"Did you have children?"
"One daughter. She was raised by my parents in Shanghai. That was after I was assigned here."
"And you remained here after the Cultural Revolution ended?"
"Yes. That’s how it was." His look revealed his clear surprise that she appeared to know all about the Chaos, the forced reassignment of workers, the tearing up of families.
"It’s a bitter road," she said softly.
"Yes. But now it’s not bad. The university is a good danwei. You know what they say. A brave man bows to circumstances as grass does before wind."
"So now you’re a teacher?"
"Administration."
She thought it over for a minute, and then laid her freckled hand over his smooth brown one in sympathy.
He stared at it.
She did not remove it.
"Yulian," he said slowly, wonderingly, "would you like to return to my place for tea?" He looked at her, everything in his face certain she would say no.
"I would." She smiled.
"Zou-ba, "he said with an amazed crack in his voice, Then let’s go. He stood with his briefcase.
They walked in silence. He lived behind the university, in an expressionless block of high-rises. They climbed up six flights of gray concrete, lined with a plain metal rail, to his apartment. Yet once he opened the door they were in another world, for like the carefully maintained interiors of so many private spaces in China, it was spotlessly clean and pleasingly fitted out. A scroll painting and a Xinjiang carpet of surprising quality dominated the room, and brilliantly colored cloths were spread over the table and the bed. In the window above the sink hung an ornate wooden cage with a twittering brown lark.
Wang put down his briefcase and turned to her, his eyes soft. "Do you like flowers?" he said. He drew a red peony from a porcelain jar on the table and cupped it in both hands.
"Yes," she said.
"I do too." He touched the flower to his cheek, then to hers. Just for an instant. She closed her eyes at its softness. She felt his fingers gently seeking hers.
They stood for a moment, their hands joined, and then she turned her back to him and began to remove her T-shirt. She liked to do it that way. From behind they would see nothing except the red silk strings. Then she would turn around, and watch their faces when they saw the phoenix spread across her middle-nude above, nude below-
This time, though, in Mr. Wang’s gracious little room, she stopped, with her T-shirt almost to her armpits. This was not her. Not really her. She dropped her shirt.
"Yulian," Wang said.
All she could think about was Dr. Lin, Lin Shiyang, the tall man from Zhengzhou who seemed to be watching her all the time.
He stepped close to her. "Shenmo?" he whispered, What is it?
She put her hands up to her face. "I can’t."
He touched her arm. "Yulian."
I feel so completely yours. She could almost hear Lucile’s voice, speaking to Pierre, the man she loved. Lucile had found real love in Chinese rooms like this. Even though she agonized over the one thing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin could not give her, and this thing ballooned in importance until it all but obsessed her. Still she returned his love. Why couldn’t Alice make that commitment? Even half that commitment?
"I’m sorry," she said to Wang. "It’s not your fault."
"So you will come another day?"
"Yes. Of course." Though she knew she would not.
"I will call you, then." He fetched a paper and pen from the table and held them out to her. She scrawled the name, Yulian, and a nonsense phone number.
"Remember where I live," he said. "Come anytime."
She walked heavily to the bottom floor and back into the fading light. Beating in her ear like a faint night insect was the drab awareness of life. Her life. She was still alive and Mother Meng was dead. If only she could connect with Mother Meng one more time, talk to her… maybe she should go see the yin-yang master. Maybe, through him, she could reach the old lady again. Because Mother Meng had said to find a man. And it was impossible.
On Shanxi Avenue, in front of the university, she found another pedicab. "Number One Guesthouse," she said.
"Eh," he agreed, glancing back at her. He noticed the tight press of her mouth, and the way she sat with her fist pressed against her forehead. He pulled out into the street, straining against the pedals, picking up speed.
He saw a man jump into a pedicab and follow them, never deviating, never veering away, staying behind them no matter how many twists and unexpected turns he added to the route as he pulled the foreign woman across town. When they stopped, he meant to tell her. But when he turned and he saw her strange, freckled, tofu-colored face streaked with tears, he said nothing. He accepted her money, let out another monosyllable, and pedaled away.
She squeezed onto the polished stool in the booth at the public phone hall. The signal came from the operator and she picked it up. Come on Horace, she thought, be home. Please be home. She swallowed. Eleven in the evening in Washington. Come on.
The burping disturbance to the ring, and then his recorded voice mail. She listened to his greeting: calm, smooth, businesslike. When the tone sounded and the inert void of the recorder came on, she spoke in a thin, childish voice, made tight by worry: "It’s just me. Wondering how you are.
"Bye," she said, and reluctantly hung up.
Lieutenant Shan, Army commander for the Ningxia-Inner Mongolia region, snapped the report he’d been given back down on his desk. "So the oily-mouth from the Golden Country only stayed inside the man’s apartment ten minutes, eh? Ten minutes! What could they do! Are the west-ocean ghosts not strange!"
His men looked at each other.
"Did you find out anything about her yet? The other American’s a scientist, what about her? She’s a scientist too?"
"No, sir. We don’t know."
"No? You dog bones! You have to be clever. Now, listen. If she calls that number in Washington again I want her very closely watched. Is she stupid? No! She’s a crafty barbarian."
"Yes, Honorable Sir!" the line of men barked.
"Move! Diu neh loh moh, " Do your mothers.
The men did not flinch at this Cantonese obscenity their commanding officer from the South was so fond of throwing around. They were used to it.
"Report back to me!"
They hurried out.
"See this?" said Dr. Lin, and handed it to her, a polished bone, familiar, twin knobs at its end. "It’s a human femur."
She gasped and her fingers came out, then stopped. "Can I really touch it?"
He laughed. "Of course. Gei."
She took it and almost seemed to stop breathing as she held it, studied it, felt it. "Can you tell how old it is?"
"Not here, not now. In the lab we could, since it’s organic material. But when you have this kind of site you can’t date things in the field. The shifting sand mixes the ages together. You see." He glanced, to illustrate, at the chalky, fine-grained dunes of the Ordos that rolled away in front of them. They had climbed to the ridge after lunch and stepped over the Wall, and now sat, sifting through sand with their fingers. Almost immediately he had found this bone. It was just a few inches down. He had been rolling his hand through the sand, and had suddenly drawn it out, smiling, ecstatic with the discovery. When he turned to her he saw her staring, not at the bone but at his face. Quickly she’d looked away. There’d been something so unguarded in her eyes, so open-those strange agate eyes, the like of which he had never seen before on a woman.
"Just think," she said softly. "It was part of a person in Stone Age times-someone who lived, hunted, grew food. Yet he or she must have thought. Must have spoken somehow." She touched the bone wonderingly.
"You surprise me so," he said. "You are a Westerner-yet you are drawn to what is old."
"You said that before. Let it go. It’s just a prejudice. When I see something this old-when I hold it-I feel the connection of the past and future. It gives me hope, though I am only one small being. Do you understand my words?" To write thetrue natural history of the world, we should need to be able tofollow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlockingsuccession of structural types replacing one another, but asan ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidatedinstincts.