The Ancient Ship
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A profound silence settled over the crowd as the hazy image of a distant mist-covered ocean came into view, with bare-armed men pulling at their oars, their lives in imminent danger, or of a ship brimming with treasure that disappears in the mist. Truly, the vista is of men and ships, with fortune and misfortune giving rise to each other. The elders could still remember ships’ masts lining the old pier and the fishy smell that hung in the air. Ships old and new fighting for space, one nearly on top of the other, as far as the eye can see. Then thousand sailors breathing on myriad decks, as lewd, murky air assails the face. Commerce is king in Wali, where silver ingots roll in from everywhere. Suddenly a cloudburst, but the rivergoing ships stay put, like a swarm of locusts…
The townspeople gathered round Sui Buzhao and his boat, making hardly a sound, exchanging glances as if they were all strangers. After rubbing their eyes they saw that Sui Buzhao was already sitting aboard his boat, still on dry land, and as he sat there, he raised the telescope hanging from his belt, an invitation for Jiansu to come along with him.
With a shout, Jiansu took off toward the ship as if possessed, but Baopu grabbed him by the shirt and refused to let go, no matter how hard his brother struggled to break free.
Foul curses tore from Sui Buzhao from where he stood in the cabin. With a wave of his hand he signaled them to pick up the boat, with him in it, and carry it over to the water. Bursting with excitement, that is what they did, and the instant the hull touched the water it came to life; a welcoming sound arose from somewhere inside. The sail billowed and moved the boat swiftly away from the bank as Sui Buzhao stood up and let the wind muss his hair. The crowd saw him put his hands on his hips, then slap his thigh and make faces. The women lowered their heads and scolded softly, “Shame on him.”
The spell was broken when the boat reached the middle of the river. “A fine boat!” the people shouted. “And a fine captain!” “Good for you, Sui Buzhao!” “Come back and take me with you!”…As they shouted their encouragement, the boat began to turn with the current, moving in a slow circle, just like the millstone. Then, as it picked up speed and everyone expected it to take off, it abruptly sank beneath the surface, leaving nothing behind but a swirling eddy. If Buzhao didn’t bob up in a hurry he’d be lost, everyone knew. So they waited, but there was no sign of him as the surface smoothed out and the river returned to its original state. Wrapped in his brother’s arms, Jiansu wept. Baopu held tight, his arms trembling.
Immersed in grief and disappointment, the people were suddenly amazed to see a head burst through the surface near the bank. Who was it? Why, none other than the stubble-faced Sui Buzhao.
Back on dry land, he ignored the whoops of joy as he walked off, swaying from side to side and dripping water. Heaven willed the ship to sink, people were saying. Maybe Wali is not supposed to have boats. If it hadn’t sunk, Sui Buzhao might have left town and never returned. Yes, they all agreed, as they chided themselves for not even considering where the man might have wanted to sail off to. Their eyes were on Jiansu. How lucky you are, they said, how very lucky. But there were those who accused Buzhao of having a sinister side. How could he think of taking a mere child with him? Baopu, who would have none of that, took his brother by the hand and walked off, following the trail of water left by his uncle.
For days Sui Buzhao was too embarrassed to leave his room. Then he fell ill. When, many days later, he finally emerged from his room, he was terribly gaunt. He had tied a strip of blue cloth around his forehead, almost as if that were all that kept his head intact.
A boat had sunk out of sight, but a few years later, a large ship would see the light of day, and its appearance would rock the entire province. That event would occur at about the same time as the assault on the town wall, making it one of the most feverish years in memory.
Sui Buzhao had his head buried in his seafaring bible when he heard someone outside his window shout, “A team of irrigation repairmen has found a buried ship!” He knew that everyone in town was engaged in digging in the ground for one reason or another, so maybe someone had dug up his boat. His heart racing, he ran outside and headed for the riverbank. When he reached the old pier he saw that the whole town had turned out, forming a crowd a few hundred yards from the riverbank. He started running, stumbling and falling several times before he reached the crowd. Fortunately for him, he was thin enough to squeeze his way up front, where he saw piles of excavated mud. Dirty water was flowing down a man-made ditch; something had been moved to higher ground. “My god!” The declaration burst from his throat when he saw it.
It had once been a large wooden ship whose deck had long since rotted away, leaving a sixty- or seventy-foot keel with a pair of iron objects—the remnants of two cannons—lying athwart it. A rusty anchor lay to the side, along with other scattered, unidentifiable items, turned black by gooey mud. A pair of iron rods lay across what had been the bow of the ship, seemingly some sort of staffs that had been stuck in the deck. A strange odor rose from the pit, attracting a hawk that was circling above them. The smell turned the people’s throats dry, inducing a sense of nausea. The keel, exposed to the dry air, had already begun to turn red. Water seeped from holes in the wood, white at first, then red. Before long, people smelled blood and backed away from the sickening odor. The hawk was still circling, carried by the air currents.
The man in charge of the dig was crouching off to the side, having a cigarette. “That’s enough gawking,” he said as he stood up. “We’ve got work to do. We’ll chop it up and carry the wood back to the kitchen for kindling.”
Sui Buzhao was in motion before the man’s words had died out. Standing as close to the keel as possible, he shouted, “Don’t you dare!…” Shocked silence. “That’s my ship!” he said, pointing to the relic. “It belongs to Uncle Zheng He and me.” His words were met by laughter. Again the man in charge told his men to go on down and start working. “Hey, you!” Sui Buzhao’s gaunt white face turned purple; the blue headband went pop and fell away, like the broken string of a lute. He ran down, picked up the rusty anchor, and raised it over his head.
“Anyone who so much as touches my ship gets this!”
Baopu and Jiansu were among the onlookers. Jiansu cried out to his uncle, but Buzhao didn’t hear him. He stood firm, gnashing his teeth, his wispy beard quivering. Someone commented that the ship must have been buried for centuries and might even be a national treasure. When he recommended holding off until they could get an expert opinion, the others agreed. So the man in charge sent someone to get Li Xuantong.
The man returned to report that Li was meditating and was not to be bothered. But he had recommended his good friend, the herbalist Guo Yun. Half an hour later, Guo arrived at the site, and the crowd parted to let him through. Hoisting the hem of his robe as he negotiated the muddy ground, he walked up to the keel, knelt down, and studied it carefully. Then he circled it, like a grazing sheep. Finally, he narrowed his eyes and stretched out his arms as if feeling for something, though there was nothing within two feet of his reach. He groped the air for a moment, a series of snorts emerging from his nose as his Adam’s apple rose and fell. He pulled his arms back and gazed skyward, just as some bird droppings fell onto his upturned face. He was oblivious. Then he looked down and gazed at the ditch, staring at it for a full half hour, during which the crowd held its collective breath. The unbearable anxiety was palpable. Slowly the old healer turned to the people.
“Which direction was the bow pointing?” he asked.
No one knew. At first, all anyone had cared about was chopping the keel up to feed the kitchen stove, so they’d carried it up willy-nilly. No one could recall which way it was facing.
“Who cares which direction it was facing?” the foreman said.
The old healer’s face darkened. “That is critically important. If it was facing north, it was headed for the ocean; south, it would have wound through the mountains. And if it was facing Wali, it would have stopped at our pier.” The people exchanged glances but said nothing. “This was a warship that sailed on our Luqing River and was sunk during territorial battles in the old days. It is a true national treasure. No one is to touch it, young or old. Post a guard, day and night. We must send our fastest messenger to the capital to report this find.”
“I’ll go,” Sui Buzhao volunteered as he laid down the anchor and elbowed his way through the crowd.
Baopu took Jiansu home and went looking for his uncle. He was nowhere to be found. Then when they were crossing the path they heard weeping inside. It was, they discovered, Hanzhang, so they rushed in to see what was wrong. Their sister was lying on the kang crying. Taken aback by the sight, they asked why she was crying. She pointed to the stable. They ran outside and went to the stable, where they saw that the old chestnut was dead. Their uncle was there, too, trembling uncontrollably and muttering something incomprehensible at the dead horse. Baopu knew instinctively that his uncle had planned to ride the horse to report the finding. But now he couldn’t. Baopu and Jiansu fell to their knees at the horse’s side.
Eventually, people at the provincial capital sent a team of experts to remove the old ship, and the residents of Wali never saw it again.
FIVE
Many years before the old ship was excavated, that is, the spring after Sui Yingzhi died, his second wife, Huizi, followed him in death. The impressive main house of the family estate burned to the ground that day, incinerating Huizi amid the cinders on the kang, a sight too gruesome to behold. Baopu, the only witness, secretly buried her. Jiansu would later ask how she had died, and Baopu would reply that she had taken poison, which was true. But there were many things he did not reveal to his younger brother. Now that the main house was gone, the foundation had been converted into a vegetable garden tended by the two brothers and their sister. Late at night, moonbeams cast their light on the bean trellises, from which crystalline drops of dew fell to the ground.
Baopu recalled how, six months after his father died, Sui Buzhao came to see Huizi. “Sister-in-law,” he said, “I think you should move out of the family home.” She said no. “Now that my brother has passed on,” he said, “you don’t have the good fortune to hold off the evil tied up in this house.” But she ignored him. Several days passed before Buzhao, his face beet red, his body trembling, returned. “Huizi!” he called out after barging into the house. “Huizi!” He fidgeted with his clothes. When she came out and saw him, her surprise was mixed with annoyance.
“What do you want?”
He pointed outside. “My room out there is neat and tidy. I even sprayed perfume on the floor.” She just stared at him, not sure what he was getting at. His chin quivered, and he blinked nervously. Finally, with a stomp of his foot, he said, “Come live with this wretched man, what do you say?” Hardly able to believe her ears, she reached out and slapped him, giving him a bloody nose. “I mean it, you should come with me,” he said, biting his lip. He was obviously not going to be easily put off, so she picked up a pair of scissors. He turned and fled.
“I’m afraid there’s no future for your stepmother,” Buzhao said to Baopu. “She tried to stab me with scissors. Instead of thanking me for my kindness, she treats me like a stranger. I’ve been a useless vagabond all my life, but I’ve never had an indecent thought where she is concerned. I may be dirt poor, but I don’t owe anyone a cent, just what she needs to get through life. Well, to hell with her! She’s never gone to sea, never seen the world. There are plenty of women down south who have moved in with their brothers-in-law after losing their husbands. But, like I say, to hell with her! She has no future!”
Sui Buzhao left and never again entered the main house as long as Huizi was alive. Before long his prediction came true. Some people came to drive her out of the house, which they said now belonged to the town. Baopu urged his stepmother to move, but she set her jaw and refused. She didn’t say a word; she just refused to move. In the end she sent the three children over to side rooms, leaving her alone in that big house. Seeing how stubborn she could be, her brow creased in an expression of strength and hostility, Baopu was reminded of how she had injured her hand by pounding on the table after his father had returned from paying off debts.
After Huizi died along with the main house, militiamen kept watch over Baopu and his siblings for a long time before letting them be. All this time Zhao Duoduo led a team of people in searching the site for hidden treasure, poking the ground with metal poles. To their enormous disappointment they came up empty.
Now that the side buildings were occupied by the brothers and their sister, Sui Buzhao often came over to where the main house had stood. Baopu tried to talk him into moving back into the compound, but he said no. So the three children occupied one of the buildings and used the others for storage. Few books were left from their library, but as political ill winds began to blow, Baopu hid what few remained in a casket. As Hanzhang grew older she more and more closely resembled her mother, but she had the temperament of her father. She moved into one of the other side rooms to be alone.
Around the time of Sui Yingzhi’s death the people who had worked for the family left, all but Guigui, who had nowhere to go. When she wasn’t cooking for the brothers and their sister she sat in the doorway of one of the buildings shelling beans. She was three years younger than Baopu, with whom she’d bathed together when they were both children. Now when she shelled beans she often looked over at him and blushed. One night, after the brothers had fallen asleep, Guigui saw that the lantern was still lit, so she went into their room; she stopped when she noticed Baopu’s muscular shoulders as he lay asleep in the red light of the room. One of his legs was sticking out from under the quilt. She had never seen so much of him uncovered. Worried that he might catch cold, she covered his legs and then his shoulders. The smell of his naked body brought tears to her eyes. She dried her eyes, but the tears kept coming. Then she bent down and kissed his shoulder. He was sleeping so soundly he did not wake up. But Jiansu did, in time to see Guigui bending over his brother’s shoulder. He sat up to see what she was doing. Only half awake, he mumbled, “Hm?” Guigui stopped and ran out of the room. Suddenly wide awake, unable to go back to sleep, Jiansu blew out the lantern and lay there smiling.
From that night on, Jiansu was always on the lookout for contact between Guigui and Baopu, and he discovered that she was actually quite pretty, while his brother was a very strong man. He could have his way with her any time he wanted. A year passed and Baopu and Guigui were married, forcing Jiansu to move into a room by himself, one next to the eastern wall. From then on he could not escape the feeling that his brother’s room was filled with mystery, and he sometimes went in to see what he could see. Guigui had stuck one of her paper-cuts over the window—a crab with a date in one of its claws. The place had a different smell, not sweet and fragrant, but warm. It was a wonderful room.
Jiansu’s own room, cold and forbidding, was only a place to sleep. Most of the time he spent with his uncle, who captivated him with tales of strange things, especially those from his seafaring days, so exciting Jiansu that he listened with his mouth hanging slack. Sometimes he went into the woods to walk aimlessly, searching the trees for birds and daydreaming. As time went on, he could no longer do that; he was like an ox in a halter, tied to a plow with no fun to be had anywhere. He and his brother worked the fields all day long, where he suffered cuts from hoes and scythes and bled like a sapling. His blood was fresh, new, bright red. Scars appeared all over his body as he grew strong from the hard work.
On one occasion the team leader sent him down to the riverbank to cut brambles for a fence. When he got there he spotted a girl of sixteen or seventeen who was also cutting brambles, and when she called him Brother Jiansu, he had to laugh. I’m a brother, all right, he was thinking, one who’s looking for a girl just like you. Hot blood that had flowed through his veins all those years suddenly pooled in his throat, and it burned. Although he barely spoke to her, he kept looking over. As a lively, cheerful girl, she’d have loved to talk to him, but he refused to give her the opportunity. What he wanted was to squelch her cheerfulness and turn her into a different kind of girl. The second day passed the same way, and then the third. On the fourth day, as he was once again cutting brambles, he had a perverse desire to chop off his own hand. At about midafternoon, Jiansu shouted to her, “Look, a thorn pricked my hand!”
The girl shrieked, threw down her scythe, and ran up to him. “Where? Let me see!”
“Here, right here!” he said. Then, when she was close enough, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to him.
She squirmed like a snake, struggling to break loose. “Brother Jiansu!” she said. “I’ll scream. Let me go!” she demanded. “Let me go!”
For some strange reason, all Jiansu could do was mimic her: “Brother Jiansu!” he said. “Brother Jiansu!” To calm her down he began stroking her hair, basking in the feeling of its silkiness. As he stroked, he could sense a change in her movements. Slowly she stopped resisting, and after a moment, she laid her head on his shoulder.
There was only dim moonlight that night as the girl slipped quietly into the compound, where Jiansu was waiting for her beneath the broad-bean trellis. He carried her into his room, where the only light came from the hazy moon. She sat down and reached out to touch his face with both hands. “I won’t let you see me,” she said.
He touched her face with one hand. “And I won’t let you see me,” he said.
Brushing his hand away, she said, “But that’s why I came here, to see you. I’ll look at you awhile, but then I have to go.” Not tonight, Jiansu was thinking, you can’t go away tonight. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. Thrilled by the kiss, she kissed him back—on the neck and on his eyes. Touching the fuzz that grew on his upper lip, she said, “Very nice.”
Jiansu was trembling all over. “Are you ill?” she asked anxiously. He shook his head and began to undress her. She asked him to let her go, but he was breathing too hard to speak. By then she was no longer speaking either, as she took off everything but a pair of knit underpants with purple and yellow stripes. Jiansu clenched his fists; his muscles rippled as she bashfully laid her head against his arm, pressing hard against him, as if she wanted to wrap herself around him. Her skin was slightly dark and chilled, but amazingly soft. Her body reminded him of a sash—long, thin, and soft. Her skin shimmered in the moonlight; her small hips were round and firm. “You can’t leave,” Jiansu said softly. “Why would you want to do that?” The girl began to cry, and as she wept she wrapped her arms around his neck. She kissed him and she cried. Tears wetted Jiansu’s face, but they were her tears, not his. After a while, she stopped crying and simply gazed at him.
A wind came up in the middle of the night. Jiansu and the girl slipped out of his room. They stopped beneath the trellis to say good-bye. “If your parents ask, just say you lost your way,” he said.
“Um,” she muttered. Then, before she walked off, she said, “You’re the worst person I know. You’ve ruined me. I won’t say bad things about you behind your back, but I won’t do anything with you again. You’re terrible, you’ve ruined me…”
Jiansu tried to console her: “You’re not ruined. You’re lovelier now than ever. I won’t forget you, not till the day I die, and I’ll never forget tonight…remember this, you’re not ruined, not by a long shot.”
The next morning Jiansu met his brother at the neighborhood well. Baopu sensed a change in his kid brother—he was more upbeat than usual; he studied Jiansu as his brother filled the buckets and then carried them inside for him. Baopu invited Jiansu to sit for a while; Jiansu turned down the offer, and when he stepped out the door he raised his arms and exclaimed, “What a beautiful day!”
“What did you say?” Baopu asked. Jiansu just turned and looked at his brother, grinning from ear to ear.
“What a beautiful day!”
The lamp in Jiansu’s room often stayed dark, its occupant missing most of the night. He began losing weight, and his face and hands were permanently scraped and bruised from work; his bloodshot eyes, which were retreating into their sockets, showed the effects of a lack of sleep, though they were still bright and lively. For Baopu it was a particularly bad time. Guigui had been stricken with consumption years before, and though she struggled to keep going, she did not make it through the year. She died in his arms, feeling to him as light as a bundle of grain stalks. Why, he wondered, did she have to die now, after having lived with the disease for so many years? Back then they had been so desperate to find food that he was reduced to removing talc weights from an old fishing net and grinding them into powder. Their uncle spent his days sprawled atop rocks on the bank of the Luqing River trying to catch little fish. Baopu recalled how, toward the end, Guigui had been too weak to even chew a tiny live shrimp, and how it had squirmed down into her empty stomach on its own. Thrilled to see that the bark of an elm tree was edible, Jiansu had shared his find with his sister-in-law. Baopu would have chopped the bark into tiny pieces if his cleaver hadn’t been taken away the year before to the outdoor smelting furnaces. The family wok had met the same end. So he chewed it up first and then fed it to his wife to keep her alive. But only for three years or so, until she left the Sui family for good. Baopu slowly climbed out of his grief a year after burying Guigui. By then Jiansu had nearly grown into a young man, and one day, when Baopu went out to pick beans, he spotted Jiansu hiding beneath the trellis with a young woman.
The noodle processing rooms on Gaoding Street reopened that year. Since there had been no mung beans for years, noodles had been out of the question. But now the old millstone was turning again, and that’s where people could find Baopu, sitting on a stool, just like all the old men who tended millstones, a long wooden ladle resting in his lap. White liquid flowed into buckets, to be carried away by women. One of them, called Xiaokui, regularly showed up earlier than the others and waited in a corner with her carrying pole. One morning she brought over a cricket cage and hung it up in the mill. When he heard the chirps, Baopu went over to take a look. Xiaokui was standing beside the cage, leaning against the wall, her hands behind her. Her face was red, bright red, and her nose was dotted with perspiration. The ladle in Baopu’s hands shook. With her eyes focused on the little window in front, she said, “You’re very nice.” Then she added, “Such a lovely sound.”
Baopu stood up and hit the millstone with his ladle. The old ox looked at him, concern, if not fear, in its eyes. The bucket was nearly full of bean starch. Two young women came in, hoisted it up on their carrying pole, and took it away with them, leaving a little pool of water on the spot where the bucket had sat.
As he glanced down at the water on the dusty floor, for some reason he thought back to when he and Xiaokui were children out catching loaches in the bend of the river. Wearing similar red stomachers, they laughed as the slimy loaches slipped out of their hands. He also recalled going over to the noodle factory and seeing her sifting bean residue, turning the white mixture into a ball. She held one of them up when she spotted him. What would he do with one of those? he wondered. But now, thinking back, he recalled the somber but reserved look on her face as she held it up for him.