The Last Lover

14. IDA RETURNS TO THE FARM

Ida swam along in pain, like an injured fish. The lake bottom was lit by a dim gleam, and there were many shadows. After a short while she saw that these shadows were actually the shadows of plants. Ida had often gone to the lake bottom before, but she had never seen these plants. It appeared this place had undergone a transformation. What kind of plants were they? They looked like climbing vines, with huge egg-shaped leaves creeping along the silt like innumerable small beasts. Now was the time when Reagan came to fish. She leaned against the leaf blades, listening to his footsteps close by. Reagan’s steps were filled with hesitation. He didn’t stop, but like a man possessed he wound in circles on the same spot. Ida wondered, Could he hear the sound she made stirring in the depths of the water? Numerous small fish stopped to rest on her naked body, crowding especially on her back. When she swam, these small animals bit her back and shoulder blades lightly, causing her pain to shift.

She heard a loud sound on the shore. It was Reagan falling into a water-filled depression. Perhaps a snake had attacked him. The snakes had always been friendly with him before. How could they wildly assault him now? Ida felt a certain comfort.

Reagan really was wrestling with the snakes. The violent little bastards not only poured their venom into his body, they also got into his abdomen and thrashed around inside it, making him die and come back to life again and again. He told himself, “Die, just die.” But he couldn’t die. Then one of the deadly poisonous bastards went into the arch of his foot, and he finally passed out. The last image he saw was a red star exploding in the sky.

When he came around Reagan heard Ida crying. She squatted at a spot five meters from him, looking very much like an orangutan. Her long arms propped her up on the ground, and in the night’s luminescence even her eyes turned red. Thoughts assembled in Reagan’s extremely weakened mind: “Did this woman grow up among the orangutans?”

“I-da.” He spoke the two syllables with difficulty.

“How good,” Ida spoke from her heart. “A nightingale just flew by.”

“Come here.”

“No. I’m not used to it any more. I want to stay for a while on the farm. May I?”

“You may, Ida.”

Reagan felt his body disappearing in the vanishing of hope.

Ida slowly left. Reagan saw her crawling away. She crawled ahead bit by bit. Reagan wanted to cry, but there were no tears in his eyes.

In that endless time before daylight Reagan sat unmoving in the water-logged ditch. The venom already flowed throughout his body, yet the great pain slowly brought him cheer. What he found astonishing was the way the snakes had suddenly disappeared, without leaving a trace. His surroundings were therefore tranquil. All the small living things were hibernating and did not stir. From the lake came the incongruent sound of singing. It was a woman, a bereft woman, but of course it wasn’t Ida. She had already gone in the opposite direction. So who was it? He didn’t want to move. Lightning flashed in his mind, flash after flash illuminating its most hidden corners until they were as bright as snow. White horses, red foxes, and spotted leopards sliced the air like comets. Tolling thunder surged, pressed by the black wind. Perhaps the pain made his imagination so keen. Reagan saw his own life turn into unimaginably clear lines of ideas, like veins. The path of his thoughts stretched out from the dark surface of the lake, slipping unimpeded along the ground. At this moment he couldn’t help sighing like Ida, “How good!” What he saw wasn’t a nightingale but rather the spotted leopards, white horses, and red foxes in his mind. He didn’t want to separate himself from his great pain. This novel experience made him reluctant to pull away. Every time he swung his head, there were ever stronger flashes inside it, and from its hidden corners ever more incredible animals ran out. Ancient Chinese qilin, dragons, and so on. .

Ida crawled far away before finally straightening up. She walked slowly. She wanted to return to the apartment building where she’d lived before, a building set among the banyan trees.

But the building had collapsed. Her friends Lara and Liang sat in the rubble of its broken walls.

Ida walked to the half-wall of piled-up debris and saw their small single beds spread with clean white sheets. The two girls were both orphans, and Ida knew nothing could happen that would surprise them. Reagan’s farm had another name, “the orphanage,” because a large part of the staff were orphans.

“Ida’s come back,” Lara raised her head. “Look, we have to sleep out in the open now. Liang and I have already gotten used to it. Will you be able to? Mr. Reagan tore down the building. His own home is torn down, too.”

“How did he tear it down?”

“It’s unclear. We were sitting inside when a thunderclap blew us to the ground beneath the building. It toppled backward before our eyes. Everyone heard the farm owner howling in the thunder. We think he did this in order to seek a better life. We should be patient.”

It was only Lara who spoke. Liang stood stooped over the head of the bed playing with several white mice. She appeared to be training them to stand on their hind legs. Her mouth made a si si hissing, like a snake.

“They are survivors from the disaster. Liang wants them to work miracles,” Lara explained off to the side. “When it rains, we prop up a tiny canvas tent. .”

Ida felt that when she said “prop up a tiny canvas tent” her voice was filled with a certain bitterly sad memory. The mice started squeaking, chi chi, as if echoing Lara’s speech.

“Ida, sit down.” Liang was calling to her.

Ida sat on Liang’s bed and saw the mice make their way into Liang’s arms. It was completely dark. Fortunately Ida’s eyes could see everything clearly in the dark. But her two friends didn’t possess her special eyesight. Ida thought of how in this rolling dark world, they were so lonely.

“Lara, where did all the other workers go?”

“They went to the mountainside and built a log cabin. Mr. Reagan wanted us to stay here.”

“Stay here and do what?”

“Wait for you to come back. Look, there’s another cot over there, that’s your bed.”

Ida followed the direction she pointed in, and to her great surprise she really did see a small white speck.

“Since you left, Mr. Reagan comes every day to change your sheets. We mock him, but he doesn’t get angry.”

Ida walked over to her cot. The bed abutted the trunk of a large banyan tree. When she spread out the quilt and lay down with her head on the pillow, the crown of the banyan hung down, protecting her. She shut her eyes and saw a calm, beautiful beach, the sea, and seagulls. A gentle breeze blew. Her dead friend appeared with a solemn face in the shallow part of the water. She was still wearing that work uniform. She was undoing the buttons on her chest but none of them would open. Her long, thin, agile fingers moved rapidly up and down. Ida sighed: “Oh Reagan, Reagan, how could you have ordered such unlucky uniforms for us?” A large flock of seagulls flew up, then dropped again near her friend. She was still undoing buttons, and above her the sun blazed down. Liang was also there, playing with her mice. Now she laughed cheerfully, and Lara was at her side, screaming. Ida’s mood became calmer. For the first time in many days she entered a deep sleep.

She dreamed of rubber trees. She didn’t know how, but the rubber trees grew on the mountain slope, and the farm looked as it had when it was still undeveloped. There were lotus pods in the lake and wild ducks drifted on it. The sun, unexpectedly, was black. “If the rubber trees are transplanted, their survival rate will be very low,” she said to Mr. Reagan. Mr. Reagan was panting inside her. She struggled to open her eyes in her dream and saw the crows she hadn’t seen for so long filling the sky. They flapped their wings and drops of water fell on her face. It was those soggy wet crows. They crossed through time and flew to the past. In tiny increments, her desire became a remotely ancient memory, in the process of reviving. This kind of desire lost its previous violent nature and came to resemble a silkworm’s thread, both disarrayed and distinct. Now she reached the deepest place inside Reagan’s body.

“Who’s crying?” Ida asked.

“I am,” Reagan said in the dark.

He stood behind the tree and spoke with Ida between the tree trunks.

“Ali and I live on a boat now, a sea vessel. In dreams, our boat reaches different places all over the world. One day I saw Ali eating durian fruit, and I asked her where she got it. She said it was from Malaysia. Then she asked me, ‘Last night we got off the boat there, and stayed for a long time in a garden shaped like a triangle. Have you forgotten all about it?’”

“These past days I’ve lived at a bar, in a tower in the air. There are two bedrooms. The owner’s daughter and I each had a room. Downstairs a group of musicians played folk music from the countryside the whole day long. There was no staircase to go downstairs, so we depended entirely on our thoughts to move up and down. They were unforgettable days.”

The sky wasn’t light yet, so Ida was still lying down. She tried as hard as she could to return to her dreamscape and converse with Reagan. She collected her thoughts by thinking of a tiny black door, and longed to hear its slight zhi ya creak. Owing to this excessive effort, she couldn’t tell later whether she had actually been dreaming. She felt her mouth saying “ah, ah, ah.” No matter what speech she came out with, it all turned into this “ah,” and that small black door was in a place nearby, half-open, with a beautiful peacock passing in and out.

“On breezy nights I lie on the deck listening to the whales swimming. There is a shark that lives there, and when it arrives the whales grow restless. On the shore someone says, ‘Is this the village of fruit?’ Then a burst of running footsteps.”

“We, the bar owner’s daughter and I, later reached the point where we didn’t want to get out of bed. We slept in the air. Gradually, the music downstairs changed into a dirge. The room was filled with women and elderly people dressed in mourning. Once someone led in a dog yapping wang wang.”

Reagan saw that Ida didn’t move when she spoke. He couldn’t make out the face of the person under the quilt. He constantly suspected that Ida’s body had already disappeared because the voice he heard sounded like it played from a tape recorder. Had Ida come, and now the sky would not grow light? Lara and Liang were lighting oil lamps. Reagan thought that the two girls seemed a little nervous, as though they were waiting for something to happen. The banyan’s aerial root swayed above him with a ge ge creak, like the sound of a skeleton in a dissection room. He thought that maybe after Ida awoke she wouldn’t remember that he and she had talked. This kind of misapprehension would be the pattern of their contacts after this.

Reagan didn’t remember when he’d begun to change into a ragged drifter. He wore clothes that gave off the sour smell of sweat, and passed through the crows that crowded together. These drenched birds sometimes attacked him, leaving his body covered in droppings, but he didn’t care about such things any more. If he saw any strange girl whatever on the farm he would go over and interrogate her, until people found him detestable.

Beautiful Ida was lying under the banyan tree, and Reagan hid behind its thick trunk, giving off a stink from head to foot. They were separated into two worlds, carrying on this strange kind of intercourse. Reagan felt that this woman had taken away all the vigor and weight of his body. He was as light as a mayfly now. His body rose and fell with currents of air.

“Is it better to change into a bird, or into a tree?” Lara asked from off to the side in a loud voice.

Liang let out a ringing laugh, playing in the dark with her mice.

Reagan came out from behind the tree trunk and walked toward the two girls. He felt as if he were swimming. The effect of the earth’s gravity on him was reduced until it was miniscule.

“Girls, girls!” he said weakly, his voice like a cicada call.

“Is it better to change into a bird, or into a tree?” Lara responded to him with this question.

He couldn’t walk. He sat down right there on the spot. He heard a section of the broken-off wall collapse. But rather than collapsing altogether, it fell down brick by brick, as though someone were knocking on it. He doubted whether he was sitting on the ground, because he couldn’t feel the soil, only handfuls of dry leaves. He became very light, so light the leaves failed to crackle into pieces underneath his body.

“Is this that powerful man our boss? His body is breaking apart like pieces of tile.”

It was still Lara who spoke. Her mocking tone made Reagan feel there was nowhere to hide himself away. He wondered how she could treat her own boss like this. She was caustic. He couldn’t help feeling over his body to make certain he hadn’t broken into pieces.

Liang was still laughing. He didn’t know whether she was laughing at him or at Lara. Perhaps her laughter had nothing to do with the two of them.

The day a rainstorm collapsed the multistory building, Reagan had seen Liang searching for her mice in the rubble of the broken walls. Her movements were like lightning in the sky. Whenever her hands touched the small animals, they became obediently still so she could lift them one after another to carry in her apron. The sight moved Reagan greatly. He meant to commend this girl, but afterward he forgot about it because he was busy finding accommodation for all the people who’d lost their homes. There were many mice on the farm, but Reagan’s attention rarely focused on these recluses as they traveled back and forth. Liang appeared to be someone who had a purpose, and perhaps her schemes ran deep. Every person here had schemes that ran deep, including the one who’d drowned.

“Girls, girls.” His voice had no strength.

“My mice, my mice!” Liang, who hadn’t spoken all along, suddenly shouted, then wailed with heart-tearing, lung-rending grief. The sound cut open the silence of the night air.

Reagan hung his head, repeating silently to himself: “Disappear, disappear.” He saw his boat and a black river, so he went aboard, entered the cabin, and lay down in its narrow space. . His hand explored underneath him, catching handful after handful of leaves, leaves he couldn’t twist into pieces. Liang’s voice grew more and more distant and finally couldn’t be heard. A wild wind, its direction uncertain, blew across the surface of the river.

At daybreak the two girls finally came over. They saw Reagan’s body buried in thick layers of leaves from the tree. His mouth was also stuffed full of leaves. His figure looked like a corpse.

“Our boss is pursuing pleasures of the mind,” Lara said. “Look how content he is. I had a grandfather whose body was set into an earthen wall when he neared the end of his days. Other people believed he was suffering, but really it was pleasure.”

At night Ida slept under the banyan tree, and during the day she drifted around the farm. One night she got up because she couldn’t sleep, and without realizing it walked to the eastern slope of the mountain. There was a half-collapsed wooden house on the hillside. Ida knew the family of the farm manager Jin Xia lived there. Ida had known for some time that the house was eaten through by termites, and now, it seemed, one side had finally fallen in. In the several rooms that had not collapsed the lamps were lit. The inhibited howl of a wolf came from inside. The shapes of two people scurried in front of the window. What was the family busy with in the middle of the night?

That wolf’s howl abruptly began again, a sound loud enough for the deaf to hear. Ida felt the ground under her feet vibrating slightly. Immediately afterward a window opened and a dark shadow flew out, landing on the ground. Ida simply stared. It was Jin Xia’s older son, the one who cared for the wolf. The boy came over to Ida.

“They will kill someone,” he told Ida, pointing to the window. “The wolf is chained, but even an iron chain can’t hold it. Mama puts the blame on me, and now the whole family wants to kill me.”

“Where will you run away to?” Ida was troubled.

“Yes, where will I run away to?”

The youth wrung his hands. The green light shooting from his eyes terrified Ida. She sensed that although he was shy, he was a bit like the chained wolf. Was it possible that he did change into a wolf, and that was why his family wanted to kill him? When she looked at the window again, the lamps were already out. Inside all was quiet.

“What will you do?” Ida asked him.

“Hey,” he was suddenly relaxed. “I will sleep in the forest near here. I’m already used to it. Father told me to raise the wolf. I was taking care of it before I’d been on the farm very long. In the end they wanted to force me to leave. My wolf ran into the house and it collapsed. It was my fault. But I worry about my little brother. Father might also order him to take care of the wolf. My brother is weak, he’d be done for.”

“Don’t worry too much, he can change,” Ida said, to comfort him.

“Maybe. What good is it to worry?” The young boy was suddenly impatient. He walked off by himself into the bushes.

The wind blew as Ida continued to climb up the mountain. Something tripped her, and she almost fell down.

“Manager Jin Xia! Why are you here?”

“I’m looking for my son. I want to catch him and bring him back. The boy’s very destructive, and I’m afraid something will happen.”

“I think not. Just now he was fine.”

Ida and Jin Xia stood side by side next to a rock projecting out of the ground. The moon hid behind the clouds. Dark surrounded them. Jin Xia lit a cigarette with his lighter. “Mr. Jin Xia, do you think your son should grow up like a wolf?”

“Yes, but he has to be fastened with an iron chain.”

“It’s too cruel.”

Jin Xia laughed piercingly. That green light shone in his eyes. “People here are all like this, right?”

When Ida lowered her head tears fell down. She left him, her spirits low, and walked back down the slope.

The sky began to lighten with morning haze, the lake water in distant places shone with white light, and birds sang on the mountainside. Some object in Ida’s heart was also little by little reviving. Was this the farm where she’d lived before? Why didn’t anyone work? In several days she hadn’t seen a single person in the rubber trees. Only one day, she saw in the distance an Eastern woman wearing a black skirt, walking alone in the woods. Ida had heard that her companions from work all lived on the mountain slope, but when she went there she didn’t see a single building, or even tents. She had also gone once to Mr. Reagan’s home. The building hadn’t fallen down after all, but it looked like there was no one inside. The jeep parked at the entrance was covered in dust so thick its color couldn’t be seen. Last month, Ida had tried to make up her mind to pass the night in this building. Originally she had planned to enter through the back door in the middle of the night, but Mr. Reagan changed his mind. He told her his home wouldn’t suit her. If she came, he would be hurt. Now he didn’t appear to want this home himself.

She heard people speak of the farm’s boundaries. It seemed the farm had already expanded to the neighboring counties. And their farm, which made up its center, was deadly quiet. The only lively things were those drenched crows. No matter where she walked Ida would run into them. It was also possible that the farm had disbanded and her fellow workers were already returned home. When Ida thought of this, the future turned into a stretch of desolate beach extending all the way to the horizon. Lara had told her that the other workers all lived on the mountainside, but probably she’d said this to keep Ida’s courage up. Not far from where they slept there was a canteen, and a black cook who made food there. All three of them went to the canteen to eat, but they never met any other workers, not once. Behind the canteen there were toilets and showers. All of these appeared to have been finished only recently. There was an employee responsible for sanitation. Canteen, toilets, and showers constituted a small civilized world. Why had Mr. Reagan arranged this strange life for her?

“It’s because of love,” Lara said to her. “His inner heart is a wasteland now.”

Ida panicked at discovering a nest of dead snakes in among the reeds, large ones and small ones, more than ten altogether. It was the striped kind of snake most common to the farm. The site showed no signs of a massacre. It might be death by poisoning. She stood to the side for a while with a weng weng buzzing in her head, as though someone kept on saying something to her. The lake water became so bright, so insidious. She gazed a moment at her face in the water of the lake. That youthful face made her think of her dead mother, especially about the eyes and brow. She thought that it might have been her mother’s wish for her to come here, poor and vagrant. Crows flew past, and the wind fanned by their wings made ripples on the water’s surface. Her face dispersed.

“Miss Ida, don’t you have a home?”

Someone in the water spoke to her. It was a child. She stared attentively, searching, but could not see anyone in the water. The person was behind her. It was Jin Xia’s older son.

“Little one, what are you doing following me?”

Ida looked into the child’s shining wolf eyes and began to smile.

“You have a home, but you won’t go back to it,” she said.

The youth stood there bashfully, looking at the water-logged ground, as if he wanted to say something, but hesitated.

“Miss Ida, tell me, will my dad kill my little wolf?” he finally said.

“No, why?”

“Last year I saw him sharpen his knife and then he cut off one of the little wolf’s paws. His left hind foot. The little wolf howled for three whole days and three nights. He covered the house in blood. Afterward my father cried, and I cried, too. He cried when he told me that this way the little wolf won’t be able to run away. Did you know that little wolves always want to run away?”

He squatted gloomily by the watery ditch, poking at the leeches in the water with a stick. Ida observed from above his fiery-red, babylike hair. The tremor in her heart was indescribable.

Someone rustled in the reeds. It was that Eastern woman again. She appeared in a flash and then was gone.

The boy didn’t raise his head.

“That women has no home. We call her the lunatic, poor woman. One time she lost a shoe at the door of our house and ran away barefoot. Maybe our little wolf scared her.”

“What is your name?” Ida finally asked him.

“My name is Little Wolf. My dad says our family has two little wolves.”

“It sounds nice,” Ida said sincerely.

Little Wolf was suddenly infuriated. He stood up and spoke with hatred: “You woman, why are you complimenting me? I don’t need you to say nice things about me.” He threw the stick, abandoned her, and walked into the reeds.

Ida thought that maybe the manager Jin Xia’s whole family was frightening. Mr. Reagan had brought him in to be the manager, so surely something in Jin Xia’s temperament must have appealed to him. Living in their wooden house eaten by termites, caring for a wolf, this family was not, in reality, a threat to anyone except themselves. Where had Mr. Reagan found this man? Thinking about the family, Ida did not notice her pain easing. It was truly a miracle cure. She stretched her long arms, jumped twice, and filled her lungs with fresh air. Mr. Reagan’s making her live under a tree was a brilliant idea.

Ida stopped drifting around. She felt there were a few things she wanted to do.

A long time ago, when Ida was still at her old home, she’d often watched the people there making bricks out of yellow clay. They baked the bricks in the scorching sun, then built houses with them. Now there happened to be this same clay beside the forest where she was staying. She started by making a brick mold with her hands, then industriously began the manual work. Her sweat dripped into the clay bricks, and her hands became extremely rough. Every day, in the setting sun, she heard the mountain flood scream past in her ears.

“Ida, don’t you like your home to be everywhere and to live out in the open?” Lara asked her.

“I am a wasp, surely you’ve seen how a wasp makes a nest.”

As the walls rose, Reagan looked on from a distance with overwhelming emotions. Ida’s movements were so harmonized, so rich in musicality. She was an innately skilled builder. The original detached wall now became the back wall of her new building. This new building had two rooms, front and back. Lara also took part in the work. She had done carpentry before, and now she was helping Ida make the roof frame, which they prepared to cover with thin strips of Chinese fir.

And so Reagan watched Ida move the cot into the small house she’d built. He knew the crude small building had no electricity or running water, or even a window, and there was only a low wooden door. At midday Jin Xia’s older son, the “wolf child,” always came to the front of the small house and knocked on the door. Ida would make warm welcoming sounds. But the wolf-child never went in. They would chat at the door, and then the wolf-child would bounce away. Reagan took notice of all this. Reagan’s home wasn’t the boat of which he’d spoken. It was an abandoned trailer. Every day Ali brought him simple meals and water.

“Why does Ida want to live in that building?” he asked Jin Xia.

“She wants to become the farm’s witness. The farm is ceaselessly expanding, the borders change and change again, and in her heart she’s uncertain about it.” Jin Xia’s expression revealed satisfaction when he said this.

Reagan saw Jin Xia’s wife holding a basket of clothes as she tottered up and down the stairs. She was going to the backyard to dry the clothes. Her purple swollen feet shuffled. She did not appear to be in a good state of health. Jin Xia went with Reagan to stand under the tree. He smoked one cigarette after another, squinting his long narrow eyes and plotting some affair in his heart. A feeling of uneasiness skimmed across Reagan’s mind as he thought of certain rumors about Jin Xia. “Never mind what they say, this man’s driving ambition isn’t a menace to anyone,” Reagan thought.

Jin Xia’s wife finished drying the clothes in the backyard and came out. When she went up to the house Reagan saw her bare feet running with water, each step a damp print on the stairs.

“Every day my wife and I make up vain dreams inside the house. She tells me our farm could occupy more than half of a country. She wants me to expand into diversified production.”

“I worry about the termites,” Reagan blurted out, then felt a moment of remorse.

A nauseating odor filled the trailer. It smelled like decomposing sea creatures. Reagan didn’t know where it was coming from. He lay on the sofa bed in the dark with his eyes open, waiting for the Eastern woman to arrive. She’d altered her pattern and no longer lay entangled with him. She stood outside the window of the trailer, poking her head in, breathing forcefully, making reveling sounds. So she liked the stench inside the truck. Reagan remembered that the woman walked back and forth under the burning sun all day, coating her clothes with dust, but when she was entangled with him he had never smelled a bad odor on her body. You could say her body had no smell. Even her body’s odor couldn’t be smelled. Then what about her body excited him? When Reagan was with her, he had never managed to attain a clearheaded judgment. Her flesh was like a fish in water, relaxed and smooth, but at the crucial moment it always lacked substance. One time, when Reagan was faint from climax, the woman’s body actually disappeared. His whole body was rapidly dispirited. He felt only dread. Fortunately the situation lasted only a few minutes, then she reappeared. He began that hungry, thirsty lingering with her again. She very seldom spoke, only once, when she told him she came from a small, little-known island in the Pacific called Yellow Fruit Island or some such. Reagan had never heard of this name. At all other times, her speech was just two or three words: “oh my,” “I never thought,” “look,” “love,” “keep on going,” etc., in a thick foreign accent, but Reagan couldn’t guess her meaning. It was as if she were practicing saying these phrases for fun.

“Seabed, seabed!” the woman said to him from the window, blowing out air with her mouth.

“Dear, come here!” Reagan called.

Futile thirsting tormented him. Inside the trailer the evil odor grew thicker. Reagan was astonished: how could a quiet, lithe woman like her enjoy the odor inside? She stopped by as if it were merely the smell which drew her there. An enormous whale skeleton appeared in Reagan’s mind. A few pieces of rotting meat stained the skeleton. A tsunami was pushing this prop, spinning it around.

He sat up with an effort and saw the woman leave the window and walk into a patch of forest that was billowing with smoke.

“Ida.” He strained to say these two syllables then returned to the sofa bed.

The farm’s territory was reaching into the far distance under the cover of darkness. The enormity of its scale drove Reagan mad. Now he entered Jin Xia’s insane path of thought, changing into a crow circling in the sky over the loess, with no way to alight. He meant to set a boundary, but this intention became an obsession over a vain dream. Thirst, hunger, fear — he flew in rings, flew on diagonal paths, then made a spiral descent. He thought that perhaps he had stayed at the same spot and was not really moving around. At one moment he glimpsed a breakwater, and thought mistakenly that it was the border. But it wasn’t a sea beyond the breakwater, it was a field of maize extending beyond the horizon — a test site for launching Jin Xia’s experiments in diversified production.

When the sky was barely light he heard Jin Xia talking to someone. Apparently it was a police officer questioning Jin Xia about the issue of buying land. Jin Xia stuttered and his voice trembled. He would say something and then immediately deny it. Reagan guessed that he was already white in the face, his forehead sweating.

Reagan walked to the window and glanced outside to discover one man there, Jin Xia, standing under the tree and staring into space.

“Jin Xia, who were you just speaking with?”

“Oh, no one. I was talking to myself,” he said awkwardly.

“Talking to yourself? Then why is there a rumor going around saying you take bribes?”

“Mr. Reagan, I tell you, I started the rumor myself.”

“Oh!”

Reagan was greatly surprised and didn’t speak for what seemed like half a day. Crows cawed suddenly in the trees. A whiteness appeared in his brain. In the trailer the stench had disappeared, but his keyed-up nerves still could not relax. What Jin Xia described, too, exceeded Reagan’s anticipation. He thought of the wolf Jin Xia was raising, his house eaten through by termites and half of it in rubble, his wife’s edema dripping water, his older son drifting around like a wild wolf. . Reagan stepped out of the trailer. He wanted to speak with Jin Xia.

“Jin Xia, how many years is it since you came here from your original home?”

“Me? Oh, let me tell you, I don’t have a native home. I was born on the road, and after that I was always on the road, in a troop on the march. . Look at me, do I look like someone who has a native home?”

As he spoke he stared into the distance. Reagan followed the line of his sight and saw a hawk drop slantingly through the air, at first managing to hold itself aloft, then plunging into the lake.

“I have no native home,” he said again. “Your driver Martin knows all about this.”

“Martin?”

“Yes. I met Martin at a picnic — a young man who took care in his dress, with an elegant manner. It was at his suggestion that I came to your farm. At that time I was enjoying successful promotion in my career. Martin said I should come here, where I would have a place to exercise my talents. He also called your farm ‘a wasteland.’ An intelligent young fellow. The scenery here is especially beautiful, particularly the green sky. It makes me enlarge my outlook.”

After a while, Jin Xia told Reagan he needed to go.

“Going back home?”

“No, to make the whole world my home. My family will leave at night when it’s dark. I already found someone to replace me. He was formerly a monk.”

“I’m very surprised.”

Reagan passed another night without sleep. He was at the lake, sitting on the small bench fishing. The boy sat on the ground at his side.

“Little Wolf, will you be leaving?”

“Yes, Uncle Reagan. Aren’t I saying good-bye to them now?”

“To whom?”

“Them, the leeches in the water ditch. I’m good friends with them. Once every week I let them drink blood from my leg. Look!”

He smoothed his pants leg, showing Reagan his slightly swollen and inflamed calf.

“I love you, Little Wolf. Are you really going to leave?”

“I really am going to leave, Uncle Reagan. Dad says we won’t come back again. My heart’s already flown to that place far away in the mountains. I heard all the buildings there hang from the cliffs. My dad is a hero, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Is your wolf going with you?”

“Hmm.”

His mood darkened. He kept kicking the small bench where Reagan sat until he could no longer fish. Reagan didn’t know why the boy was so unhappy. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought up that wolf. He’d never understood why Jin Xia had lamed the wolf. He packed up his fishing rod and sat down on the ground with the child, holding his little hand, wanting to speak with him. The child’s hand was extremely skinny. It gave Reagan an unusual feeling. He remembered the child had been eating and sleeping out of doors all these days.

“Uncle Reagan, will I die?”

“No, you won’t. You are a child.”

“Children can die, too. I was just thinking about the buildings hanging from the cliffs. When our wolf starts to howl, the buildings might fall down. Last time when most of our house collapsed it was the wolf that did it. It wasn’t the rainstorm at all. My dad told everyone it was the rainstorm. He was fooling people. Uncle Reagan, do you think I should go? I want to stay on the farm with my wolf. I already found a good place over there in the forest. I could put up a house and live there with it. I wouldn’t have to live in that termite nest any more. But I also wonder if living on a cliff would be more interesting, only if you don’t fall in. I think and think, and I can’t make up my mind. I’m still a child, I don’t want to die. My dad is a hero.”

Reagan pityingly rubbed the child’s small hand, although in his heart he understood that the child needed no pity.

“Little Wolf, you don’t have to go. You could live here with me in the forest. What do you think? In the future you would grow up to be like your father and come help me manage the farm.”

“Things are good here, but I also want to go live on the cliffs. Uncle Reagan, what do you think I should do?” He looked seriously at Reagan.

Under the moonlight Reagan thought his eyes looked like two deep caves, as if there were no eyeballs in the sockets. A feeling of cold scudded across Reagan’s heart, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. Someone swam by in the lake with a noisy gurgling, hua hua. Reagan could tell it was someone else, not Ida. Ida was rhythmical, while this person slapped the water carelessly, almost willfully. “It’s the forest keeper,” Little Wolf told him.

The forest keeper came ashore naked. His clothing was on the bank, and he walked over to dress. The old man’s silhouette looked strong and healthy, not at all like his downtrodden appearance in the daytime. Reagan thought: Maybe the forest keeper believes this lake and farm both belong to him? Look how confident he is. His movements are so poised. Little Wolf suddenly ran over and hugged the forest keeper. The pair walked away, speaking warmly in whispers.

Without blinking Reagan watched their old and young figures as they left. A kind of regret sprung up in his heart. Without knowing why, he sensed that the forest keeper was the true owner of this land. Every tree and blade of grass was probably in his dreams, and this child was a free bird flying back and forth. It was said that the forest keeper’s family had lived here for many generations. Formerly it was a true wilderness. Suddenly, the silhouette of a deer appeared within Reagan’s view. The deer were on the opposite bank, a great herd of them. He had never heard of there being deer in these mountains. What sort of monk had Jin Xia hired to replace himself as the manager of such a large farm? Seeing the deer suddenly emerge from lower ground on the opposite shore, Reagan felt that the future was uncertain. At this very moment Jin Xia might have already packed his bags.

He returned to the trailer, unable to lift his spirits, lay down, and shut his eyes to its stinking odor.

“Mr. Reagan, I will start my job today.” The forest keeper’s voice came from inside the trailer.

“You?”

“Of course Jin Xia didn’t tell you, that bastard!” He clapped the trailer window so hard it rang.

“He said it would be a monk.”

“I used to be a monk. That bastard, playing tricks on us!”

“Come in and talk.”

“No, I need to get to work. Mr. Reagan, yesterday I dreamed I saw our farm extending to the eastern seacoast. Jin Xia had great momentum.”

Reagan shut his eyes and reflected for a long time, but he was unable to think of the forest keeper being the manager of the farm. In these past few years, everyone viewed him as a dirty, strange old man who lived alone on the undeveloped land. In these years there were countless times when Reagan had burst with the impulse to speak with him, but once he got to the keeper’s door he was held back by dread. How was Reagan not a plunderer? This stretch of earth was formerly a wilderness. The forest keeper’s family had lived here for generations, and the forest keeper was the only descendent of that clan. Naturally he saw this land as his. Now Reagan had transformed the land into a farm and him into a forest keeper. Who knew what grudge he might still harbor in his heart? Looking in through the broken door, Reagan always saw a snow-white triple-edged scraping knife lying out on the table.

How many years might this old man have been matching his strength with Reagan’s in the dark? There were many times when Reagan had heard that the forest keeper would die soon, or was at his last breath. Apparently this was all a smokescreen. It was as if this strange man controlled everything here from a place deep in the earth, and was now, finally, bit by bit, encroaching, retaking the things that belonged to him. Jin Xia’s sham expansion was no more than a means to divert Reagan’s attention. Damn Jin Xia. Where had he come from? What was he doing? Reagan thought back, but his first meeting with Jin Xia was always a blank. He couldn’t recall anything. It seemed to have been in some underground walkway in City B; it also seemed to have been at home in the kitchen, at midnight, when he went to fetch brandy. Had he invited Jin Xia to work on the farm, or was it Jin Xia who wanted to come? Or was there some third party who introduced him for the job? Reagan no longer retained the slightest impression. His distinct memories all came after Jin Xia started at the farm, and these were all connected to the wooden house on the mountainside that was eaten through by termites. Now he decided that, very possibly, this was a scheme plotted out a long time ago, a conspiracy relating to some few ancient, untraceable wishes. Even his driver, that young fellow, played a role. From the beginning it was like this. . And Ali? At this thought, Reagan felt like a drowning man, like that girl, except he didn’t wear a work uniform and could get to the water’s surface to breathe.

Ali quietly came into the trailer. She was making him breakfast. Reagan, trusting to his luck, thought that maybe nothing had happened. She was so serene!

“The new manager does not intend to move. He will still live in his old cabin.”

Ali finally spoke the fearful truth. Was this possible?

He must open his eyes, must get out of bed. The world had not disappeared in front of him. He saw a drenched crow plunge from the window into his trailer, dropping into the washbasin. A warm, damp animal smell spread everywhere inside the trailer. The bird’s half-shut eyes seemed to stare at him. Ali ever so carefully cupped the injured bird (perhaps it was not injured) in her hands, stepped down from the trailer, and walked it to a growth of grass, where she put it down. She kept saying, “Little fellow, little fellow, you’re so rash!”

“Mr. Reagan, you should get moving!” she said when she left.

When he stuck his head out the window, the violent sunlight temporarily blinded him.

Ida left her own small house and came there. Now she saw him clearly. He didn’t look like a farm owner any more, only like a man who was down and out. He was extremely thin, so thin that his old clothing appeared empty on his body. The trailer was behind him, and the black-clad woman’s skirt flashed behind the trailer. What was that woman doing hiding there? Two days earlier Ida had seen that Jin Xia’s wooden house had completely caved in. A few wild dogs moved around in the ruins. She didn’t know where the family had gone.

She thought, “Today the sky is green. It’s so strange, how is the sky green first thing in the morning?” The road she’d taken passed through the rubber tree plantation. There was not a single worker there.

Mr. Reagan evidently saw her, but his expression was hollow. He had sunk into distraction. “Mr. Reagan!” Ida called out in an exploratory way. The woman behind the trailer was nowhere to be seen. Ida ran over to look, but there was no one behind the trailer. She looked back inside the trailer, but she saw only Ali sweeping.

“Ida, what are you looking at? Everything has changed now.” Ali spoke without raising her head.

“I’m still not used to it. Can you teach me, Mother?”

“You don’t need me to teach you. Isn’t this what you hoped for all along? Try calling him again, I think he will answer. He answered you before, but you didn’t hear.”

Ida called to Reagan again. Her voice was rending and shrill. Suddenly she felt that there was nowhere to hide, and she ran away, cradling her head. She ran to the lake and then through the groves of trees, running until her eyes went black and she fell to the ground. She indistinctly remembered falling on a space of open ground.

“You run back and forth, but it’s still the same piece of land. The young lady’s heart is like the morning dew.”

Ida heard the forest keeper close by. He was wearing the same clothing and leg wraps. He hugged a wild pheasant to his chest.

“Mr. Reagan handed over the farm to me. I want to change it into a territory of the night. Ida, your eyesight is so good at night. You will have a place to develop your talents.”

His voice came through his beard with a weng weng droning. He’d already grown a beard.

“With the first light of morning, I saw Ida running toward me. My heart was truly moved.” His snow-white brand-new beard shook.

“But I didn’t. . Oh, the sky this morning was so beautiful. Where did our convoy go? Doesn’t it usually travel along this road?”

Some object in her heart revived. She felt herself eager to do something. She stood up and stretched her body out, appraising the forest keeper’s cabin.

The forest keeper laughed heartily and said in a loud voice: “Convoy! Convoy. . There’s no convoy any more, dear, only a pack of wolves tearing through the wilderness.”

But at noon large crowds of workers appeared on the road. To the south there was a road-repair bulldozer pushing earth. The forest keeper stood underneath the machine giving orders. Ida knew he wanted to construct a new road. This was the pack of wolves he talked about — those workers. Among the workers were both new hands and old hands. Ida asked one of the young men where they lived. He said by the sea. They slept on the beach under the open sky. He also said their manner of living now was “better than we ever imagined.” Ida saw that he was holding a pheasant in his arms and asked what he was going to do with it. He said he was going to domesticate pheasants. “Everyone’s job will change. This is what the new manager says.”

Ida thought of Reagan’s unfavorable situation. One moment she thought it was the end, but the next moment she thought it was a turning point. As if in a trance, she came to the seaside. A breeze was blowing and the fish smell of the water excited her. There were many people on the beach with their bodies buried in the sand. She approached them and chose a stretch of sand to sit on. She began to bury herself. The middle-aged woman next to her said that lying like this you could hide from a landslide, and you could also speak directly with your ancestors. “You are crushing my hand,” she complained. Ida thought this was odd, because the woman was more than two meters away. How could her hand be underneath Ida’s body?

In the sky numerous hawks stared greedily, but they didn’t dare take precipitate action. Maybe they thought that these people with only heads showing were a bit unusual. You couldn’t say what snare might be hiding underneath. After long, hesitant wheeling above, one large gray bird made a fierce dive at a young boy. Grappling and struggling began. They all held their breath and looked on intently. Ida wanted to look, too, but the sand got in her eyes. She couldn’t see anything. She heard the woman calling her.

“Ida, Ida, I am your mother!”

“Mama, Mama! My eyes, I can’t see you!” Ida began to cry.

“Never mind, stupid child, it doesn’t matter. When the flood came from the mountain you couldn’t see, either, but didn’t you escape? And not seeing is better. It’s tragic, tragic, the child broke the old hawk’s wing. There’s so much blood.”

Some object was underneath her, pushing at Ida’s back until it hurt. She thought of sitting up, but didn’t move. The woman beside her said there was a person underneath. It was Mr. Reagan. Ida pressed down on him so that he couldn’t get out. No matter how much he tried, it was a waste of his strength. Ida felt blood running from her eyes. The grains of sand cut her eyeballs like needles. “Mr. Reagan, I love you,” she said. Then the person stopped pushing at her so hard.

“How nice, Ida found a beau!” The woman’s voice was piercing. “And he’s a landowner.”

Ida remembered that Mr. Reagan had already given his farm freely to the forest keeper. Now he had nothing at all. But who had told her this? Was it him?

In the midst of the stinging pain, which was hard to bear, Ida began to ponder.