Lost in Translation

6

"Okay," said Dr. Spencer. "Here’s what we’re going to do."

They sat facing him in his room.

Spencer waved at the pile of books, manuscripts, and essays on his desk. He might just have brought along every single thing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had ever published.

"All right. Nineteen twenty-three. He and Émile Licent took the train as far as Baotou, then rode mules. When they arrived here in Yinchuan they stayed with a Dutch missionary, Abel Oort. Interesting man; Catholic, but knew a great deal about Buddhism and Lamaism. He and Teilhard seem to have had a philosophical meeting of minds. Then the two French-men stocked up on supplies and rode out of the city on April twenty-sixth."

Kong and Lin listened attentively.

Spencer studied his notebook. "Heading northwest, they found the Border River and followed it. This was the edge of Mongolia. And here is the important clue: the Mongol family. When they stumbled on the site alongside the river-the site we now call Shuidonggou-there happened to be a family of Mongols living nearby. The Mongols helped them, and Teilhard in particular struck up a close relationship with the family. He said he felt free there, with them."

"He felt free-why, exactly?" Lin asked.

"Because there he could be his true self," Alice said. "Imagine. Him traveling along the river on mules, stopping, sitting by the water to eat. Then glancing up to see a stone tool protruding from the cliff! He must have seen it all-the site, the first proof of ancient man in Asia-and yet he knew the Church would only laugh at him. All others might see the truth, but it was to the Church he’d made his lifetime vows. And they would say it proved nothing."

He stared at her. Eh, how her face shone with feeling and fascination. She seemed to want so badly to make him see. Like Meiyan used to do. She’d have had some point, some insight, and would come near to tears, explaining it to him. As if nothing on earth mattered more than that he should know. So long since he’d thought of that. "I see," he said to Alice now.

"The Mongols were different," she finished. "They were wild about the find. Totally into it. They dropped everything to help the priests dig. Sorry," she said, turning back to Spencer. "Go on."

"Okay," Adam continued. "They found the skeleton of a man, bone ornaments, crude stone tools. Crates and crates of stuff. And the Mongols, of course-they believed in him. That’s why I know he brought Peking Man back out here. Teilhard scholars never made much of his relationship with them, but I think it was central for him. Birth of hope. Acceptance."

"Who were they?" Kong asked.

"He never mentions a name. They must have been living there in 1923. Now…" Spencer shrugged. "Way I see it, we go out to the site and start looking. Maybe their descendants will be there. Or somebody who knows where they went."

"Because," clarified Kong, "you believe this Akabori actually returned Peking Man to the priest in 1945, and then the priest carried it out here? And contacted the Mongols?"

"That’s… one scenario."

"Hmm," Kong said. He crossed one narrow leg over the other and wagged a running shoe rhythmically in the air.

"And just to refresh your memory…" Spencer pulled out a photocopied list and passed copies around. "Alice, would you…"

She began reading aloud from her list in Chinese, while Lin and Kong took notes. "Six facial fragments, fourteen cranial pieces and six partial skullcaps, fifteen jaws, one hundred and fifty-seven teeth, four arm pieces, eight leg pieces, one collarbone-parts of forty different hominids, in all. These were the contents of the crate when it was last seen."

They all stared at the list.

"There’s one other thing," said Spencer. "Alice and I found this letter in Beijing, in some boxes left by Lucile Swan. You both know the name, Lucile Swan?"

"Yes-the American," said Dr. Lin. "The woman friend of the priest."

"Right. It was among her effects, but it actually appears to be a letter written to Teilhard." Spencer handed it to the Chinese scientists. "Whoever wrote it is talking about the warlord out here, Ma Huang-gui, saying he kept out the Japanese and he’ll keep out the Communists too. See? As if he’s reassuring Teilhard that it’s a safe place to hide Peking Man. It all fits. Except that little drawing-I don’t know what that is."

"That’s the Helan Shan petroglyph," Kong said promptly.

"What?" Spencer’s eyes popped. "You know it?"

"Of course. It’s a rock art design found only in the Helan Shan Mountains around Eren Obo-that’s a village over the border in what’s now Inner Mongolia. They’re quite controversial, these petroglyphs. Nobody knows whether they are from a thousand years ago or twenty thousand years ago. And no one knows what they signify. Or what culture created them." Kong’s thin, high-cheeked face was lit with knowledge and pleasure. "Here!" He reached for one of Spencer’s maps, uncapped his ballpoint, and drew a circle around a section of the Helan Shan mountains. "This is where they’re found. No place else."

"Only here?" Spencer’s grin pulled slowly at his mouth. "This is great. We’ve got to check this out. I’ve never seen any design like this in the Americas, a sun with the face of a monkey."

"Isn’t it so. Moreover, monkeys were never native to this part of north China. Never."

That stopped Spencer cold. "Then the image must date from after trade was established."

"Yet the patina on the rocks suggest these petroglyphs are much, much older," Kong countered. "We don’t know. We only know that this motif-we call it the monkey sun god-is unique to the Helan Shan."

"And it was sketched in this letter, written to Father Teilhard in 1945. What does that tell us?"

Dr. Kong touched his fingertips together. "Let me think back and forth. Certainly by 1945 nothing would have been published about this rock art. At that time the monkey sun god would only have been known to local people."

"Suoyi, " Alice said, "whoever wrote this letter lived in or near the Helan Shan Mountains."

Spencer picked up the map Dr. Kong had drawn on. "So worst case-I mean, suppose we don’t find what we’re looking for here? We could go on to"-he squinted-"Eren Obo." He propped open his notebook and wrote swiftly, beaming. "You’re something, Dr. Kong. How’d you know about this petroglyph?"

"How could I not know? Late Paleolithic hunter-gatherers are my specialty."

"Late Paleolithic…" Spencer glanced from Kong to Lin. "I’d assumed both of you were Homo erectus specialists."

"Dr. Lin is an expert on Homo erectus," Dr. Kong clarified, pointing to the other Chinese. "Early-Middle Paleolithic."

Dr. Lin nodded. "And I study nomadic foragers in the Late Paleolithic," he finished. "Also the Neolithic, the transition to agriculture."

"Ah. Like me," Spencer said.

Kong nodded.

"Then why were you selected to come, Dr. Kong?" Alice asked.

"Oh! Because I am the vice director’s cousin."

Aha, Alice thought. Of course.

"The vice director depends on me to take care of you. And, of course, to watch you."

Alice jumped on his candor like a small animal. "Do you know anything about those men who were following us in Beijing?"

He shook his head. "I don’t know who they were. But it was ordered, I know that. They are watching you. Surely you realize they watch foreigners."

"Yes-sometimes-" Alice said.

"It’s because you’re looking for Peking Man. Please understand, this is considered most important."

"Of course it is," Spencer agreed. "And thanks for being honest. I appreciate it. I think you’re all right, Dr. Kong. I like you."

"Bici." Kong smiled. It’s mutual.

An hour later they were bouncing out of Yinchuan in a cheap rented jeep, an old machine that had seen many better years. It had gray splotches of primer everywhere, rudely patched tires, and one door that wouldn’t shut. The driver grinned at Alice crazily when she addressed him in Chinese and asked if he thought the jeep would make it. He had a mouthful of silver teeth and lentil-shaped freckles splashed over his jutting cheekbones. "I have my tools!" he explained, waving a thin, muscled arm at a single screwdriver and a plastic jug filled with water. "It’s no problem!"

"Those are your tools? That’s it? You have a spare tire?"

"Foreign woman, don’t worry. I can drive to the shores of the four seas and back."

"What’s he saying about the jeep?" Spencer asked nervously.

"He says it runs great."

And it did attain surprising speeds as they roared out of the city, out of the oasis with its lush fields and into the desert. The dirt and rocks became a carpet, rolling gently away toward the horizon, where the wall of the Helan Shan could faintly be seen. No one followed them. Alice could see miles of empty road behind. Scotch broom and sagebrush and other scrubby plants Alice could not name grew in patches. The terrain was so like the Mojave that Alice expected to see a green-and-white sign at any moment, announcing Barstow or Needles. But the road was unadorned and the desert was empty under the brilliant azure sky. Alice held on hard to the window frame as they slammed over potholes and rattled in and out of ruts.

"Dr. Kong." Spencer leaned over the seat. "Is it true as I’ve heard-the archaeological sites out here are undisturbed?"

"Oh, yes! Untouched." Kong smiled, though his bony frame was bouncing cruelly against the hard seat. "Man has been here continuously for eons. We just have not had the resources to study the place. Only a few of the major cultures have even been identified!"

"God," Adam groaned next to her. "Alice, there’s nothing like this in the West. It’s a gold mine."

"Want to change your project?" she joked.

"No! Peking Man’s the thing. That’s what we’re after."

"But it’s heaven for Dr. Kong," she said, glancing at the rapt Chinese professor.

Lin was watching her. "Dr. Kong loves the Neolithic," he said.

"And you, Dr. Lin? You love Homo erectus?"

"I do," he said, and excitement touched his mouth and eyes. "I’ve studied Sinanthropus all my life-from pictures, you understand, and from the bits and pieces we have found at other sites around China. It’s not much. A skull fragment here and a tooth there. Of course, we keep digging at Zhoukoudian, but during the fifty years since Peking Man disappeared we have found almost nothing. Nothing like the original cache of fossils."

"Yet you’ve learned a lot about the yuanren."

"Yes-his tools, what he ate, how he hunted, how he used fire. Where he found shelter."

"Did they have language? Imagination?"

He laughed out loud. "Of course, we don’t know this. But, truly spoken, we could learn so much more if we could locate Peking Man. That is why I had to come on this expedition. If there is any chance at all to find it-even so little as one blade in a field of grass-it is worth going to the ends of the world."

Ah, she thought, such longing. "Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we succeeded?"

"Ke bu shi ma, " he said in the soft voice of a man who has learned not to allow himself to hope, Isn’t it so.

Presently the jeep left the road and bounced through a grove of oleaster trees. The trees stopped at a barren, skidding slope of bare dirt. At its bottom, slow and brown with the sun shattered all over it, crawled the Yellow River.

The jeep coughed to a stop in the trees. Red-cheeked children ran shrieking up the bank, and a gaggle of older women appeared with a watermelon, a cleaver, and a piece of bright cloth. In a moment they had rigged up a little table and awning and were selling slices for thirty fen apiece. Other passengers rolled down into the grove to wait with them: a truckful of armed People’s Liberation Army soldiers, a man driving goats, and a stunted little pickup truck overflowing with a family of Mongols. Alice stared at the ancient patriarch, tiny round glasses of hammered gold on his nose and a few wisps of white straggling from his chin.

"Good morning, Elder uncle," she said politely.

"The foreigner talks! The foreigner talks!" The children punched each other and giggled. The old man’s eyes were almost lost in folds of skin; his papery mouth trembled.

Then she studied the soldiers, wood faced, sitting in two rows in their flatbed truck. Each gripped the worn stock of an automatic rifle.

"What are soldiers doing out here?" Spencer whispered.

She swallowed. "Remember what they’ve been saying. This is a military area."

"So’s Nevada," he said sourly.

He was right, of course. She noticed the other passengers had edged away from the soldiers and turned their backs to them. An unpleasant silence ballooned over the group, broken only by the slight slapping of the waves and the hum of the barge’s little motor as it bellied up to the shore and loaded everyone on.

They crossed the river in silence and drove off the barge on the other side. "The PLA’s not too popular out here, is it?" Spencer asked. She translated softly. Kong and Lin looked at each other but didn’t answer.

The road was now dirt, rutted and unpaved, and they drove west on it through landscape which had subtly changed. Instead of rocky, pebbly desert there stretched away all around them a carpet of yellow earth-loess, Spencer called it, the dust and silt carried and spread by the Yellow River over geologic time. This blanket of loess was not flat, but billowed and rolled in every direction, making hills and hollows and soft eroded canyons, all the same dun color. Loess. Left by the river. Carved out of this earth, every so often, were little settlements of houses, with sunflowers and hollyhocks blooming by their doors. But as they drove through these settlements the people Alice glimpsed didn’t look as she expected. They had neither the flat, scornful faces of the Mongols nor the mixed, half-Turkic faces of the Muslims. They weren’t tall the way northern Chinese were either. The people she saw were small, with wiry, curved legs and compact, corded bodies. They looked like the people in China’s southern provinces. Puzzling.

"Have these villages been here long?" Alice asked Dr. Kong as they rattled through one.

"Not long," he answered.

"Like… a few generations?" she pushed.

He shifted in his seat, adjusting his cell phone on his belt, looking away. "The people you see out here were resettled. East China and South China are very crowded. Here, the population is small. So people moved here."

She heard the careful diction of Chinese evasion and glanced imprudently at Lin. He darkened his eyes in the universal signal: Don’t ask about this. She turned, mind racing, and fixed an innocent look out the window. So! These villagers must have been inmates of the laogai, released from the camps but not allowed to leave the area. Of course. She could see they were poor people with hardscrabble lives, hanging washing over rocks and pulling carts down dirt tracks. They had all been prisoners, and now were doomed to a lifetime in this yellow dust. Was Lin’s wife one?

It was almost noon when they finally topped a rise and headed down a long slope to the Shuidonggou site. At the bottom of the little dirt valley lay a winding, glittering creek lined with rustling acacia trees. Behind the creek rose a canyon wall, and along the top of the canyon limped what was left of the Great Wall.

In the center of the canyon face, halfway up, a huge box-like hole had been excavated.

"This is it," Kong whispered. He jumped out of the jeep and scrambled eagerly up the yellow-earth wall.

They all followed. "This is one of the few archaeological sites in China that’s really been excavated," Adam told Alice. "Like Zhoukoudian."

Lin pried a tiny piece of stone out of the dirt wall. "See? This type of rock is native to this area. It could have occurred here naturally. But this one"-he worked another one loose- "had to have been brought here by someone. That’s how we can tell humans lived here. And look." He brushed off the bits of dirt. "See these scrape marks and chips? It was worked by someone’s hands."

"Incredible," Alice breathed. "What kind of culture lived here?"

"This is a Late Paleolithic site," Dr. Lin said. "So, of course, I do not know as much as Dr. Kong." He glanced at the other Chinese professor, on his knees, excitedly picking bits of rock from the dirt wall. "But I know a little. We should find microliths everywhere. You see, stonework was quite advanced here, and they trimmed pieces like this into scrapers and blades. Hunting was crucial-until about eight thousand years ago, when they started domesticating steppe animals and growing crops. Then their tool making changed." He smiled down at her. "Do you find it interesting?"

"Interesting!" She examined the stone he had handed her. "It’s almost beyond words. How old do you think this is?"

He peered at it. "Maybe ten, twelve thousand years."

"I’ve never held anything so old," she breathed.

"Look!" Spencer cried suddenly.

He had picked up a tiny circle of something white, and laid it on his palm; it had a perfect hole drilled through its middle. A bead. "See?" Spencer said. "Only a human with a tool could have made this. It’s ostrich shell. That makes it easy to date-ostriches have been extinct here since the end of the Pleistocene. Beautiful, isn’t it?"

Alice translated, skipping over the words ostrich and Pleistocene,and saying instead, "a big bird that has been extinct here for a long time." She stared awestruck at the tiny thing. Someone made that at least ten thousand years ago, she thought. Ten thousand years – the time unit of commitment in the Chinese mind. I will love you for ten thousand years. May you live for ten thousand years. Wansui.

"What?" said Dr. Kong, looking up from the spot where he was working.

Spencer held out the bead.

"Let me see," said Kong, reaching for it, and somehow in the fumble the thing dropped to their feet, glanced off someone’s shoe, and bounced out of the cutaway toward the valley floor below.

Alice saw Lin’s face, stricken, follow the tiny, threading arc the bead made for a split second against the air. White, almost the same color as the earth below, it would be hell to find.

"Oh, shit," Adam mumbled. "Sorry."

"The fault is mine." Kong sighed.

"No, really. God."

"It doesn’t matter," Kong said. He turned to the wall and returned to prizing out chips and rock bits. "There is more here to find."

"No"-Lin shook his head-"it was perfect. I’m going to look for it." He turned and climbed back down the handholds in the wall.

Adam sighed. "I feel terrible."

"It’s okay," she said, knowing it wasn’t, not really.

"Listen, Alice. Let’s start looking for the Mongol family. They’re the thing we should concentrate on."

She closed her eyes and visualized the empty rock-and-earth expanse of this little valley the way they had seen it, driving in. There had been no signs of habitation. None. "Did you see anything from the jeep?"

"No, I didn’t. But let’s just start walking."

She explained to Dr. Kong, and they followed Lin back down the wall. Kong was absorbed in the microliths embedded in the loess walls, Lin in pacing back and forth by the stream, head down, scanning the soft earth. Alice and Adam left them and hiked upstream.

"Teilhard never says exactly where they lived."

"What if they’re gone?" she asked.

"They might be."

"What if even their house is gone?"

"That’s unlikely. The climate here preserves things, which is why Teilhard found so much at Shuidonggou in the first place. We’ll find them. We just have to cover the whole area."

So they walked, in the pulsating yellow sun, through the silty dirt. The crumbling canyon walls rose around them. Ravines and washes tumbled down from the crest above, where the ridgeline was still topped with the eroded backbone of the Great Wall.

Spencer said they should explore each ravine in turn. So they climbed as high in each one as they could, struggling up the grade, slipping in the quick, fine earth. Sometimes they got close enough to catch a glimpse of the worn-down Wall above them, sometimes they hit a jumble of rocks or an impossibly narrow cleft or some other formation that told them no house could possibly have been built any higher up. Then they would turn around. They stopped talking. There was no sound except their sand-sucking footsteps, the drone of wind, and the scratching of Adam’s pen in his notebook as he mapped the system of canyons.

"Keep going," Spencer insisted when her disappointment started to show. She did. Even three hours later, when his shirt was sweat blotched and his nose starting to show pink, he kept saying it. "Let’s do the next one."

"The house could be anywhere. In any direction."

"We’ll find it," he said stubbornly.

It was like this, dragging, empty handed, that Dr. Lin Shiyang spotted them moving around the lip of a wash, at the turn of the canyon a mile or so up. "Tamen zai ner," he said with relief, and pointed them out to Kong with his chin. A small movement, economical. He was hot and tired too.

’’Na hao. Women zou-ba. " Kong sighed, and walked away to collect the driver from his patch of shade.

When the Americans walked up Lin could see they’d found nothing. Their eyes sagged with failure.

"It should have been right here," Spencer said, the rust-headed woman putting his words into melodious Chinese. "Right by the site. But it’s okay. Tomorrow, we’ll keep looking."

He nodded and looked down at the woman. "Zenmoyang?" he asked her-How did it go?

She shook her head. Nothing.

"Tai zao-le, " he said sympathetically.

Alice sighed in acknowledgment. All she wanted at this moment was to get back to Yinchuan and have a bath. She was coated with dust and grit. Her mouth was dry and aching with thirst, but she had finished off her water bottle as they hiked back down the last canyon.

Lin saw her glance at her bottle, empty, saw the flush in her freckled cheeks. He held out his own, still a third full. "Gei, " he said quietly.

"Oh, no," she said. "Na zenmo xing."

"Gei, " he said again.

She took it, drank gratefully, and handed it back to him. "Thank you."

He nodded and reattached it to his belt.

"What did you get?" Spencer was saying in English to Dr. Kong, nodding his head at Kong’s sack bulging with microliths.

Kong smiled broadly and opened the bag for Spencer, who inspected the contents and gave him a thumbs-up. "Good work."

The driver, who stood next to Lin, cleared his throat and glanced pointedly at the sun’s angle above their heads. The light had grown long and yellow, the shimmering heat almost unbearable.

"Yes," Lin said. "We should go."

"Dr. Spencer," she said, taking a few steps toward him, "the driver says we should hit the road."

"Oh? Okay. Hey, congratulations, Dr. Kong. Great stuff." He twirled the bag closed and handed it back to the Chinese, smiled tiredly at her. "Let’s go."

"God, Adam," she said in English, "look at your neck! Don’t you feel it? It’s bright red!"

"It is?" He reached back and touched it, winced.

"You have to be more careful. Sunburn is no joke." As she spoke she reached out and unfolded his shirt collar, positioning it gently so it covered his neck. She smoothed out the denim. "Really. Be careful."

Lin felt his stomach drop, watching them. Don’t stare, he ordered himself. Turn away. The way she touched the American man! So familiar, so intimate. So there was something between them. When he and Kong had been briefed it had been made clear that these two foreigners did not know each other until a week ago, when the man hired the woman as his interpreter. Both, they’d been informed, were unmarried. He’d heard stories about Americans, just as all Chinese had. Their restlessness, their high sexual interest. These two had worked together only one week. Could they already be qing ren?

"You ready, Dr. Lin?" Now her face was turned to him, those khaki eyes wide open, pleasant, expectant.

"Eh," he said. "Ready." Remarkable.

"Zou-ba, " she said, watching Lin climb into the rear seat.

She stepped into the back and sat next to Lin. He showed her a millisecond of mild surprise, and then faced front again. She adjusted in her seat for Spencer, who climbed in the back on her other side. Kong got in front with the driver.

They bounced up the dirt road, twisting and turning through the long series of canyons. It would take an hour and a half to get to the ferry crossing. She let the first hour go by without a word.

As they passed through the resettled villages, she saw that Lin scanned out the window constantly.

He thinks his wife might still be out there, Alice realized. He thinks he might actually see her.

So she waited until they came almost to the river before she spoke to him. By then, she knew, they were out of the laogai zone and the only people they would see would be the Mongols, and the Muslims, driving their camels and their sheep and their two-wheeled carts.

"Dr. Lin," she ventured. "Find anything today?"

He turned to her with his mouth bent in the smallest smile. Instead of speaking, he opened his clenched palm and extended it.

There, all but invisible in the brown landscape of hollows and calluses, gleamed the tiny ostrich-shell bead.

Sun Gong, third assistant Party vice manager for Ningxia Province, was back in his office after a week’s leave, glancing through a sheaf of faxes on his desk. One from Beijing caught his eye. It was his prudent habit to always look carefully at faxes from Beijing.

Vice Manager Sun squinted at the letterhead: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. Curious. The IVPP was the national research institute handling anthropology and archaeology. They gave out excavation permits and oversaw Ningxia’s provincial Bureau of Cultural Relics. What was odd was that they were communicating with the Party ofnce-with him, Sun Gong. Normally their directives went straight to the Bureau of Cultural Relics.

He scanned through the fax. Alerting him to the presence of an American archaeologist and his female assistant… attempting to recover Peking Man, the single most important batch of fossils lost by China during the world war… calls placed to highest-level U.S. Government offices… Peking Man! Sun’s eyebrows went up. One of China’s great lost treasures. He read on: Two Chinese scientists accompanying, from Huabei University… permits granted to cross Xi Xia Missile Range… please coordinate with regional PLA command. They are providing security. Cordially. Vice Director Han.

Security! Sun’s fingers trembled as he pulled a crumpled pack of Flying Horse cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one loose, and lit it. The words seemed clear enough, but what lay behind them? Did Vice Director Han imply that if they found the precious Peking Man remains-though surely that was impossible, for the Japanese had spirited the bones away fifty years before-the Americans might try to smuggle the fossils out of the country? The very idea made Sun Gong bridle in righteous fury.

Or was it possible-could it be-did they suspect espionage?

Yes, he thought, pulling hard on the strong cigarette and feeling his heart race, yes, it was possible. Anything was possible. The archaeologists were going to cross a missile range, after all. Highly sensitive. State secrets.

For years, Sun Gong had been looking for a way to prove himself to the bosses above his head. It was not easy, out here in the provinces, where nothing ever happened.

He snatched up the phone and jabbed out a number. Miles away, at the PLA command post, he heard the insistent ring.

"Wei?"

"Give me Lieutenant Shan."

"Lieutenant Shan! Who’s calling?"

He raised his face and blew a perfect smoke ring, which floated lazily toward the ceiling. "His cousin," he answered, satisfied, for a moment, with his lot in life. "Ningxia Province Party Vice Manager Sun Gong."

Back at the Number One, she stopped at the front desk after dinner. "Phone call to Beijing." She took a form and filled it out.

The fuwuyuan took the slip, bored. "Hao-de, " she said. "Deng yixia. "

On her way back to her room Alice thought through what to say. Mother Meng, I’m sorry for the scene I caused, showing up like that with Jian and his wife there, at your apartment. Next time before I visit you I’ll call first -

The phone in her room was jangling. Next to it she saw the clipping, the yellowed newsprint, the obituary of Lucile Swan. She snatched at the receiver. "Wei!"

"Beijing dianhua!" the operator screamed.

Suddenly there was a male voice on the other end. "Wei! Wei!"

A male voice? But this was Meng Shaowen’s apartment.

"Wei, " she said tentatively, "Duibuqi." Sorry. "I must have punched wrong. I’m seeking the home of Meng Shaowen."

"Who is this?" The voice tensed.

"Jian?" she whispered. Of all the bad luck-

"Mo Ai-li," he said flatly, recognizing her.

"Jian, please. Is she there? I need to talk to her."

"You can’t."

"Please, Jian-"

"Do you understand me or not!" he cried in a swift, miserable spurt. "She’s gone away!"

"What?" Gone away was the Chinese euphemism for dead, but he couldn’t mean she was dead, he couldn’t possibly-

"Ta zou-le, " he repeated, She’s gone away.

"But what are you talking about!" she cried.

"It was her lungs-an embolism, they think. The neighbors took her to the hospital but"-now she heard his voice cracking -"it was too late."

"But I just saw her Saturday! She was fine!"

"It happened that night. Later."

"I don’t believe it!" Behind the words her heart was screaming and thrashing in her chest. "Are you sure?"

"Ai-li," he said softly. "Of course I’m sure."

"But, Jian, it’s impossible."

"Ai-li, please," he said. There was a strained silence, as if he was trying to decide whether to comfort her, which was dangerous, for it might let some of the love back in between them, or whether to cut her off quickly and decisively. "Eh, " he said gruffly. "How do you think I feel? She’s my mother. But now she’s gone. Gone to the Yellow Springs. You’ll see her in another life. Isn’t it so?"

He waited for her to answer but she couldn’t, she could only stand frozen with the tears burning and forcing and finally seeping out of her eyes. She pressed the phone against her forehead. How could he expect her to answer?

"Eh, Mo Ai-li, bie ku," Don’t cry. "I’m sorry if I was rough with you the other day. I never expected to see you here. And my wife-my baby…"

"I know," she gulped through her tears.

"I wish you good luck in your life," he said. "Really." He paused and she didn’t answer. He waited a little more and finally cleared his throat. "Good-bye, Ai-li," he whispered softly, and hung up the phone.