Lost in Translation

5

The train stood gasping in Beijing Zhan. They pushed aboard with the Chinese and all their boxes, suitcases, bundles, and bags full of fruit, melon seeds, and steaming, fragrant baozi.

She glanced around the second-class hard sleeper. It would be a rough two days and nights, sleeping on flat, narrow berths stacked three up to the ceiling. Though it was better than sitting up all night on a wooden bench, in "hard seat."

"Berth forty-three," he said, handing her a stub.

A middle bunk, just above his. A couple of slots facing them on the right, empty. Those were for their Chinese colleagues, Dr. Kong and Dr. Lin, who were scheduled to board at Baotou.

"Where’s your luggage?"

"This is it." She tossed the black Rollaboard on her berth. Her point of honor: never more than one carry-on bag, plus a purse. And of course, she had to make it smaller than regulation size, which then catapulted her into an agonized stratosphere of wardrobe planning. Pants, shirts, and socks that all matched, all the colors and weights and textures in line and interchangeable. One baseball cap, weighing nothing. Tiny vials of shampoo and cleanser and moisturizer and makeup and toothpaste, all rationed out day by day. The collapsing hair-brush, the minitoothbrush. The clothes with labels snipped out. Her one concession: the black dress, for going out. The antique Chinese stomach-protector.

"That’s really all you have?"

"All I need."

"You’re incredible."

"I notice you don’t carry too much either. You always wear the same thing."

He laughed. "That’s lifestyle engineering. Just think of the hours I’ve saved in my life wearing only jeans and work shirts. Days, by now. Weeks."

"Never thought of it that way."

He rolled his shoulders modestly. "So tell me about our destination-Yinchuan. Have you been there?"

"Actually no. I’ve never been to the Northwest." Most of Alice’s jobs had been in commerce, and most of the commerce buzzed around China’s eastern cities. Guangzhou, initially, after things started to open up in the mid-seventies, and then Beijing and Tianjin and Nanjing and, of course, the jewel in the trading crown, Shanghai. But the Northwest, no. She shivered with anticipation, a touch of fear, because she’d heard it was a different China out there, in the desert. A place where the rules varied. Be alert, she reminded herself.

"Well, I’m excited about seeing the Chinese deserts," he said. "The Gobi, the Taklamakan, the Tengger, the Ordos. Even their names sound like music. They’re interesting archaeologically too-especially the Tengger and the Ordos, where we’re headed."

"Because Peking Man is out there?"

"Not just that. Because they’re said to be full of prehistoric sites, and totally undisturbed. Pristine is the word we use. It’s not like America, where everything’s been looted and picked over. Out where we’re going, ancient people left stuff behind and it’s still sitting there just the way they left it."

"How can that be?"

He beamed. "Chinese grave robbers only went after tombs from historical times-tombs with treasure. They had no interest in Neolithic and Paleolithic sites."

"Lucky for us." She visualized the little drawing from the letter, the sun head with the face of a monkey. It had a primitive, archetypal look.

"It’s odd that nobody’s surveyed out there since Teilhard." Spencer settled back. "Nobody’s even looked for sites. Do you know how far it’s going to be, to Yinchuan?"

"About two days." Though she hadn’t been there she had read about Yinchuan, the closest town to the Shuidonggou site, where they were going to stay. It was an oasis city. It sat near the top of the Yellow River’s horseshoe curve, on the Ningxia- Inner Mongolia border. It was the edge of the genetic Chinese world, the place where the Chinese and the Uighurs, Muslims, and Mongols started mixing. The region of the three great north-central deserts, too, the Ordos and the Tengger and the Gobi. All cut by a majestic mountain range called the Helan Shan.

Outside, she watched the Beijing suburbs thin. City of history, six hundred, seven hundred years. Teilhard had lived there, had left Peking on a day like this for the Northwest, had ridden a train on this very line. What I like most in China is thegeometry of the walls, the curve of the roofs, the multiple-storeyedtowers, the poetry of the old trees teeming with crows, and thedesolate outline of the mountains.

She watched the trees in a blur, and the villages in their momentary clumps-the few buildings, the crossroads-between stretches of fields. She watched this changing terrain for a long time before the hills appeared, green walls sloping steeply up away from the train. Every few minutes a break in the landscape, a cleavage, would reveal the triumphant, snaking form of the Great Wall in the distance, marching along the crest of the hill above them. Shudderingly beautiful. Built on death and heartbreak. Like so much in China.

These hills, and the stone line of the Wall, disintegrated into the advancing dark. Then it was a shrouded nighttime world roaring by, the ghostly hills cradling north China against the hydraulic train-whistle scream.

Eventually she crawled under her thin blanket and slept. By the time she opened her eyes on her hard pallet the next morning the hills had flattened out; all the green land had vanished and they were rattling across the yellow rock-strewn desert. It seemed to stretch to the limit of the earth. Nothing but boulders and steppes forming low, tired plateaus tufted with struggling gray-green grass.

"Teilhard took this train," she said.

"That’s right. In 1923, on his way to find Shuidonggou, his first big site. Shuidonggou’s in the Ordos Desert-that’s where we’re going to start."

"Because you’re thinking, he hid this crate of fossils out there in 1945. How? He shipped it to someone?"

"Or he carried it there himself. There is this one month, April of forty-five, when he’s unaccounted for. He wasn’t in Peking, but there’s no record of where he went."

"How could he have traveled out here during the war?"

Spencer lifted his hands. "I don’t know. Maybe he just found a way. But I know one thing, from his letters. He loved it out here. Shuidonggou was a place that gave him hope."

Her eyes locked in. "You know-I think you’re right. I remember a line I read last night in one of the books. He wrote from somewhere-Ethiopia, I think-that he felt homesick for Mongolia. For Mongolia! I thought it was odd."

"But if you think about what happened to him out here it makes sense. He stumbled on a site of ancient man. The locals dropped everything they were doing and pitched in to help him. It was the proof he was looking for."

"Though it didn’t help-with Rome, I mean."

"No. It didn’t."

They settled back, Spencer making notes, Alice watching the morning bustle that had taken over their crowded railroad car. It was overflowing now with bodies and luggage and had become a noisy, hurtling village-a Mandarin wall of shouting, laughing, and singing. Old men coughed and hacked and spat at the floor, none too accurately. Spencer winced at the sounds, but Alice was used to it. And she knew, when she got up, to step carefully over the splintered sunflower-seed shells, gnawed watermelon rinds, and sodden black tea leaves.

By noon the pebbly sea outside had given way to grass-lands. Baotou was scheduled for twelve-fifteen.

Now on the horizon Alice could make out the huddle of sand-colored buildings.

"Our colleagues." Spencer closed his notebook.

"Yes." She peered ahead, trying to make sense of the far-off skyline. The two men from Zhengzhou would be there, just ahead, in that town, waiting on the platform. Right now. That tall, contained man, Dr. Lin. And Dr. Kong.

They shot into the squat, sun-baked town, clanked into the station, squealed to a stop.

All around the train was a hissing cloud, the surge of people, shouts and cries, and suddenly there they were, Dr. Kong and Dr. Lin. They bumped their big suitcases down the aisle, smiling. "Hello again," they said. "Hello."

"Hello."

"Hi."

Alice and Spencer stood up. Alice spoke. "Was your journey pleasant?"

"You trouble yourself too much to inquire," Dr. Lin said, using the kind of honorific Chinese one didn’t hear so often these days, except on Taiwan. Mainland people were more suibian, follow convenience, casual. Not him.

"It is of your journey that one should speak," he continued. "You are the foreign guests." He ran his hand through his shock of black hair, then turned and settled his suitcase up into the storage net above the window.

Her gaze settled on his back.

He seemed to feel it, glanced behind. "Truly spoken, it’s an amazing thing. You can really talk."

"Your praise is unjustified," she answered. It was a proper answer, but she tempered it with a smile. She knew her Chinese was good. Mainly, of course, it was because she had a good ear. She had always loved music. All her life, even when she was small, she’d been aware that she heard music the way most other people did not-really heard it. And when she got older and studied Chinese, she found that the other students didn’t listen the way that she did. They thought they did, but they didn’t. And because she heard Chinese, the way that she had always heard music, she quickly picked up the small lilts and angles of Mandarin speech. So what was exceptional about her Chinese was her accent, not her vocabulary. It took years of hard work to build a Chinese vocabulary, and hard work was not Alice’s strong point. Smart but ever so slightly lazy, that was Alice. To Dr. Lin now she demurred politely: "There are lots of foreigners around who can speak better than I."

"Really? I hardly know whether to believe you or not. Still, you are the first foreigner I’ve ever spoken with, so"-for the first time he allowed a hint of a smile onto his composed face-"my research is not complete."

"Not yet."

"Not yet," she heard him answer, but she couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or merely echoing, the way Chinese often did. "You’ve really never met another foreigner?"

"Oh, yes, I have met other foreigners. I’m originally from Shanghai, you know. I moved to Zhengzhou as an adult."

"Yes, I hear that in your accent," Alice said, for he had the s-laden pronunciation of someone from the Yangtze River delta.

"As a child in Shanghai, I sometimes met foreigners. But you are the first one I’ve met who can talk." And the first one, he thought, who seems aware and civilized. He studied her peculiar skin, pale but covered with freckles, and her sharp but not entirely unpleasant nose. He was careful not to look directly at her body. Peripherally he registered it, though: spare and compact, wider across the shoulders than a Chinese woman, but narrower through the hips and legs. How strange, he thought, the way Western women wear clothes that show every curve and line of their bodies, leaving nothing for a man to imagine…

"Then I’m honored to meet you," she was saying.

Dr. Kong had stabbed out a number on his phone and was talking rapidly to someone in a slurred, provincial accent. Dr. Lin stood for a minute, nodding politely to her and to Spencer, and finally fitted himself onto the berth opposite Alice. He lay on his side, head propped on his hand, and kept his serious gaze on her. "If you permit me to ask, Interpreter Mo. How does an outside woman come to learn Chinese? Your parents were perhaps missionaries?"

She laughed. "No-far from it."

"Your father is a diplomat, then?"

"My father is a United States congressman," she said, and instantly regretted it.

"A congressman," he repeated.

She sighed. This would be repugnant to him. In China, everyone scorned the bratty children of the ruling elite. Why had she told him?

"A difficult road," he answered.

"Shi zheiyangde." That’s how it is.

Professor Lin’s eyes lit on the book she still clasped in her hand. "Ni kan shenmo?" What are you reading?

"The letters of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin." She showed him the book. "Do you read English?"

"No. Eh, the French priest." He turned the book over, regarding Teilhard’s solemn picture on the back cover, the spiritual blue eyes, the black-and-white priest’s collar. "So Teilhard is famous in the West for his discoveries."

"Not at all. Hardly known for that. Famous for books he wrote about religion."

"Religion?" He stared at her.

"His church"-she had to search a moment for the word for Catholics – "the tianzhujiao didn’t accept evolution. Teilhard wrote books describing evolution itself as an act of God. Reconciling science and religion. These books are quite famous."

"I see," he said. "But is it not strange to have to prove these things? Because man has evolved since the ancient times. That is the fact."

"Now this is known," Alice agreed. "But in the time of the French priest, a lot of Western people still believed in their old creation myth-that the world began with a man and woman in Paradise, and they sinned, and because of that the world is tainted and none of us is pure."

"Oh, yes, I have heard this religious idea from the West." He narrowed his eyes. "Do you believe it?"

"Of course not." She grinned. "Who of intelligence believes such a thing? The world did not suddenly appear four or five thousand years ago. So much in archaeology goes back so much farther! It seems like every year they find something older-isn’t it so? Homo sapiens has been here a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand years. And before that- Homo erectus." Her eyes were bright with interest.

He smiled. "I’d always heard Western people had no interest in the past."

"Not me, Dr. Lin. I love history. I love everything old."

"Me too," he said softly.

Then suddenly Spencer was there, speaking, pointing outside to the heat-shimmering rocky tundra. "Tell him it looks just like Nevada."

She translated this.

Lin drew his brows together.

"Did you tell him I’m from Reno?" Spencer asked. "It’s amazing how much it looks like home. The geology and topography-I could be in Nevada!"

Alice put this in Chinese.

"Come on," Spencer said. "What were you and Dr. Lin talking about?"

"Oh. Chinese-Western attitudes on evolution."

"Okay. He got the briefing. He knows what we want, the intact teeth, the DNA sample, to find out who modern humans are descended from. So ask him. Ask him if he believes Homoerectus came from Africa or evolved in China."

"Dr. Lin. Dr. Spencer wonders if you think Peking Man evolved separately here in China, or if Homo erectus evolved everywhere out of Africa."

Lin opened his small black eyes wide. "Separately in China. Naturally. This is well known."

She conveyed this to Spencer.

"What?" the American pressed. "How is it known?"

Lin lifted his big shoulders in a shrug. "It is borne out by the fossils-Acheulean tools are found with Homo erectus in Africa and Europe, but never in China. Asian Homo erectus must be a separate species. Of course, this is logical. China is the seat of civilization. It’s the place where all ancient life took hold. Also, it hardly seems possible that modern Chinese could be descended from Africans. The races are too-too different."

Dr. Spencer opened his mouth, then closed it again. He gave Alice a look that said: Aren’t they silly. She could tell Dr. Lin, eyes crinkling with humor as he leafed through the book of Teilhard’s letters, was thinking the same thing about them.

Late that night, just before she slipped into the deep, disassociated well of sleep, a shaft of light crossed the car and she caught a glimpse of Dr. Lin’s face in the opposite berth. His eyes were open and he was watching her.

The lush oasis fringe around Yinchuan appeared as a sudden block of emerald, backed right up to the rocky brown desert. One moment there were mountains bare as flesh undulating to the horizon, the next the train was flashing through grove after grove of oleaster trees, their leaves rustling green and silver in the wind. Canal trenches jumped out of the Yellow River, itself a muddy silt ribbon in the distance, and sprinted in all directions. They vanished into fields of eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. And miles of rice: the seductive carpet of deep green so rarely seen in north China.

In 1923, she knew, the rail line had ended at Baotou- where Lin and Kong had boarded the train. There Teilhard and his fellow priest, Émile Licent, had paid silver Mex dollars for mules, and ridden across the desert to this city, Yinchuan. The name Yinchuan was incomprehensible to Alice. Yinchuan meant Silver River, and nowhere was the river anything but a slow, plodding brown. She noticed as the train clattered through town that the city walls Teilhard had mentioned in his letters were gone. Instead there was a string of masonry buildings, and the billowing smokestacks of factories. Here and there Alice could see a few of the original gates and watchtowers, still standing up, shocked and ancient.

They fell exhausted into the lobby of the Number One Guesthouse, spilling on the limestone floor with their bags and their gear and their dust-streaked clothes. They were given their rooms: Alice and Adam in one building, Kong and Lin in another.

"Why?" Adam wanted to know.

It was the way it always was, she explained: Chinese and foreigners separated.

She shut herself in her room and immediately and obsessively unpacked, the way she always did upon arrival in a new hotel room. Her clothes formed neat rows in the wooden drawer, the antique silk stomach-protector and black dress hidden at the bottom. She dug from her pocket the small folded drawing of the monkey sun head and the obituary of Lucile Swan, and placed them on the bureau. Then she drew the heavy Pompeiian-red velvet curtains, filled the bathtub, stripped, and climbed in.

Ah, she thought. Light from the overhead bulb broke up on the water’s surface, clinking and distorting the pale line of her naked body underneath. She soaked until she felt clean, delivered, all true and restored again. For a time.

She closed her eyes.

She must have dozed, because when she jolted back the water had grown cold and still. She splashed to her feet, shook the drops from her hair, rubbed hard at herself with the towel.

Awake again, alive.

Tea.

Suddenly she wanted to get out, walk, see Yinchuan. Was it really different from the China she knew? So far it seemed like any backwater town, and this hotel-with its barely functional toilets and old-fashioned velvet curtains-was just another provincial establishment.

Dressed, she stepped into the hall. She saw that Spencer’s door was closed. He’d said something about reviewing Teilhard’s maps from the 1923 Shuidonggou expedition. She listened at the door, heard nothing, and went out, crossing the courtyard between the buildings, to emerge finally from the front door of the Number One complex. There Dr. Kong and Dr. Lin were sitting on the steps. "Zenmoyang?" she said politely, and sat beside them.

"I must compliment you," Kong remarked. "Your Chinese is very standard."

"Guojiang, " she demurred, and then pointed to a small black machine wrapped in its cord on the cement step. "What’s that?"

"My fax." Dr. Kong raised his narrow hands in despair. "I need a line for it, and the hotel cannot spare one. Is it not unthinkable? A hotel in this modern age without extra phone lines…" He shook his head.

"He loves that fax." Dr. Lin laughed. "He got it on a trip to Japan last year. Now he takes it everywhere."

"No extra lines. Really, I had no idea this place would be so tu."

Alice smiled. Tu, hick or rustic, carried a veiled insult. Most urban Chinese looked down on rural Chinese. "It is pretty tu out here," she conceded.

"Regrettable," sniffed Kong, and picked up the machine. "In Zhengzhou this would never happen."

"Nor in Beijing," Alice said. "But does not progress have its price? Every time I go out it seems I see some lovely old neighborhood torn down, and in its place a new concrete building."

"Yes," Kong said, "but they are beautiful. They are modern. Life in those narrow alleys in Beijing is-is"-he searched for the word-"unhygienic." He thought about his visit to the vice director’s Beijing home, just a few days before, in just such a hutong. True, his cousin’s courtyard house retained a certain feudal charm. But the smoke from the cook shed! The dogs running free! And worst of all, the primitive bathroom, no more than a tiled trough on the floor through which water gurgled. "You see, Interpreter Mo, we Chinese are most anxious to leave those primitive conditions and move into modern housing."

"Not me," she said. "I like the hutong houses better." She glanced at Dr. Lin.

"I feel the same way," Lin said, speaking to Kong but smiling at Alice. "I like the old courtyard homes."

"When they disappear a part of old China will be gone forever."

"Exactly."

Kong rolled his eyes. "The past is the past. Anyway. I’m going to the Bureau of Cultural Relics. They’ll have an extra phone line for me."

"The Bureau of Cultural Relics?" Alice asked.

"The office in charge of archaeology for all of Ningxia. They run the historical museums too." Kong hoisted his fax machine. "Zai jian."

"And what are you going to do?" Lin asked her as Kong walked out the gate.

"I thought I’d look around the town."

"I noticed a place around the corner that rents bicycles," he said carefully. "Would the foreign woman want to get a bicycle and sightsee with me?"

"Yes, I would, but if you continue to call me ’the foreign woman’ I might have to curse your ancestors for eight generations."

He laughed. " ’Interpreter Mo,’ then?"

"That’s at least a little better." She knew she could not ask him to call her ’Alice’ or ’Ai-li’; given names were only for intimate use in China. Mostly, people addressed each other by title. She didn’t mind. There was a certain security in it. One always knew where one was, in the group. Is this my group? she thought for the thousandth time. China. The Chinese.

"Better wait here," Lin advised. "I’ll go rent the bicycles. If the old man sees you are a foreigner he’ll want a huge deposit from you-a hundred yuan, say, or your passport."

"Oh." While he went around the corner she studied the old Chinese Muslim women behind their yogurt stands. They sat in their wide cotton trousers behind the rickety little tables, waving flies away from crude paper-covered crocks of yogurt. As she watched them she felt her heart pounding pleasantly. Did Lin feel the same flutter of affinity she did? Of course he does, she thought, he must. If experience had taught her anything it was that when she felt it, the other person felt it too.

Riding up Sun Yat-sen Boulevard, the main street and biggest commercial center for nearly a thousand miles of desert, Alice saw an endless stream of functional, Eastern-Bloc cement buildings. Everywhere were majestic signs in Chinese characters and Mongolian script, announcing the Number Three Light Industrial Store, the Municipal Committee for Liaison with the Minority Peoples Subheadquarters, the Hua Feng Institute for the Training of Herbal Medicine, and the Number Eight People’s Clinic.

The streets were not crowded-at least not by Beijing or Shanghai standards. They passed a few carts, an occasional car. There were no streetlights and pedestrians ambled in all random directions, hardly seeming to notice the distinction between street and sidewalk.

They paused at the West Gate Tower, which now kept only a silent, symbolic watch over the streets. She recalled one of Teilhard’s letters; he had written about standing at this West Gate of the city in 1923, looking down the long dirt road to Tibet. Tartary, he had called this place. A bygone word now. Tartary. She looked at Lin from the corner of her eye. Maybe the kind of word he would like.

"Shall we turn?" he asked.

"Sure."

They swung to the left. The road out of town was just a continuation of Serve-the-Nation Boulevard, a two-lane blacktop lined with noodle stalls and barbershops. As they pedaled west on Serve-the-Nation this crumbled into animal pens and occasional dispensaries for hardware or vegetables, and finally into farmland. They were alone. No one was following them. "Let’s stop and have a rest," Lin called over his shoulder.

They steered off the road where a small hill sloped up to a grove of willows, dropped their bikes, and sat in the grass. Off in the distance the fields marched in squares, marked off by brown-ribboned canals, punctuated here and there by the sand-colored houses made of earth. Lin pulled an orange out of his pocket and gouged at the peel with a small knife. He gazed out at the landscape and nodded as if satisfied.

"You seem to like it here."

He handed her a section, cradled in his broad palm. "You can say I have an interest in this area. I tried to get a permit to visit here in seventy-four."

"You mean you wanted to be sent here to do your work in the countryside?" She knew that educated city youth had been forcibly reassigned to rural areas then. The Cultural Revolution. She thought back. Sixty-six to seventy-six: she had been so young then, a child playing along the damp, oppressive Houston bayous, alone and jealous and full of rage at a world which seemed all wrong to her and dreaming about someplace where she would belong, really belong, and meanwhile here in China hundreds of millions of souls were flying apart. The blood in that decade drained out onto the earth faster than it could be dammed up. Later, when she came to understand the language, and began working here, she heard the stories gushing bitterly from everyone. The horror of it finally settled on her. "Why did you want to be sent here?"

"I wanted to try and visit my wife."

A wife! But of course, he was a mature man, older than she. "So-she was the one sent here?"

"That’s how it was."

"And why do you say ’try to visit’? If you were both sent here, couldn’t you just be assigned to the same place?"

He didn’t answer right away, but made a great show of peeling the orange.

"This was a Cultural Revolution thing, right?" she persisted.

"It was during the Chaos, yes."

Alice kicked herself. She couldn’t shake the habit of using the phrase wenhua da geming, cultural revolution. Stupid. Naive. Many Chinese didn’t reply with that phrase, cultural revolution. To them it was something so much larger and more engulfing. They often called it the Chaos.

"Dr. Lin, I guess you’re not talking about her just being sent downcountry." His hand shook and the point of the knife made a jagged tear in the orange’s delicate membrane. A drop of juice welled up and dripped down the side. "Of course not," he said, and now an edge was in his voice.

"So you mean…" She didn’t want to say the word, in case she was wrong.

"Laogai, " he said, and dug hard at the orange with the knife. Just the one word was enough, laogai. Literally it meant "reform prison," but everyone knew it was a shadow world of hard labor, and lots of people disappeared into it and never came out. She saw the tight irritated press of his mouth. This happened to her a lot. She spoke pretty well, and so people thought she would float easily into the oblique nuances favored by Chinese intellectuals. For them, it was all about allusion: more beautiful than definition. But she never seemed to talk that way. Language fluency was only language fluency. It didn’t make her Chinese.

"Look, I’m sorry." She didn’t know if she meant about his wife, or her west-ocean-person rudeness.

"Mei guanxi, " he said, It doesn’t matter. But of course it did.

"Call to America," she told the fuwuyuan at the front desk. "Houston, Texas." Horace still paid for an apartment in Houston and she checked her voice mail there from time to time. Jobs, she usually got through her referrals from the U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce. But sometimes people called her apartment.

She penciled in the form the clerk gave her and headed back to her room to wait for the connection to go through. She’d been surprised to learn that her international call had to go through Beijing-it had been years since she’d been in a hotel of any size that didn’t have international direct dial. She picked up the book of Pierre and Lucile’s letters and tried not to watch the phone.

A few thousand kilometers away, in Beijing, Fourth Apprentice International Operator Yu Lihua noticed a blinking red light on her board, one she hadn’t seen before. She called her supervisor over.

"It means the call’s to be recorded," Supervisor Ling said. The older woman covered her surprise. She glanced at a sheet of little-used codes, tacked to the wall. "Ah," she said, "it’s PLA."

Yu Lihua just looked at her.

"Are your ears clogged? Has your brain run out through your mouth? You know the sequence. Tape it! They’ll pick up the tape next shift." She turned and walked away.

Finally Alice’s room phone stabbed out with its twin bursts. She snatched it up. On the line another phone was ringing, far away. She visualized her studio apartment in the Heights, upper right unit in a pleasingly outdated white clapboard, once a family home in Houston’s boomtown cowboy days, when jalopies were roaring down dirt roads and Hank Williams was blaring from jukeboxes, now walled off and turned to apartments for four single people. She was old for such a life, she knew. She was stuck in the past, with the same rough Mexican table she’d had since her days at Rice, same bookcases. No more ferns, no ponytail palms, no artful bonsai. Was never there long enough to take care of them. My life is my art, she liked to lie when people asked her. She waited now through her outgoing message and then beeped for her calls.

"Alice, how are you, dear? It’s Roger."

As if she would not know the parched voice of her father’s top aide anywhere.

"Call in, please, Alice. There are some things we need to talk-What?-Wait a minute…"

Some whispered voices in the background. Urgent tones, disagreement. Someone’s hand muffling the mouthpiece. She pressed closer to the receiver, concentrating. "Give me that," she heard distinctly, her father’s polished corporate voice.

A fumbling noise, then Horace.

"Alice, darling, please call as soon as possible. Something’s come up. Nothing to worry about. But call as soon as you can-"

There was a sharp breath, a silence. Horace, groping for words? Impossible.

"-Okay sweetheart. Good-bye."

The message beeped off.

She stared at the phone. Nothing to worry about? He never left messages for her like this. It was always Roger, crisp as the Chinese word for a dry stick snapping, gancui, checking off what needed to be conveyed to her as if he were discharging his to-do list. Or else Horace would call her message machine himself, to tell her he missed her or he loved her or she was the most wonderful girl in the world-or to ask her when she was coming home to visit him-but he was always warm, eloquent, and fully in command.

This message had sounded downright nervous. Very un-Horace.

Something had to have happened.

She scrabbled for her wallet and her sunglasses, glancing at her watch and calculating the time difference. Eight-thirty in the morning in Washington. Good. He might be in the office.

Still, she had to go out to an anonymous public phone hall. She couldn’t call him from her room. China was too full of listening ears and prying eyes-and Horace was an important man in America.

On this afternoon the public phone hall three streets over from Sun Yat-sen Boulevard was crowded with Chinese, Mongols, Muslims. Black-eyed stares lapped at her as she walked lightly across the stone floor and to the end of the booking line. She pulled her baseball cap low over her eyes. Her eyes narrowed as she saw that the people around her were different, not what she was used to, not wholly Chinese. There was an insolent, almost truculent air in the place that one rarely saw with an all-Chinese crowd. Finally she got her ticket number and slipped over to wait against the wall. The ceiling was high, vaulted stone, and it turned the noise of the crowd into a bouncing roar.

"Qi shi ba hao!" a voice sang over the din, and Alice threaded back to the counter to be directed to a phone booth. As she eased down onto the polished wooden stool in the wood-paneled cubicle, she fought down apprehension. She stared at the black metal phone, the beautiful old rotary kind she hadn’t seen in the United States in forever. Why would Horace sound so agitated?

She eased up the receiver. "Wei!"

’’Meiguo dianhua! Deng yixia!" the operator screamed, Phone call to the U.S., hang on.

The faint stew of indiscernible languages, the trans-Pacific phone lines, and then the far-off ring of an American phone. Horace’s private line, the small phone on his desk, next to the framed pictures of herself and her mother-young, fresh faced. She was already so much older than her mother was then. A second ring. Was he at his desk?

"Mannegan," he answered crisply.

"Horace, it’s me." She’d intended to be the concerned, bustling caretaker. She’d also intended to remain Alice, separate, safe on the other side of the world. But as usual, the minute she heard her father’s voice she felt the rush of belonging. He was the one person in the world to whom she was permanently connected. "How are you?" she asked.

"Alice! So good to hear your voice. I’m fine, sweetheart."

"I was a little worried about you. Nothing’s wrong, is there? With you?"

"With me? Oh, no. Everything’s all right."

"It was such a weird message. You sounded-" Her voice caught and she closed her eyes. For a moment she was a girl again, a girl on her own in the world, with no one but Horace. Horace, who took care of her with all his power, his clout, his strength.

"Wait a moment, darling." He put her on hold; clearing out his office, probably. He came back on. "Now, my favorite girl, that’s better. Don’t worry, everything’s terrific. Where are you?"

"China, Horace. Of course."

"And what are you doing right now?"

"Working for an archaeologist. He’s looking for some proof about the origins of man."

"That sounds interesting."

"It is," she said, and felt herself smile, the echo of Pierre and Lucile coming to her mind, the ghost of the Peking Man skull. "But I was worried, Horace. The message you and Roger left-"

"Oh, that was nothing," he assured her. "I’m perfectly strong."

"Did something happen?"

"Nothing, really. An anomalous number on my blood test."

"What blood test?" Her stomach dropped.

His voice was casual. "I had an elevated PSA level, that’s all."

"What’s that?"

He paused. "Prostate."

"But what does it mean?"

"Nothing much. An infection. Don’t worry! You’re not getting rid of me that easily."

"Oh, Horace." She kept a chuckle in her voice but inside she felt she might collapse, she was so washed with relief. The stasis she had built around herself was teeteringly fragile, and Horace’s continuing presence in her life-from a distance- was one of its building blocks. But he was okay. He was.

"Call me in ten days or so when the antibiotic’s finished, if you like."

"Okay-"

"Or better yet, come home and visit. You haven’t come in two years. Please, darling. I’d love to see you."

"I don’t know, Horace. I’ll try. But please take care of yourself-"

He cut in, his voice different, businesslike. "My meeting’s here now. Got to go."

"Bye, Horace-"

But the line had gone dead.

She sat staring at it before she replaced it in its heavy black cradle. Then it rang again.

She jumped. "Wei?"

"Shuo-wan-le ma?" the operator screamed, Are you finished?

"Wan-le, " she answered, fighting back her apprehension, I’m finished. She tumbled the phone back down.

In Beijing, International Operator Yu finished filling out the little onionskin form with its six layers of carbon. She filed one copy in her logbook and carried the rest to her supervisor. "This call was to an official government office," she told the older woman. "It came up on our highest-level track."

"Well done, Fourth Apprentice Yu." Supervisor Ling did not conceal her excitement. Phone numbers that sorted to top diplomatic status were always reported. And this call originated from the people they’d already been asked to record-by the Army, no less. By the PLA. Supervisor Ling set aside the stack of paperwork she’d been sorting through, and lifted her tea mug for a long lukewarm drink. She clicked the ceramic lid back on the cup decisively.

"Try to get through to District Commander Gao of the PLA," she ordered the apprentice. She watched the girl hurry to an empty desk and dial.

"It’s ringing," Apprentice Yu reported, head twisted over her shoulder.

Supervisor Ling laid a hand over the receiver, ready to pick it up. She felt flushed, important, her heartbeat steady and strong. Things like this never happened on her shift.