"What did he say?" Spencer whispered.
"He said, the lamb." Alice closed her eyes, feeling full now, finally. God, could they really bring more food?
Of course they could, in China.
The Leader had his cup up in the air again. His grinning face seemed to swim at her. "To the friends of the Frenchman!" he called, and upended his cup.
She translated, then drank again. Before, it had seemed like fire going down; now she barely felt it. Just a warm liquid line running from her tongue to her stomach.
"Mo Ai-li," said Kuyuk, leaning toward her. He looked almost sober, although he had drunk every round. "Tell me how you learned to speak."
"In school," she said, and with the two abrupt words a kaleidoscope of her years at Rice rolled over her, pulled into flaccid Edvard Munch shapes by the alcohoclass="underline" beginning Chinese, intermediate, advanced… the two hundred and fourteen radicals, streaming down the page in the front of her notebook, the nine thousand characters she had committed to memory, writing each a thousand times, then another thousand times, then more…
Her teacher had been a soft-spoken little gentleman of Manchurian ancestry who wore old slippers in the classroom and always buttoned a sweater vest over his trim shirt and tie, even in the summer months. He had a lined, dark-bronze face and a fastidious way of clearing his throat before he spoke. "See how each character combines the radicals, the component symbols of its basic nature-man, wood, fire, water, rain, the sun, the moon-to form an ideogram for each thing known to man. Thus each time you sit down to write, you review, by inference, the nature of the world itself. It is an unending labyrinth, timeless and secure. Yet never static. For," he told her, "each phrase can be interpreted in different ways-especially in spoken Chinese. Never one meaning, always many. Not like English. And our idioms-the best ones are not literal, no, not at all, instead they are oblique, they make reference to legends, stories, famous dramas, and books. They do not offer specific information, do you understand me or not? They produce a state of mind! Ah, so few of you outside people grasp the pleasure of speaking a truly civilized language -never base, never obvious and therefore clunky and painful, as English is…"
But Alice had understood. Chinese was a huge maze-world: stable yet evasive. Nothing was permanently what it seemed. Yes meant maybe and no meant maybe and so did everything in between-other Westerners saw this as Chinese prevarication but to Alice it was simply the natural mutation of things. Natural and welcome-because here in China the self could always be reinvented. She, too, could become someone else. Eventually. Or so she’d told herself all these years.
"Your Frenchman," said the Leader. He threw a loose, lubricated wave at the letter, which was propped now at an odd angle against a soy sauce bottle next to the wine.
"Teilhard, my good friend!" called Spencer. "Turn my life around!"
Alice did not translate anymore. No one seemed to care.
"The Frenchman," the Leader repeated, but in a different voice, an insistent voice which commanded their attention. Silence settled. He continued: "The Frenchman went to the lamasery during his visit. To the baisi. It is recorded. This is a sacred place, high up a canyon."
They stared.
"What?" Alice managed.
"Kuyuk will take you there tomorrow."
But just then the doors flew open and the girls in the shiny red lipstick bore in the lamb, still whole except for the head, slow-roasted out in the open air to a dark crackly caramel. The smell was round, pitched, monumental. The men who’d been lounging around the edge bolted from their seats now, and with instant, sinuous grace produced long and copiously decorated daggers from within their clothes. They fell on the meat in a circle. Slices dropped into their hands and were carried to plates.
She whispered to Spencer what the Leader had said about Teilhard visiting a lamasery. He leaned over, intent on her English, eyes fixed in a glassy stare at the steaming meat in front of him. Then his face broke open in an unfettered smile.
"This is it," he whispered, writing the three words in his notebook as he said them to her. She watched him underline them.
He’s drunk, she thought, but he might be right. We might actually find the damn thing.
"I have a toast," Spencer announced, pushing away from the table and standing with exaggerated care. He held his wine cup in front of him. Then he dipped two fingers in the wine and tossed the drops on the floor. "To the earth!" he cried. He dipped again and flicked drops into the air. "To the sky!" The third time, he wet his fingers and drew them across his own forehead. "To the ancestors!" he finished.
There was a stunned silence, broken by a thundering cheer as the Mongols leapt to their feet and drank. "The American!" they called, hoisting their cups. "The American!"
The Leader drank, beaming. "How do you know this toast of ours?"
"Books!" Spencer cried happily. He raised his cup and drank. "History, letters, memoirs of foreigners who have come here."
"Impressive," Alice grinned, toasting him.
They all fell to eating lamb, which was lean and long-cooked and fell apart perfectly in their mouths. When she pushed her plate back she was aware of Lin’s gaze and risked a glance at him. He was watching her quite openly, as if there was nothing to hide. He smiled, a smile that seemed magically to target only her.
She smiled back.
"Now!" called the Leader with a hearty clap, and one of the knife men was back in a spinning instant to the table.
On the Leader’s signal the man used a quick pirouette of his hand to disengage the glistening suet oblong of the lamb’s tail. He deftly cut off a long, paper-thin slice, and bore it to Alice on his open brown palm.
"All Mongols must do this." The Leader laughed.
"Oh, I can’t," she said, affecting retreat. It was an accepted ploy in Chinese manners. Women could excuse themselves from any excess by saying, simply, that they could not. As if they were physically unable. This invoked the female frailty that Chinese society, despite the fact that it no longer actually bound the feet of pampered girls, still found endlessly compelling.
Lin smiled at her Chinese decorum and looked away. Whether his smile was one of affection or amused superiority, she could not tell.
"Then to the American scientist," insisted the Leader.
The brown man, his planar face creased by a smile, carried the lamb fat to Spencer.
"To be a man, you must." The Leader smiled.
"All right!" Spencer slapped the table with his palm.
"You should take it all in one gulp," Alice whispered in Spencer’s ear, repeating what the knife wielder was declaiming in Chinese. "Don’t stop. This is a manhood thing. Don’t look back."
He nodded, an intimate glance to her, they were confederates, the Americans.
The Mongol pushed the tip of his middle finger right up against Adam Spencer’s pale Caucasian lip. He tilted the blond head back with his other hand, as if in baptism, and then the white slab, with a sickening fat sluicing sound, disappeared down Spencer’s mouth. The American contorted a long instant. Then he swallowed hard, grinned broadly.
The room roared with approval.
"The scientist! The friend of the Frenchman!" the Leader cried. "He’s as one of the Mongols!"
Alice made it back to her room, across the open courtyard, then the stone-floored empty lobby, then the stairs. Come on, up. Up. Next loomed the linoleum hallway, and her door, then suddenly there was her tufted bedspread, which flew up and slammed her in the face.
Where was she? Eren Obo, the Mongolian desert.
She groaned and turned over. Was that someone knocking on the door? Again. A knocking sound. Yes. "Come in," she said. Now that she was down she couldn’t get up.
"Xiao Mo?"
"Oh-Lin…" She struggled to a sitting position.
"No, no." He held up his hand. "It’s quite all right."