Lost in Translation

14

Peking Man.

Alice envisioned the creature’s skull for the hundredth time: the flat brainpan, the thrusting underbite, the staring eye-holes of death.

What had Kong said of Peking Man? Ke yu er bu ke qiu, It cannot be found through effort now, only by chance. And remote chance at that.

She pulled the ling-pai from the drawer and chose a new spot for it, the rickety bedside table. She had bought a few bright paper cards in the death-ritual store, and she propped those before the plaque. What else? No food, no incense-she looked around. Tea. She opened up the little box by the thermos, crumbled some of the leaves off the tea brick, and piled them in front of the tablet. It wasn’t much, but it would do. She bowed her head.

Meng Shaowen, Lucile Swan. Help me.

She sat there numbly, aware that she didn’t really know what she asked. Help her find Peking Man-was that what she wanted? Or help her with Lin Shiyang?

Teilhard said all things happened in relationship to each other. Life and matter, like one single organism. You had only to look at it, to be in it.

If only.

She sat silently, emptying her mind, waiting. Mother Meng, you loved your husband. Lucile, you loved Pierre. Guide me.

But she felt nothing from the ling-pai, nothing. It was just a wood plaque inscribed with some characters and marked with a dried-up blotch of her blood. Her knees hurt from sitting so long. The sounds outside distracted her, the scattered voices in Mongolian, the far-off clanking of machinery. She couldn’t rid herself of an image, a thing she had seen earlier in the courtyard: a girl, singing to herself, using a glowing-hot poker to singe the shaved, pearl-colored skin of a just-slaughtered lamb.

She knocked on Lin’s door but he had vanished, gone somewhere, and so she took the photograph and left by herself. She paced up the wide, half-empty main street. A few twisty, scrubby trees had been planted, but mostly it was the low, unrelieved ocher boxes of buildings, the repeating power poles, the packed earth and desert sky. She walked past hardware stalls, produce and meat markets, with the open space and noise level of small airplane hangars. She passed a crude beauty shop: two seats, two tin basins. In wind-rattled windows she saw herself. She was short, autumn colored, shockingly different from the dark, erect, self-possessed people of the town. In America she’d always been called cute. Here she just looked different. She hated cute. Different was better.

She climbed down the shallow bank to the creek and sat by the trickling water for a while. Where was Lin? She had no right to ask him where he went, she knew that, but she still yearned to know. As if he were hers already. Foolish girl.

She stared at the stream. It was no more than a thin little gully, but spread out all around it in a blessed alluvial strip was a carpet of deep green. Even just the tiny sound of the water, and the rippling of the breeze in the grass, relieved something parched in her. She never had enough to drink in Eren Obo. Water was strictly apportioned, and she got only one boiled thermosful a day. Strange how she’d adjusted down to it. Hoarded aside enough for washing, and measured out the rest. It was just enough. But it always left her wanting more.

Should he give up? Lin asked himself. He sat on a pile of smooth white limestone rocks in a grove of poplars, looking at a clear pebbled stream. He’d caught a ride to this village called Long Bin. Behind him was the one dirt-road intersection and a single stucco building, directions to other villages painted on it in big red characters. The building fronted a big sunbaked open space that served as the village square. He’d been talking to a man who now stood at the top of the bank, wearing a straw fedora, sunglasses, and a loose white shirt. "It’s regrettable we knew nothing of your wife," the man said.

"Never mind. I’ve troubled you too much, elder brother."

"Don’t talk polite. Old Yuan is leaving soon for Eren Obo. He’ll give you a lift back."

"Thank you."

"Nothing. A trifle."

Lin looked up through the columns of poplars. It was so hot. The sky was so pale, almost white-baked of color. Exhausted, like this settlement, with its one whitewashed building and its paths, radiating out to its irregular spattering of mud huts.

Like his idea of ever finding out what had happened to his airen. No one seemed to know. No one anywhere he went.

They met back at the guesthouse. He didn’t say where he had been. She didn’t ask.

They went out and walked in the waning sun up to Eren Obo’s plaza-a brick circle, concentrically ringed with pink hollyhocks. In the center stood a statue of a camel, head and foreleg nobly raised.

Some Mongol men were playing on the bricks, hitching up their loose cotton pants and haggling over their chesslike game. Their playing board was a square of paper marked in a strange, complex geometric pattern. A player moved a piece. All the men cheered.

"Excuse me." She squatted next to one of the Mongol men and spoke in slow, clear Chinese.

"Outside woman!" he squawked, his accent heavy. He looked up at her and Lin.

"Do any of you know this place?" She extended the photograph. The men craned over it and erupted in their own language. Alice and Lin listened, exchanging looks. The Mongols didn’t know. The hesitant, speculative rhythm of their speech was obvious.

"Sorry, foreign lady," one concluded in Chinese.

"It’s nothing. Thank you," Lin said. By the time they had turned back into the rings of hollyhocks the men were playing again, exhorting one another, laughing.

As they walked she wondered when Lin was going to tell her about his family. She was waiting for him to reveal more about himself. Talking about families signaled serious intent in Chinese erotic relations. It brought honor to the equation.

And what was honor for her? Taking Lin home to meet Horace? Never. Although she loved her father in her own way -even needed him-she knew enough now to keep a man like Lin far away from him. She was older now, stronger. She’d never cave in to Horace again, not like she had with Jian. She would live according to the center of herself, and Horace would not be permitted to have an opinion.

Startling, how simple it sounded.

In this daze of realization she walked beside Lin for most of the afternoon, feeling calm. They talked only a little. As Teilhard had written to Lucile, let us not discuss too much aboutwords…

But they found nothing. By now everyone in the town knew what they were looking for before they approached. "Let me see the picture!" the townspeople would bark. They would study it and, almost to a man and woman, be crossed by an instant of genuine pain and forfeiture-this small chance to be a hero, lost-before they shook their heads, and said no, truly a pity!-but they did not know this place.

Back at the guesthouse, they separated to rest before dinner. She addressed him lightly as Dr. Lin, Lin Boshi, and then wondered about the word. "Boshi," she said. "Doesn’t that mean ’Ph.D. doctor’ as opposed to ’medical doctor’?"

"It does. To earn the Ph.D. is one of the highest goals in our society. We say: Wanban jie xia pin weiyou dushugao," Except for attaining a higher education, all pursuits are lowly.

"It’s always been that way, hasn’t it?" she asked. "Since the Imperial Examination system."

"But the role of the court academician was different from the role of the Ph.D. today," he clarified. "The court academician was more than a scholar-he was an exemplary figure. He held the highest responsibility to adhere to the codes and rules. "

"Yes, I know. The codes and rules." This had always fascinated her, China’s massive, nuanced structure of obligations and principles. Though where all the codes and rules ended in China, the precise point at which they dissolved into secret sex and a ruthless gulag and rampant bribery and a million other knifepoints, including the Chaos-that was the thing that had always really intrigued her. All that lay behind China’s ordered, polite, honorific veil.

Lin Boshi.

"See you at dinner then," she said.

In her room, she decided to put away the ling-pai. It was starting to seem like a bad idea to have it out. She studied the characters as she moved the folded clothes aside, placed the tablet at the bottom of a drawer. Meng Shaowen, passed over July 14… Yet where was Meng Shaowen? In these last few weeks, despite all her rituals, the old woman had only slipped farther and farther away from her. Meng was gone from this world. Face it, she thought. You’ll never have a mother. Not Meng. Not Lucile Swan.

You have only one ancestor. Your father, Horace.

Underneath the ling-pai she saw a glimmer of color, and recognized the silk stomach-protector. Her heart raced. What if Lin were to see this? She crumpled the bit of silk into the smallest possible ball, and pushed it to the farthest, jumbled corner of the drawer. No, Lin wouldn’t see it. She would never let that happen.

They walked after dinner and questioned people until the daylight began to fail. ’’Lei-le ma?" he asked.

She nodded. He was right, she was tired. But not from the walking. From failing. Someone had to know something, and yet no one did.

She glanced at Lin. "Do you remember when we were in the cave? Did you notice anything strange about the missile?"

His eyes met hers sidelong. "You mean, that it was not a missile?"

"Yes! Did you see-did you-"

He made a sound to cut her off, to stop her from defining everything so much. "We sometimes say in Chinese: you simply wait until the fog lifts, then-ni renshi lu shan zhen mianmu, You see the true face of Lu Shan Mountain. Do you understand me or not, Mo Ai-li? We have lived in our Chinese world always. To us this true face of things is not so mysterious."

"I see," she insisted. She knew with this inference he was touching on all that the masses had feared, and learned, and come to painfully accept, about their government and their military. All she had never had to live through herself, but had read about, analyzed, mulled over countless times. "I understand."

"Though truly, how can you?" he countered sadly.

Pain rose, hot and prickly, behind her eyes. So close to him, to China, yet always shut out. "Please don’t do that," she said softly.

"Oh, yes." He closed his eyes, remembering. "Duibuqi. Forgive me. I didn’t intend to hurt you. It’s just-you’re a strange story from beyond the seas, Interpreter Mo. Sometimes I don’t know where I am, who I am, talking to you."

"Bici, " she answered, which meant she felt the same.

"There is so much I did not know-did not do-before I met you. Ah," he said, "Daole." We’re here.

And they said good-night.

It was hotter than usual in Alice’s room. The still air pressed in through the wide-flung windows and brought all the life of the night from outside: a squealing night raptor flapping down on some prey, the distant roaring engines of motorcycles from across the town, finally a jeepload of young soldiers careening up and parking in the courtyard beneath her window. As they drank beer, their voices detonated off in laughter and Chinese songs from the distant provinces. Finally the soldiers gunned their vehicle to life again and blared away, leaving their bubbles of talking and giggling and the roar of their engines to evaporate in the air. Alice looked at her watch. Ten forty-five. Useless. She’d never go to sleep.

She dressed and walked quietly down the hall. All the doors were closed, the lights were out. Everyone was sleeping. She brushed quickly out into the street. Immediately she felt a lift. Like all desert places, Eren Obo had a second life in its late summer evenings. There was a pleasant breeze. People were walking around.

She hurried up the main street and turned off into the low monochromatic labyrinth that radiated away from it. The creek was nearby, she could hear it. She scuffed along a row of dusty oleasters, listening to the water gurgling down below. This was the older part of town. Instead of the methodical yellow two-story buildings, with their rows of square-paned windows and flat roofs, here strode the lumpy, hand-built loess houses, like the ones she had seen out in the country, thatched roofs over their rafters, the houses that had stood as misshapen parts of the desert landscape for hundreds of years. There was a temple complex too. Its ornate pagoda design was all out of place in the town. Yet it was lovingly kept. Water was spared on it. Its courtyards were profuse and miraculous with potted trees and flowers.

She stood to one side of the moon gate under an electric light, looking in. The gate wasn’t closed, but she knew that the hour was too late to go in.

"Younger sister," said a male voice behind her, crumbly with age. She turned and stared into an old man’s deep-etched, hooded eyes.

"Is it true as I’ve heard, you can speak?"

"Elder brother, I don’t know what you have heard. Whatever it is, I’m unworthy." Outdated politeness.

He gave the breath of a wrinkled smile, lifted his scraggly white brows. "The talk’s like this. A west-ocean girl, red hair, an apparition-who can speak."

She laughed. "Narde hua." It meant "Nonsense," literally, but she said it with a smile.

"I have not seen a foreigner in so many years. Trouble you to tell. Is the outside the same?"

"No, the world’s changed. It’s a telling that would have no end."

"Really."

"Yes."

He gave a quiet old puff of a laugh. Then he studied her, storing, she felt, every pore, every fleck of off-color in her eyes. "And you, American girl child? What caused you to learn our tongue? I don’t suppose you can read?"

"Yes. Inadequately, but modern and classical Chinese both."

He tilted his head. "Remarkable."

"It’s nothing, old uncle. But I ask you a question. I-I beg you a question. This place-" She dug out the photograph, and handed it to him. Don’t get your hopes up, she warned herself. He examined it. "Do you know it?" she asked.

"I may travel a thousand li from my native place, but I would never forget it," he quoted dreamily, his gaze lost in the photograph.

What? She felt like a fish flapping in a dry gulch. "Does that mean-you say-I guess you’re saying you don’t know it."

"Know it?" He looked at her sharply. "Of course I do. It’s my sister’s farm."

A bolt of wonder jolted through her. Had he spoken those words? Had he? Or was she lost in an idiot’s daydream? "Did you say you know this place?"

"Well, it’s not my sister’s, precisely," he clarified. "I am Chinese. This family’s Mongol. But my sister married one of the sons, long ago." He fell silent, staring at it. "This is an old picture. Where did you get this?"

"Ah. From these people"-she pointed to Teilhard and Lucile with a trembling finger-"you see, they’re outside people. They are…"

"Your relatives?" he prompted. He was glancing from the picture to her, Alice noted, no doubt comparing her to Teilhard and Lucile. To the Chinese, all white people looked alike.

"Well…" Lie. "Yes. My relatives. I must contact the Mongol family that lives here." She pointed to the building behind Teilhard and Lucile. "They are old friends. And I bear a-a message."

"How can it be? Such a coincidence."

"Can you give me directions to this place?"

"The pleasure’s on my side." He turned over the photograph and wrote quick, looping characters across the back, sketched a simple map. "Imagine! I do not usually come out in the night air. In my lungs there is cold. This evening I decided to go out. What if I had not?" He finished writing down the directions and handed her back the picture. "Eh, my regards to them. Now forgive me, I return home. Level road. Peaceful journey."

"Bici, " she said to his dignified, old-man nod, and then to his back as he turned and walked away from her, again, "bici." When he had moved out of her sight around the corner she realized she was clenching the photograph in a trembling, white-knuckled fist.

She knocked softly. Lin’s room was silent.

She knocked again. Of course, she had to wake him up, she had to-her hand darted out and tried the knob.

The door opened.

Inside all was dark.

A moment she stood still, then slowly under a faint cold wash from the slice of moon, all the room’s shapes swam into view. The vinyl chair, the wood desk, the bed. In the bed the long huddled form, still.

She walked softly and knelt beside him. ’’Lin Boshi, " she whispered, allowing her left hand to touch his cheek. Dr. Lin. Where all the rules dissolve into a million knifepoints.

He breathed in with a faint groan. He did not rise up or cry out. He merely said her name, "Xiao Mo," plainly, as if her coming to him in the dark was a foreseeable fact of nature.

His hands came out from the warmth of the bed and took her face between them, exploring it as if to make sure, yes, it was really her, Little Mo. Then the hands fell away. "Shenmo?" he breathed, in the tiniest whisper, What is it?

She bent and whispered she had found someone who knew the photograph.

"Zhen-de ma?" Definitely?

She nodded.

’’Deng yixia, " Wait.

She stood back. He rose and dressed swiftly in the dark, right in front of her, while she held her breath and watched his gracefully moving shadow.

"Zou, " he said, snapping his belt. Let’s go.

They hurried outside, she relating quickly how she had met the old man outside the temple. They huddled under the lit front door of the guesthouse and studied the writing and the sketch on the back of the photo. There was the name of the valley, Purabanduk, and the few words explaining the road to take and where the canyons intersected. "Do you know where this is?"

"I think so," he said. "See here. This is the road we came in on. It’s an ancient road, I heard the driver talking about it, it’s surely the same one. And there’s the pass, and here he seems to mark an opening in the foothills. There was a gap there, in the Great Wall, I remember. Perhaps we should see a dirt track leading off into this valley, Purabanduk."

She stared at the map. "Should we go there, right now?"

"Without the others?"

"Just to see if we can find it. Suppose there is a house? Just like in this picture? We don’t have to approach it. We could all return together, tomorrow."

He smiled down at the photograph.

"But we need a car," she said.

"A car?" He shook his head. "No. What we need is a driver."

She looked at him strangely. "What are you talking about? I can drive."

"You can?" He stared.

"Of course, everybody in America can drive. It’s not like here. We all learn. Driving’s great, it’s-" She stopped herself. The joy of the blacktop, the long desert view, the blood sun-sets, the filling-station map on the seat next to you-he wouldn’t understand. "Look, this might be the Mongol family. Could we take the jeep?"

His smile was wider now. "Why not? It is for our research, isn’t it so?"

"Yes, but the keys…"

"Ah, I know where the driver leaves them. I have seen. He puts them on the right front tire."

She stared at him. "Isn’t he afraid someone will take it?"

"Take it? Take the car? Unlikely. First, not many people can drive. Second, the penalty for stealing a car’s severe. You could go to the laogai. You could be shot. Why between heaven and earth would you do it? How could it be worth the price?"

"I see," she agreed, though what she really saw was that it was crazy: his own wife had gotten herself into the camps for what, a scholarly article? Was that worth the price? It was a kind of commitment, though, Alice knew; one of the time-honored Chinese ways of being a hero. A quality she, Alice, did not have.

"So you will drive to this valley?" He touched the photo.

"Of course."

"Zou-ba, " Then let’s go.

The jeep waited in the hard-dirt yard behind the guesthouse. They went to it, climbed in quietly, and started it up. She checked the gas and water levels, then puttered quickly to the edge of the settlement. In the manner of all outpost towns, civilization-buildings, people, lights-fell away from them with unnerving suddenness when they hit the main road. In an instant it was all empty, the silty sea of desert and black mountains.

They bounced painfully on the first long stretch, a deep-rutted, unforgiving dirt track. But then they hit smooth pavement, and the road settled to silk and looped through the night. They were in the other realm now, in a car with a dark highway in front of them and the Tengger Desert all around.

"Don’t you love it?" She crooked her left arm out in the night wind.

"Driving?" He drew his brows together, confused.

"Sure. I used to drive all the way to Laredo, all the way across Texas. Imagine. It’s so hot you could die. And then Customs, the little linoleum room and the man with the shark-pressed khaki uniform, but fat, beer roll, the uniform’s too tight, he checks your driver’s license, he asks you the questions, you answer correctly because you know what to say and they send you out of the room and through a gate and you have left your country, you are over the border, now it’s Nuevo Laredo. Mexico. Everything looks different. The houses are all these wild colors. The light is strange. It smells primeval. You’re on Mars."

"You are talking about driving?" Lin attempted to clarify.

"About wanderlust," she answered, using the inadequate Chinese phrase, re-ai luxing, and pointing out the windshield. "This is it, the open road."

He stared at her.

"Wo shi yige luxing aihao-zhe, " she tried again: I’m a wanderer. But still he did not click in. Texas-the road-he’d never know. How could he? Yet the strange thing was she had the same feeling right now that she’d had all those years ago, driving out west, to Tonopah. A free feeling. Leaving her old life behind. Becoming herself. Teilhard had done it: Make me more myself, as I dream to make you reaching the best of yourself.

She watched Lin switch on a small light inside the glove box and peer at the back of the photo again.

"You should start watching for a dirt turnoff on the left," he told her.

When they came to it she drove past, but he spotted it and she turned the jeep around. When she caught sight of the track she saw that it was little more than a faint tamped disturbance in the great prairie of loess, but a track it was, definitely, and it wound away from them toward the black foothills. She cut her speed and lurched onto it. The surface was rough. She braked more.

"A few miles, I would guess." His voice was tight, his hands gripped his knees.

Some small marmot-looking animal darted across their path, eyes refracting brilliantly in their headlights, then shot off into the darkness.

"See that?"

He nodded.

She concentrated on the bad road. To either side of them, piles of rock stood sentrylike on the desert floor.

"Soon we’ll be climbing the ridge," he whispered.

Bumps, painful pitching jolts, each threatening to tear off the muffler or bend a tie rod. They bounced and rolled, gaining elevation. Finally in front of them the track curved gracefully to the right and swept through a break in the humped-up hills, and there, in that astonished second before the car dipped nose-down into the deep falling grade, they glimpsed the spreading valley, the sheep pens, the jumble of dwellings and outbuildings. It looked just like the picture, it was the picture. And up behind it, the strangely notched black ridgeline of the Helan Shan.

There were lights on in the house.

She and Lin exchanged glances, triumphant. Lights down below. That meant people. The Mongol family.