The Tibetan guide never stopped talking. He called himself T.S., short for something that Jia Jia had already forgotten. T.S. remembered her husband, he told her, because he never forgot a Beijing customer. He had lived in Beijing for a year and learned what he called some ‘authentic Mandarin’ there, even had a local girlfriend. But of course he did not want to stay in Beijing, he told her, he was proud of his home and wanted to return to promote his culture. He had aspired to become a tour guide and his ambitions had come true. Chen Hang had been his twentieth Beijing customer, and Jia Jia was his thirty-second.
Chen Hang’s trip had gone mostly according to plan, T.S. recalled, until one morning when he had asked to cancel his final destination.
‘We were supposed to go to the Lamaling Monastery,’ T.S. said, scratching his head. ‘But your husband was a little weird that morning. He seemed to be very angry when I met him at the hotel, and he yelled at me, yes, he really did, he yelled at me, “Forget all these temples, I’ve seen enough temples, let’s go somewhere else.”’
The two men had sat down in the hotel lobby with a map of Tibet, and T.S. had suggested every sight within a day’s drive that he thought could possibly have interested Chen Hang. Chen Hang had listened and nodded intently without saying a word, and finally he had decided, ‘Let’s go to your village.’ T.S. had explained that his home village was far too underdeveloped, and without proper tourist accommodation or restaurants: where was Chen Hang supposed to sleep and eat? T.S. had suggested that perhaps Chen Hang could stay in a larger city nearby, and if he wanted to visit T.S.’s home, they could make a day trip.
‘I’ll sleep in your house,’ Chen Hang had responded. ‘I come from a humble background too. I can sleep anywhere.’
‘He stayed in the room that used to belong to me and my brothers. They both moved out after they got married.’ T.S. made a thumbs-up gesture and said, ‘Your husband was not boasting, he really didn’t seem to mind the poor life in the countryside. He even helped out in the qingke fields!’
Jia Jia understood then that her careful itinerary might be in vain. She considered going directly to T.S.’s village, but she decided to visit all the temples anyway and pay particular attention to every detail, trying to extract for herself some meaning from it all. Over the next few days, when she came across paintings or objects involving fish, she stood in front of them and prayed. But the fish-man left no clues for her.
It was not until the drive towards Nyingchi, while she was snoozing on the back seat of the car, that the fish-man appeared in her dream. She seemed in the dream to have no memory of anything that had happened to bring her there: Chen Hang’s dream, his death, the sketch, Leo, moving out, the wall painting, her trip, Ren Qi. She was alone with the fish-man in a boundless white room and the fish-man was swimming in the air away from her. Jia Jia’s legs were weak and trembling, and she was sitting on the ground without casting a shadow in any direction. Puzzled, she called out to the fish-man, not because she recognised it as the one thing she had been looking for, but because it was the only creature in sight.
The fish-man must have heard her. She was loud enough.
‘Don’t wait for me for dinner,’ it repeated in a rusty voice. ‘Don’t wait for me. Go ahead and start. Where the hell am I anyway?’
It waved its fin in the air as it spoke, swimming forward without acknowledging Jia Jia’s cry for help. Jia Jia crawled towards it with her elbows on the ground, dragging her legs behind like a wounded soldier. She swore at the fish-man.
‘You bastard! Help me, you cold-blooded shit! Fine! Leave me!’ she yelled.
When she woke up, she found they had arrived at the hotel where she was supposed to spend the next two nights, and she could not remember how the dream had ended. She locked the door of her room that afternoon; she wanted to make a rough pencil sketch while the image was fresh in her memory, so that when she returned to Beijing she could try to paint the fish-man again. She made sure to be as meticulous as possible with the body, and found that the more the fish-man took shape, the more she began to feel a balloon of hope expanding within her. With every line her pencil drew, her heart pounded faster and her muscles tensed. When she had completed the body, hands shaking from having clutched the pencil too tightly, she held it next to the one she had found by the bath at home.
Nothing looked alike. With the two drawings in front of her, her feeling of hope, as if having undergone a chemical reaction, transformed into fury inside her. She felt as though she had reached the sudden end of a long, arduous road. What was she doing, making pictures like a child, betting her hopes of conclusions on meaningless drawings? Did she even know how to do anything else?
Jia Jia phoned the hotel reception and asked for a pair of scissors. While she waited, she took nail clippers from her bag and began cutting and tearing up her drawings of fish. She started with her sketchbook, ripping out those fish she had drawn on the day at the river, the ‘mechanically drawn’ pictures, as Ren Qi had observed. She wanted to slice through all of them at the same time, but the pile was too thick, so she shredded them one by one and flushed them down the toilet. Then she took out the paper that was folded inside the zipped compartment of her wallet.
‘This one has emotion,’ Ren Qi had said.
A young woman in a long black skirt delivered the scissors. Standing at the open door, Jia Jia cut the drawing in two, in front of the woman, right down the middle. There it went, the drawing that had emotion. As the part with the fish head fell to the ground, a look of panic and unease rose to the woman’s face. She stood stunned, her mouth slightly open.
‘Can I help you?’ Jia Jia asked, wanting to sound calm but her voice getting caught, as though there was something stuck in her throat that she could not swallow. She pulled her sleeves down over her hands, dug the nails of her left hand into her right palm, cleared her throat, and opened her mouth again.
The young woman spoke first. ‘So sorry, so sorry, sorry,’ she interrupted Jia Jia and darted off, her skirt getting trapped between her legs as she scuffled quickly around the corner.
Jia Jia stepped into the hallway and lingered for a moment, waiting for something to happen. Nobody came. Back at her desk, she gazed at the two fish-man drawings, the one she had just finished and the original sketch from Chen Hang. These were the only two that she had not destroyed. Finally, she held them one on top of each other, and cut them both down the centre.
Somebody tapped on her open door. She heard T.S.’s voice.
‘Ms Wu, are you ready to go to dinner?’
Jia Jia stood up. Perhaps going out to dinner would do her good right now. She went into the bathroom to tie her hair. When she came out, T.S. was standing at the desk, pointing at her sketch.
‘I’ve seen this guy,’ he said.
He picked up the two parts of her drawing and pieced them together.
‘Actually,’ he continued, ‘it’s not exactly the same. But we have a sculpture like this in our village, a fish’s body with a human’s head. It’s been there a long time, ever since I was a child, carved from a big log next to the stream in the forest. According to the stories, an old man we call Grandpa once saw the shape of a fish in the log, and decided to make it into a sculpture. How do you know about it?’
‘Did Chen Hang see it as well?’ Jia Jia asked.
Her earlier dread vanished as though it had never existed. The dead end was an illusion; she had found another road. This sculpture, whatever it was, must have had something to do with Chen Hang’s dream. He must have seen it.
‘Let’s go. Let’s leave now. Meet me at the car in ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to your village.’
‘I think it’s too late today. It’s already getting dark, it’ll be better to stick to—’
‘What do you know about the fish-man?’
‘What fish-man?’
‘The one you were just talking about! The fish-man on the log in your village!’
‘Fish-man? Oh, fish-man!’ He threw his head back and laughed. ‘That’s a great name! I should tell Grandpa about it. We’ve always referred to it as “the sculpture”. The “fish-man” sounds so much more mythical. I’m going to come up with stories about the fish-man to tell the kids in the village. They’ll love it.’
Jia Jia walked up to him and gripped both of his shoulders in her hands, shaking him hard. He must have understood how determined and desperate she was, because he went quiet, slackened his posture, and caved his chest in to make himself smaller. Then he rushed out of her room to prepare the car, without saying a single word more.
*
The moon glowed behind a thin veil of clouds, and the night was wet with a fresh breeze blowing. They were high in the snowy mountains. As T.S.’s Jeep curved around the bumpy road, Jia Jia saw a handful of villagers drinking and dancing next to a bonfire, its flames lighting up prayer flags attached to poles in the ground, and hanging from the tops of houses.
An old man with braided grey hair, dressed in a tan robe, made his way slowly towards the vehicle. T.S. parked it and called out to him in Tibetan. The old man gestured back and T.S. yelled towards a two-storey farmhouse, built from white bricks, not far from where he had parked.
‘That’s the old man we call Grandpa – he can’t speak,’ the guide explained. ‘He’s like a real grandfather to me. I think he came to our village when my mother was young.’
Momentarily, Jia Jia was able to see the old man’s face clearly in the light from the fire. There was something that felt familiar in his stare, which penetrated through her as if she were glass. It was as though he was a long-time neighbour with whom she had never spoken, someone who knew everything about her yet kept it all a secret. She caught his eye and looked away.
A stocky, middle-aged woman came out, with a surprised expression, and guided the old man back towards the house. As she walked, she kept turning to look at Jia Jia.
‘That woman is my mother,’ T.S. explained as he pulled Jia Jia’s suitcase towards the farmhouse. ‘Nobody really knows where Grandpa came from. My mother told me that he just turned up one day, but she doesn’t remember when exactly. She was still a child. Our village used to be much more isolated. Now, since the highways have been built, we get many more cars passing by. My mother thinks that Grandpa came during the time when they first started to build roads connecting to the larger villages. Maybe he came from another village nearby.’
The family managed to spare a room for Jia Jia. T.S.’s mother offered her some stir-fried cabbage and scrambled eggs, apologising for the fact that she only had a little food left from dinner. The walls in the house were a teal colour, and on the section of wall next to the shrine for Buddha statues, there was a painting of yellow Tibetan horns. Almost all the furniture was made out of wood the colour of raisins – the sofa, the tables, the shrine. The entire house smelt like goat’s butter mixed with incense – a pungent smell that had been soaked up over the years by the bricks and the wood.
Jia Jia had immediately wanted T.S. to show her to the river bed to see the log, but it was late and she felt reluctant to disturb what seemed like a long-awaited family reunion. Anxious for the next day, she slid open the window to let in the cool, moist air. The bonfire was dimming and only four men remained, drinking qingke wine. They each held a cowboy hat in their lap. Jia Jia sat down on an embroidered cushion and tried to decipher what the family was talking about next door. Grandpa seemed to live with them; for Jia Jia this was strange, as her family would never have taken in an unrelated elderly guest. She dug out a cigarette from her bag, rested it between her lips for a moment, and then struck a match and lit it.
Ren Qi had not phoned her. Jia Jia trusted that he would keep to his promise, because he seemed like an honest man. Perhaps he had not found his wife yet? Might he have told her this, at least?
While she recalled her conversation with him, she rubbed through her skirt at the kite-shaped birthmark on her thigh. She still found herself fidgeting with it like this, as if she could erase it. Her headache came pounding back harder than before and she gently brought her legs towards her chest and hugged them. She watched the men leave the bonfire, and the fire die out, until the throbbing pain faded and numbed. Hearing the laughs and chatter floating in from the living room, she covered her legs with a blanket woven by T.S.’s mother and leaned against the wall, until the half-moon faded into daylight.