Most truly a beautiful girl!
How strange he could remember that, he thought now, pedaling past the patchwork of open fields, the wind off the Helan Shan whistling by. He remembered, too, the laughter that had exploded at the nursery rhyme’s end, everyone nodding, yes, yes, wasn’t it so, and the bowls of hard candy going around and around the room-Happiness Candy, the politically correct substitute for the then-forbidden wedding banquet. Nineteen seventy-one. Meiyan had worn a blue cotton suit like everyone else, except that it was her sharply ironed best. He remembered how her milk-white oval face had radiated joy.
Then after they were married, there was the single memory that had become a well-marked door in his mind: lying in bed with her afterward in the small room on Renmin Road in Zhengzhou, the sheets crumpled on the floor, talking about Lantian man, the Homo erectus find in south China to which she had devoted her study. Playing with the Homo erectus tooth she wore on a cord around her neck, never took off, not even when her entire naked length was smothered beneath him. She had stolen it from the vault where the Lantian County fossils were kept. Strange. Had she been caught stealing and wearing such an important cultural relic she’d have earned herself a PLA bullet in the head. Yet this had never been discovered and she had been sent to prison for a political misstep in a scholarly essay, a trifle, chicken feathers and garlic skins.
How she had loved that piece of bone. Davidson Black, the Canadian doctor who headed the group Teilhard had worked for in Peking, had worn a Homo erectus tooth around his neck, and Meiyan would do the same. Nothing Lin could say could convince her to bury it somewhere until the Chaos ended and she could safely reclaim it again. No, she would wear it. And just before he entered her, when he had her gasping and pulling his hips frantically down to her, he liked to pick the tooth up off her sweat-glistening chest with his lips and take it in his mouth and play with it, a gesture she found unbearably intimate, and a way of making her wait another few moments…
Ah, a millennium ago-he’d been so young then. West Road, Tibet Road. He soared down the hill, away from the heart of the city, through the flat oasis suburbs.
It was in 1973 that her article had been submitted. Why hadn’t she just lied in the article? Why did she have to be so heroic? A resounding silence had followed. Fear crept in and ate at all their thoughts and words until it smothered everything. Finally they heard she was going to be arrested. So many others they knew had already been taken. They had offended someone else, or had a "bad" job before liberation, or had owned land, or their parents had owned land before them. All someone had to say was that you were fan geming, Counterrevolutionary, just those two words, then the death grip at your throat.
"Eating bitterness won’t kill me," she had said, sitting beside him on the bed, affecting bravery. "And I should have expected it. How often have you heard it said? When a rat scurries across the street, kill it! Kill it!" She’d smiled slightly at this overused maxim of the Chaos. All he could think of were the nights when she was writing the article, the hot July nights without air, the heat-muffled shouts and traffic sounds rising from Renmin Road. He had told her: Invent something about class struggle among the ancient hominids. Make something up. He himself had done it. Everyone did it.
But she refused. Ah, Meiyan. So faithful to something higher. She had been a better person than he. He had lied easily in his scholarly papers. It had seemed easy and obvious to him-of course, lie, why get arrested? He had made up whatever drivel about class and capitalism seemed necessary to stay out of trouble. Had told himself it didn’t dilute his basic work. Not Meiyan. She would not do it. So the people struggled against her.
After she was taken Lin learned, through the human net that spreads news like a fire through tinder grass and can never be quite contained, that she was sent out to Inner Mongolia. Camp Fourteen, it was whispered: a cluster of loess huts in a flat yellow plain-across the Helan Shan Mountains from the city of Yinchuan.
He’d had one brief smuggled message from her. Then nothing.
The years dragged by. Things started to get better. Chairman Mao died, the nation pinned all its hate on the Gang of Four, and the era of Wound Literature began. He held himself apart from it, buried himself in his obsession with the ancient human ancestor, clung to Meiyan in his mind. How could he live with himself otherwise? He’d only survived because he’d been willing to lie. Then came the open door with the 1980s, a rush of money and relaxed thinking and new culture from the outside. He started teaching at the university; he published work on Homo erectus. All his colleagues pretended he had never been married. Some of them did not know. Some knew, of course-Kong knew, he had once made a reference to it, not unkindly. But Lin never talked about it.
During these years Lin had not been completely without women. Now, decades later, riding his bicycle out from Yinchuan, he recalled them. There had been Ping, the reedy woman mathematics professor with the terse little mouth, who had lost her husband; she had discreetly been his special friend for some years until, finally, she said she could endure his impermeability no longer. Ping and then Lan-zhen, the shy, bespectacled graduate student who had sat mesmerized through his every class until finally he’d approached her. She’d come to him gratefully, completely open, mad about him, so much younger than he, yet through a year of physical intimacy he never let himself love her, never opened his door, never forgot he was married to Meiyan. He saw how deeply Lan-zhen was hurt by this. She wanted desperately to hold first place in his heart. They finally parted, after defeat and resentment had destroyed her love. Her pain brought him even more shame. But he did not know how to stop loving his wife, even though she was gone. And Lan-zhen simply was not like Meiyan. Neither was Ping. Though Little Mo was, wasn’t she? She had the courage and the mental alacrity-do not think like that, he admonished himself. She is an outside person. A joint-venture colleague. American!
He left the main road behind now as he had been directed and pedaled off on a dirt track to the north. He crested a hill, broke through the pass, and there was little Laishan Village spread out in the yellow dust below him. He knew, in his first snatch of breath and his first glimpse of the jumbled settlement, that Meiyan was not there. Her energy, her intelligence-these things were simply missing from the landscape. This realization was like a powerful voice in his ear, and it nearly made him falter off the path. He was not used to instincts. Lin Shiyang was an educated man, from a modern city; he would never willingly concern himself with forebodings and premonitions. Yet this instinct was so powerful, he almost felt he could trust it. Meiyan was not present.
As any careful man would do, though, having come so far, he locked up his bike and removed the precious photograph from his pocket. Meiyan, 1972. Young eyes shining with intelligence, black hair pulled back. The children’s song bounced around in his brain.
Her cheeks were as pink as a rosebud.
Her teeth were as white as a pearl…
He shook his head. Too many years had flown. What did she look like now? Nothing like this, certainly. If she was alive.
But the picture was all he had.
He approached the first of the dozens he would speak to that day, an older man with a wiry body and gently bowed legs, hurrying now down the dirt-packed lane with a bundle of dirty sheep’s wool.
"Elder uncle, forgive me-"
"Eh?" The man bolted back in alarm.
"No, don’t fear, uncle, just a question, forgive me. Have you seen this woman?" Lin thrust forward the small square picture with its ghostlike, girlish smile.