Lost in Translation

13

Alice sank hard to her knees, pulse hammering. The voices, bursting one atop the other in a thrill of Mandarin, and Spencer’s English, first "My God," and then "Can you get it open?" but she couldn’t speak, in either language, because for a moment speech lay entirely outside her. She squatted in the cave, in the flashlight-riddled dark, gasping, stunned.

It’s here, she thought. We found it.

"Slowly," Lin was saying to Kong, who was bent over the box. "Be careful."

She trained her flashlight straight ahead and realized, with a start, that Lin was standing directly in front of her. His khaki-wrinkled leg rose before her face. To connect the twoenergies, of the body and soul… Without thinking she put out her hand, slipped it under the rough cotton cuff, and slid over the smooth knob of Lin’s ankle. She felt him shudder, sensed the current of surprise through him.

Lin felt it. Everything about him was focused on Peking Man, yet still he answered her touch by pressing his leg back into her hand. "It’s not locked, is it?" he said to Kong simultaneously.

She squeezed his ankle once and removed her hand.

"Locked? I’m not clear," Kong was saying as his slim, brushlike fingers explored the box’s rim. He fluttered down to the dirt-crusted catch on its front, tested it.

A thrill of murmured tones raced around the little group as everyone trained their flashlights on the box. "No. It’s not locked." Gently Kong manipulated the clasp.

In the hush of indrawn breath the click of the latch opening filled the air around them. Then, the soft creak of the lid. From the corner of her eye Alice glimpsed Spencer’s blond putty face, haggard, triumphant.

The first to speak was Lin.

"Zenmo-le?" Alice heard him croak in disbelief. She craned over the hunched shoulders of Kuyuk, trained her flashlight beam into the yellow pool with all the others. The beam shone into a bottomless black hole, large and dusty.

It was empty.

’’Mei shenmo, " Kuyuk breathed.

"Nothing there," she translated.

"But the bones have to be there!" Spencer insisted.

Dr. Kong tipped the box so that its interior, bare and blank, aimed mercilessly at the face of the American.

"Jesus, this is terrible." Alice touched Spencer’s shoulder.

"Looted…" Spencer shook out, fixing the box with a glassy-eyed stare.

She sent a desperate glance to Lin. The Chinese scientist was already looking at her, his maroon lips flat with sorrow and frustration. "We’ll just have to keep trying." The painful words squeezed out of him. "Won’t we?"

No one answered.

"After all," Dr. Lin croaked, "water wears through a rock."

Outside in the light the soldiers, who by now understood that the artifacts had been stolen at some point, herded the group to the side of the cave entrance. "Wait," the group leader ordered.

Then he opened his cell phone and dialed the Public Security unit from his base. As soon as someone answered he started shouting angrily into the little phone he clutched to his face.

"What’s he saying?" Spencer hissed.

"You’re not going to believe this." She shook her head. "He’s reporting the theft."

"What!"

"Well…" She hesitated, wondering how to explain it to Spencer. Life in China always followed a particular logic, and he just didn’t see it yet. "From his point of view, there’s been a crime. Now he has to go through the appropriate steps. Relax. He doesn’t think we took it."

"I should hope not! Does he realize it’s probably been gone for thirty or forty years?"

"Maybe," she said. "Not that it would matter."

Spencer emitted a croak of disbelief and buried his head in his hands. Kuyuk stood off to the side, studiously ignoring things. Kong and Lin simply tolerated it. They didn’t bother arguing with the soldiers or suggesting that an investigation would waste everyone’s time. Instead they stood, staring out over the ledge to the canyon below, lost in their regret and frustration, waiting for these military functionaries-who, Kong and Lin being scholars, were naturally beneath them in the general hierarchy of things-to finish their job.

Half an hour later the Public Security men arrived, exhausted and annoyed at the long climb from the lamasery. They were taken quickly inside to see the scene of the crime, and then hustled right back out by the soldiers.

A lengthy and heated discussion ensued between Public Security and the soldiers as to who bore responsibility for the theft. The soldiers insisted that the police should have taken better precautions with such a National Cultural Treasure; the officers retorted that the cave was a nuclear missile silo and therefore under the purview of the Army; moreover, who knew Peking Man was in there in the first place? Everyone unburdened themselves of blame. No resolution was reached. The loud voices gradually died down. Kong, Lin, and Kuyuk waited in patient silence, while Alice translated quietly for Spencer.

Finally the officers drafted a statement, read it aloud, and had everyone initial it. In a last flare of self-righteous fury they handed the empty box to Dr. Spencer and stomped away back down the mountain.

"All right," the military group leader said at last when the police were out of sight, "you may go."

At the lamasery they piled into their jeep and bounced back in silence. Spencer slumped on the window. "Adam," Alice tried once, touching his arm, and he said in reply: "What am I going to do now?"

"I’m so sorry," she said quietly, feeling for him. And on the other side of her was Lin, burning with his own pain and loss. She knew how he’d longed for this. She saw. They jolted in silence all the way to Eren Obo.

At the guesthouse Kuyuk said good-night. Dr. Kong and Dr. Lin showed as little as possible, though the veneer of hurt in their faces was clear. Spencer hardly spoke at all.

Lin and Kong said the box should be left overnight in Spencer’s room, but Spencer made a barring gesture. "Don’t bring that thing near me!"

So Dr. Kong shrugged and carried it upstairs. Spencer followed. It was just Lin and her. He started to say good-night, then stopped. "Do you remember when we sat on the bridge in the middle of the night in Yinchuan?" he asked.

"Of course," she said quietly.

"You asked me-do you remember or not-had I ever wished my life could be different?"

"Yes," she said, mesmerized.

"I did not tell you the truth. The truth is, I wish it." He looked miserable. "I wish we had found the bones today. I wish we could have brought our ancient ancestor back. I wish I either had my wife or else I-I knew her fate."

She felt numb when she heard the last sentence, so full of yearning. "I know it’s hard for you."

"Yes." He sighed. She felt his eyes moving over her. "You’re a good woman, Mo Ai-li. I’m not sure if you understand how it is with me, with my commitments. I wouldn’t want to hurt you."

Maybe you wouldn’t have to hurt me, she thought.

He turned resolutely and walked up the stairs.

"Peaceful night," she called softly, but he did not hear.

Alice awoke. For a moment she clung to the void, and then remembered. Crash. Peking Man stolen from the cave. Who did it? When? How many decades?

And another thing.

What if she let herself fall in love with Lin Shiyang?

If they kept going like this, they were going to sleep together. She closed her eyes, imagining how it would be to let herself go with him, to have him inside her and wrapped around her and to come: the high tide, the Chinese called it, the flooding instant without a mind or heart. To come with him. Oh, God. What if she let it happen?

Then again he might not let it happen, because of Meiyan. Or he might let it happen only partway. Keep free of myself, ifpossible, Lucile, in having me.

Yet Lucile had taken the chance, hadn’t she? She had loved Pierre Teilhard de Chardin anyway.

And what had she gotten for it, actually? Too little. In the end she grew old alone. Alice’s eyes strayed to the little altar she had half hidden behind a stack of Teilhard’s books. She should do more for her ancestors, she thought guiltily. Lucile would probably help her if Alice served her better in the world of ghosts. It came to Alice that she should go out and get some ritual objects. Things like incense, fruit. Well-omened characters on silk ribbons. Paper money.

There was a store in the town that sold such objects, Alice recalled suddenly, feeling almost inspired. This was the thing to do. She got up and washed quickly, climbed into her jeans, dug around for her wallet, and went out.

Several miles from the town, in the clutch of loess-brick administrative buildings he used as his headquarters to command both Yinchuan and the area around Eren Obo, Lieutenant Shan called his subordinates together.

"Listen, you whores. The west-ocean outsiders have failed. They found the box in which Peking Man was hidden, but some clever fornicating person had already stolen it. Huh! And sold it profitably, I’m sure. Anyway, it’s obvious now the foreigners will not find the ape-man. They may keep trying, but all they’ll do is squat in the outhouse-squat and produce nothing." He chuckled and lit a cigarette, drew in deeply.

"Moreover," he continued. "I’ve received word from Beijing. They have no further interest. So-do your mothers. As of now the surveillance is canceled." Smoke drifted from his mouth. "I don’t have any more time to waste on these foreigners anyway." He looked around the room. "Go on, out."

Lin Shiyang spent a long time by his window that morning, watching the dark ridgeline change along the mountain crest. First dawn, the sun screaming from behind the mountains. Then the brilliant blue bowl of midday. He stared unhappily at the world’s transformation.

What was more brutal than the loss of hope? Now they would not restore Peking Man to China after all. Would not attract the money to excavate new sites, even to finally sort and catalog and properly store the appalling disarray of Homo erectusfossils which still remained from the Zhoukoudian site. Would not clean up the mess which had begun when most of the Peking Man bones disappeared in 1941 and whirled out of control when the Cultural Revolution came, and the students seized what bones were left and poured them out on the floor and ground them under their feet-if only, now, they could have borne back the original Peking Man. That would have reversed things.

They had started in such hope. He recalled as if it had just occurred the electrically charged scene three weeks before in Zhengzhou, when the department head had given them this assignment. How shocked he had been when the man mentioned Yinchuan, and Inner Mongolia! How he had gaped at his director-the stocky little man with the receding chin and the bottle-thick glasses and the perpetual stacks of files on his desk-who’d had no idea that Lin’s wife had vanished in this remote place twenty-two years before.

But she did, and she’s gone.

Then admit that she’s dead.

Meiyan dead.

Lin couldn’t bear this thought, this black door. Inside was a pain so sharp, so barbed with guilt, he could not go near it. So he thought: Out! Must go out. Paralyzing, these four walls. He hurried down to the street, then up the hill and to the intersection. The monochromatic labyrinth of buildings, the dark wall of mountain-somehow it comforted him. It couldn’t really be said that she was dead, he reassured himself. No. Her fate was simply unknown. He could approach Mo Ai-li.

Then what of the promise you made?

He twisted uncomfortably into a faster walk. "You don’t have to wait for me," Meiyan had told him. "But I will," he’d replied, even as he sensed the far-off foreboding of doom. How could he have said otherwise? She was, of the two of them, the superior being. The better Chinese. Where she had upheld the truth, he had swayed with the wind. So since she’d been taken he waited, which seemed the least he could do. His liaisons with women allowed the yang part of him to flower once in a while, but they never disturbed his true self. His true self rested intact.

Yet now he’d looked for Meiyan and found nothing. It was if his wife had never been here.

And now the line was drawn and the stage was set with an outside woman, an aware woman, a woman who could hear one thing yet grasp ten others. It was a kind of intellect and soul the Chinese prized. He walked harder, picturing the small freckled face and the blunt-bottomed red hair. The way she sat right down out in the desert, sat shockingly the way a Westerner does, her ass in the dirt, her blue jean legs crossed. The way she talked directly into his face.

All of him, his mind, his heart, his yang, could not stop dwelling on it.

He paused in front of a small brick store that sold death-ritual objects. Its huge, brilliantly colored displays of paper flowers held his gaze. Silk ribbons of every color ran from the standing wreaths like tears. Poles, tented with tasseled white paper, hung down their curtains of white streamers. This was lamaistic, Mongolian. It was different from the stores in Shanghai he remembered his mother going into when he was a child. That had been another world, the twilight of another time. Now he would never enter such a store. He was not some tu, backward peasant, but a modern man.

So he felt it as a shocking drop in his midsection when he heard the female voice that had been enthralling his imagination, flattened by its American accent, call out to him sharply from within the store:

"Eh, Lin Boshi!"

It was Alice, running out, taking his hand impulsively and then dropping it. "See who I’ve walked into-Ssanang, the Leader’s daughter."

The Mongol woman, taller than Mo Ai-li, stepped out. "I came here to buy things. It is the first anniversary of my aunt’s death."

"Lin, listen," Alice burst in. "She has a photograph!"

Eh, those eyes. Inhuman nearly. "Of what?"

"Of Teilhard!" she cried. "And Lucile!"

"Lucile Swan?" he repeated.

"Don’t you understand?" Mo Ai-li demanded. Her hand slipped out to touch his again. "It means Lucile must have come here with him in 1945. She was here in Eren Obo."

"But the Leader did not tell us this."

"It was not asked," Ssanang explained. She took a small book from her pocket, extracted a tattered picture, and handed it to him.

He bent over it with Mo Ai-li. The priest and the American woman stood small and wartime serious in the frame, arms folded, by a low cluster of buildings. Behind them a strange W-shaped cleft marked the mountain ridge.

"What is this place?"

"No one knows. One of the Leader’s men went with them and made the photo. It was a place the priest asked to be taken. That is all we knew."

"It looks like someone’s home."

"The Mongol family?" Alice asked.

He met her eyes briefly and then turned the picture over, as if some clue might be on the back. It was empty, crisscrossed only with a web of fine sepia crack-lines. "What about the men who accompanied them to this place?"

"Dead many years."

He blinked.

"I heard what happened in the cave yesterday," Ssanang said quickly. "That you found the box, and someone had removed Peking Man. Pitiable! Keep the picture. It has no use for us."

"Do you think we can find this place?" Alice asked.

"If you look"-Ssanang paused-"be careful. The Army is everywhere. Now I must go. My aunt’s memorial."

They watched her carry her purchases away down the hill.

Mo Ai-li stood close to him. He could feel the radiant warmth from her body, see her small chest heaving. If they were not in public he would have only to raise his hands and slip them around her shoulders, turn her toward him… He closed his eyes a second. He wanted to slide his hands under her shirt and feel her. Would he do it? Would he? Yes. If they were alone.

"Lin Boshi," she was saying. "Suppose Peking Man was actually removed by someone who was supposed to remove it? Who had been asked to do so by Teilhard?"

"What?" He looked down. "Interpreter Mo. In archaeology, when artifacts are taken, it is always by looters. Thieves. Why, Dr. Spencer has said in your own country, the Native American sites-"

She shook her head. "This is different, out here. And Lucile came here with Teilhard, don’t you see? That changes everything."

"How?" he asked, wanting to listen to her talk.

"Well. It proves Teilhard confided everything in her. And she would have wanted to make sure Peking Man was never lost. It was the key to his legacy. So I think, she might have seen to it that he arranged for someone to come and remove it. Later. It was because she loved him," she said.

"Ni shuo ta ai shenfu?"

"Of course she loved him. These people." She turned back to the photograph. "This house. This could be the Mongol family."

"Yet even the Leader and his men do not know where it is."

"I bet they didn’t really try to find out."

"Mo Ai-li." He allowed himself to run his hand once over her hair. He saw her eyes soften. "Wo kan ni zai zuo meng, " I see you are still dreaming. "Listen. Since the separation of heaven and earth, men have sought glory. And this, to find Peking Man again, would be the greatest glory to me. It is our ancestor. It is a thing beyond price. But I think it is not on my road."

"Can’t a road be changed?"

No, he thought sadly, it cannot; only a fool would even imagine that it could. But this he dared not say. She might take it to mean they could not try love together either-and that he could not bear to rule out. So he shrugged and said nothing.

She only smiled. "Let’s tell the others."

They turned to walk back. He didn’t ask-somehow he didn’t really want to know-what she had been doing inside a death-ritual store in the first place, a feudal place for ignorant tu people, out here in Eren Obo.

They huddled over the photo in the guesthouse lobby.

"I know Alashan Banner, every step of its earth," Kuyuk insisted again. "How is it I cannot recognize this place?"

"Maybe it’s outside the Banner," Kong said.

"Yet one of the Leader’s men took them here."

"What do you think, Adam?" Alice asked.

"I think it’s gone," he said flatly. "We found Teilhard’s box, right in the cave, near the rock art, right where it was supposed to be. But Peking Man had been taken."

"But now we have a new lead," she insisted.

"You call that a lead? It’s a picture."

"But…" She looked at the photo. "Okay, yesterday we were at a dead end. I admit that. But things change."

"Do they?" Spencer looked at her. His eyes said, Look at you, look at your life, has anything ever changed? "You think so."

"Yes," she said defensively, "I do." She turned to Dr. Lin. "Ni shuo zenmoyang?"

"I think we should continue on. Of course! This is something very important. We must keep looking."

She smiled at him. "Wo tongyi, " I agree. "Dr. Kong?"

Kong thought. "It’s like this," he said slowly. "Is there a chance to find the relics now? Yes. Perhaps. But it is a thing so distant now, so unlikely…" He paused. ’’Ke yu er bu keqiu," Only blind luck will bring us upon it, not searching. "Therefore. Since we have found an undreamed-of quantity of hunter-gatherer artifacts, of the highest quality under heaven – enough to support research for many years-I for one would prefer to continue surveying these sites and collecting artifacts." He looked at Adam. "Are you with me, Dr. Spencer?"

Adam listened to Alice’s translation and nodded decisively to Kong. "Yes. Let’s do it-survey, plan, come up with a good research design. It’s true. The Late Paleolithic opportunities out here are beyond anything I ever imagined." He opened his book and made a note. Alice could see him blocking Peking Man from his mind, putting another beacon in its place.

"Of course"-Kong looked at Alice and Lin-"if you two wish to continue to look for Peking Man, I invite you. Please."

Alice and Lin exchanged glances. Be alone together, all day? Quickly they looked away.

After the meeting broke up she walked by herself to the edge of the town. At its boundary Eren Obo’s hard-won civilization vanished all at once in the rock-strewn dirt. Then there was rolling yellow earth, ascending ever so gradually to the brown apron of mountain in the distance. Winded, scratching at the rivulets of sweat inching down through her hair, she slumped down by the side of the road.

She didn’t have to wait long. A truck came roaring out from the village. She jumped up and signaled.

It ground to a stop.

"Elder brother." The Mongol in the truck held on to the wheel with one callused hand, and with the other clutched the groaning gearstick. "I beg help. You are going to Yinchuan?"

He nodded, and spat casually onto the ground.

"I need a message delivered to someone there." She held up the envelope. "I will gladly pay you ten dollars American to do this thing which is so important to me." She passed him the envelope with a U.S. bill, noting that his eyes widened in a favorable way. "The address is written on the outside."

He looked at it and froze.

Oh, she thought, he can’t read characters. She rushed to explain. "The man’s name is Guo Wenxiang. It is one seventy-eight Gansu Street, the Chinese quarter. Can this be remembered?"

He secreted what she’d given him in his clothing, creased his dark face into a grin. "Ni fang xin hao, " Put your heart at rest. No further pleasantries, then, as there would have been with a Chinese; he simply nodded, gunned the engine, and drove off.

She watched the dust spit up behind him, watched until he was a distant drone and then a moving dot miles away, in and out of sight among the switchbacks on the first flank of mountain. Then finally, the dot entered the sunbaked pass and vanished. She thought about what she had written in the note to Guo Wenxiang. How to find them in Eren Obo should he need to. Was there any news of the Mongol family-and, oh, yes, most privately important to her: had Guo learned anything of the fate of Zhang Meiyan?