-story marble lobby with a waterfall and a massive glass-shard chandelier like a small planet hanging in the center. Uniformed staff members walked efficiently back and forth through the barely perceptible hum of air-conditioning.

They turned into the coffee shop, legs aching pleasantly. "A beer?"

"Great."

"Two Tsingtaos," he told the waitress. "This is bizarre," he said, staring at the waterfall. "It could be L.A."

She laughed. "Most of my clients love it here."

"You’re kidding." He raised his eyebrows.

"They hate being away from home, hate what’s foreign. They prefer to spend as much time as they can pretending they’re not here."

"Unlike you," he observed.

She smiled.

"So where do you live? Not the Minzu."

"No, I’m based at a smaller guesthouse. It’s one of the old ones, a compound, with courtyards. I like it a lot-even though the utilities are, shall we say, unreliable. But I travel. And when I’m working I move to the client’s hotel, so I can enjoy the amenities."

"And keep the other place? Nice."

She shrugged. "It works."

He picked up the menu. "I bet you don’t eat like this, though."

"Definitely not."

"Neither do I." He snapped the menu shut and gave her a good-natured challenge with his eyes. "During this job, I want you to make sure that every meal we eat is Chinese-absolutely local-the weirder the better. Okay?"

"You’re on."

"Good." He opened his notebook and wrote it down, as if it were a contract point and he planned to hold her to it. "Tell me, Alice. What made you decide to learn Chinese?"

"I guess I always wanted to." She closed her eyes. As a child, long before she had known her fate lay in China, when all she’d known was she needed another world to which she could escape, she had made up a private language for her diary. For no one would she translate. This had been her first ticket out. Then she got to Rice University, and found Chinese, and it had been so much better. A door to an alternate self. This self was another Alice, not the childhood Alice: capable, free in the world, independent.

Their bottled beer came, trickling ice-sweat, and each took a long drink. "It’s a relief to have a client like you," she admitted.

"Oh?"

"Most of my jobs-selling oilfield equipment. Distributing peanut butter. Bartering intermediate chemicals for finished compounds. Once in a while it’s something fun. Last year a company that arranges religious tours to remote monasteries hired me to ride the route ahead of time and make sure all the rural buses were functioning. That wasn’t bad. But I don’t meet too many outside people over here who are like you, who are"-she searched for the word-"open minded. Most Westerners seem to look right through China. They don’t even see what’s in front of them." She shrugged, drinking her beer, and he grinned at her. She liked his grin. He was smart, he had a nice human quality despite his oddities. For one thing, he appeared to wear a clean version of the same outfit every day: jeans and a blue chambray shirt. He must have three, four, five sets of the same thing, she thought. Strange. Still, we could be friends. I need friends. I hardly know any outside people in Beijing these days.

Alice had once had a lot of expat friends, but they were all either gone, or married, or had children; nobody’s life now matched hers. And they clung so to their Westernness, their imported newspapers, their Sunday touch-football games in the diplomatic compound, weekly trips to McDonald’s. Alice had drifted away. She spent most of her time with Chinese now, trying to fit in.

"What about you," she said. "You have a family?"

"I’m divorced." He swallowed. It still sounded strange. Divorce was a dark bridge behind him, a bad dream, something he’d never expected. Though he should have expected it. He’d waited so long to get married-until he was almost forty -and then he’d chosen too quickly. Ellen was fifteen years younger and not really ready to settle. There was always something partial and half committed between them. But two years into their marriage she had given birth to Tyler and then, finally, Spencer had known what real love was. With Tyler there was nothing he would not give, no sand-and-grit play-ground on which he would not push a swing for hours, no Saturday cartoon he would not sit through. Ellen complained that he spoiled the child. Maybe he did. But he gave love, and got it back, in a form so unconditional that he could not even bear to go away-to a dig in the desert, say-without a worn piece of baby clothing that carried Tyler’s smell. This was a rapture he’d never known with any other person.

And then Ellen had met another man and left him, moving back to northern California, taking the boy with her.

"I’m sorry," Alice said.

"Thanks." He drank. "I have a son, though: Tyler. Want to see?" He dug out his current school picture, third grade, a towheaded boy with a serious, freckle-faced gaze.

"Cute," she said. "Do you share custody?"

"I get half of each summer and school vacations."

"Oh." She nodded sympathetically, hearing the pain in his voice. "That’s tough."

"Yeah." He looked at the picture for what seemed like a long time before putting it away. "You? You have kids?"

"Me? Oh, no." She picked at the label on her beer. Children were way down on the list of things she figured the universe was ever going to allow her to have. Like love. Start with love. "I’m not even married," she said.

"Oh," he answered, as if he didn’t know, but of course he knew already, for he had seen her riding her bicycle back to the hotel in a short black dress, had seen her walk into the building at dawn, tugging her hem down over her thighs. Then at breakfast it was obvious. He had not written it in his book, it was a private observation, but he’d seen: she was single. Very. He’d been drawn to women like her when he was much younger, when excitement was the thing he wanted. When he had not yet learned to assess how twisted up a girl was inside. Not anymore. Not now. If it ever happened for him again it would be with a woman who could be trusted. But not now, not soon. All he wanted now was his son. And to get his career back on track. Peking Man.

Yet this interpreter was interesting. Likable-as long as he didn’t get too close. "By the way, Alice. I brought you a book." He removed The Phenomenon of Man from his day pack and pushed it across the table. "Father Teilhard’s best seller. Thought you might want to reread it."

"Hey. Thanks." She flipped through it, remembering the picture of an expanding universe, the sense of Christian revelation, the coherent, unified vision of human growth. Whereas her own evolution had been stalled forever. "Are you interested in Teilhard’s philosophy, then?"

"No. I find it a little hard to read. I’m interested in his life here in China-who he knew, where he went. Because somewhere here, he hid Peking Man."

She closed the book. "So tell me about his life, then. Here in Peking. He lived here on and off for…"

"Twenty-three years. Nineteen twenty-two to 1945. He went back to Europe and America a few times, but this is where he lived."

"He had a lot of friends?"

"Everybody knew him. The foreigners’ community was a small one. And he was an explorer, a scientist-a real man of the world. Women found him fascinating. One woman in particular. Lucile Swan."

"Who was she?"

"An American in her thirties, a sculptor. She had come to Peking from New York after a bad divorce, and stayed on. Peking was a fantasy world then. Foreigners could have anything, live any way they wanted, cheaply. I think all she wanted to do was sculpt, and find a man to love. Couldn’t have been easy for her in China."

"I think she sounds interesting."

"You do?" He drank from his bottle, and thought: Of course you do, she’s right up your alley.

"Did she ever fall in love?"

"Yes-with Teilhard. Unfortunately, he was a priest. That kind of limited things." Spencer smiled.

"Did they…"

"Doubtful. I don’t think so. I think they were so emotionally enmeshed it didn’t matter. I haven’t researched her too much-I’m pretty sure she had nothing to do with where he hid Peking Man. But if you’re interested, you can read their correspondence. It was recently published, all twenty-three years of it."

"I think I’ll start with this one." She glanced at the volume in her hand, Teilhard’s masterpiece of theology. "Thank you, Dr. Spencer."

"Don’t call me that."

"What, then?"

"I don’t know-Adam? Spencer? But no ’Doctor.’ "

"Okay." She liked the detached, friendly way he talked. He didn’t seem interested in her as a woman any more than she was interested in him as a man. Which was not at all. Western men didn’t get to her.

"You ready?" he said.

As they crossed the gleaming floor of the lobby he tapped her elbow. She took in the row of girls flaunting brief skirts and pouty, red-painted lips. They were giggling and whispering. One of them got up and intercepted a foreign man in a business suit, said something to him, and smiled prettily.

"Is that what I think it is?"

"Sure."

"What? You mean they’re-"

"Hookers," Alice supplied.

"In China?" He was incredulous.

"Of course. Prostitution did disappear for a few decades, obviously, but now-now that we have the kai fang, the open door, it’s back." She made her voice mischievous. "Commerce is booming everywhere in the Middle Kingdom, Adam. In all forms."

"But who’s"-he looked around-"are they just independents, coming in here?"

"You mean who’s running their business? The PLA."

"What!" Now his voice was a minor screech.

"That’s right, the PLA." She was enjoying his reaction. "The Army owns this hotel. They control the girls and, of course, the profits. Or so everyone says."

"The Army? I can’t believe it."

"The Army is business," she told him, suddenly sober. "Very serious business. Remember that. You don’t ever want to cross them. Don’t be fooled by all these big glitzy hotels. Regardless of all the new stuff you see around you-all the Big Macs and the Italian shoes and the Seiko watches-the Army’s power in this country is still absolute."

She left Spencer at their hotel and stepped into a taxi. "Where go?" the driver bawled in bad English.

"Am I a miserable white ghost from the western sea, ignorant of civilized speech?" she asked sharply. "The American Express office, quickly. And don’t take Changan. The traffic’s a dammed-up river which threatens to overflow its banks."

"The honored foreigner speaks." He pulled out from the curb. "Ten thousand pardons."

"None needed," she murmured, knowing she had been short with him, feeling her stomach knot up as it always did when she went to check for mail and faxes from her father. She had to go, she hadn’t gone in too long. Plus, this time of the month, he usually sent her money. She closed her eyes, hating herself for wanting the money and relying on it; at the same time so glad it was coming.

The driver swung onto Ximen and crawled north through the traffic. He leaned on his horn and swore constantly at the swarm of cars and bicycles in front of him. "Sons of turtles!"

"Too many cars." God, she thought, fourteen years ago there was barely a car on the street here. Just bicycles. And I was a wide-eyed graduate student, freshly arrived, ecstatic to have escaped America and finally be smack in the middle of the oldest, most complex, most intricately structured society on earth. Safely walled in by what was different. By the labyrinth. She leaned her head back on the overstuffed, antimacassared seat and watched the bustling free-market stalls, the parade of offices and restaurants and shops, the lit-up character signs more discreet than the visual cacophony of Hong Kong and Taipei, but still so earthily and ineluctably Chinese. The pyramids of cabbages stacked on the stone sidewalks. The post-Soviet dinginess of the low block buildings. The fetid smell of rotting garbage and untreated sewage. The remarkable light, crystalline white when the air pollution cleared, which always seemed to Alice at its most beautiful in the hutongs, where it bathed the traditional gray courtyard houses in its distinctive weightless glow.

"Wait for me," she told the driver when he ground to a halt. She dashed inside.

The American Express office was empty. Young Wu looked up from behind the counter and broke into a smile.

"Eh, Mo Ai-li, truly it’s a long time we haven’t met," he said, even though she’d come in only a few weeks ago. "You’re well?"

"Not bad." She smiled back. "Any mail?"

"Oh, yes. I always keep it for you, special."

"Sure you do."

"Eh! Aren’t we ’old friends’?"

She laughed. "Of course," she lied. She had been picking up mail from Young Wu for almost two years, but the catch-phrase old friend meant more, so much more, and they both knew it: permanent loyalty, mutual obligation, the promise to deliver on almost any favor when asked. And to weigh carefully before asking.

"Anyway…" He grinned. He reached under the counter and brought out a thin sheaf of faxes and letters.

She paged through the faxes. Most were from the U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce, relaying inquiries about her services from prospective clients. These she put aside for later. Two letters. One was addressed to Bruce Kaplan care of Alice Mannegan, from his mother. Bruce was one of Alice’s few local foreigner friends: a bookish, reclusive American who had lived in Beijing for years. His mother knew he never went to collect his own mail, so she occasionally sent him letters, like this one, through Alice. She tucked the envelope in her purse.

Then, on the bottom, the letter from Horace. His precise handwriting.

"Mind if I sit down a moment?" she asked Wu.

"Take your ease." Wu pointed to a generic waiting-room couch along the far wall.

She tore the envelope open. Immediately the check tumbled out, $1,000 U.S., not enough really to live on but, in combination with what she earned, a cushion that kept her always comfortable. Even if she was an outside person and had to pay more for everything. She folded the check and put it in her wallet, her heart banging with relief and shame. Another month set, walled in, and she could go on pretending that this freelance life she had carved out actually made her financially secure-when in truth without her father’s help she’d be, sometimes, downright scraping.

She unfolded the letter. It was brief. The usual. His life in Washington, gearing up for the election next year. He always got reelected. As usual, no reference to the money. He never mentioned enclosing it and she never acknowledged receiving it. Finally, at the end, something new:

I wish you’d put some thought into coming back. I think about it now because we’re coming up on the anniversary of her passing again. Will you think about it, Alice?

Her passing. Alice’s mother had died when she was a baby, too young for Alice to remember. It was a source of loss for Horace still, after all these years, but to Alice just an empty place. She thought she should feel more for it than she actually felt. Naturally her life would have been different if she’d had a mother-but there was no use thinking about it. She folded her father’s letter back into the envelope.

"Are you by any chance free now, Mo Ai-li?" Young Wu inquired from across the room. "I am closing in ten minutes and wondered if you would care to go and drink coffee with my lowly self."

"Oh." She looked up. "Oh, thanks, Young Wu, but no. I have to go back and meet my client."

"Another time," he said smoothly, concealing his disappointment. He had asked her before, always in a casual way, to go out with him and she had always refused. Interpreter Mo Ai-li was appealingly piaoliang for a foreigner: small, intelligent looking, with a face that was pretty in a neat, trim sort of way. It was also said of her that she liked Chinese yang. He had always wanted to learn for himself whether it was true or not. Even if she was a few years older.

"Zai jian, zai. jian," she said absently, stuffing the papers into her handbag. She rose and pushed through the revolving door.

"Zai jian, " he answered, watching her go, watching her carry her body with frank, hip-rolling confidence the way a Chinese woman never would. She climbed back in the taxi and it roared away.

Wu put all his supplies in order and checked the fax machine to make sure it had a fat roll of paper and was set to receive overnight. He glanced at the clock. Four fifty-five. Well. He might as well lock up. He was just removing the key from the drawer when the door hissed and a bespectacled, pinch-chested Chinese man strode in. The man took out a name card and slid it across the counter.

Wu didn’t look at it. "I’m closing," he said, still arranging things in the drawer.

"Wu Litang," the man said.

Young Wu looked up sharply. Somehow this man knew his real name, not his work name, not his school name, but the name his parents had given him at birth before his ancestors.

"Did you recognize the foreign ghost woman who was just in here?"

"No," Wu said automatically, and then glanced at the man’s card. Ice stabbed through him, not at the name-which was unimportant and undoubtedly false-but at the danwei: PLA, Beijing District Command.

"You’ve never seen her before?"

"She could have come in before," Wu evaded. "I’m not too clear. The foreigners who come in here are numerous."

"Well, Wu Litang." The man placed a delicate emphasis on his true and private given name. "Listen well. The next time she receives mail, or faxes, you are to call me at this number at once. I’ll examine them before she picks them up. And any mail for a certain other American person, an archaeologist." He leaned over and wrote out the American names on his card. "Is it clear?"

"Yes," Wu said, hating him for knowing his name and using it so rudely, hating him because he was PLA and the Six-Four at Tiananmen was so unforgivable.

"Remember," the man ordered, and walked out.

Discourteous bag of flatulence, Wu thought. As soon as he saw the man step into a waiting car and slam the door, he picked up the card and crumpled it into the wastebasket.

He would certainly inform Interpreter Mo of this the next time he saw her. Though, of course, there was no telling when that would be. Foreign clocks and calendars running as they did, differently. Inexplicably.

"This used to be called Morrison Street." Alice pointed down congested Wangfujing Boulevard. She opened her antique guidebook to the city, published sixty years before. "Something to do with a British newspaperman who lived here a hundred years ago. Now. According to the headings on Teilhard’s letters, the Jesuit House was off Morrison in Tizi Hutong. Ladder Lane." She leafed through to the index. "Ah, here. In the upper part of what used to be the Tartar City. This way."

They shouldered north through the throng. Spencer felt tired and still a little jet-lagged; it seemed that an ocean of Mandarin sucked at him in waves. But he noticed that Alice strode calmly, at home in it. She jostled easily through the surging flood of people. She ignored the vendors promoting their sweet potatoes, steamed buns, tea, and Popsicles. She stepped around the drifts of garbage on the sidewalk. Barely glanced into the shop windows teeming with cloth, clocks, cooking pots, shoes, canes, clothing, and everything in between.

And then she stopped at a dusty storefront. "I can’t believe it," she said. "Look." She took out her old guidebook. "Chang-er Bing Jia, Chang-er’s Cake House. Chang-er’s the girl in the moon, you see, or so say the Chinese." She leafed through the guidebook. "It’s still here! See? ’In business continuously since the late Ming, an acclaimed purveyor of moon-cake molds.’ People here make mooncakes every year for the Moon Festival." She pushed past him and went inside.

He followed her. A tiny room, a low ceiling, every surface covered with the hand-chiseled wooden molds, each cut and carved to produce a scallop-edged cake the size of a hockey puck, imprinted in intricate relief with beasts and flowers and lucky characters.

"You shi ma?" said a young girl who had been sitting in the shadows by the counter.

"Mei you, " Alice answered automatically. She was moving slowly around the room, squinting, examining the molds.

"You like old stuff, don’t you?" Adam asked her.

"I love it. Look at this one!" She touched one with a carving of a fairy in fluttering robes.

"Why don’t you buy one?" He took a mold off the wall and studied it. "They’re beautiful."

"Oh, no." She looked startled. "I never let myself buy things. I can’t carry stuff like this around."

"It’s a trade-off. If it expresses your inner…"

But she was already nodding to the girl, pushing wide the bell-jangling door, heading back out to the sidewalk. "Just a little break." She unfolded her map and scrutinized the grid packed with tiny characters.

He waited, thinking how odd she was, absorbing the shade and the comforting, cooling rustle of an acacia tree growing up from the sidewalk, until she put the map away and started walking again. Then Spencer registered something peripherally: a man who’d been leaning against a building some paces back straightened at the same moment and began walking, after them, dodging easily through the moving crowd, keeping a calibrated distance.

"I know it sounds insane," he told her. "But you know what? I think someone’s following us."

She looked sharply up at him from the corner of her eye.

"Is this possible?" he asked.

She quickened her pace. "Of course it’s possible. Just keep walking."

"Has it happened to you before?"

She shook her head. "It’s usually diplomats and journalists they trail, not people like me. I almost always work for businessmen, and business they leave alone. But Adam? Follow me."

She stepped abruptly to the side, turned, and walked briskly through an open courtyard packed with stalls and food vendors and walking, standing, eating, shouting Chinese. He scrambled after. She feinted to the left, threaded through a momentary gap in the crush of people, slipped through a door in a stone wall, and led him through an indoor dining room. It was walled in white tile, with a black-and-white tile floor, loaded with tables, all full. "There," she said, and pointed to a half-lit corridor off the clanging kitchens.

They slipped into the little hall, sank into the shadows, and watched the door. Workers in blue coats and tight-fitted white caps bumped past them, trays high, steam billowing, their guttural Pekingese bouncing on the narrow walls. Just a few beats, and then there he was, the man, moving against the crowd outside the restaurant door. His eyes searched the crush of people. He glanced into the restaurant, hesitated, then slipped on, out of sight.

"Nice work, Bond." She winked at Spencer, stepped back into the light. "Come on, let’s cut over and go up Dongsi Beidajie. He’ll come back to Wangfujing to look for us. But we won’t be there."

"You seem pretty good at this. People follow you a lot?"

She grinned. "Once or twice over the years. But writers get followed all the time-anybody associated with a paper or a news service, forget it. Somebody’s always on them, listening to their phone, opening their mail. It’s just standard paranoid PRC procedure. So there’s kind of a running competition among journalists living in Beijing. You know-what you did yesterday to elude your tail."

"But this is just archaeology."

Her smile faded. "Right. Obviously something about what you’re doing scares them. What, I don’t know."

"Is it possible that they could, what, arrest us? I know that sounds crazy-"

"Not so crazy. In the fifties and sixties, even early seventies, some of the Westerners who’d stayed around after the revolution were arrested. There were Americans and Europeans who languished in prison for years. But nowadays it’s the kai fang, the open door. You do something bad, they just deport you. And they don’t let you come back."

"That would ruin my project!"

"Your project-what about my life? It would ruin everything for me! I live here, don’t forget. But you have to break some serious laws for that to happen. And we’re not planning to break any laws. Are we?" She looked hard at him. "Are we, Dr. Spencer?"

"No! No, of course not. And don’t call me that."

"So long as you promise. I like you, I like your project. But I’m not getting deported for you."

He straightened and solemnly held up his right hand. "Very well. I, Adam Spencer, swear-"

"Okay, okay." She let her mouth curve up again. "Enough."

They moved over to Dongsi Beidajie, walked on, and found the Jesuit House up a terraced set of broad, shallow steps, cobbles overgrown with tufted grass. Formerly Ladder Lane. Now-Alice checked the book, and then her map: there, People’s Northeast Small Lane Eight. She smiled. A lucky number in Chinese. Eight, ba. It sounded like fa, which meant "to get rich." Enormous good luck to get an address with an eight in it. "Look," she said, and stopped by a wall with a round gate, "the house is still here."

Through a crack in the gate they could see a stone courtyard with rooms opening onto it, peonies and locust trees in ceramic urns, bright cloth fluttering behind open windows, a single bicycle leaning. A breeze ruffled their hair and the tendril leaves of the trees above their heads, a soft wind, the longed-for kiss of the Beijing summer.

She knocked.

They stood in silence a minute. No one came out. Nothing but the moon gate of thick, ancient red wood, the stone walls, the eaves with their swooping Chinese tiles.

"This was the Jesuit residence?" she asked.

"Yes," he said while he wrote. "I’ve researched his life here. You wanna know? Okay. He got up every day; they said mass. He went to work at the Peking Union Medical College, where the China Geological Survey was housed-that’s because both the college and the survey were run on Rockefeller money. At five o’clock every day he left the survey and went to Lucile’s house. They talked, and dined, and spent the evening together."

Alice peeked through the closed gate. "You know where she lived?"

"No. In his letters to her he refers to her place as Da Tian Shui Qing, but I don’t know if that’s the name of the street or just what he called her house."

"Without seeing the characters I can’t be sure, but it sounds like it might mean ’Great Heaven and Clear Water’- probably an old hutong name." She searched through her guidebook’s index, frowned. "No. Not in here. So-they spent the evenings together?"

"Right. Talking, studying, reading. Weekends, they would go with other foreigners on excursions. Picnics in the Western Hills. Visits to temples. To the seaside."

"Then she was always with him." Alice’s eyes softened.

"Yes." He was staring through the hole at the inside of the compound. "She was his muse. She listened to his ideas, retyped his manuscripts, translated things from French to English and back again."

"But weren’t most of his books published much later?"

"True." He grinned, pleased with her intelligence. "The Jesuits didn’t permit him to publish much during his lifetime- essays mostly-almost all his books came out after his death. Think how he felt."

"God, you’re right. Like a failure."

"But at least he had her."

"And she accepted him."

"Right, she stuck by him. Even though she never got the thing she always wanted from him," Spencer added.

Of course, Alice thought, but she didn’t say it: the total commitment of his heart, his mind, his body. Pierre could love Lucile, could care about her and be close to her-as long as he never became her lover. Whereas she, Alice, entered the sexual heart of China all the time-but only the sexual heart. Which way mattered more?

She looked hard into the courtyard, into the rooms which boxed around it, each presenting a wall which was half windows. Small panes, old-fashioned wood trim. In one of those rooms he wrote The Phenomenon of Man. Connected the scientific and the divine.

She had reread the book late the night before. Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what isdeepest in themselves. This is a fact of daily experience. Your daily experience, Pierre, she thought, gazing into his house. Did you really love her? Did you enter her heart and mind? Or did the two of you always remain outside each other? She pounded on the gate again.

"Come on," Spencer sighed. "Nobody’s here. Let’s go."

Alice took the steaming teacup and extended it to Mrs. Meng with two hands, the old way. The aged lady’s face creased with pleasure. She liked the old customs.

"Eh, Six Tranquillities Black! Where did you find it?"

"Hong Kong." Alice poured her own cup. "It’s nothing, a trifle, but I know how you like it." She glanced at the large brick of tea wrapped in a torn page of the South China MorningPost which she had placed on Meng Shaowen’s table. Another forgotten grace of old Peking, the constant affectionate gift-giving.

"It is I who should serve you, when you come to my home," the old lady protested happily. The room was dark, the slatted shutters closed against the July heat. Long shadows fell over all Meng Shaowen’s accumulated treasures: the Qing dynasty embroideries in their dusty frames, the bed quilt which had come from Meng’s own mother, the luminous sparrow carved from white jade, the photos of her son, Jian; and, on Meng’s desk, the ornate old European-style clock, ticking off the days and months and years of life that still remained. Mrs. Meng shivered. Despite the summer heat she pulled her sweater closer.

"You, serve me? No, Mother Meng. And haven’t we known each other too many years to talk polite?" Alice smiled at the old lady, who was always the first person she called upon returning from any trip, always the first person she went to visit. Yet at the same moment Alice noticed how old Mrs. Meng suddenly seemed. Was it last winter, or the winter before, that Meng Shaowen’s hair had gone so white and her fingers had twisted into the tangled briars of arthritis? Or was it back when her husband died? Was it then that Mrs. Meng’s eyes, once snapping sharp through long nights of debate over the Chinese classics of literature and philosophy, had begun to rheum over?

The Chinese lady doubled forward in a raking cough. "Forgive me, girl child. Though it’s the time of heat there’s cold in my lungs."

"Nothing to forgive."

Mrs. Meng reached out and brushed a stray hair from Alice’s forehead.

Alice clasped the old woman’s hand.

"It’s my sorrow, I never had a daughter."

The words hung. But you had a son, Alice thought. Jian. And I almost married him. And if I had I’d be your daughter now.

"They have a daughter," Mrs. Meng said. "Jian and his wife."

"Yes. I know."

"Little Lihua! She’s my heart and liver!" The old woman’s face wrinkled up in fondness. Then went serious. "Of course, girl child, Jian’s wife is not like you! She is Chinese. She is not free with her mind like you foreigners. Jian once said he never knew any other woman like you. He said he could talk to you about anything."

Alice knew this was probably true. Most Chinese were educated through rigorous rote training. To even read books one had to memorize four, five thousand characters. So to a Chinese intellectual, more used to deduction than questioning, rarely presented in conversation with the unexpected, a Western woman-a smart, open-minded, sassy woman-was a marvelous companion. But only a companion. There seemed to be in the Chinese men she had known, even in Jian, the only one she had actually loved, the same hesitation she had to admit she felt within herself. They were exhilarating companions. Fantastically exciting as companions. But marriage?

"Perhaps this road is better," Mrs. Meng said gently. "It would have been hard for you and Jian. You can never be Chinese."

"Of course not," she said instantly. Yet Alice had begun to feel, during the year she was with Jian, that she had a place she belonged in the Meng family. A clan, a mother. A Chinese mother who taught her all the old techniques she herself had used to keep house during the decades of privation: how to maximize the things that were rationed and stave off hunger by using the hou men, the back door, to obtain more. Wash clothes in a bucket. Cook with a handful of coal. Buy slowly, cautiously, use the windowsill as your refrigerator in the winter.

Mrs. Meng had recited the history of the Meng family, told the names of all the ancestral souls who now dwelt beyond the Yellow Springs. Alice would always listen closely, Jian beside her, bored. Like so many modern young intellectuals he was impatient with feudal superstitions. Though he, an astute student of history, at least respected the past.

Jian. The bright, narrow black eyes, the expressive hands. Now a professor at Bei Da, Beijing University. Jian, loving her in his narrow bed in his small room, whispering to her in his musical, beautifully modulated Mandarin, of her body, its strange-feeling skin, the exotic way she walked and talked, and of his studies: the majestic tide of Chinese civilization, revolutions, upheavals, the march of legends and dynasties. Then the Khans and the Ming and the Qing and the Republicans and then the Warlords and finally, as if in a last gasp of Luanshi, Chaos, before the Communists nailed things down strangling tight, the rampaging Japanese. He had taught her that China’s power lay in its endurance, its shoudeliao.

Jian. So open minded about some things. He knew he was not her first man but he never asked her to explain. Then, after a year he asked her, awkward and limpid at once, if she would come with him to his superiors at the danwei and "talk about love." Marriage! She said she needed to think about it. She knew instantly, sinkingly, that Horace would ruin it. He would wage some kind of war that would force her and Jian apart. And that was exactly what happened.

And since then no man seemed to be what she wanted.

"Yes," she said haltingly to Mother Meng now, "I often think back and forth on it. If not for Horace, Jian and I would have married."

"It’s a bad road for you. Your baba forbade you." Meng used the familiar, intimate word for father even though Alice always referred to her father only by his first name. "And the blood and the flesh can never be untied. Isn’t it so? But, girl child"-Meng lowered her voice-"listen to me. How old are you now?"

"Thirty-six."

Mrs. Meng shook her head. "Eh. Too pitiable! How can one tell how old a foreigner is? So you can no longer bear children."

"But in America, Mother, lots of women-"

"Ai-li." Meng drew her closer. "Children are for young women with strong bodies and innocent hearts. As you get older you eat too much bitterness. There’s a legend, you know. It’s like this. When you die you approach the Yellow Springs. Old Woman Wang waits for you there with the wine of forgetfulness. You drink this wine, you forget the life you’ve just finished. You are pure for the next life. You are yourself. And while you’re still young this self is true-because all the memories, the pain, the burdens, have not started to come back to you yet."

"What do you mean, come back to you? Doesn’t the wine erase everything?"

"By the last dynasty, people were burying the dead with cups that had holes in them." A smile touched at Mrs. Meng’s thin, corrugated mouth. "Old Woman Wang didn’t mind if you brought your own cup."

Alice laughed.

"At the time of your death you can choose, do you understand me or not? Leave it behind, or carry it forward."

Alice nodded.

"Don’t carry it forward. Ai-li. Listen to your old mother. Find a man. You mustn’t live without the yang. It crosses the rule of nature."

Alice nodded. She’d heard this before. As if I can just do it, she thought. Just pluck a rare, intelligent man, with kindness and room in his heart, out of the air. I wait. I look. And in the meantime, do I live without the yang? No. I allow myself to have a little.

"A strong man," Mrs. Meng was advising. "Maybe a Chinese man. You are older now."

Alice moved into the old woman’s embrace, rested her head on the narrow chest. She felt the frail arms go around her. How could she have survived without the old lady’s love? "I’ll try. I fear I won’t succeed."

"Narde hua," Nonsense. Mrs. Meng touched Alice’s cheek. "But don’t let too many more seasons pass," she whispered into the red hair.

Alice laid her things out ceremoniously on the desk in her hotel room. Her "four treasures": brush, ink, inkstone, and paper. Today for paper she had a small piece of xuanzhi, the expensive handmade sheets one could still buy in certain shops here in the capital. She dripped a little water into the inkstone and rubbed the ink stick in the puddle until she had the right viscosity. In this she twirled the brush.

She looked at the exquisite, rough-textured rice paper. On paper such as this one should write poetry. Living, moving ideograms, their various meanings touching infinite shades of possibility.

Instead Alice found herself drawing the name Yulian with the brush-the name she had been using lately at night. First the radical for the moon, then the ear radical which brought in the notion of happiness through the senses and made it into yu, fragrant. Then lian, lotus, with the flower radical on top and combining below the sound, lian, with the symbol for cart or car, originally connoting the name of a related flower in Chinese. Lotus. Fragrant Lotus.

She looked at it, blinking.

She’d used other names in the past. Yinfei, Yuhuan. None of them her real name.

None of this her true self. She folded the edge of the paper over so the two characters, Yulian, were covered. Out of sight.

She took a long, cleansing breath and began again.

"Aiya, tian luo di wang!" Professor Kong Zhen grumbled as he picked up the hand of cards that had just been dealt onto the table, fanned them out, and studied them. You’ve filled heaven with nets and all the earth with snares.

"I’m the one whose luck is odious," Vice Director Han complained, keeping just enough bile in his voice to mask the glee that bubbled up in him when he saw the winning cards he now held. "You’re one hundred and eighty ahead at the moment, cousin."

"And in one turn of the head it’s gone." Kong Zhen sighed, laying down his cards, knowing he would lose the pile of well-worn bills in front of him, knowing, too, that he was capable of playing far more cleverly, and winning-certainly he could win if he wanted to-but the vice director was his elder-born relative and, more important, a high official in the IVPP, the Institute. Although the IVPP had no say over his own danwei, Huabei University, it controlled all the research money for archaeology as well as most excavation permits. And Vice Director Han was a powerful man in the IVPP. It would not do to win against him. "Aiya, cousin," he said, pretending bitterness, "I wanted that one-eighty."

"So did I," the vice director said happily, and pocketed it. "More tea?" He poured.

"Yes. It’s excellent." Kong Zhen settled back in his chair. He was a lizard-shaped man with a fondness for shiny, tightly belted Western slacks and all the accoutrements of the kai fang: portable phones, beepers, computers, faxes, knockoffs of foreign suits, and clean, lustrous white running shoes. He loved these things almost as much as he loved the archaeology of the Late Paleolithic-but not quite.

He savored the lichee tea now, the hot Beijing night, the comfortable antique furniture and paintings in the vice director’s study. He knew that the vice director had invited him to the capital so they could discuss his joining an American archaeological expedition, but he did not yet know why. What was so special about this particular expedition that it had to be monitored-and by a relative of the vice director, no less? But he did not ask. The Chinese approach was to talk, to socialize, to play cards, to cement the sense of a relationship, before undertaking anything. This took time. And who of consequence did not have time? Kong Zhen sipped his tea, content with the dinner and the round of cards. Elder cousin would say what had to be said in due time.

"Younger born," said the vice director at length. "There’s this delicate matter of the expedition I have asked you to accompany. "

"Yes," his cousin answered, face calm, senses alert.

"My colleagues and I may grant permits for the foreigners, but they will have to travel across military installations. And there are also"-he paused-"reform camps in the area."

Kong Zhen raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, I know. It’s most unusual to let foreigners in. But what they seek is unusual as well."

"And what is that?" asked Kong Zhen.

"Peking Man." The vice director cleared his throat, drank from his cup. "They believe they can recover Peking Man."

Professor Kong let out a snort of surprise.

"It’s so." The vice director smiled.

"But-in the Northwest?"

"They have evidence that the French priest got it back from the Japanese and hid it out there. Younger cousin. I need you to go with them. And I need you to select a colleague from your department to go too-a Homo erectus specialist. I know that’s not been your concentration."

"I know a good man," Kong Zhen said, thinking of one of his fellow professors, the thoughtful Lin Shiyang.

"Do you? Then arrange it. And bring him back with you to Beijing in the next few days. We’ll discuss all the facets of this thing."

"Of course," Kong Zhen answered.

"Cousin. Let me put the eye on the dragon. Why do I need you there, watching every step they take? Eh?"

Kong Zhen raised his eyes to meet the other’s and waited. He knew the vice director wished to answer his own question.

"To stop them smuggling Peking Man out to America."

Kong gasped. "You believe they would?"

"Merely consider history! Where were the fossils when they were last seen in 1941?"

Professor Kong hesitated. "The war-the Americans were preparing to ship them to New York-"

"Just so," said the vice director. "The way of things is as clear as water. But please, ni renwei zenmoyang. Do you think it possible? Have they any chance of finding Peking Man again?"

A sad, indulgent smile flitted over Kong Zhen’s face. He shook his head slowly. "Find Peking Man? After so many years? Oh, no. I’m sorry to say it’s impossible. It would be like searching for a stone which has dropped into the ocean."

The village of Zhoukoudian nestled in a leaf-shaded bowl in the southwestern suburbs of the capital. Alice wanted to stop and get something to drink before continuing on to the Peking Man site. It was still and humid, with a hot, high-summer noon silence lying over the valley. She was thirsty.

"In the Northwest it’s desert." Adam squashed his face into a concerned frown. "You’ll have to carry a water bottle out there."

"Okay. I’ll buy one. I just hate to carry extra stuff."

"But you must." He drew his shoulders up to his ears to emphasize. "Got to carry water. You’re much too valuable to what I have to do for us to take any chances."

Alice smiled. So unconscious, so open about the fact that to him she was only a project asset, no more. At least he wasn’t like her other male clients, who usually started signaling, after a while, that they were attracted to her. Not to her, exactly, for they hardly knew her. No, her businessmen clients were excited by her because they were in a foreign country, and she was the only person they could talk to, and there was a certain magic in that. A kind of casting off and floating free. But this soft-faced late-forties American scientist was not going to put her through that. She could already tell.

The driver stopped alongside a low one-room mud-walled hut with a window full of food and cigarettes, drinks, matches, and dubbed Hong Kong videos. Spencer lumbered out and followed her in, ducking his head. "You are valuable to this expedition," he repeated, eyes widening at the tight walls packed to the ceiling with boxes and coolers and racks.

"I’m glad you think so," she said. "Speaking of which- I’d appreciate it if you could pay me the first installment of my fee before we leave Beijing. My bank is here, you see. Can you do that?"

"Yes." He hesitated and his face clouded. Reflexively he reached for his notebook, opened it as if to write. "I think I can," he said, without writing.

She straightened up from the cooler she’d been scanning and looked at him steadily. "What do you mean, you think you can?"

"Just that I don’t have the funds in hand yet-not today, I mean. But the money ought to come through before we’re ready to leave Beijing. No problem. That’s going to be a few more days anyway, isn’t it?"

"Of course-we have to get permits…"

"Right."

"So you mean you have someone in the States wiring you money or something?" Alice stopped and turned to the tiny, weather-beaten old woman in black clothes who had padded out from the back room and was standing expectantly by the counter. She smiled politely and fell into clear, unaccented Mandarin. "Elder sister, greetings. Forgive me. Trouble you to wait a moment."

The gray-headed woman nodded, little oblongs of jade gleaming in her ears.

Alice turned back to Spencer. "So you’re expecting a wire? Is that it?"

"No." He clutched his book. "Actually I’m still waiting to hear. I applied for a National Science Foundation grant for this project. I haven’t heard. I should have heard by now. But I haven’t."

She swallowed. "You came over here and hired me without funds?"

"No-no, well, not exactly. This grant is a sure thing, Alice. Peking Man is very, very big in the world of archaeology. Very important. The NSF Board met last week. Just hang on a few more days. So what are these in here-Cokes? I can’t believe it." He pulled one out and a puff of frosty smoke came with it. He peered at the bottle. "Canned in Singapore. You want one?"

"Yes," she said, distracted. "And get one for the driver too. Are you sure about this, Dr. Spencer?"

"Of course. And I told you not to call me that." He dug some renminbi out of his pocket and handed a few bills to the old lady. "Jesus," he whispered. "Look at her feet."

"They’re bound," Alice answered in English.

"My God." To him the little feet seemed hardly more than stumps, just three or four inches long, wrapped in black cloth shoes. Revulsion brought his abdomen shrinking back against his spine. "What did they have to do to turn her foot into that? "

"A lot. Though I personally find it fascinating." She bent to the old lady, who was counting out Spencer’s change. "Xiexie. "

"And look." Spencer’s eyes flitted over the tiny cement cubicle behind the counter, with bed and washstand. "She must live back there."

"Of course."

"Doesn’t it bother you?" He was ducking back out through the door after her. "I mean seeing this kind of life?"

"No. Why should it?" She turned her clear eyes on him, thinking how simple he was. "But it would bother me if you couldn’t pay me."

"Don’t worry." He popped open his can and took a long drink. "I can pay you."

They parked at the mouth of the canyon in the parking lot and gave their names to the single attendant, who confirmed that they could go past the fence and enter the cave. Using a series of metal rungs secured into the rock they climbed fifty feet or so up the canyon wall to the cut-out cave where Peking Man had been found. Below them, on the floor of the neglected gorge, disjointed Chinese tourists stepped over candy wrappers and cigarette butts, and gaped at the foreigners scaling the cliff above their heads.

"That was some climb," she said, damp with sweat, huddling in the cave mouth and peering back down the rungs they’d come up. "But the view…" She paused, drinking it in. Below, the leafy deep-green canyon, and beyond that the valley floor, with distant peasants moving in the fields. The scrolling clouds, the repeating green hills, the far-off roof of a temple. Vistas in China were so inexorably Chinese; they made so much that was in Chinese art seem inevitable. "So how did they find this site?" she asked him.

"It was like this. The local people were working a quarry, and they kept turning up fossils. Enough product found its way into the black market in Peking that the scientific community started noticing it. They tracked the influx to this valley." Spencer lay on his back, working himself inch by inch ever deeper into the narrow cleft. The French priest, the Canadians, the Germans and Chinese, who had scraped this out with trowels so many decades before, all of them were long dead. Maybe now it would be his turn, he thought hopefully, running his flashlight beam over the scarred dirt ceiling.

"So they just started digging and found Peking Man? Just like that?"

"No, it took years. They dug and dug through the late twenties, excavated huge sections of the canyon floor, you know, methodically, in a grid. They found a lot of stuff that was tantalizing but minor. Extinct animals. Pieces of bone and teeth that looked human. Or sort of human. They dug out a few sections of the canyon wall, like this one.

"And then in 1929 they decided to start closing down the site. They hadn’t found anything significant. It was time to move out. Most of the workers were already gone. It was the last day. One of the Chinese scientists climbs up in this cave to take a few final measurements. He hauls himself up and lies down and runs his hands over the ceiling like I’m doing now- no reason, you know, it’s an impulse, a crazy thing to do-but he feels something that doesn’t belong there, a bump, feels almost like part of a brainpan, but that’s impossible, a skull, how could there be a skull just protruding from the ceiling? And so he shouts for the others, the men that are left, and they all climb up and start digging. Imagine!"

She smiled at him; he had come alive for once, telling it. "You love archaeology, don’t you?"

"Yes. The long thread of human life, you know, it makes me feel connected." He clicked the flashlight off, closed his eyes, and ran his hands over the cave ceiling.

"Find anything?"

"No." He spread his hands as wide as he could over the rocky dirt, moved in slow arcs, covering it in sections, methodically, feeling everything. He let out a tiny laugh. "Just the past."

After a time they climbed down from the cave and made their way through the hot, cricket-buzzing trees to the top of the hill, where a small museum stood. It was a forgotten-looking brick building. They stepped inside to a dusty silence and an ancient fuwuyuan at the desk by the door.

"Okay." Spencer’s voice rang in the empty rooms. "When Teilhard got Peking Man back, he hid it somewhere. We have to think the way he thought. Take your time. Look at his pictures. Read the text. We have to know him, if we’re going to pull this off. Really know him."

They stopped at a clay bust of Peking Man. The steeply ridged forehead, the crashing, shallow chin, the matted hair. The eyes, which managed to capture a look at once cunning and subrational.

Alice bent over the label. "By Lucile Swan!"

"Yes. She was a talented artist. And she could give form to Teilhard’s visions." He paused, examining the sculpture. "It’s not surprising. She was practically inside him."

But not really, Alice reminded herself. She couldn’t have all of him. So close-but no farther. Because he was already taken, in a way.

They stopped in front of the huge, grainy 1929 excavation photos. The dig, which covered much of the canyon floor in addition to the openings higher up the rock walls, was shown all in black-and-white, marked off in squares and full of European and Chinese men leaning on shovels. Teilhard was easy to pick out. He was taller than everyone else, falcon faced, with hooded eyes frozen in a glance at the camera.

"You notice he wears plain clothes?" Spencer said. "He never dressed like a priest, not once he got to China."

"Is that Lucile?"

"That’s her."

She peered at the photo. Lucile Swan was strong looking, small, and buxom; she stood half behind Pierre Teilhard de Chardin of the Society of Jesus. Lucile looked frankly into the camera, her gaze intelligent. She had old-fashioned braids twined around her heart-shaped face, but in her eyes was a world of experience. Alice smiled. This was a woman who stood easily among the men. "How long did she stay in Peking?"

He thought. "She hung on through the war, by hiding in the French Legation. Then she got out, went home. She died in New York-let me see-in ’65."

There was something about Lucile’s position in the picture, behind the priest, which formed a scraping stone of sadness in Alice’s middle. The fate of the thing was all there to see, Pierre with a shovel and eyes piercing the camera, Lucile behind him, self-contained. She loved him, she couldn’t live without him, she couldn’t fully have him. Oh, yes. Alice understood.

She stared into Lucile’s face. "I want to look at this for a while," she whispered.

Spencer nodded and drifted away. She contemplated the frozen pointillist images until they became gray shades of meaninglessness, with only Teilhard’s sharp gaze still there, boring through her. Did you love her? she thought intently, memorizing his jutting face. Or did you use her for what you wanted and discard the rest?

When the picture was taken Lucile, wearing the demure dress of a European peasant, had been the same age Alice was now. Why did pictures of women in history make them look so much older than they were? Or did Alice now look this old? Alice glanced down at her own blue jeans. Face it, she thought, I’m thirty-six. And Lucile was just like me. Adrift in China. Lonely, for years. Then in love again, finally, but with a man already committed to the Church. Stuck outside herself, outside love. Empathy flooded Alice’s modern heart.

Some minutes had passed when Spencer coughed discreetly. She walked over to where he stood near the museum’s entrance and he handed her a book from the display shelf.

"It’s the book I told you about," he said. "Their correspondence."

She looked down. The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan. She felt a smile tugging at her face.

"I’ll buy it for you."

"No, I’ll buy it." She smiled: solidarity.

"Si-shi ba kuai," the old man said in a thin voice. His spotted hands trembled as he accepted the money and counted out the change. "Are you foreign guests interested in the French priest?" he asked, glancing up through small round glasses of hammered gold. His blood-cracked eyes, almost completely shrouded over, still radiated intelligence.

"Very interested, elder uncle," Alice answered. "This outside person is an archaeologist. He is researching Peking Man."

"Can I help you in some humble way? I worked for the survey as a boy."

"What!" Alice translated for Spencer.

"Yes." He inclined his snow-white, sparsely fringed head toward the blown-up excavation photographs. "At first I was an apprentice, hauling rocks. But the head of the survey, Dr. Black, trained me. I continued working there until-until the situation grew unstable."

Alice saw him stop, move his papery mouth in a soundless swallow. He had used the cautious euphemism bu wen, unstable, but she knew something of the war and the famine and the chaos behind the word; she knew how many terrible years there had been. She stayed silent a moment, to show him respect, and then cleared her throat. "Do you remember much about the priest? Or his American friend, Lucile Swan?"

"Eh, Miss Swan. Of course." His voice was thin. "They were very close."

"Did she mention-perhaps-near the end of the war, might she or Teilhard have said anything about Peking Man?"

"Eh, no, no, that was lost much earlier, near the beginning of the world war."

"Yes, I know, but-well. I suppose they said nothing."

He shook his head.

Alice quickly translated the exchange for Spencer.

"What sort of road did her life take?" the old man was asking.

"Ah." She delivered the answer as if she had known it for years, when in fact she had heard it moments before from Dr. Spencer. "Miss Swan returned to the United States. She died in New York in 1965."

"Eh. It is hard for my heart to hear it."

"Yes."

"Well. May I see your name card?"

She took one out and handed it to him. "We’ve troubled you too much."

" ’Mo Ai-li,’ " he read. " ’Interpreter.’ I am Mr. Zhang. The pleasure’s all on my side. Shuoqilai, " he said, By the way. "I knew the widow who took over Miss Swan’s house when she left. Of course, she has long since gone away from the world. I do not know what has become of the place."

"Really?" She felt a racing in her chest. "Lucile’s house?"

"Do you wish to go there? I will give you the address." He uncapped a pen and began writing.

"We did go to the old Jesuit House, where Father Teilhard lived," Alice told him. "But it was locked up."

"Eh, but I can take you to that place too," the man said, lowering his voice a notch. "It was owned for a long time after the Europeans left by the Chinese Antiquities Association. I know the gentleman who occupies it now. Tomorrow night? Seven? I will meet you there. But better we do not talk anymore, not here." He blinked at her.

"As you say." She hadn’t been aware of anyone else around, but she knew that, in China, eyes and ears were everywhere.

He finished writing. "Here." He pushed the paper with Lucile’s address across the table.

"Deeply indebted."

He made his face blank and waved them away.