Fong turned away and spotted a cormorant fisherman far off to the port side. The old fisher had just released one of his elegant birds and was preparing a second for the day’s work.
When young, Fong, like most Chinese children, had been told stories about the famous fishermen who used trained cormorants rather than hook, bait and rod, but he’d never seen one before.
He noted the lantern stands at the front and back of the fisherman’s boat.
“Do they fish at night?” he managed to ask.
“Night, day, winter, summer – they’re always there,” the boatman answered with a sour sneer. Fong assumed he didn’t like cormorant fishermen. Why should he? He didn’t seem to like anything else. Why should cormorant fishermen escape his venom?
As Fong watched, a mature cormorant hopped up onto the fisherman’s boat and waddled over to the old man. The man’s gnarled fingers reached out and stroked the bird’s long neck – from its beak down to the glinting metal ring at its base. The bird cooed and released a fish from its throat. The plump thing flapped on the seat of the boat for two beats then disappeared to the floor. The fisherman fondled the bird again and fluffed its feathers before committing the animal once more to the lake’s cold waters.
From a distance, the cormorant and the old fisherman appeared to be ideally fitted – two halves of a crossspecies partnership. At least that’s what the children’s stories would have one believe.
“There,” said the boatman in a guttural exclamation from behind Fong. He was pointing to the right.
The island had come up quickly. Fong looked at his watch. They’d been on the lake for just over an hour – a personal best that he had no desire to challenge.
There was no wharf on the Island of the Half-wits, just a rocky beach where several fishing boats rested at cocky angles. One was flipped over and two men were re-gumming the starboard side of the keel with a dark resin. Women sat on some of the larger rocks cleaning and dressing fish. Children walked beside baby cormorants that picked their way carefully among the sharp stones. The whole scene struck Fong as oddly domestic – like Shanghai on Sundays.
To the north along the rock-strewn beach, tendrils of smoke came from the fishermen’s huts. Past them, a gravel path led steeply upward to what Fong guessed was the farmers’ enclave.
As he approached, eyes followed him. Just like in the village west of the Wall. But something was different here and Fong felt it the moment he’d left the shoreline and headed inland. It was as if he’d left China. Not just modern China, but China altogether.
Like every other conquering power, the Communists made deals with local power elites. Over the years, Mao and his successors had reneged on, or renegotiated, a great many of those agreements. But China is a vast country and during the War of Liberation, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of virtually autonomous regions formed. On the whole, if a region was small and self-contained, the Communists left it alone. Clearly this island, the Island of the Half-wits, was such a place.
As Fong moved farther inland, the place got somehow older and definitely more foreign. Even the pattern of the farmers’ huts hit an odd chord in him. The only familiar objects were the pails of night soil hanging on either side of every doorway. As he passed them, their scents told Fong how long the material had been ripening.
Old skills never really die – they ferment.
Then he heard the braying of a horn and the slash of a cymbal.
Fong followed the sound to the back of the huts. A procession was forming. It seemed that the whole village had assembled. Not the whole island, he noted. The fishers stayed to themselves.
Four young men lifted a scarlet-sheeted body above their heads and started up the path. The red cloth was the most intense red Fong could remember.
A long line of vigorous, work-toughened men walked slowly behind the body. They were dressed from head to toe in white. The old man Fong had seen at the jail – Iman – led the procession.
Fong scanned the men. They shared similar facial features. Almost all were the same height, all had the same square body type – shit they even used the same shambling gait.
The women followed the men. Once again led by an elder. Once again in white. The women were as rugged as the men and resembled them closely. They looked like they’d all sprung from the same set of loins. But there seemed to be no mental deprivation here. Only a sameness – and an undeniable vigour.
The rhythm of the cymbals increased and the procession picked up speed heading straight up the terraced hills toward the centre of the island. As they passed by terrace after terrace, the procession began to sing. The words were ancient. “Death is ancient,” Fong thought. “It invites us all with cymbal and horn – like a Peking Opera performance.”
By the time the body reached a dry terrace, two-thirds of the way up the mountain, Fong had fallen far behind. He knew they’d seen him, but when he crested the final rise he was surprised to find them lining either side of the path. The singing had stopped. The only sound was the blare of the mournful horn – and Fong’s wheezing efforts to supply his lungs with oxygen.
Fong walked slowly between the rows of faces. Up close he saw that some were so alike that he was sure he wouldn’t be able to tell one from the next even after concerted study. Then he was there – at the end of the line of islanders – facing the one called Iman. Behind the vital old man stood the four younger men with the crimson-swathed body of Hesheng on their shoulders. Suddenly, Iman snapped his head downward in a gesture of submission as old as the land upon which they both stood. “You honour us with your presence.”
Fong wouldn’t have been more surprised if the old man had whipped out his penis and sprayed his name in the dirt. Fong nodded slightly, careful to keep his head above the level to which Iman had lowered his. Iman’s eyes held Fong’s for a long moment.
The interment began.
Some of Fong’s acquaintances had passed away, but none of them had been formally buried. No one was put in a box and dropped into a hole anymore in the great Communist state. Even funeral ceremonies were frowned on.
A shallow grave had already been scraped from the moist ground. The body in its scarlet swathing lay beside the hole. The trumpet sounded and the cymbals crashed a-rhythmically. Then Iman raised his hands and cried out, “Take Hesheng back to you. We commit him to your care. We honour you, our ancestors, and now him, by committing him to your care. Take Heshing back to you, our ancestors.”
“Why are rituals always repetitious?” Fong wondered.
Iman paused. His mouth opened then shut.
Fong took a step closer, anxious to hear what Iman would say next. But he said nothing. “Why?” Fong thought. “A man of Iman’s advanced years must have recited the burial ceremony dozens, if not hundreds, of times.” Yet the man stood stock-still, clearly lost as to what to say next.
Finally, Iman signalled that Hesheng’s body should be put in the ground.
Fong backed off and climbed a slight rise at the back of the graveyard. He looked around him. The place was small. Few plots.
Then his eye landed on a grave directly beneath the wall. The soil on top had not yet settled. Night soil-laden dirt did that – took a long time to pack. He looked up. Above him was a hand-hewn terrace wall that no doubt held back an upper paddy’s water. In the rainy season it could overflow, depositing night soil in the graveyard. Night soil.
He looked at the grave. It had been dug recently.
He crossed over to it and picked up a handful of dirt. He let it run through his fingers. Memories of his youth flooded through him – and of the bag of dirt the specialist had taken as evidence from the sunken boat’s runway. Dirt on the stripper’s runway. Night soil-laden dirt. Like the dirt from this grave.
Fong felt a tendril of cold slither up his spine as a possibility – a shocking possibility – presented itself. Then he looked behind the grave’s headstone. And a piece fell into place. There on the ground stood a small column of free-standing stones, one balanced perfectly on the next. Four stones. Stacking stones. “The stones are a way of marking time, Detective Zhong. A way of noting its passage. One stone for each . . .”