He let a beat of quiet fall before he continued. "Hao changshijian han xin ru ku, " It’s such a long time we’ve been drinking from the bitter cup. He sighed and rubbed his eyes with his large, hairless hands. "But this is our circumstance. These are our times. And the road behind cannot be changed."
"What of the road ahead?"
He smiled. "What of it?"
"Can you change it?"
He considered silently. His road was made up of everything he was and everything he had endured, so it was deeply paved already. All he had allowed himself to feel and all he had walled off from his feeling. Like his wife, led away one day, one look back, over her shoulder, and then a universe of nothing ever after. Years of nothing. He would, of course, not say such a thing to an outside woman, whom he barely knew, in the middle of the night. Instead he said: "I don’t think the road can change."
"I used to agree with that," she said slowly. "Lately I feel different." She thought of herself in bed earlier that evening, reading The Phenomenon of Man. In fact I doubt whether there isa more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scalesfall from his eyes and he … realises that a universal will to liveconverges and is hominised in him… the axis and leadingshoot of evolution. She breathed in fully, deeply. He had a spicy, wonderful Chinese smell, Lin Shiyang.
"Perhaps you are right. Eh, Mo Ai-li, I can’t believe I’m talking to you in the middle of the night like this. You’re a strange woman. Are other outside women like you?"
She laughed. "No."
"May I ask, are you married?"
"No," she said, and then added, "not yet."
He looked into her face but she couldn’t read him in the dark.
"You were married," she said boldly.
"Yes."
"Are you still?" Her heart beat faster. Had he put his wife aside, that’s what she wanted to know, had he huaqing jiexian, drawn a clear line between them, as so many Chinese had been coerced into doing in those years?
"Eh, yes. I suppose I am still married." He looked at her through the dark. "Xiao Mo, I’ve said too much to you."
"No," she insisted. "Not too much."
But the slight cramp of pain crossed him again. "It’s been a long time since I talked to anyone of my wife, and now here I am dropping my guard and clearing my heart. So you know my wife was sent to Ningxia. Zhang Meiyan was her name."
So that was her name, Meiyan, it meant "beautiful swallow." How could she be named Beautiful Swallow in an era when most girls had been named Benefit China or Serve Truth? Old-fashioned parents, maybe, why hadn’t she changed it-
You’re jealous, she stopped herself.
"Yes, Zhang Meiyan," Lin said again. He had so few chances to even say her name anymore. And yet he never forgot her. Meiyan.
"So you don’t know what happened to her?"
He shook his head.
"Kelian, " she said with feeling.
"Of course, she may be dead."
May be dead? Alice thought. Kind of an understatement. "How long since you’ve heard?"
"Over twenty years," he said, finding that he wanted to sit here, wanted to talk to Mo Ai-li. There was something about her that pulled at him, something at once female and unearthly. "It’s a long time. So I do not know her fate."
I think you do, Alice thought.
He closed his eyes, remembering. "I was told to forget her. Do you understand me or not? We were never actually divorced. But I was told to remain in Zhengzhou. It was later, after the Chaos ended, that I came to Huabei University. It’s a good life there, teaching. I don’t want to lose it."
"But?"
"Yin hun bu san, "The ghost refuses to leave. "And I need to know what happened to her. So now-now that I am in Ningxia anyway…"
"You’ll try to find out."
Lin turned to her. "Don’t speak of this to the others."
"Ni fang-xin ba," she said. She wished she could lean over, just a few inches, and rest her shoulder against his. She wished she could sit here with him all night. "Fang xin hao-le, " she said again, and touched his smooth forearm briefly with the cool flat of her palm. It was a casual gesture in the West, a gesture almost purely conversational, but here in China it burned with physical presumption.
Dr. Lin withdrew his arm and got to his feet in a quick stumble. "Eh. Well."
She stood up sadly.
"At breakfast. See you."
"See you."
He was already walking away.
She went in to breakfast the next morning and sat with her back to the dining-hall door. She could barely sit still on her seat, waiting for Lin to arrive.
Finally she heard the two sets of footsteps, the brisk tread of Kong and the listing walk of Lin.
The screen door clicked open, banged shut.
"Zao, " said Dr. Kong.
"Zao, " she returned, Morning, and she slid her smile over both of them.
"We’ve been talking about the site," Kong said. "So far there’s been no sign of the Mongols at Shuidonggou."
"That’s true," said Spencer, looking dejected.
"Then what about going to Eren Obo next?" Lin put in. He leaned intently toward the American. "The rock art drawing in that letter to Teilhard definitely comes from around Eren Obo. To find Peking Man again, Dr. Spencer-it would change everything in our field. It would bring our Homo erectus studies back to life." Lin paused. He did not say aloud his private reason for wanting to find Peking Man so badly, that it would be the highest tribute to Meiyan-or to her memory, if she no longer lived. "Wo henbude," he said, I want this so powerfully. He looked from one to the other. "If there is even the smallest chance your theory is correct, we must try everything. We must go everywhere."
Passion! Alice thought. She put his words in English.
"Of course," Spencer agreed. "I’m with you on that. But let’s give Shuidonggou a little longer. We haven’t covered the whole area yet."
"True," Kong said. "It will take days to get the visas anyway. Crossing the Helan Shan and taking you to Eren Obo will require very special permission. So Dr. Lin and I should not go with you today. We should go to the bureau and work on it."
Spencer looked worried. "Do we have to go back to Beijing for these visas, to Vice Director Han?"
Kong and Lin exchanged tactful glances. "Why don’t we seek this permit locally," Kong said.
"All right," Adam said, understanding. "If you say so."
As she translated this Alice locked eyes briefly with Dr. Lin. He didn’t smile at her exactly. What he did do was incline his head ever so slightly, and place his gaze fleetingly on her as if to say: Yes, I was there last night. I remember.
Driving out of the city, thinking about Mother Meng, she noticed an unusual sign.
YIN YANG XIANSHENG, Yin-yang master.
What was that?
"Driver." She leaned over the seat. "Trouble you with a question. What does a yin-yang master do?"
"Eh, that’s from feudal times. Like wind-and-water masters?"
She nodded. Feng shui, of course, Geomancy.
"None left now," the driver barked, all pride and satisfaction in the bustling new world.
"What are you talking about?" Spencer demanded.
"Nothing." Alice cracked her own little book open and scribbled the names of the cross streets. Drum Tower Road. Wool Market Lane.
Spencer peered out the back window for a minute, then faced front again. "You won’t believe this."
"What?"
He pointed his gaze to the rear. "Someone’s following us."
The car kept an implacable distance behind them, mirroring their speed, locked in to their every turn. "Do you see that?" she asked the driver, who nodded, shrugged. They stayed on the West Road, kept a steady speed through the checkerboard fields. Past the place Alice and Lin had stopped the day they rented bicycles, past the end of any kind of city, into the farmland with its interlocking trellis of canals. They passed the edge of the oasis, the point where the moisture dropped, suddenly, and the green earth reverted to yellow. Watching in the rearview mirror they saw the car slow when it reached this natural borderline; slow, then turn around and roar away in the opposite direction, back to the city. "Thank God for turf," Alice said.
"Maybe Teilhard is watching over us," Adam joked.
"Maybe." She laughed.
"You’re reading his stuff, aren’t you?"
"Yes-just about every night."
"Learning anything?"
She thought. "That as a human being I’m not necessarily static, but… evolving. That I’m supposed to grow and develop, just like the physical world, the planet, the universe."
"No." Spencer rolled his eyes. "I meant about what he did in his life-something that would tell us where he put Peking Man."
"Oh! I don’t know. I only know he was in love with Lucile, and she with him. Did you read that book of their letters?"
"Some of it."
"They connected on every level-mental, philosophical, emotional. But she couldn’t have him, not all of him. He was promised to God. Though he loved her." And that’s the one thing I’ve missed, Alice thought to herself. Someone who loves me. Though since Jian I’ve had plenty of physical satisfaction. Nothing else. "Lucile fought against it, and finally agreed. She went along with him on his spiritual journey."
"And?" Spencer prompted.
"And Teilhard adored her for it. He knew what a sacrifice it was for her." And thank you, so much, for forgetting as you do,for me, what you might, naturally, expect, but what, for higherreasons, I cannot give you. I love you so much the more for this "renoncement." And there is nothing I will not do for you, inorder to repay you. "From that point on," Alice said, "he confided everything in her."
"So you think he told her where he put it."
"Exactly."
"Interesting," said Adam. He worked his blue book out of his pocket and wrote it down. "You’re probably right. But how do we pursue it? Lucile’s been dead for a long time."
The sun was straight over their heads when they pulled into Shuidonggou and started walking. First they traversed the ridge, following along beside the corroded, hip-high huddle of the Great Wall. There was little left of the Wall out here, yet it still marched in a crumbling, orderly line, disappearing over the far-off mountain passes. On one side, for millennia, China. On the other, Mongolia. On the Chinese side the desert was scruffy bits of grass and craggy, eroded buttes. On the Mongolian side it became a shifting ocean of white sand. Dunes that went on for miles. Over everything a bowl of hot, deepest blue.
She rationed her water more carefully today, knowing the heat and the thirst by now, knowing how to manage them. Still the sweat trickled down her spine, itching her as she scrambled down a ravine after him, kicking and scuffing against rocks and pebbles, brief clouds of fine dust rising wherever their shoes exploded in the soft sand. Spencer rubbed his putty face. "What do you think of our Chinese friends?"
"They’re okay," she said cautiously.
"Kong’s a good guy," Spencer went on. "Lin, I can’t read. He likes you, though."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, I see him looking at you. Can’t you tell? He likes you. "
"I hadn’t noticed," she lied.
They kept on through the hot canyons. Nothing. Dead ends. They would climb each wash to the narrow brush-tangled limit. Then they would hike back down to the main canyon and mark another one off on their map. Then turn west again. Always west. They kept it orderly. Adam sketched each little canyon in his book, listed its identifying features. But no Mongols, no houses, no sheep pens, no gardens, nothing. Just desert.
It was quiet too. Every so often on the wind they heard the far-off honk of camels, but they never saw them. They had seen some from the jeep, though, driving in: the camels moved across the desert in clumps of two or three, heads high in their slow rolling walk or heads down, nosing in the rocks and dirt. She supposed they were grazing, though there seemed little for them to eat. Still, the Number One Guesthouse had served a peculiar vegetable every night, one which looked for all the world like clumps of wet black hair. And that was the Chinese word it was called by: fa-cai, hair vegetable. One of the older Muslims around the guesthouse had told her it grew in a fine low-hugging net across the desert floor. He described the tool they used to harvest it, something like a wide, curved-tooth fork, and indeed she had seen this mysterious item displayed in Yinchuan’s hardware stores. She thought of it now, laboring in the sand behind Dr. Spencer, how one would drag it across the dirt and pull up clumps of hair. Perhaps the camels were eating fa-cai.
And the Mongols who’d lived here when Teilhard had come, what did they eat? But of course they’d have kept sheep, and some goats, and peppers and eggplants must have struggled up in their gardens. She knew that the Yellow River yielded only one thing out here, a flat, bony carp: so the Mongols had probably had commerce with the people who lived closer to the river, trading mutton for fish. And then when their camels had grown old and sick and outlived their usefulness, they ate those too. God, the sand was hot, it burned right through her shoes. She had been served camel hump, in Yinchuan. It had been a tough, rubbery membrane of a meat, cloaked in a brown bean sauce that did nothing to hide the taste of old, mean animal. And the sauce hadn’t really disguised the look of the meat, either, she thought: it was the same dun color that was everywhere here, the color of the river, the roads and houses, the color of the loess, the color of-
Spencer stopped so suddenly, she walked into his back. "Oh, my good God in heaven," he whispered.
In front of them shimmered the homestead.