Twenty-seven

ANNA OPENED HER EYES to a city.

It was morning, and summer; and the sound of the place swept down at her like a tide, one great relentless wave of color and sound.

The air was full of a peculiar, rhythmic noise: Anna recognized the beat as the heavy, speeding clatter of looms. Crowds pushed up the street where she stood. Sunk in shadow, the sun touched only the tops of the temples and the garrison walls; but the street and its shade were multicolored, with lacquered and gilded shop signs hanging from each building. She was carried by the busy stream of humanity, carried as effectively as the sedan chairs with their curved poles that lifted the chairs above the heads of the pedestrians, edging past pushcarts and wheelbarrows, down other streets, each devoted to a different trade: skins and furs, embroideries, goldsmiths, silversmiths, silks.

She looked up at the silks—indigo from P’eng Hsien, held in straw-braid baskets from Shuangliu Hsien and every shade from the palest ivory to the deepest blue-green, fluttering like flags on their stalls and in curtains from the doorways, and lying in rolls, color after color, delicate to the touch. She stretched her hand to the closest display, and felt the brush of it, strangely, pass along her arm to her face.

“This is Chengdu Fu in 1910, a city of three hundred thousand people,” said her guide.

She turned her head, tried to find him. She looked in the faces that were passing her, reached out her hand to stop someone. Her grasp closed on nothingness. Yet she knew that voice, that familiar voice whispering beneath the clattering looms.…

“Surrounded by a nine-mile wall pierced by four fine stone gates. The wall was over sixty feet broad at the base, forty feet broad at the top, and thirty-five feet high.…”

Anna was suddenly completely aware of this construction, of its importance, of the shape and slope of the brick as it tapered upward. Her heart suddenly went out to it with a peculiar strong passion, and she thought of Rachel, and her drawings; and she suddenly understood entirely, in a flash, Rachel’s fascination with the way that things were put together, and the vitality and ingenuousness of the imagination behind them. She found herself staring at the walkway that ran along the top of the wall; it boasted a fortress balustrade, squared and patterned. Her eye ran from the walkway to a gate, and she drifted through it, trailing her fingers along the inner facing, the forty feet of stone.

“The bridges,” the voice said. “The bridges.”

There were ditches, canals, and streams beyond the city walls.

Anna could hear these waters, the snowmelt of spring, the grudging race of a dry autumn, the bubble and trickle over weirs and dams; she could hear them like the blood moving in her own body, the pressing and receding beat of her own pulse.

“Every stream had its bridge. This one is Han Chou,” whispered the voice. “This is the Bridge of the Golden Goose, this rests on six stone piers, this is ornate, it is carved—look…” And she thought immediately of the covered wooden bridges of home: of the red- or green- or blue-painted, slate-roofed bridges of Vermont, the trellis-sided bridge at Brattleboro, the English church lych-gate splendor of the span at Franconia Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

“This is Marco Polo’s bridge…”

It was filled today with wagons, each with its curved bamboo roof; and at either end of the bridge were timber-framed houses, looking exactly like the black-and-white-framed Tudor houses in England; while down in the weedy shadows of the river they were emptying the fish baskets, and the river widened and slowed.

Anna looked ahead of her. Out on the road were thirty men. The morning had grown hot, and the mist that never quite left the plain was hanging low, ochre under a gray and humid sky. She walked with them, under memorial arches and gates—arches where even the road surface failed, and there was nothing but dust and the high bamboo on either side of the track—arches to gods and ancestors, capped by crouching tigers, embroidered with leaves. They passed fields of millet and sugar; pulse, indigo, and tobacco; rice and hemp and cotton.

They reached the river gorge. The road swept upward, upward, skirting the valley sides above the river. There were no more trees now, only the low shrubs with thick and felty leaves that illustrated the uniquely dry atmosphere of the gorge. At single rope bridges of plaited bamboo, they met the foot soldiers of trade, carrying huge packs on their backs of potash salts, charcoal, and oil cake.

At the desolate little hamlet of Peh-yang Ch’ang, they came to a breathtaking piece of heaven.

There was spread out before them mile upon mile of Buddleia davidii, the intensity of the violet color so striking that each man put down his load, and the whole party stood for minutes, staring out across it.

After a few moments, Anna saw the tall man walk forward. He crouched by the roadside, and put his hand to a smaller shrub. It was not more than four feet high, but it was a single albino form of its royally colored sisters. He took its flower heads and seeds, and those of the Hydrangea villosa that stood next to it.

Anna watched him wrap the seeds in paper, and then in cotton, and put them in his pocket. Then he walked away, brushing the dust from his jacket. It was a little gesture, an automatic gesture, as though the plant were of no consequence. Ten years later there would be white buddleia in America, edging the gardens in Boston with a neatly nodding white hem.

They reached Hsao-kou at six thousand feet. On all sides the mountain walls sheered upward, culminating in razor-sharp peaks; and yet at the door of the inn and around all the houses, magnolia grew, along with aconite.

It was the last they saw of any kind of cultivation. After less than a mile, the magnolia, buddleia, and hydrangea fell away, and the climb became dangerously steep. The pace slowed until the summit, and, on the other side, they saw the Lungan side of the pass, and a graveyard of trees: the relics of giants long cut down for their timber.

Suddenly it began to rain, as they came down from the summit. The light began to fail. And Anna saw, as the men around her slipped on the steep shale, and then gradually, as the height dropped, gained more and more purchase on soil and grass, that through the gloom all kinds of plants surrounded them, like ghosts in the low cloud.

They walked deeper into woodland, where maples hung with rain, and the floor was covered with anemone, and astilbe and spirea, meadow rue, and drifts of yellow and pink impatiens. She stopped and looked at them in amazement. She bought impatiens every year for her flower tubs; she bought them as seedlings, and repotted and nurtured them, and waited for weeks for the first buds and flowers. Last year, Grace had grown white and pink impatiens along her paths, and complained at how long they had taken to flower, and how thin and leggy they had become through the dry summer. Yet here they were, in huge drifts in the twilight; and the bearers trod on them as they passed.

She let the men go past her, and stood and watched them as they walked out of sight between the trees. She did not question the slow dream; she was grateful for it. It was the strangest of gifts. But when she looked at the last draining light between the trees, she felt suddenly sure that she was alive only in this curious other world, and that she was never going to wake. And she was never going to go home.

The night was spent at San-chai-tsze, at thirteen thousand feet.

They woke the following morning to a glorious day.

The path down was full of alpine flowers—larkspurs, gentians, and aconite providing stunning blues; saxifrage of all kinds, especially the purple Saxifraga oppositifolia, which was sometimes called snow purple.

It was as they reached the very top of the pass that Anna saw the senecio.

She paused at the word in her mind, senecio, a word she had never heard before. She could not understand where it had come from, why it had suddenly emerged in her thoughts. In the cool breeze blowing on the upland she looked to left and right, across the ruins of a fort where a prayer flag still fluttered. Below it, in the sunshine, she saw a raised mound of stones, a flat cairn, and something balanced on top of it. The bearers walked down to it, and stopped silently in front of it.

“Senecio,” a man’s voice whispered. “Remember.”

She put her hand to her head, frustrated at this returning whisper, this familiar echo. It was so close and so intimate, and whenever she heard the voice she also heard the peculiar pulselike ticking that accompanied it, and, even further in the background, the muted rise and fall of other voices.

She walked down to the rubble of the ruin.

The coffin was balanced on top of the cairn; a man lay inside it, mummified by the dryness and cold; and, on top of the coffin, lay what he had been carrying when he had been attacked and robbed. There was not much. He had been a poor man. There was just the framework of bamboo poles out of which he would have made a carrying load on his return from Lungan. His two thin cedar-strip sandals lay on top of it, and a prayer flag had been attached to the stick that he had been using to walk. Anna looked down at the granite and sandstone underneath him, and the alpine flowers, a blinding carpet of yellow, around the rocks.

Anna couldn’t look at the inhuman face in the coffin; she concentrated her gaze on the plants at her feet.

And then, abruptly, she knew.

She knew the word. She knew the voice. In this desperate place, it came back to her.

The plant beneath her was senecio. It was a sister to that other senecio, the Senecio squalidus, the plain yellow weed that had spread out of the Botanic Garden and along the railway lines from Oxford. And David came back to her, David sitting opposite her at a bar table.

“It’s part of the daisy family, ragwort…”

“Am I going to get a botany lecture?”

His smile.

“…Listen, this is interesting…”

She had begun to laugh.

“Oh, I’m transfixed…”

The afternoon that she had chased the names down in Flora Britannica, for no other reason than that they sounded exotic to her, even the names of the ragwort weeds and the incomprehensibly bland-looking lichens that had so amused her. And she remembered his talking of trees and her own thoughts, that this was possibly a very single-minded man, a man who hid behind what he knew, all his lists, all his names, all his theories. A man she wanted to find and keep close to her. The man who had walked with her through Godshill and up Godshill Ridge to Island Thorns, and who had looked at the perfect white rim of the water in the pool. The man who had touched her, and who clung to her, like a tune she would never get out of her mind.

Transfixed.

Senecio.

She turned around.

Transfixed…

David was standing behind her on the slope, below her, holding out his hands. Her heart jumped. She felt a terrible pressure in her chest, as if she were in the coffin that was weighted down with the stones, piled with all she had achieved. As if she were being compressed, the life squeezed out of her. She had a sudden crushing image of her paintings piled on top of her, and among them, the lilies, the Davidia, the trailing, peony-headed poppies, their faces turned to the ground.

She began to gasp. She tried to walk.

“Anna,” he said, “can you hear me?”

His gaze was centered on her. Irrationally, she thought she could feel his hand in hers.

Somewhere beyond him, Rachel.

Somewhere beyond, on a thin, impossible bridge.

“Yes,” she told him. “I can hear you. I can hear you.”

But the words were taken away by the wind, swept away in the violent sunlight.