Lost in Translation

7

"All right," she called through the door. "I’m coming." She splashed a little more cold water on her face, then checked the mirror. Anybody could tell she’d been crying.

"What’s wrong?" Spencer said instantly.

"Nothing."

"Come on. Don’t be so Chinese. Something happen?"

"I just learned a friend in Beijing died."

"Oh." He studied her. "Close friend?"

"Yes."

"Hey. Sorry. Was it sudden?"

"Yes. Well, no. She was old. She had lung problems."

"That’s too bad." His baggy gray eyes were kind. "Still want to go out on our mission this evening?"

"Yes," she said firmly, and wiped her face with the backs of her hands. "Yes. Let’s go."

"Good. That’s what Teilhard would have said, you know. He didn’t let stuff keep him down. Okay. The Dutch missionary, Abel Oort. During the days that Teilhard and Licent stayed with him here in Yinchuan, they posted one letter- luckily." Spencer pulled one of the paperback editions of Teilhard’s letters from his day pack, and opened it to a marked page. "Here. The heading is Gansu Street, Yinchuan." He showed it to her.

"So." She read quickly through the letter’s text; it revealed nothing. "Let’s start there, then. Gansu Street."

They set out in the evening light on Sun Yat-sen Boulevard, alone, their Chinese colleagues busy sorting microliths in the hotel. Through her grief she noticed that the air was soft and warm, that the boulevard was throbbing with carts, crowds, full-laden mules, and camels. Itinerant Mongols lined the sidewalk, their goods spread on hand-loomed wool blankets. Yes, she thought, pausing sadly to stare at knives and inlaid daggers, kitchenware carved from wood, and bundles of camel-hair stuffing for quilts, Mother Meng is gone. But I’m still here, living. They walked alongside the mosque and stared at it, walking past. On its mosaic steps a kneeling tile-setter pounded, his pinging hammer a high-pitched heartbeat over the crowd. Snatches of Mandarin, Mongolian, and other dialects swirled up and were gone.

Gansu Street, which marked the border between the Muslim quarter and the old Chinese neighborhood, was only partially cobbled now; it had probably been nothing but a dirt lane when Teilhard came here in 1923. Yet almost at its end the two Americans came upon a weathered stone building, sagging in disrepair, that had the triple-arched doorways and the soaring facade of a Western-style church. To one side of the entrance, there was a small metal plaque. HAPPY FORTUNE CONSULTING SERVICES.

"Welcome to the new China," Alice said. Something like a smile stretched her mouth, piercing her pain for a moment.

Spencer knocked, then pushed the handle. It was unlocked. Inside they stepped through the darkened, gritty-floored nave and into the church itself, with high vaulted ceilings where sparrows beat at the air. No pews. No altar. Empty.

"Wonder where Happy Fortune Consulting Services is?" Her voice bounced unpleasantly around the hall.

They stepped back into the nave and ventured up a narrow stone stairway. At the top there was a small office, its desk cluttered with papers as well as a modern phone and fax machine.

"We strike out again." Spencer stared at the empty chair.

Alice leaned over the pile of faxes. "Looks like his name is Guo Wenxiang. I’ll leave a note." She picked up a pen and paper and sketched out the quick characters:

Esteemed Mr. Guo-

I am an American named Mo Ai-li, visiting at the Number One Guesthouse. I want to ask you a few questions on behalf of my employer. Thank you for contacting me there in Room 542.

Outside the church, Yinchuan was just slipping into the day’s last mysterious margin of light. Alice and Spencer fell into the moving crowd and walked on.

Lin Shiyang left the hotel, having been vague about his errand to Kong Zhen. He murmured a few words about something he needed, something at the light industrial store-one of the small requirements of travel. Kong had nodded absently, immersed in his fine pebbly mountain of artifacts.

"I’ll see you later, then," Lin told him, and left.

From the Number One he walked quickly east, toward the drum tower, along one of the main arteries of the old town. Behind the gray blocks of commercial-looking buildings life descended abruptly into narrow streets lined with close-fitted apartment houses and small, back-street establishments like market stalls, barbershops, cafés. Into one of these, a corner ground-floor room in a nondescript structure, Lin stepped.

"Xi fan, " he told the man behind the counter as he sat at one of the three tiny tables, Rice gruel, the simplest of Chinese comfort foods. A stumpy lady in her sixties bent over at the table next to him, slurping xi fan. He had seen her eating it and ordered the same. She was not a person of his educational class; on the contrary she appeared to be a simpleminded, tu woman. But she would serve his purpose.

"It’s good, elder sister, is it not?" he had said politely when his came and he started spooning it down.

"Eh?" She looked up. "Hao chi, " Delicious.

He ate for a minute.

"You’re not from around here," she observed.

"You’re right."

"I knew! You have a southern accent. Shanghai?"

"Eh, sister, your intelligence surpasses me. You’re right. I lived there as a boy."

She laughed, finished her bowl, put it down.

He cleared his throat. "Wo xiang qing wen yixia. Do you know-do you happen to know-were all the camps in this area closed or are any still open? I am talking of the women’s camps. "

"Eh, younger brother, it’s not always good to speak so boldly."

"I know," he said. He was careful to look away from her now. One never knew who might be watching.

"But you have a good face, an open face. I’ll tell you to the limit of my knowing. All of them were closed, the last ones more than five years ago."

"Thank you," he said softly, and finished his porridge, not speaking to her or glancing at her again. As he left he did not notice a man observing him, a man who stood in a doorway on the other side of the road staring distractedly, now, at the ground. A man who at this moment was swiftly recataloguing in his mind every movement Dr. Lin had made, his route here from the hotel, his time inside the little café. In which a conversation seemed to have taken place, but too far away for the man to hear.

Dr. Lin turned the corner to walk back toward the Number One.

The man stepped into the street and followed him.

The four of them plodded the steep, rock-rubbled canyons for a few days more and found nothing. The third night Spencer walked into her room with a bottle of Russian vodka. "Do you mind?" he said, his face squished over to one side by his lopsided grin. "I really hate to drink alone."

"No. No-it’s fine," she answered. She’d been sitting alone, staring out the window, replaying Meng Shaowen’s death in her mind. Now the sight of Spencer’s soft, lived-in face and his worn American jeans was a welcome relief. I need a friend, she thought. "Come in."

"Thanks." He strolled past her, dropped into one of the two armchairs, and twisted the cap off the bottle. "You feeling better about your friend’s death?"

"Actually no," she said. "I’m not feeling better."

He shook his head, uncovered the ceramic tea mugs, and gurgled vodka into them. "Here." He handed her one. "My sympathies. "

They clicked teacups and drank.

"Grief is a killer, isn’t it?" he said. "Brings you right up to the truth."

Truth. Sometimes she wasn’t sure what the word even meant. What had Teilhard written? Truth lies in seeing thateverything gives way in the direction, and under the influence, ofbeauty and goodness. That is the inner face of evolution…

"Like me," Spencer was saying. "I have this son. Tyler. Before his mother and I split I used to take him everywhere with me-when I wasn’t working, I mean. We’d go out to one of the rock ranches and dig agates, cheer at the ball games, drive around the desert to the old mining ghost towns. I used to put him to sleep every night. Now he doesn’t even live in the same state as me. He’s growing up and I’m not even getting to see it." Spencer’s eyes clouded, pinched; he looked away from her.

"I’m sorry," she said quietly.

"Yeah. Well."

"Maybe one day you’ll get married again. Then he can live with you."

"Married?" He let out a short, empty laugh. "Impossible. I’d have to have sex again first."

"Frightening, isn’t it?" She laughed, working hard not to show her discomfort.

He took a sip of vodka and closed his eyes for a second. "Look, Alice, maybe we could just talk about this. We’re on this trip together, I’m a single man, you’re a single woman. But believe me, I’m not coming after you. I can’t deal with any of that stuff at the moment. The only person I care about is Tyler. So. You can relax." He glanced at her.

"Thanks. I appreciate it. Male clients are one of my occupational hazards. They’re always coming on to me."

"I won’t. Don’t worry. "

"And I feel the same way about you. I mean," she said delicately, "I’m not interested."

"Friends, then."

"Friends."

He held out his cup and she tapped hers against it. He was glad they had gotten it out on the table, glad he had not mentioned the real reason he would never approach her, which was that she seemed far too various. He would never let himself trust a woman like her, not at this point in his life. Permanence, that was what he wanted now. Loyalty. "Can I ask you a question, though?"

She nodded.

"There is something different about you-I can’t quite place it." He studied her. "It’s almost like you’re off the board somehow. Like you’re not playing on the same field. You know?"

"No. I don’t."

"I remember the first time I saw you-at five in the morning, you were coming back to the hotel on a bicycle. Wearing some little black dress. So I figured you probably had a boyfriend in Beijing-what, a Chinese guy?" He stopped, saw the click in her eyes, and understood. "So that’s it, then. You only like Chinese guys. That’s it, isn’t it?"

"Full marks, Dr. Spencer." She smiled, drained off her cup and held it out for a refill.

He poured for both of them. "So, I was right."

"Hardly a state secret. I love Chinese men."

"Really? What is it about them?"

She thought. "They incite a certain race memory in me."

"Very funny."

"Not a joke."

"Seriously. What is it? It has something to do with your father, right?"

"No!" she answered, a few notches higher.

"Okay!" He put his hands up. "Okay. Sorry. I said I wouldn’t mention him, I know. So why, then?"

"Well. They’re beautiful, for one thing. Chinese men and women both-haven’t you noticed? Edgar Snow once wrote that the Chinese were arguably the most intelligent yet certainly,without a doubt, the best-looking people on earth. It’s true."

"So they’re beautiful, that’s one thing." He licked his index finger and tagged the air.

"Yes. And another thing. Their skin is different. Smooth. Almost hairless. Not like barbarians."

"Number two, smooth skin." He marked the air again. "Wait a minute. Aren’t you a barbarian?"

"Not really. Inside I’m half Chinese. Okay: another thing. You have sex with one of them, you have sex with China. Know what I mean? You’re not on the outside anymore."

"Does it last?"

"Only for a minute. Now the most important thing. Chinese men are reserved. Much more reserved than Western men."

"Reserved?"

"That’s right."

He knit his yellow brows at her.

Like Jian, she thought. Jian, who had been able to communicate to her with a single hard look in some public place-on the street, or in a roomful of his friends-what he planned to do to her the minute they were alone. Jian, who had been with her for weeks before finally reaching out and touching her neck, her hair; who had taken over her body with agonizing slowness, over a period of many more weeks, showing her finally when he went to bed with her that physical sex was only one more link in the chain that bound them.

"Reserved?" Spencer asked. "Okay, reserved." He licked his finger and made a final mark in the air. "Interesting. So your boyfriend in Beijing-the man you saw the night before we met-he’s like that? Reserved?"

"Well…" Alice hesitated. Lu Ming, of course, had only been reserved on the surface. He had woven his net around her with words, looks, the touch of his foot under the table. But when he had gotten her alone, he-like most of the men she picked up-had driven right into her. No reserve. Not like Jian. Jian had understood sex the way that she, all her life, had understood music, and then later, language. He was aware of it: the thousand ways of touching, breathing, smelling, the rhythmic exchange of physical innuendoes. The theme and variations. She sometimes realized-faintly, as if from a distance-that she was going from one to another in search of a man like him. A man with all his subtlety, his intelligence, but a man-unlike Jian-who was willing to accept and love her true self. Though what was her true self? The vodka was like a bubble now, pushing against the top of her brain. She laughed. "I suppose I’m holding out for the true Chinese man-the type who waits until he has a woman’s heart. When a man like that delivers, watch out."

"But it’s just love that does that, isn’t it?" Spencer asked, syllables starting to get mushed. "You can be English or Eskimo or anything. It’s when you truly love someone that happens."

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back over the top of the chair.

"Don’t you want love?" he pressed on. He carried his cup to the spot where his mouth was supposed to be, slopped a few drops over the side. "Don’t you want to get married, settle down? What about kids? Don’t you want to have kids?"

"Yes," she said. "Absolutely."

"I bet your dad wants you to have kids."

"You mean Horace. Of course he wants grandchildren, but only if they’re Anglo-Saxon. That’s Horace."

"You never call him Dad?"

"Horace. Look-he’s my father. But I don’t call him Dad, or Daddy. Dads take care of their kids, and help them, and let them be whatever they want to be. They let them grow up. We’re not a family that way, Horace and I. We’re-" She stopped, stuck, not sure how to say what in fact they were. A diagram. A pattern formed by a famous politician and his daughter. Locked together. The man loving the daughter deeply, but too overpowering to know how to let her live. And the daughter needing his love, but unable to bear it.

Was this the price of Alice’s life? And why did her price seem to be so much higher than everyone else’s? She thought of what Teilhard had written about evolution: Every synthesiscosts something… Something is finally burned in the course ofevery synthesis in order to pay for that synthesis. Well, she had paid, certainly. Paid and burned. Why didn’t things change? "I really do want love," she said nakedly to Adam now. "I do. I’m just waiting for it."

"You and Lucile," he said, meaning it as a joke, not meaning to hurt her, but cutting through her with the words nonetheless. Because Lucile had succumbed to self-deception. Lucile had told herself Pierre would leave his order for her, and had ended up waiting all her life in vain. As she wrote in her diary: I suppose a lot of the things I have been living on were built by myown imagination-that is not his fault…

Lucile, alone in the bitter sea, with only a priest at her side.

But Alice’s life was going to be different.

"To love," she said resolutely to Spencer, and they drank.

That night, small and shiny with sweat, the vodka worn off, she lay in bed thinking about it. She was thirty-six. Old. But there was still time to change, wasn’t there? And now Mother Meng was dead. Alice sighed and twisted to one side in the sheets, staring through the window.

The street outside was empty now, it was past midnight. Quiet had settled like snow, and the only sound she heard was the far-off approach of the cricket vendor. This was a sound she loved, a sound of old China: the surging waves of cricket song, and under it the sad creak of the vendor’s bicycle wheels. The man approached and then seemed to pause under her window.

The chorus of crickets. It always carried her back to Houston, Texas, to running along the top of Buffalo Bayou in the dusk, the trees, the path, the bayou banks blurring to something else. Black stick or cottonmouth snake? Jump over it. Do the others hate you? Show them. You want to change yourself? Leap. Just leap.

She concentrated on the sound of crickets, and the smell of the cigarette the cricket man was smoking. She slid out of bed and to the window: yes, there it was, the leaning bicycle, the hundreds of tiny woven cages. The man was staring, shave headed, white capped, off down the deserted street. No, this was not Houston, it was bleach-dry Ningxia. And outside there was only the oasis night, the dim boxy shapes of concrete buildings, the spires of the mosque.

She gave up finally, dressed in the dark, and slipped out of Building Three. The hotel courtyard was silent except for the small slapping of fish in the pond. She padded down the covered walkway and found a spot on the little bridge that curved over the dark water. To one side was a decrepit gazebo; to the other beds of hollyhocks, bunched between intersecting stone paths. Everything had been laid out in the spirit of formal Chinese gardens, the kind that were popular back East, in towns like Suzhou and Hangzhou and Shanghai, where the affluent men of the Ming and Qing had had the time and money to create them. Here in the Number One the gardeners had made do with a pond, some aging carp, and an arched bridge cast from concrete. They had managed to raise big deciduous trees, not often seen here in Ningxia, but most of these were clumped against the two-story hotel buildings. It was a pleasant spot, if out of place. Sitting here, it didn’t feel like Yinchuan, an oasis at the intersection of two deserts. A flowering patch of farmland at the foot of the Helan Shan range.

Teilhard had loved the Helan Shan, had written rapturous letters about the ways in which their purple peaks rose up to God. In the shadow of those mountains he had found his proof, Paleolithic proof. But it didn’t help. Man was doomed in the Garden, they told him.

A waste, she thought, staring at the trees waving and whispering by the wall of Building Two.

There was a movement in the trees, near the door to the building: a person, perhaps, or an animal, or just a rippling bush. The motion detached and wove through the plots of hollyhock. Something white glimmered about its upper half-a shirt, maybe, pale and detached in the darkness.

A man. She squinted.

He came toward her. Only when he was almost upon her could she see it was Dr. Lin.

"Shuibu-zhao?" he whispered, Can’t sleep? and squatted beside her. A carp broke the water and slid under again. Dr. Lin folded his arms over his knees.

"How did you know I was here?"

"Meiyou zhidao. " I didn’t.

Then there was quiet for a stretch, in the temporarily unreal night world of the Number One courtyard. They sat so close, their legs were almost touching. She knew he spoke no English at all, so her thoughts, her mind, her senses, slid entirely into Chinese. "Dr. Lin. Do you ever wish you were somebody else?"

"Trouble you to repeat?"

"Do you wish your life had been different?"

He made a chuckle, but it was a hollow sound. "Of course, but I don’t think of it that way. We Chinese can’t think that way. It’s different here. I don’t know if you can understand."

"I think I can," she countered. "I have worked here a long time. I have listened to many people’s tales."

"So you have," he said, looking briefly into her face. Privately he thought: She knows a lot. But whether or not she knew about the insides of a man after the Chaos, the barren soul, the fields sown with salt-he could not tell.

"I know it was bad," she said in a softer voice, respectful, knowing something terrible must have happened with his wife.

He nodded.

She sighed, aware that he saw her as an outsider. They all did, at first. If he got to know her, he would see that she was more Chinese than American. Wasn’t she? Sometimes, when she looked back on the thick, damp air of Houston, she wondered if she had ever really lived there at all, if it had been anything other than a strange dream of before. Not that Dr. Lin would have understood this. Not that she felt ready to say it.

He let a beat of quiet fall before he continued. "Hao changshijian han xin ru ku, " It’s such a long time we’ve been drinking from the bitter cup. He sighed and rubbed his eyes with his large, hairless hands. "But this is our circumstance. These are our times. And the road behind cannot be changed."

"What of the road ahead?"

He smiled. "What of it?"

"Can you change it?"

He considered silently. His road was made up of everything he was and everything he had endured, so it was deeply paved already. All he had allowed himself to feel and all he had walled off from his feeling. Like his wife, led away one day, one look back, over her shoulder, and then a universe of nothing ever after. Years of nothing. He would, of course, not say such a thing to an outside woman, whom he barely knew, in the middle of the night. Instead he said: "I don’t think the road can change."

"I used to agree with that," she said slowly. "Lately I feel different." She thought of herself in bed earlier that evening, reading The Phenomenon of Man. In fact I doubt whether there isa more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scalesfall from his eyes and he … realises that a universal will to liveconverges and is hominised in him… the axis and leadingshoot of evolution. She breathed in fully, deeply. He had a spicy, wonderful Chinese smell, Lin Shiyang.

"Perhaps you are right. Eh, Mo Ai-li, I can’t believe I’m talking to you in the middle of the night like this. You’re a strange woman. Are other outside women like you?"

She laughed. "No."

"May I ask, are you married?"

"No," she said, and then added, "not yet."

He looked into her face but she couldn’t read him in the dark.

"You were married," she said boldly.

"Yes."

"Are you still?" Her heart beat faster. Had he put his wife aside, that’s what she wanted to know, had he huaqing jiexian, drawn a clear line between them, as so many Chinese had been coerced into doing in those years?

"Eh, yes. I suppose I am still married." He looked at her through the dark. "Xiao Mo, I’ve said too much to you."

"No," she insisted. "Not too much."

But the slight cramp of pain crossed him again. "It’s been a long time since I talked to anyone of my wife, and now here I am dropping my guard and clearing my heart. So you know my wife was sent to Ningxia. Zhang Meiyan was her name."

So that was her name, Meiyan, it meant "beautiful swallow." How could she be named Beautiful Swallow in an era when most girls had been named Benefit China or Serve Truth? Old-fashioned parents, maybe, why hadn’t she changed it-

You’re jealous, she stopped herself.

"Yes, Zhang Meiyan," Lin said again. He had so few chances to even say her name anymore. And yet he never forgot her. Meiyan.

"So you don’t know what happened to her?"

He shook his head.

"Kelian, " she said with feeling.

"Of course, she may be dead."

May be dead? Alice thought. Kind of an understatement. "How long since you’ve heard?"

"Over twenty years," he said, finding that he wanted to sit here, wanted to talk to Mo Ai-li. There was something about her that pulled at him, something at once female and unearthly. "It’s a long time. So I do not know her fate."

I think you do, Alice thought.

He closed his eyes, remembering. "I was told to forget her. Do you understand me or not? We were never actually divorced. But I was told to remain in Zhengzhou. It was later, after the Chaos ended, that I came to Huabei University. It’s a good life there, teaching. I don’t want to lose it."

"But?"

"Yin hun bu san, "The ghost refuses to leave. "And I need to know what happened to her. So now-now that I am in Ningxia anyway…"

"You’ll try to find out."

Lin turned to her. "Don’t speak of this to the others."

"Ni fang-xin ba," she said. She wished she could lean over, just a few inches, and rest her shoulder against his. She wished she could sit here with him all night. "Fang xin hao-le, " she said again, and touched his smooth forearm briefly with the cool flat of her palm. It was a casual gesture in the West, a gesture almost purely conversational, but here in China it burned with physical presumption.

Dr. Lin withdrew his arm and got to his feet in a quick stumble. "Eh. Well."

She stood up sadly.

"At breakfast. See you."

"See you."

He was already walking away.

She went in to breakfast the next morning and sat with her back to the dining-hall door. She could barely sit still on her seat, waiting for Lin to arrive.

Finally she heard the two sets of footsteps, the brisk tread of Kong and the listing walk of Lin.

The screen door clicked open, banged shut.

"Zao, " said Dr. Kong.

"Zao, " she returned, Morning, and she slid her smile over both of them.

"We’ve been talking about the site," Kong said. "So far there’s been no sign of the Mongols at Shuidonggou."

"That’s true," said Spencer, looking dejected.

"Then what about going to Eren Obo next?" Lin put in. He leaned intently toward the American. "The rock art drawing in that letter to Teilhard definitely comes from around Eren Obo. To find Peking Man again, Dr. Spencer-it would change everything in our field. It would bring our Homo erectus studies back to life." Lin paused. He did not say aloud his private reason for wanting to find Peking Man so badly, that it would be the highest tribute to Meiyan-or to her memory, if she no longer lived. "Wo henbude," he said, I want this so powerfully. He looked from one to the other. "If there is even the smallest chance your theory is correct, we must try everything. We must go everywhere."

Passion! Alice thought. She put his words in English.

"Of course," Spencer agreed. "I’m with you on that. But let’s give Shuidonggou a little longer. We haven’t covered the whole area yet."

"True," Kong said. "It will take days to get the visas anyway. Crossing the Helan Shan and taking you to Eren Obo will require very special permission. So Dr. Lin and I should not go with you today. We should go to the bureau and work on it."

Spencer looked worried. "Do we have to go back to Beijing for these visas, to Vice Director Han?"

Kong and Lin exchanged tactful glances. "Why don’t we seek this permit locally," Kong said.

"All right," Adam said, understanding. "If you say so."

As she translated this Alice locked eyes briefly with Dr. Lin. He didn’t smile at her exactly. What he did do was incline his head ever so slightly, and place his gaze fleetingly on her as if to say: Yes, I was there last night. I remember.

Driving out of the city, thinking about Mother Meng, she noticed an unusual sign.

YIN YANG XIANSHENG, Yin-yang master.

What was that?

"Driver." She leaned over the seat. "Trouble you with a question. What does a yin-yang master do?"

"Eh, that’s from feudal times. Like wind-and-water masters?"

She nodded. Feng shui, of course, Geomancy.

"None left now," the driver barked, all pride and satisfaction in the bustling new world.

"What are you talking about?" Spencer demanded.

"Nothing." Alice cracked her own little book open and scribbled the names of the cross streets. Drum Tower Road. Wool Market Lane.

Spencer peered out the back window for a minute, then faced front again. "You won’t believe this."

"What?"

He pointed his gaze to the rear. "Someone’s following us."

The car kept an implacable distance behind them, mirroring their speed, locked in to their every turn. "Do you see that?" she asked the driver, who nodded, shrugged. They stayed on the West Road, kept a steady speed through the checkerboard fields. Past the place Alice and Lin had stopped the day they rented bicycles, past the end of any kind of city, into the farmland with its interlocking trellis of canals. They passed the edge of the oasis, the point where the moisture dropped, suddenly, and the green earth reverted to yellow. Watching in the rearview mirror they saw the car slow when it reached this natural borderline; slow, then turn around and roar away in the opposite direction, back to the city. "Thank God for turf," Alice said.

"Maybe Teilhard is watching over us," Adam joked.

"Maybe." She laughed.

"You’re reading his stuff, aren’t you?"

"Yes-just about every night."

"Learning anything?"

She thought. "That as a human being I’m not necessarily static, but… evolving. That I’m supposed to grow and develop, just like the physical world, the planet, the universe."

"No." Spencer rolled his eyes. "I meant about what he did in his life-something that would tell us where he put Peking Man."

"Oh! I don’t know. I only know he was in love with Lucile, and she with him. Did you read that book of their letters?"

"Some of it."

"They connected on every level-mental, philosophical, emotional. But she couldn’t have him, not all of him. He was promised to God. Though he loved her." And that’s the one thing I’ve missed, Alice thought to herself. Someone who loves me. Though since Jian I’ve had plenty of physical satisfaction. Nothing else. "Lucile fought against it, and finally agreed. She went along with him on his spiritual journey."

"And?" Spencer prompted.

"And Teilhard adored her for it. He knew what a sacrifice it was for her." And thank you, so much, for forgetting as you do,for me, what you might, naturally, expect, but what, for higherreasons, I cannot give you. I love you so much the more for this "renoncement." And there is nothing I will not do for you, inorder to repay you. "From that point on," Alice said, "he confided everything in her."

"So you think he told her where he put it."

"Exactly."

"Interesting," said Adam. He worked his blue book out of his pocket and wrote it down. "You’re probably right. But how do we pursue it? Lucile’s been dead for a long time."

The sun was straight over their heads when they pulled into Shuidonggou and started walking. First they traversed the ridge, following along beside the corroded, hip-high huddle of the Great Wall. There was little left of the Wall out here, yet it still marched in a crumbling, orderly line, disappearing over the far-off mountain passes. On one side, for millennia, China. On the other, Mongolia. On the Chinese side the desert was scruffy bits of grass and craggy, eroded buttes. On the Mongolian side it became a shifting ocean of white sand. Dunes that went on for miles. Over everything a bowl of hot, deepest blue.

She rationed her water more carefully today, knowing the heat and the thirst by now, knowing how to manage them. Still the sweat trickled down her spine, itching her as she scrambled down a ravine after him, kicking and scuffing against rocks and pebbles, brief clouds of fine dust rising wherever their shoes exploded in the soft sand. Spencer rubbed his putty face. "What do you think of our Chinese friends?"

"They’re okay," she said cautiously.

"Kong’s a good guy," Spencer went on. "Lin, I can’t read. He likes you, though."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I see him looking at you. Can’t you tell? He likes you. "

"I hadn’t noticed," she lied.

They kept on through the hot canyons. Nothing. Dead ends. They would climb each wash to the narrow brush-tangled limit. Then they would hike back down to the main canyon and mark another one off on their map. Then turn west again. Always west. They kept it orderly. Adam sketched each little canyon in his book, listed its identifying features. But no Mongols, no houses, no sheep pens, no gardens, nothing. Just desert.

It was quiet too. Every so often on the wind they heard the far-off honk of camels, but they never saw them. They had seen some from the jeep, though, driving in: the camels moved across the desert in clumps of two or three, heads high in their slow rolling walk or heads down, nosing in the rocks and dirt. She supposed they were grazing, though there seemed little for them to eat. Still, the Number One Guesthouse had served a peculiar vegetable every night, one which looked for all the world like clumps of wet black hair. And that was the Chinese word it was called by: fa-cai, hair vegetable. One of the older Muslims around the guesthouse had told her it grew in a fine low-hugging net across the desert floor. He described the tool they used to harvest it, something like a wide, curved-tooth fork, and indeed she had seen this mysterious item displayed in Yinchuan’s hardware stores. She thought of it now, laboring in the sand behind Dr. Spencer, how one would drag it across the dirt and pull up clumps of hair. Perhaps the camels were eating fa-cai.

And the Mongols who’d lived here when Teilhard had come, what did they eat? But of course they’d have kept sheep, and some goats, and peppers and eggplants must have struggled up in their gardens. She knew that the Yellow River yielded only one thing out here, a flat, bony carp: so the Mongols had probably had commerce with the people who lived closer to the river, trading mutton for fish. And then when their camels had grown old and sick and outlived their usefulness, they ate those too. God, the sand was hot, it burned right through her shoes. She had been served camel hump, in Yinchuan. It had been a tough, rubbery membrane of a meat, cloaked in a brown bean sauce that did nothing to hide the taste of old, mean animal. And the sauce hadn’t really disguised the look of the meat, either, she thought: it was the same dun color that was everywhere here, the color of the river, the roads and houses, the color of the loess, the color of-

Spencer stopped so suddenly, she walked into his back. "Oh, my good God in heaven," he whispered.

In front of them shimmered the homestead.