The Incarnations

30. The Wake

LIN HONG PROWLS amongst the guests, her loud and empty voice possessive of the attention in the room. She parades her new dress, the black ruche fabric sliding from her shoulders and clinging to her curves. ‘Fifty per cent off in the sale,’ she boasts to those who compliment her, tossing her head and tinkling her chandelier earrings, as though showing off their deliberate bad taste.

News of the tragedy had spread about Maizidian. Though Wang hadn’t been more than a nodding acquaintance to most, he’d been polite, unassuming and well liked, and many neighbours have come to pay their respects. Some taxi drivers who’d grumbled over noodles and beer with Wang, about traffic cops and extortionate fines, have come too. Baldy Zhang walks in and lets out a low whistle at the grandeur of the high ceiling and marble floors. (‘Fuck me! Who knew that Wang’s folks were so rich? What the fuck was he driving a taxi for?’) The young girl from the convienience kiosk outside Building 12 comes and stands shyly at the door. ‘A pack of Red Pagoda Mountain, twice a week,’ she tells the other guests. ‘Mondays and Thursdays, usually. He always said thank you. Never forgot.’

Wang Hu’s former colleagues from the Ministry of Agriculture have come, ostensibly to offer condolences for the loss of his son, but mostly out of a morbid curiosity to see how the once larger-than-life Wang Hu, now semi-paralysed and wheelchair bound, is faring these days. Slumped in his chair, Wang Hu is miserable, doubly humiliated by the procession of witnesses to his debilitated state and the death of his son, unfilially passing away before him. The cadres slap him on the back, bantering and making witty jokes like back in the day, but Wang Hu, ashamed of his slurring, dribbling speech, doesn’t join in. Though in their sixties, the cadres are strong and in robust health from golfing and extramarital affairs, and the stark contrast with his crippled impotence is more than he can bear. He’s relieved when Lin Hong sashays over, hips swaying as though swinging a tail, and offers the cadres more drinks. ‘Tea? Beer? Anything you want. .’ The cadres’ wives narrow their eyes at Lin Hong’s convivial manner. Even to the most generous-minded of guests, the stepmother of the deceased looks in a celebratory mood.

A framed photograph of Wang, taken by Yida the year they were married, sits on an altar of burning candles and incense. The guests go to the altar and contemplate the handsome young man in the photograph — remembering him fondly, or not fondly, or not at all. Baldy Zhang chuckles at the photo and remarks, ‘When was that taken? Looks nothing like him! Where’s the eye bags? Why so much hair?’ There are no wailing mourners at the wake, or hired monks chanting verses of Buddhist scriptures, or burning of paper money for Wang’s prosperity in the afterlife. The ashes were left at the crematorium. The guests murmur about the break with tradition; the subdued, modest affair. It’s not as though Wang’s family can’t afford the expense.

Wang Hu and Lin Hong are nervous about the details of Wang’s death coming to light. The police had estimated his taxi was speeding at 140 km per hour when it crashed into the guard-rail of a vaulted flyover in the north-east of Beijing. The police had suspected more than reckless driving — that Wang had crashed intentionally. But the last thing Wang Hu wanted was the shame and embarrassment of a murderer and a suicide for a son. ‘Perhaps,’ Lin Hong had suggested to the investigator, ‘the man in the passenger seat attacked my son-in-law, causing him to lose control of the wheel? Perhaps the man attempted to rob him, and that is why Wang accidently crashed the car?’ Damage limitation. Both of them are used to limiting the damage Wang Jun has done to his father’s reputation over the years. They’ve been cleaning up his messes all his life. Why should his death be any different? They were fortunate that the passenger, who’d catapulted through the windscreen and soared twenty metres above the ground before thudding to his death, was no one of any significance. A drifter and male prostitute from Guangzhou. The Zeng family had been difficult at first, pestering the Beijing police with questions about the car crash. Then Lin Hong had contacted them, and offered to cover the funeral expenses, and generously compensate them for their loss. The Zengs had accepted the offer and shut up.

Wang’s taxi-driver friends are out of place at the wake, and hopeless at small talk. (‘Fucked if I care,’ one mutters, when Lin Hong asks if he is looking forward to the Olympics.) They retreat to the kitchen, where the caterers are preparing trays of snacks, and gather around a table with their cigarettes and smuggled bottles of baijiu. They talk fondly of Driver Wang, gallows humour soon kicking in.

‘Crashed off a bridge! What an idiot!’

‘Maybe he had an undiagnosed brain tumour. That would explain a lot. .’

‘Probably had a heart attack at the wheel. He was so out of shape. .’

‘His stepmother says his passenger robbed him at knifepoint. That’s how he lost control of the taxi. .’

Baldy Zhang pours Red Star baijiu into the other drivers’ cups. They drink to the memory of Driver Wang.

‘Seen his wife? She’s a weeping mess.’

‘Not bad, though, as far as weeping messes go,’ Baldy Zhang says slyly. ‘Should the poor widow be in need of comfort, she can come and weep on old Uncle Zhang’s shoulder. .’

‘Show some respect! At the dead man’s wake!’ Driver Liang laughs. He points to the kitchen ceiling. ‘Driver Wang is watching you now. He’s grinding his teeth and getting ready to punch your lights out!’

Baldy Zhang calls up to the ceiling, ‘Now now, Driver Wang. You wouldn’t want your wife to be lonely in her bed at night, would you? Old Uncle Zhang will keep her warm for you. .’

Laughter, another splash of baijiu in the cups, and they change the subject.

The widow and child of the deceased are on a sofa and, as a dazed spectacle of grief, Yida does not disappoint. ‘Poor Ma Yida,’ the guests whisper. ‘First her home burnt down, and now she’s widowed at thirty. It’ll be impossible for her to find another husband now. .’

Yida has been holding the same cup of tea on her lap for the past hour. Not sipped from once, the tea is stone cold. The wrinkled faces of elderly neighbours loom in and out of focus as they offer consoling words that Yida can’t hear. Echo is troubled to see her mother unable to hold a gaze, or finish a sentence. She looks sullenly at the middle-aged women who pat her on the head and say, ‘Oh, you poor child,’ and wills them to go away. They whisper to Lin Hong, ‘How your daughter-in-law is suffering. She looks like a ghost.’

Lin Hong nods, her chandeliers tinkling. ‘Looks awful, doesn’t she? Can’t eat or sleep and is barely functioning. I had to get my doctor to prescribe her some tranquillizers, just so she can shut down for a few hours each night. Still, how frightful she looks!’

Yida’s hair has not been washed in days, and her skin is blotchy and her eyes bloodshot from weeping. Lin Hong could advise Yida on how to reduce her eye swelling (with a few dabs of haemorrhoid cream), but she’ll be damned if she’ll pass on her beauty tips to the Anhui girl. Echo is the one Lin Hong is saving her advice for. She can’t wait to straighten Echo’s teeth and hair and give her lessons in how to use make-up to accentuate her eyes.

‘We heard the mother and child’s house burnt down. Where are they living now?’ a wife of one of Wang Hu’s former colleagues asks.

‘Why, here, of course!’ Lin Hong says. ‘Where else would they go? They are our responsibility now. The mother has plans to take Echo back to Anhui, but that won’t happen. Echo and I are very close and won’t be parted. She is like a daughter to me. Maybe the mother will return to Anhui alone.’

The cadre’s wife looks at Yida and shivers. What will become of this poor widow, now she has nothing left?

Yida rises from the sofa.

‘Ma, where are you going?’ asks Echo.

‘Kitchen,’ says Yida, and stumbles away. Echo can tell by her mother’s voice that she does not want her to follow.

Yida enters the kitchen. She walks up to the table of boozy taxi drivers, who look up at her in surprise.

‘I need a cigarette,’ she announces. ‘And a glass of whatever you are drinking.’

The six men leap to meet her need, nicotine-stained fingers fumbling for packs of cigarettes and lighters, proffering her the choice of three different brands. A glass is fetched and colourless grain alcohol poured in.

‘Mind if I join you?’ she asks.

They shake their heads and say they don’t, so Yida sinks into an empty chair, inhaling the fog of smoke and the musky odour that reminds her of her late husband. The drivers continue chatting awkwardly, but Yida is so quiet, they forget her after a few minutes and resume their sweary, bawdy banter. Yida smokes cigarette after cigarette down to the butt and knocks back glasses of liquor. Some of the guests, when they hear of this, couldn’t be more scandalized if the widow had squatted and peed on the kitchen floor. But Yida can’t see their disapproving looks from the doorway. The alcohol is mixing with the tranquillizers she took that morning and her vision is blurring, the kitchen slanting at a tilt. She slurs to Baldy Zhang, ‘You were my husband’s friend, weren’t you?’

Baldy Zhang clears his throat and admits, ‘We weren’t really friends. Your husband was a good man, but I don’t make friends easy. I’m a mean bastard, truth be told.’

A few knowing chuckles around the table. Yida is solemn as she waits for the laughter to die down. Then, her alcohol-limp tongue wrestling with words, struggling to shape them in her mouth, she says, ‘You are wrong. . He was not a good man.’

The drivers pause, then laugh uncertainly, spluttering smoke. A hysterical shrill to her voice, Yida continues, ‘He crashed that car on purpose to kill himself and the man in the passenger seat, who was his lover. He committed suicide, leaving his wife and child with not one fen to support themselves. So you are wrong, Baldy Zhang. My husband was not a good man.’

Yida looks around the table at the stunned and speechless drivers then stands up to leave. But no sooner has she risen, she keels over as the blood drains from her head and her knees buckle. Driver Liang leaps up, frowning as he catches her by the shoulders and supports her. Yida slumps in his arms, rolls her head towards him and smiles — her first smile in days. Driver Liang is two decades older than her late husband, but something about his strong arms and concerned expression agitates the itch of lust in Yida. Take me to the spare bedroom, Driver Liang, Yida thinks, and she laughs at the lewdness of her thoughts. The taxi drivers watch her uncomfortably.

‘Oh my goodness! Is everything all right?’ Lin Hong rushes to drag Yida out of Driver Liang’s arms, and attempts to stand her upright. ‘Accept my apologies. My daughter-in-law is not quite herself today. She needs to lie down. I hope she was not disturbing you.’

The taxi drivers watch as Lin Hong steers Yida out of the kitchen. Out in the hall, Lin Hong throws open the door to the guest room and points at the single bed.

‘Get in there and lie down,’ she snaps. ‘You are making a fool of yourself.’

Yida sways in the doorway, woozy and unable to focus. Lin Hong pushes her inside and slams the door. Pathetic, she thinks. But at least the ignorant Anhui girl has the sense to do as she is told.

By four o’clock the incense has burnt to ashes and the candles melted to stumps. The guests start leaving their empty glasses on the sideboard or coffee table, saying their goodbyes and heading for the door. Lin Hong pursues them out to the hall, standing over them as they rummage through the shoe pile for the pair they came with, and making threats to invite them round again. Then she follows them to the lift, waving and calling, ‘Thank you for coming!’ like a party hostess who doesn’t want the party to end.

As the elevator pings shut on another group of guests, a woman in her late fifties or early sixties shuffles out of the door leading from the stairwell, a shabby woman, whose padded Mao jacket and worn trousers remind Lin Hong of the days when everyone owned one set of hand-sewn clothes. Lin Hong looks at the woman’s lined skin and thinning hair, brittle enough to break in the teeth of a comb. Who in their right mind would climb ten flights of stairs in the July heat? The woman, who is not breathless or perspiring from the climb, moves with a slightly arthritic gait towards the open door of Lin Hong’s home.

‘Excuse me. Who are you?’ Lin Hong asks, her eyes polite but her mind wanting to shoo the woman back down the stairs.

The woman does not answer, but wanders into the apartment as though Lin Hong is someone of no importance at all. She must be one of Yida’s relations from Anhui, Lin Hong thinks, wrinkling her nose as the woman traipses her mud-caked sandals down her hall. These peasants are so rude and uncivilized. Then the taxi drivers stumble out, headed to a local Sichuan restaurant for more booze and spicy food, and the unknown guest is forgotten as Lin Hong chases after them, calling her goodbyes and inviting them to come again.

On the sofa in her formal black dress, Echo watches the last of the guests gossiping and stuffing their mouths with the left-over snacks on the trays on the sideboard. She watches her grandfather squirming in his wheelchair as though his incontinence pad needs to be changed and she is wondering whether to raise the alarm when the downtrodden, grey-headed woman enters the room. Echo lurches with recognition and fear. What is the Watcher doing here? At her father’s wake? Echo hadn’t thought the Watcher could exist so openly out of the shadows, or the shrubbery in the park, or the shopping crowds. But here she is now. In her grandfather’s apartment, for everyone to see.

The Watcher gazes about the living room, but her eyes don’t widen in envy and admiration like the other guests’. She heads directly to the altar, nodding curtly at Wang Hu as she passes his wheelchair. Wang Hu wheezes as though with the onset of an asthma attack then keels over, wracked by choking, hacking coughs. The guests rush over, crowding him. ‘Slap him on the back!’ they cry. ‘Bring water!’ ‘Loosen his tie!’

The drama of the choking man does not distract the Watcher as she stands at the shrine and, like the guests before her, contemplates the young man in the photograph. But, unlike the other guests, the Watcher starts to weep. From the sofa, Echo watches, realizing that the Watcher is only the second person she has seen crying for her father. The first was her mother, who, when the police informed her of the ‘bad news’, crashed on the hospital floor and sobbed on her hands and knees, like a wounded animal. The Watcher, however, is silent in her grief, tears streaming down her cheeks. She weeps for a few moments longer then reaches into her Mao jacket for a large manila envelope. The Watcher stands with the envelope in front of the altar, as though debating whether to leave it as an offering or not. She decides against it and turns away.

The Watcher stares at Echo with her piercing gaze, and Echo shrinks back. Caught up in the commotion of Wang Hu’s seizure of hacking coughs (‘Call an ambulance! Wang Hu is choking!’), none of the guests notice the strange latecomer approaching the daughter of the deceased, who is wide-eyed with fright. Echo has never seen the Watcher close up before. She can see the crow’s feet wreathing her eyes and the tears glistening on her cheeks. She can see the large mending stitches on her jacket and her bedraggled trouser hems. The Watcher’s accent, when she speaks, is not what Echo expected. Not that of an uneducated migrant from the countryside, but that of a well-educated person from Beijing.

‘I knew your father,’ the Watcher says. ‘I knew him very well. Better than anyone.’

Echo does not believe this. If this woman knew her father better than anyone, then why did she only ever watch him from afar? Why didn’t she ever speak to him, or say hello? The Watcher is lying, but Echo holds her tongue.

‘I know you too, Echo,’ the Watcher says. ‘I know you better than you know yourself. Recently, I have been dreaming of you.’

Echo is silent. She dreams of the Watcher too. She dreams of the Watcher stalking her through the streets and lurking outside the door of 404. She dreams of the Watcher standing in the corner of her bedroom at night. And now the Watcher has stepped out of her dreams and into waking life, looming over Echo, smelling of old age and homelessness. Though her eyes are shrouded in wrinkles, they are sharp as knives, dissecting Echo with their gaze.

‘The dreams show me who you were in the past,’ the Watcher says. ‘Once, you were a sorceress, and then a Mongol warrior with a battleaxe-scarred face. Once, you were Emperor and ruler of all under heaven, and then a Red Guard called Long March.’

Echo shudders. The Watcher is mentally ill, she realizes. Though her eyes are shrewd and intelligent, her mind is deranged.

‘And now in this life,’ the Watcher says, ‘you are my grandchild.’

Though the madwoman is lying, Echo recoils at the thought of being her granddaughter.

‘Here,’ the Watcher says, handing her two brown envelopes. ‘One letter I wrote to your father, before he died. The other I wrote for you. It’s the story of your first incarnation. And there will be more, Echo. . For it’s my duty to enlighten you about your past.’

Echo accepts the envelopes with both hands.

‘Now you are only eight years old, and too young to understand my letters. But, one day, when you are older, you will read them, and you will know about the bond that has entwined us for over a thousand years. You are very clever, Echo. It won’t be long.’

The Watcher turns and leaves, and Granny Ping (her Olympic Security Volunteer armband strapped over her sleeve) looks up from Wang Hu’s wheelchair and gasps, ‘Even the dead have come to pay their respects. .’ The Watcher walks out of the living room as Lin Hong walks back in. The women brush shoulders in the doorway.

‘Lin Hong! Your husband won’t stop coughing!’ wails a guest. ‘What shall we do?’

Lin Hong ignores Wang Hu. She marches over to Echo. ‘Who was that woman? What did she give you? Let me see!’

Echo leaps up from the sofa, hugging the envelopes tightly to her chest. ‘No!’ she shouts, with such force that Lin Hong steps back.

As Echo runs to the spare room, Lin Hong decides there are too many guests about to make a scene. She will discipline Echo later. The patriarchs of the Wang family are either crippled or dead, and she is in charge now. And as much as she adores Echo, it is important that she keep the child in line. No doubt Yida’s breast milk poisoned Echo as a baby, contaminating her with her backwards Anhui ways.

‘Lin Hong! Your husband!’

Lin Hong smiles pleasantly and turns to the crowd panicking over the choking man. ‘Slap him on the back a few times. The harder the better. That will shut him up.’

Echo goes into the guest room, where her mother is unconscious, sprawled with her face in the pillow under lank and unwashed curls. Yida’s dress is hitched up over her buttocks and, though there’s no one about to see, Echo tugs the dress down over her knickers. Seeing her mother like this, drunk and insensible, is worrying to her. How will she stand up to Lin Hong when she is so weak?

Echo kneels and reaches under the bed for a large metal security box. She turns the combination lock, clicks open the lid and deposits the brown envelopes inside with the others. Her mother gave her the letters. She said it was her inheritance from her father. ‘Your only inheritance,’ she had laughed. ‘Your father wrote them. Once, when I was angry, I threw them out of the kitchen window. I thought they were lost, but a security guard saw me from below. He gathered them up and gave them back. Anyway. . I thought maybe one day you will want to read them. You will want to know who your father was.’

Echo crawls on to the bed next to her passed-out mother and wraps her arm around her. She touches her forehead to her mother’s shoulder and is reassured by the life and blood she detects thrumming there. She lifts her mother’s curls from her cheek, and leans in to kiss her. Her mother is different when she is sleeping. She is like a child.

Echo slides off the bed. She puts the security box in her backpack, zips it up and feeds her arms through the straps. Then, her heart racing, she waits with her ear against the guest-room door until there’s no sound in the hall, and sneaks out. She slips on her flip-flops and runs out to the stairwell. As she flies down the ten flights of concrete steps, Echo thinks of the guests at the wake, feasting their mouths on the trays of snacks, and their eyes on her mother’s burnt-out grief. She thinks of overbearing Lin Hong, with her over-plucked eyebrows and stretched-too-tight face. She hopes Yida will move them out of her grandfather’s home soon. Otherwise, Echo will run away.

Echo runs through the marble-floored foyer, past the doormen and out of the revolving glass doors. Out in the street, her flipflops slap the pavement as she runs, and her backpack thuds on her back. She can’t believe that her father is not out there still, cursing the traffic and tapping cigarette ash out of the window. She can’t shake the feeling that at any moment his taxi will pull up. That he will beep the horn and call, ‘Echo! Jump in! I’ll drive you the rest of the way. .’

At a bridge over Liangma River, Echo stops and leans over the railing, peering down at the shallow water below. She thinks of taking out the metal box and emptying the letters into the stagnant ditch, drowning the letters so the ink dissolves into illegibility. But she tightens the backpack straps and runs over the bridge instead.

Echo runs all the way to Xiu Xing’s run-down apartment block and sinks down on a concrete step in the entryway, panting and sweating in the July heat. When she recovers her breath she will knock on Xiu Xing’s door and he will pause his video game and let her in. Xiu Xing will hide the letters for her in his bedroom, where Lin Hong won’t be able to find them. He is her closest friend, and can be trusted to keep her father’s letters safe.

Echo unzips the backpack, takes out the metal box and puts it on her lap. As she turns the combination lock, set to the date of her father’s birthday, she remembers how the Watcher had said, ‘Now you are only eight years old, and too young to understand. .’ Who says I am too young to understand? Echo thinks. And, burning with curiosity and defiance, she unfolds one of the Watcher’s letters.

‘“Sorceress Wu, Sui Dynasty, AD 606,”’ Echo reads out loud. Straining her eyes through the shadows, she reads on.