She watched the dust spit up behind him, watched until he was a distant drone and then a moving dot miles away, in and out of sight among the switchbacks on the first flank of mountain. Then finally, the dot entered the sunbaked pass and vanished. She thought about what she had written in the note to Guo Wenxiang. How to find them in Eren Obo should he need to. Was there any news of the Mongol family-and, oh, yes, most privately important to her: had Guo learned anything of the fate of Zhang Meiyan?
14
Peking Man.
Alice envisioned the creature’s skull for the hundredth time: the flat brainpan, the thrusting underbite, the staring eye-holes of death.
What had Kong said of Peking Man? Ke yu er bu ke qiu, It cannot be found through effort now, only by chance. And remote chance at that.
She pulled the ling-pai from the drawer and chose a new spot for it, the rickety bedside table. She had bought a few bright paper cards in the death-ritual store, and she propped those before the plaque. What else? No food, no incense-she looked around. Tea. She opened up the little box by the thermos, crumbled some of the leaves off the tea brick, and piled them in front of the tablet. It wasn’t much, but it would do. She bowed her head.
Meng Shaowen, Lucile Swan. Help me.
She sat there numbly, aware that she didn’t really know what she asked. Help her find Peking Man-was that what she wanted? Or help her with Lin Shiyang?
Teilhard said all things happened in relationship to each other. Life and matter, like one single organism. You had only to look at it, to be in it.
If only.
She sat silently, emptying her mind, waiting. Mother Meng, you loved your husband. Lucile, you loved Pierre. Guide me.
But she felt nothing from the ling-pai, nothing. It was just a wood plaque inscribed with some characters and marked with a dried-up blotch of her blood. Her knees hurt from sitting so long. The sounds outside distracted her, the scattered voices in Mongolian, the far-off clanking of machinery. She couldn’t rid herself of an image, a thing she had seen earlier in the courtyard: a girl, singing to herself, using a glowing-hot poker to singe the shaved, pearl-colored skin of a just-slaughtered lamb.
She knocked on Lin’s door but he had vanished, gone somewhere, and so she took the photograph and left by herself. She paced up the wide, half-empty main street. A few twisty, scrubby trees had been planted, but mostly it was the low, unrelieved ocher boxes of buildings, the repeating power poles, the packed earth and desert sky. She walked past hardware stalls, produce and meat markets, with the open space and noise level of small airplane hangars. She passed a crude beauty shop: two seats, two tin basins. In wind-rattled windows she saw herself. She was short, autumn colored, shockingly different from the dark, erect, self-possessed people of the town. In America she’d always been called cute. Here she just looked different. She hated cute. Different was better.
She climbed down the shallow bank to the creek and sat by the trickling water for a while. Where was Lin? She had no right to ask him where he went, she knew that, but she still yearned to know. As if he were hers already. Foolish girl.
She stared at the stream. It was no more than a thin little gully, but spread out all around it in a blessed alluvial strip was a carpet of deep green. Even just the tiny sound of the water, and the rippling of the breeze in the grass, relieved something parched in her. She never had enough to drink in Eren Obo. Water was strictly apportioned, and she got only one boiled thermosful a day. Strange how she’d adjusted down to it. Hoarded aside enough for washing, and measured out the rest. It was just enough. But it always left her wanting more.
Should he give up? Lin asked himself. He sat on a pile of smooth white limestone rocks in a grove of poplars, looking at a clear pebbled stream. He’d caught a ride to this village called Long Bin. Behind him was the one dirt-road intersection and a single stucco building, directions to other villages painted on it in big red characters. The building fronted a big sunbaked open space that served as the village square. He’d been talking to a man who now stood at the top of the bank, wearing a straw fedora, sunglasses, and a loose white shirt. "It’s regrettable we knew nothing of your wife," the man said.
"Never mind. I’ve troubled you too much, elder brother."
"Don’t talk polite. Old Yuan is leaving soon for Eren Obo. He’ll give you a lift back."
"Thank you."
"Nothing. A trifle."
Lin looked up through the columns of poplars. It was so hot. The sky was so pale, almost white-baked of color. Exhausted, like this settlement, with its one whitewashed building and its paths, radiating out to its irregular spattering of mud huts.
Like his idea of ever finding out what had happened to his airen. No one seemed to know. No one anywhere he went.
They met back at the guesthouse. He didn’t say where he had been. She didn’t ask.
They went out and walked in the waning sun up to Eren Obo’s plaza-a brick circle, concentrically ringed with pink hollyhocks. In the center stood a statue of a camel, head and foreleg nobly raised.
Some Mongol men were playing on the bricks, hitching up their loose cotton pants and haggling over their chesslike game. Their playing board was a square of paper marked in a strange, complex geometric pattern. A player moved a piece. All the men cheered.
"Excuse me." She squatted next to one of the Mongol men and spoke in slow, clear Chinese.
"Outside woman!" he squawked, his accent heavy. He looked up at her and Lin.
"Do any of you know this place?" She extended the photograph. The men craned over it and erupted in their own language. Alice and Lin listened, exchanging looks. The Mongols didn’t know. The hesitant, speculative rhythm of their speech was obvious.
"Sorry, foreign lady," one concluded in Chinese.
"It’s nothing. Thank you," Lin said. By the time they had turned back into the rings of hollyhocks the men were playing again, exhorting one another, laughing.
As they walked she wondered when Lin was going to tell her about his family. She was waiting for him to reveal more about himself. Talking about families signaled serious intent in Chinese erotic relations. It brought honor to the equation.
And what was honor for her? Taking Lin home to meet Horace? Never. Although she loved her father in her own way -even needed him-she knew enough now to keep a man like Lin far away from him. She was older now, stronger. She’d never cave in to Horace again, not like she had with Jian. She would live according to the center of herself, and Horace would not be permitted to have an opinion.
Startling, how simple it sounded.
In this daze of realization she walked beside Lin for most of the afternoon, feeling calm. They talked only a little. As Teilhard had written to Lucile, let us not discuss too much aboutwords…
But they found nothing. By now everyone in the town knew what they were looking for before they approached. "Let me see the picture!" the townspeople would bark. They would study it and, almost to a man and woman, be crossed by an instant of genuine pain and forfeiture-this small chance to be a hero, lost-before they shook their heads, and said no, truly a pity!-but they did not know this place.
Back at the guesthouse, they separated to rest before dinner. She addressed him lightly as Dr. Lin, Lin Boshi, and then wondered about the word. "Boshi," she said. "Doesn’t that mean ’Ph.D. doctor’ as opposed to ’medical doctor’?"
"It does. To earn the Ph.D. is one of the highest goals in our society. We say: Wanban jie xia pin weiyou dushugao," Except for attaining a higher education, all pursuits are lowly.