She concentrated on the bad road. To either side of them, piles of rock stood sentrylike on the desert floor.
"Soon we’ll be climbing the ridge," he whispered.
Bumps, painful pitching jolts, each threatening to tear off the muffler or bend a tie rod. They bounced and rolled, gaining elevation. Finally in front of them the track curved gracefully to the right and swept through a break in the humped-up hills, and there, in that astonished second before the car dipped nose-down into the deep falling grade, they glimpsed the spreading valley, the sheep pens, the jumble of dwellings and outbuildings. It looked just like the picture, it was the picture. And up behind it, the strangely notched black ridgeline of the Helan Shan.
There were lights on in the house.
She and Lin exchanged glances, triumphant. Lights down below. That meant people. The Mongol family.
15
They turned off the car and stared at the valley below for a long, speechless while, then finally she started it up again, turned it around, and bounced away, back down through the pass. A dog had started barking. If they sat there any longer someone would notice.
"Lin," she said, her voice low with excitement, downshifting into the grade. She glanced over and saw that he was staring at her too. "Think it’s the Mongol family? Can we hope?"
"I don’t hope," he answered, eyes on her. "I never hope. I just live in gratitude for what comes."
It felt strange to be the open object of his gaze. She felt as if everything about her was lit up. She sat as erect and still as she could in the driver’s seat, wishing she were tall and beautiful. He kept watching her while she eased the jeep down the hill and into the long flat stretch, steered through the scattered piles of rock.
"Xiao Mo," he said.
She glanced over. "Eh?"
"Ting che." Stop the car.
"Shenmo?" What? She’d heard him, of course she’d heard him, but it was too shocking, too unforeseen suddenly, and she had to pretend she hadn’t heard. She had to make him say it again.
"Stop the car."
She oversteered on the narrow track, corrected. Okay. Stop. She pressed a long, steady foot on the brake and then rolled off a little ways into the dirt and cut the engine. The craaack of the emergency brake seemed to split the night and the desert in two. In the silence she felt the endless dry air around them, a universe of it, no one for miles. Emptier than Nevada, emptier than Death Valley. Tartary.
Lin climbed out. He took the old blanket from behind the backseat and spread it on the flat ground next to a pile of boulders.
She watched, hypnotized.
He walked back and opened the door on her side.
"Lin-"
He stopped her. "My name is Shiyang."
She caught her breath. This was the first time he had offered his given name. "I am called Alice."
"Alice."
She nodded. She followed him to the blanket, and lowered herself to sit on the ground opposite him, cross-legged. He sat studying her without a word for what seemed an endless time, then eventually reached over and grasped her gently by the hips, pulled her close to him, almost to his lap, carefully moving her legs until they were wrapped around his midsection.
She placed her hands on his shoulders. Fear erupted and she fought it down.
He only had to lean forward a few inches to brush her lips with his. His mouth was soft and dry like the mouth of a young boy. She kissed him back the same way, gentle, the way an inexperienced girl would, but with all the tender feeling she’d been keeping inside.
He paused, then kissed her again. This time he entered her mouth and touched her once, delicately. She bit his lower lip a little. Yes, she meant to say, I want it. So he came into her mouth again, but confidently now, and keeping a rhythm.
They kissed this way for a long time. She moved her hands over his back, his neck, his shoulders, but he sat very still. He used only his mouth. She felt she was going to explode. Then finally his hands left her waist, slid over her neck and through her hair, dropping to her chest and her small breasts.
"Shiyang," she breathed, enchanted by his name, the softness of his mouth, the longed-for feeling at last of him touching her. She arched her back to press herself into his hands. Finally after a long time his hand arrived between her legs and grasped her there, hard, right through her clothes. "Pan-wanglehao jiu," he whispered, I’ve wanted it such a long time. He squeezed gently and her whole body cramped.
Ah, they would do it now, she knew; no more turning back. When she had been a young girl, learning about sex, there had been times when she had kissed a man like this, and touched and been touched, through her clothes, and then stopped. Not anymore. She understood now that kissing like this made all the promises, gave out all the rhythms of the love that was to follow. She knew that after kissing like this a man and woman didn’t say no. They undressed each other, and lay down in the infinite night air, and did everything to each other they could imagine.
When, some hours later, they arrived back at the Eren Obo guesthouse, they slipped quietly into Lin’s room together, and spent the rest of the night in his bed. They did not actually sleep until close to dawn, and then only for what seemed like a few minutes.
When she opened her eyes the light was growing stronger in the room. She slid off and stood nude by the bed. "Wo gaizou-le, " she whispered, I should go. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, stepped into her jeans. She was probing his face. Was he happy? Did he regret it? Were they just beginning, or would he, having attained her, now get scared? As she had always done herself, with every man save Jian and then, finally -admit it-with Jian too. "Shiyang?" she asked.
"Go on," he whispered, and she could read in his face nothing but the mixture of awe, joy, and painful terror to which she knew, in her most honest heart, he had every right.
"You found this house?" Spencer stared at the picture. "You actually found this house?"
"I told you things could change," she said triumphantly, and repeated the story yet again-glossing quickly over the fact that she and Lin had taken the jeep and driven out there in the middle of the night.
Spencer didn’t seem to fix on this anyway. Instead he was locked into the image of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan, as they had stood and soberly spoken to the camera with their eyes fifty years before. "Is everybody finished eating?" He looked up, excitement pulling his face into a grin, across the breakfast table from Lin to Kong to Alice. "Why are we waiting around?"
There was a sea change in the group. A whiff of hope had returned. Kong and Spencer postponed their search for new hunter-gatherer sites, even though Kong still insisted on sitting in the front passenger seat so he could watch the landscape for possible signs of Paleolithic habitation. Spencer shuffled through his notebook, reviewing all he’d written, tapping his pen against the spiral-bound pages.
In the backseat, Alice tried to focus on a Teilhard book but found herself unable to think about anything but Lin, next to her. Was he it, then? Her true Chinese man?
They crested the hill through the pass and saw, spread below them, the hamlet and the house.
Smoke curled from its chimney.
"Daole, " Lin breathed, but no one answered, or saw any need to, for it was indeed the place from the photograph. In the spread of daylight, at the spot where Pierre and Lucile had stood for the picture, in front of some animal pens, there now toiled a garden. A complicated pipe arrangement fed it from the stream. More outbuildings had been added. But there was no doubt; it was the place.
Only one person was home: a woman. She was older, but not old enough to remember 1945. No, sorry, she had no knowledge of the visit these two white people had made here. They would have to return and talk to her old father. He would come back from Yinchuan in a few days. He had been a young man at that time. He would know.