Lost in Translation

15

They turned off the car and stared at the valley below for a long, speechless while, then finally she started it up again, turned it around, and bounced away, back down through the pass. A dog had started barking. If they sat there any longer someone would notice.

"Lin," she said, her voice low with excitement, downshifting into the grade. She glanced over and saw that he was staring at her too. "Think it’s the Mongol family? Can we hope?"

"I don’t hope," he answered, eyes on her. "I never hope. I just live in gratitude for what comes."

It felt strange to be the open object of his gaze. She felt as if everything about her was lit up. She sat as erect and still as she could in the driver’s seat, wishing she were tall and beautiful. He kept watching her while she eased the jeep down the hill and into the long flat stretch, steered through the scattered piles of rock.

"Xiao Mo," he said.

She glanced over. "Eh?"

"Ting che." Stop the car.

"Shenmo?" What? She’d heard him, of course she’d heard him, but it was too shocking, too unforeseen suddenly, and she had to pretend she hadn’t heard. She had to make him say it again.

"Stop the car."

She oversteered on the narrow track, corrected. Okay. Stop. She pressed a long, steady foot on the brake and then rolled off a little ways into the dirt and cut the engine. The craaack of the emergency brake seemed to split the night and the desert in two. In the silence she felt the endless dry air around them, a universe of it, no one for miles. Emptier than Nevada, emptier than Death Valley. Tartary.

Lin climbed out. He took the old blanket from behind the backseat and spread it on the flat ground next to a pile of boulders.

She watched, hypnotized.

He walked back and opened the door on her side.

"Lin-"

He stopped her. "My name is Shiyang."

She caught her breath. This was the first time he had offered his given name. "I am called Alice."

"Alice."

She nodded. She followed him to the blanket, and lowered herself to sit on the ground opposite him, cross-legged. He sat studying her without a word for what seemed an endless time, then eventually reached over and grasped her gently by the hips, pulled her close to him, almost to his lap, carefully moving her legs until they were wrapped around his midsection.

She placed her hands on his shoulders. Fear erupted and she fought it down.

He only had to lean forward a few inches to brush her lips with his. His mouth was soft and dry like the mouth of a young boy. She kissed him back the same way, gentle, the way an inexperienced girl would, but with all the tender feeling she’d been keeping inside.

He paused, then kissed her again. This time he entered her mouth and touched her once, delicately. She bit his lower lip a little. Yes, she meant to say, I want it. So he came into her mouth again, but confidently now, and keeping a rhythm.

They kissed this way for a long time. She moved her hands over his back, his neck, his shoulders, but he sat very still. He used only his mouth. She felt she was going to explode. Then finally his hands left her waist, slid over her neck and through her hair, dropping to her chest and her small breasts.

"Shiyang," she breathed, enchanted by his name, the softness of his mouth, the longed-for feeling at last of him touching her. She arched her back to press herself into his hands. Finally after a long time his hand arrived between her legs and grasped her there, hard, right through her clothes. "Pan-wanglehao jiu," he whispered, I’ve wanted it such a long time. He squeezed gently and her whole body cramped.

Ah, they would do it now, she knew; no more turning back. When she had been a young girl, learning about sex, there had been times when she had kissed a man like this, and touched and been touched, through her clothes, and then stopped. Not anymore. She understood now that kissing like this made all the promises, gave out all the rhythms of the love that was to follow. She knew that after kissing like this a man and woman didn’t say no. They undressed each other, and lay down in the infinite night air, and did everything to each other they could imagine.

When, some hours later, they arrived back at the Eren Obo guesthouse, they slipped quietly into Lin’s room together, and spent the rest of the night in his bed. They did not actually sleep until close to dawn, and then only for what seemed like a few minutes.

When she opened her eyes the light was growing stronger in the room. She slid off and stood nude by the bed. "Wo gaizou-le, " she whispered, I should go. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, stepped into her jeans. She was probing his face. Was he happy? Did he regret it? Were they just beginning, or would he, having attained her, now get scared? As she had always done herself, with every man save Jian and then, finally -admit it-with Jian too. "Shiyang?" she asked.

"Go on," he whispered, and she could read in his face nothing but the mixture of awe, joy, and painful terror to which she knew, in her most honest heart, he had every right.

"You found this house?" Spencer stared at the picture. "You actually found this house?"

"I told you things could change," she said triumphantly, and repeated the story yet again-glossing quickly over the fact that she and Lin had taken the jeep and driven out there in the middle of the night.

Spencer didn’t seem to fix on this anyway. Instead he was locked into the image of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan, as they had stood and soberly spoken to the camera with their eyes fifty years before. "Is everybody finished eating?" He looked up, excitement pulling his face into a grin, across the breakfast table from Lin to Kong to Alice. "Why are we waiting around?"

There was a sea change in the group. A whiff of hope had returned. Kong and Spencer postponed their search for new hunter-gatherer sites, even though Kong still insisted on sitting in the front passenger seat so he could watch the landscape for possible signs of Paleolithic habitation. Spencer shuffled through his notebook, reviewing all he’d written, tapping his pen against the spiral-bound pages.

In the backseat, Alice tried to focus on a Teilhard book but found herself unable to think about anything but Lin, next to her. Was he it, then? Her true Chinese man?

They crested the hill through the pass and saw, spread below them, the hamlet and the house.

Smoke curled from its chimney.

"Daole, " Lin breathed, but no one answered, or saw any need to, for it was indeed the place from the photograph. In the spread of daylight, at the spot where Pierre and Lucile had stood for the picture, in front of some animal pens, there now toiled a garden. A complicated pipe arrangement fed it from the stream. More outbuildings had been added. But there was no doubt; it was the place.

Only one person was home: a woman. She was older, but not old enough to remember 1945. No, sorry, she had no knowledge of the visit these two white people had made here. They would have to return and talk to her old father. He would come back from Yinchuan in a few days. He had been a young man at that time. He would know.

They were dumbfounded. This was the first time someone had not told them the person is dead, or the records are lost, or no one knows. Here there was actually someone who knew. And he was coming back in a few days.

Alice wondered as they bounced back to Eren Obo, Lin next to her, their legs pressed together, if she should let herself believe it was possible. That they might find Peking Man. That she might trade in all her shame, let it go, forget it, and only worship her new ancestors, Meng Shaowen and Lucile Swan. She stole a look at the tall Chinese man next to her. That this might be real.

She lay in his arms. The bed was as narrow as a cot in a monastic cell, but to them it was as wide and joyous as any sumptuous bower. They were alone, safe and undisturbed. She moved against him, closer. "Did you ever think this would happen?"

"Before I met you? How could I dream it?"

"After, I mean."

"I hoped so." His hands moved over her, memorizing. No matter how much he touched her and grasped her and kneaded her, the different feel of her skin remained something he could barely comprehend. The tiny network of pores and freckles, the down on her arms and legs, her clean dusky smell.

"I thought you said you never hoped."

He laughed. Of course he had said that, but it had not been the truth. Sometimes, he hoped. He had hoped on the way out here, to the Northwest, that they might learn what happened to Peking Man. And he had hoped to find Meiyan. He had looked, he had asked people, had even made "gifts" to a few local district administrators to lubricate his casual-seeming inquiries. But nothing.

Had he done enough? Perhaps he should have found a way to leave the group for a couple of days, make his way somehow to Camp Fourteen, or at least the site of Camp Fourteen, for everyone said that it had been closed down in the late seventies. All the inmates, those still living, reassigned.

Reassigned. Her housing registration could be anywhere. Yet he knew that usually local authorities made the choices that were convenient. That meant assignment to nearby towns and villages. And now he was back at the beginning of the circle. For nowhere, anywhere he had gone, had he located a person who had heard of Zhang Meiyan.

And yet a foreign woman lay in his arms now, wide open to him, her legs twined through his-a creature more fascinating than any he had dreamed of since his wife vanished. This is now. He smiled down at her. "No, I don’t hope," he teased her. "But do you remember what else I said? I do practice gratitude."

"For what?" she said immediately. Ah, he knew, looking into her green gaze, that she wanted him to say it was for her. And was it not? He was thankful-thankful that she risked all this with him. That she was shi yu yuan wei so physically direct. That unlike a Chinese woman, whenever she laughed it was true and unconstrained, it rose right up out of her the same way her high tide did during sex. And so this erupting, rolling laugh of hers, at any time, even-especially-when they were fully dressed, in public, pretending to be no more than colleagues, seemed to excite him in a way that connected him to the base of life itself.

"Grateful for what?" she pressed again.

"For you, of course. Foreign female! You don’t know how to wait for anything, do you? Eh?" He smiled. "I’m going to have to teach you."

"No you’re not."

"What? Why not?"

"Because I’m a foreigner, that’s why."

"You don’t seem like a foreigner. In fact, you talk like someone from my home province. Do you realize you speak with a nanfang accent?"

She grinned. "No, no. It’s just right now, because I’m talking to you, and that’s your accent. I can’t help but repeat it back to you."

"Ah, so you mirror me. And where is the real you?"

"Behind the mirror." It was a flip answer, but she longed for him to come in after her.

He pulled back in play exasperation, though he kept a tight hold on the lower half of her body with his legs. "Behind the mirror, eh? Your talk is too clever. You should have been a high official. Perhaps a professor of philosophy! Or maybe-"

"An interpreter. I’m an interpreter, Shiyang."

He studied her face. He had wondered about this. She was so intelligent, so perceptive. Why had she not aimed higher? She could have attained any degree she wanted. She could have been a zhuanmenjia-An expert. "Did you always wish to be a translator?" he asked softly.

"Not really. It just happened that way." She looked away from him, knowing that at thirty-six she was little more than a go-between. She’d done nothing she could call her own. It was her fault. She had let herself drift here in China, allowed herself to be fascinated by the surfaces, the stereotypes of Chinese life. She had let sex carry her to the center of things.

"It’s all right," he told her. "It’s a good job."

"No, it’s not."

He tightened his arms around her, then reminded her of that basic rule of Chinese life. "Boundless is the bitter sea."

"Wo zhidao, " she whispered, I know.

Adam Spencer sat in his room, looking at his son’s photograph. Tyler James Spencer, ruffled blond hair, suspicious of the camera. Roaring down the street on his bicycle one minute, climbing up his father’s leg the next. Adam had gone to California, to Stockton where Ellen and Tyler now lived, just before leaving the United States. It was Tyler’s birthday and he took the boy for the weekend. He’d had high hopes, big plans, but after a desultory tour of the town sights they’d ended up in Adam’s motel room, eating grocery-store cake and watching cable TV. Adam had felt awful. He knew that he should have handled it better somehow, made it magical. Found a swimming pool or miniature golf, something. As it was he only lay late into the night holding the sleeping child, his heart pounding. He saw no way to get back into his son’s life. All he could do was go to China. He could recover the original ancestor, find it, and leave the Spencer name on it. He could do that for Tyler.

Spencer wondered what the boy was doing, at this very moment, on the other side of the world. He might be sailing ships in the bath, reading Batman comics in the dusty crook under the stairs, or perhaps standing at quiveringly brave attention, bat in hand, on home plate.

Adam’s eyes drifted from the photo to the pile of Teilhard books on his desk. There were editions of letters; biographies; and then Teilhard’s own books of spirituality, geology, and archaeology. There was a lifetime’s thought, painstakingly worked out, copiously set down. Thousands of pages, opining the unity of all things.

Spencer walked across the room and propped his child’s picture atop the pile of books. Now the trail was warm once again. In two days they’d drive back out to the Mongol homestead and meet the old man. There was a chance, still a chance, they might recover Peking Man.

But what if they failed? He considered the question, gazing at Tyler’s simple smile. Yo, Dad! he could almost hear his son say. Catch! I’m such an idiot, he thought suddenly. Tyler could care less.

It was even better between Alice and Lin that night. They had been together a few times, and by now felt free enough to adjust each other’s bodies with their hands and mouths. To try things.

He held her back from coming. When she was close he pulled out and lay over her, whispering in her ear in gentle, Yangtze-accented Chinese while she squirmed beneath him, alternately laughing and begging.

"All around us right now the Tengger is full of microliths," he told her. "Arrowheads, the tips of spears-men were whittling them out there ten thousand years ago. Twenty thousand. Carving stone, shells, animal bones."

"Are you trying to distract me?" she whispered, trying to maneuver her hips under him.

"No. I’m telling you something. We are fucking now in the center of the anvil." He used the crude slang, cao, fuck.

She found this departure from his usual polite speech unimaginably exciting and struggled to pull him to her. "So this was the beginning of the world?"

He laughed and pinned her hips down so she couldn’t move. "No. The world began with Gun and his son Yu. Don’t you know this? Everybody knows this. They were gods who could change into any animal they liked. The world was covered by water then. Gun and Yu had the secret of soil-earth which could contain water and dam it up"-he pushed lightly against her-"and they used the magic soil to create land masses. Do you want it, Ai-li? Do you? Then once Gun and Yu had made the earth, they gave the earth to men."

"Please!"

"Xing, " he whispered hoarsely, okay, and drove in again. He moved inside her for a minute. "Now you tell me," he said into her ear.

"What?"

"How the world began."

"In the beginning was the word-and the word was with God-then in six days-in seven days-I don’t know, Shiyang." She couldn’t do this like he could, with words, not now, not when she felt herself rising rising rising. All she knew was, the whole of China was concentrated in him, moving with him, flowing into her. "The true Chinese man," she whispered, barely audible.

He looked down at her, his breathing ragged. He was a man, just a man, what did she mean?

But she could say no more. His rhythm had reached a perfect frequency, brought him to some ultimate spot in the center of her. The great Tengger all around them, the dark room, the bed, even his face now, just above hers, swam away into darkness.

Later they lay open, waiting for a breeze, and he said: "I really do want to know."

"What? How the world began?"

"Aiya! Shuode shi ni de wenhua!" I’m talking about your culture!

She swallowed. The hot Houston nights, the radiant, space-colony skyscrapers, the forms of upthrusting light. Country music. Men in boots and hats. The bars and juke joints. Shame of her childhood. Oh, you must be Horace Mannegan’sdaughter. "I wouldn’t know where to start."

"Start here. Where are you from?"

"I told you, Texas."

"I’m saying what country are you from? Before America."

"Oh. Different ones came from different places. Ireland, Germany, England."

He looked confused. "But what do you consider yourself?"

She hesitated. "I don’t know. The truth is, I don’t really think of myself as having a culture."

"But you are American."

"Not really."

"But of course you are American," he insisted. "And you are white. Not Chinese. That’s the way of things." But he gathered her close to him as he said this, and held her protectively, as if to console her for her whiteness, her misfortune in not being Chinese. She had the sense that he forgave her all that she was. That there was a chance that she-her true self- might be acceptable to him.

Later she closed the door to her room, took out The Phenomenonof Man, and read once again the words written by Father Teilhard more than fifty years before: Nowhere either is the need more urgent of building a bridge between the two banks of our existence-the physical and the moral… To connect the two energies, of the body and soul, in a coherent manner… Well, then. The body and soul. The self and the other. Settle down, Mother Meng said. With a strong Chinese man.

The past was locked in behind her, barbed with mistakes. She hadn’t stood up to Horace when she should have. But that was changed now. The future was up to her.

Could she do it? Could she keep house for Lin in Zhengzhou?

She thought it over. He would probably have a two-room cinder-block apartment, companionably lined with books, but cold and at the top of endless stairs and ringed by dozens of avidly nosy neighbors. Their lives would be ruled by his danwei – Zhengzhou University. A better work unit than most, maybe, but a monolithic institution nonetheless, one to which they would have to submit for every decision: when and where they might travel, what research he might undertake, what work she’d be permitted, even whether or not they might try to have a child.

Yet they’d be together. She could sleep in his arms. And every night and every morning, she could have him inside her again.

How long will that last?

Or, they could leave China.

They could live in America-but the thought seemed almost unimaginable to Alice. Whatever she was, she wasn’t American any longer.

Could Lin even live there? She envisioned him in Houston, on the hot, dewy street, along Buffalo Bayou with its cicadas swelling in summer. This was the Houston of her childhood, the one that persisted in her mind. Then there was Houston now: the chaotic commercial growth, all the nouveau business rich, the white-collar army clogging streets and freeways every morning and afternoon, the young women with their overdressed hair, the men in their discount suits. All this perhaps Shiyang could learn to accept.

But in America, who would he be? It would take him eight or ten years just to master enough English to work in his field, and by then he’d be in his mid-fifties. Too old. Ah, he would wither there. He was too much zhi shi fenzi, an intellectual.

Zhi shi fenzi. Even the Chinese phrase emphasized his otherness. It did not mean intellectual in the individual sense, but a member of the intellectual element. Like so many things in China, it was only spoken of in reference to its position in something much larger. I guess that’s a thing I’ve never had, Alice thought. A secure place in some larger mosaic.

The next day they drove back to the Mongol house in the Purabanduk Valley.

"This is the picture," Dr. Spencer said. "We know they visited Eren Obo in the winter of 1945. The Leader has records of this. And look-it is your property. They must have come here."

He handed the picture to the Mongol patriarch, Ogatai.

"I remember. It was at the end of the Japan War."

The old man handed it back. His varnished face was flattened around the cheekbones, his eyes narrowed to almost nothing. A hanging mustache and bit of beard, white. "I was young then. The French scientist came here with the woman, from Peking."

"This Frenchman-did your family know him?"

"Know him? He was like one of us!"

With his dark eyes Lin threw silent congratulations to Dr. Spencer.

"We used to live on the other side of the Helan Shan," Ogatai explained. "By the Border River. The same place where the Frenchman found the Shuidonggou site. He stayed with our family many months then, in 1923. We moved over here, but he always wrote letters to us."

Thousands of volts were running between Kong, Lin, Alice, and Spencer.

Spencer reached for the edge of a rough table that stood nearby; he looked as if he was having trouble standing. "Alice, ask him. Did Teilhard say anything about Peking Man? About the bones he brought with him?"

Alice’s Chinese rendering dropped into a void of sucking silence. No one dared to draw the next breath.

Silence.

They waited.

Finally Ogatai spoke. "It is no good man who accepts guests, especially those with some connection to the family, without proper welcome. Since you have come, take your ease." He turned aside and addressed the two women in the doorway. Instantly they disappeared behind the whitewashed wall of beaten earth and returned with dried fruit and small, bright-colored plastic liquor cups.

They poured out the familiar red spirits, sweet, powerful. Everyone drank.

Ogatai said they should all come sit on the kang, the most pleasant spot in any northern home, winter or summer-but there was not enough room on the kang for everyone. Kong and Lin crowded onto a wooden bench opposite.

"Yes, the Frenchman did bring a box of bones," Ogatai said slowly. He dropped himself on the seat of honor, center back wall of the platform, facing the door, and settled comfortably on his heels. "It was to be left in this region until the war situation stabilized. By that time the Japan War was in its last gasp-but the civil war, that was just starting. He knew the bones would not be safe in Peking. And he didn’t think he could get them out of the country. Here the fossils would be secure. He said scientists would come for them. Scientists he would send." He examined them carefully.

All eyes locked. Even Kong was twitching on his seat.

"We are scientists," Lin said carefully.

"We continue this work the Frenchman started," Spencer added.

Ogatai considered. One of the women fetched more wine, poured it, and sat down with them.

Finally Ogatai said: "You must remember, we made a promise to the Frenchman. To us, this is most serious. The Frenchman had a long history with our family."

"Did you take Peking Man from the cave?" Alice blurted.

Lin and Kong raised their eyebrows at her; way too fast, too direct, not Chinese.

But Ogatai did not flinch. "Yes. According to our promise. Which was to remove the remains after thirty years if the scientists did not come."

"Do you have it?" Kong wheezed.

Next to him Lin looked as if he was going to bite all the way through his lip.

"But you have not even told me who you are!" Ogatai cried. "What is your relation to the Frenchman?"

"His fellow scientists," Spencer said. He closed his eyes, reining back his churning feelings. "He did not instruct us himself to come here. He died a few years after this picture was taken. It was still too soon to be able to return here. Aside from the woman who came here with him, he told only one person, as far as we know."

"Then how-?" Ogatai asked.

"That other person was my grandfather," Spencer said.

Ogatai stared.

"And so we studied the French scientist’s life, all his writings-everything-and by guessing"-he glanced at Kong, Lin, and Alice-"and by luck, we followed his trail-which led to you. No, he did not send us himself. But, Ogatai. Truly. We are the scientists."

Ogatai studied them, and a glimmer of acceptance played around his eyes.

Oh, yes, trust us, Alice begged in her heart.

The old Mongol shook his head. "So he told your grandfather. But I had always thought he would send his own son. Or his grandson."

"Oh, no!" Lin jumped in. "It is impossible. Teilhard could not have any sons. He was a Catholic priest. Did you not know?"

Ogatai froze. "It’s so?"

"Yes!" Kong said.

"But he brought a woman with him! Never did he say he was a priest."

"In fact," Alice said, "he became quite famous after his death-as a Catholic theologian." A very alternative Catholic theologian, of course, but no need to detail that.

"You say he wrote books about the ape-man?" Ogatai asked.

"Well-in a way. He wrote about evolution and God."

"That’s the Catholic church for you!" Ogatai slammed down his hand. "They teach their priests they are descended from monkeys-"

"No, no!" she cried, "that’s not what the Catholics think-"

"-While our shamans are taught they are descended from the rocks and the sky! Well! Who’s right?" He laughed the uproarious laugh of one who wants to divert the conversation away from some mounting tension, wiped at his watering eyes, and raised his glass. Everyone drank again.

"Anyway." He cleared his throat. "It is not here, you know. Peking Man. We do not keep it anymore."

"What?" They all sank as if shot.

"Where is it?" Lin managed.

"I can give you the address."

"You mean you’re keeping it someplace else?" Alice burst.

Lin quieted her with a look. "Ogatai," he said more formally. "It is not even necessary for us to take the bones-if we could photograph them-catalog them-"

"Extract a small tissue sample from one of the teeth," Kong gasped.

Alice whispered these promises to Spencer in English. She saw him swallow, nervously, knowing this was a lie, knowing they would never see Peking Man, lay eyes on it, touch it, take it out in the sunlight and gasp at the wonder of the flat skulls, the receding jaws, the heavy femurs-and then hand it back to Ogatai and walk away. But no need to say so now. "Right," Spencer agreed nervously.

"Dui, " she translated.

"Eh," grunted Ogatai.

A premonition sharp as ice passed through Alice as she watched the old man’s face growing tighter and tighter.

"So sorry," Ogatai said faintly. "You say you want the bones?"

"Yes!" blurted Kong. "Of course!"

Awash in horror, Alice gripped Spencer’s hand.

"The ape-man bones?" Ogatai said.

"Yes!" Lin shouted. "Yes!"

A pulled-out silence, made longer by the screaming shreds of hope.

"But I tell you we sold it," Ogatai said finally.

"You what!" Spencer shouted. "What!"

"You gave it to someone for money?" Kong said in his slowest, most excruciatingly pinpoint tone.

"Yes," the woman suddenly spoke up, as if talking to children who did not see the obvious. "And why not? We have eighty-four mu of land now."

"Congratulations," Spencer breathed miserably. "Oh, my God."

"What does the American say?" Lin called over to Alice, watching Spencer.

She closed her eyes and shook her head.

Lin leaned forward and fixed directly on Ogatai. "When did you sell it?"

"Nineteen seventy-six. One year after we took it from the cave.

"According to our promise," the woman emphasized.

"Oh, God," Spencer said again.

"It’s no problem," Ogatai said kindly. "We kept the address of the place. We always thought you might still come." He said something to the woman in Mongolian, and she left the room.

She came back with a dog-eared envelope, which she passed to Ogatai. With great seriousness he leaned forward and gave it to the American scientist.

Kong, Lin, and Alice watched in horror.

Spencer took the envelope and closed his hands around it without looking at it. It was the NSF rejection letter all over again, the custody papers, the empty box. "I’m screwed," he mumbled. "Completely screwed."

She did not translate.