But in the morning, the feeling was still there. Like some burgeoning sickness. I went to breakfast and I found myself watching Qiao, who giggled while he ate. It wasn’t as if there was anything for him to laugh about, and yet the haphazard business of eating was enough to raise a smile from him, especially considering he was the messiest eater of us all (my grandmother came a close second). He would stuff sweet-sticky rice into his mouth, his fingers shiny with honey dip, and he would smile delightedly, perhaps because we, all of us, seemed a tad ridiculous to him or maybe because the food tasted so sweet and warm. My mother batted at him with her hands, trying to avoid the debris which would inevitably slick his chops and cascade down his grubby top, but this made him laugh all the more, as though the whole performance was one put on exclusively for his entertainment.
‘Mama … Qiao go “munch munch”,’ he enunciated delightedly, as miniature boulders of food avalanched out of his mouth. He turned to me and grinned, flicking his chubby toddler’s fingers in my direction, a display of happy triumph on his part.
I looked at his face – shining with mirth and newness – and whereas I usually felt irritation towards my brother because his boisterousness was overwhelming, now I experienced a desperate and fearful sense of love for him. I looked at his face and his big open toddler’s smile, and in his innocence he seemed both oblivious and vulnerable. What Gen had said about the dead children seemed ridiculous – something designed to rankle me – and yet I realised that I had in fact heard of children dying. A girl in the year below had been hit by a car. A boy in the year above had become ill. Their names eluded me, and the details of the illness, or the circumstances of the accident, were also invisible to me.
I’d heard about the events at the time, perhaps through second-hand conversations, or something said at a school assembly, but I’d never really taken in the specifics. Now, though, it was more real. I looked at my brother with his glistening dark eyes and his full cheeks bulging with food and felt my breath catch. All it would take was for some of that food to get lodged in his throat, or perhaps when our mother had helped him down from his high chair, his belly swollen, he might stumble, cracking his head smartly against the corner of a door. Or he could …
The infinite variety of ways in which my brother might suddenly be taken from this world ran across my mind, and all at once it seemed to me there was no way he would survive the day. I reached out to him instinctively; I squeezed his nose and he blinked and laughed, and I had to fight back tears. Nobody else noticed the sudden change in my behaviour (before this day I was more likely to pinch my brother’s cheeks to make him cry). But perhaps my grandmother realised something was different, for I felt the wrinkled darkness of her eyes upon me, curious, tinged with mysterious amusement.
But the situation for me was anything but funny. As my mother herded me out of the apartment that morning, as I felt the door close behind me, I was convinced I would never see my brother again. That something would happen to him while I was gone. I imagined his face no longer bright-eyed and shiny, but shut-eyed and grey, his body suspended within the strange orange glow inside that great building; then I imagined my brother being belched out from that tapering chimney, his dull death mask outlined in a smoke-filled scream. More than anything I wanted to tell my mother not to make me go to school – to let me stay at home – but the words wouldn’t come. At that age there is such a gulf between your childhood certainties and the adult world your parents inhabit; even though I was certain my brother was in great danger (though I knew not from what), nevertheless I couldn’t change the course of my routine, I couldn’t give voice to my fears, for I knew I would never be able to make my mother or father understand what I felt.
So I sank into a wretched state. I sat at my desk in class with a feeling of dread broiling in my belly. Every minute passed as an inscrutable agony. At lunch I couldn’t help but wander up to one of the other girls – Fulin – who always seemed amiable and sensible.
‘Hey, Fulin!’
She seemed friendly but I would have to approach this with a great deal of caution and tact.
‘Fulin?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Do you think that it is possible something really awful could happen at any moment, and that we could … die … at any point, and that when that happens they would take our bodies and burn them and our spirits … would end up coming out as smoke?’
She looked at me, blinking in much the same way my brother had done when I tweaked his nose.
‘I can’t chat right now. I have to … get started on my homework.’
The rest of the afternoon was equally excruciating. By the time I returned home, my thoughts had rolled over and over in my brain, and I was certain my brother was already gone. When I stepped into the living room and saw him being bounced on my grandmother’s lap, for the second time that day I found it difficult to breathe. He looked up at me and gurgled cheekily, before returning to the intriguing topography of my grandmother’s face, pressing his hands against her in the way I had once done myself. But my grandmother’s eyes remained on me, curious and penetrating.
I went to my room. Qiao was okay, that was the important thing. Only then another thought arrived. A week before, I had been running with my friends after school and I had cut my knee clambering over a wooden gate. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, even though I noticed a slight yellowing around the thin lip of red. The skin there tingled. It occurred to me that it had got infected – my mother was always talking about such things. Perhaps it was not Qiao who was the vulnerable one, but me.
And then, another thought came. Perhaps we were all vulnerable. Perhaps any of us could die at any time. But how could people live like this? With such an awareness? My eyes felt heavy but at the same time the tears wouldn’t come.
I felt a great sadness. It was a feeling which seemed to separate me from my family, from the world. I watched my mother jostle with my little brother. I watched my father retreat into his study deep in thought. They all continued as usual. Had they never experienced such thoughts? Would we all end up in the place Gen had described? Would we all end up as the dark smoke pushed out from some strange chimney?
I found myself wandering into my grandmother’s room.
Her large turtle-like eyes fixed on me.
‘Are you ready to let it go?’
‘Let what go?’
‘Let go of whatever it is you have been keeping inside you. It’s like a volcano, you know. And eventually, all volcanoes must explode.’
Something in me seeped out in a rush of feeling. I felt tears forming in my eyes.
‘There is this boy.’
‘Ah yes, I thought you were a bit young for that. But if he is handsome and you really like him, and you are feeling these warm sensations in your belly every time you look at him, then perhaps …’
‘Eww, no! I don’t like him at all. I hate him, in fact!’
‘Well love often begins with hate …’
She smiled her great toad’s smile.
‘Po Po – be serious. He … he told me something horrible.’
Her expression became gentle.
‘What did he tell you?’
‘He told me that there is a building where they burn …’
Suddenly I was overcome by the rawness of my emotion. I felt my body heave in a single silent sob.
‘Burn what?’ my grandmother asked.
‘Burn … burn the bodies of … dead children. And that their spirits come out in the smoke. But that’s not true, is it, Po Po?’
‘Where is this building?’
‘The Beijing Children’s Hospital.’
My grandmother sucked her bottom lip. She was concentrating. Generally speaking, that was what I loved about her. Most adults never take what children say seriously. They just respond with an uninterested and anodyne answer. But my grandmother really seemed to consider what I said. Only on this occasion, I wished she hadn’t. Eventually she began to speak.
‘I think what your friend said may be true.’
Something in me sank. It was one thing for such a story to arise in the world of children. But for an adult – and an ancient one at that – to give credence to what Gen had said made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.
She smiled, a soft melancholy smile that caused the wrinkles on her forehead to become ravines, deeply etched into the skin. As I got older, I thought about ageing more, as we all do. I came to think of old age as a fallibility akin to illness, something that left a person weak and in some way less than themselves. But I never used to think of my grandmother that way. Her hands with veins running across them like vines, the lines which criss-crossed her forehead, the full softness of her belly, the solidity of her arthritic shoulders, and those ancient, timeless eyes – to me these things spoke not of fallibility but of permanence. Of implacable strength, like an old gnarly tree that had been battered by wind and weather, but remained stubbornly set into the soil.
Indeed, while my father worked, my mother bustled and shopped, and my brother and I were at school each day, it was as though my grandmother had taken root in our apartment. And the awareness of her – her presence, the rich odour of leather oil which emanated from her – was something I sought to breathe in, for it brought me comfort. My grandmother could be wicked, and she had an acid tongue – my father had been lashed by it, and it was enough to turn my mother’s face a crimson blush before sending her scurrying from the room. But although my grandmother sometimes slapped my wrists hard in a moment of pique, her attitude to me and Qiao was one of gentle amusement. Now, however, she looked serious; she thoughtfully stroked the hairs which protruded from her chin and began to speak.
‘Do you remember much of your grandfather?’
I was suddenly anxious. I did not wish to displease my grandmother.
‘I … I … remember the day his shouling began. I think so anyway. It was before Qiao was born. And they … I mean he … he was laid out in … our living room,’ I finished lamely.
I could never tell whether my grandmother’s expression would get light or dark. This time, though, no shadow passed across her face. Instead just a wan smile. And a confidential twinkle in her eyes.
‘He was an old goat, that man.’
My mouth must have fallen open, because I had never heard my grandfather described that way. But my grandmother simply grinned wickedly.
‘What you need to understand, Little One … is what times were like before. Do you think me and your grandfather saw each other one day and were struck by love and lived happily ever after? Like in one of your fairy tales? No, that’s not what happened at all. My parents and his parents made a pact. We were promised to one another long before we ever met. The whole thing might have been forgotten though. I stayed in the village. Your grandfather came to Beijing. He was studying to be a railway engineer. Perhaps by that time he had found himself a girl, a more modern girl without broken feet.’
I was captivated.
‘So what happened?’
‘In 1937 the Japanese invaded. The Japanese army – they were hard, and fast, and they passed through the villages so quickly. So brutally. The villages bore the brunt of their soldiers. It was decided that a girl like me – I was just sixteen at the time – might not be worth much after the soldiers had come through!’
I was baffled.
‘Why wouldn’t you be worth much just because of horrid soldiers? You are worth a lot to me, Po Po. More than even two hundred Dragon Beards!’ (Dragon Beard candy was the delicacy we kids prized above all others, though we never had the means to secure much of it.)
My grandmother looked at me, those dark eyes shining like a river at night. She spoke more softly.
‘Times were different then.’
I realised I was being brushed off, that it was no kind of answer, and I went to press for more information, but she raised her hand.
‘In one way, it was good the soldiers came. Because my parents sent me to Beijing, to your grandfather. And if they hadn’t done that, well then – you wouldn’t exist!’
She reached out and tweaked my nose with her fingers the way she sometimes did. It hurt a bit but it made me giggle anyhow. But I was still focused on the story.
‘So grandfather didn’t even know you were coming?’
My grandmother chuckled ruefully.
‘Nope. They stuck me on a mule, shoved some jewellery into my pockets, told me that once I got to his place, I was to put the gold into his hand and insist he make good on his parents’ promise. That he make me his wife. In fact, he went quite white when I arrived.’
‘Did he take the jewellery?’
My grandmother frowned.
‘No, some bandits stopped us along the way. The rogues robbed us as the price of giving “safe passage”. But, somehow, I got there. All the way to Beijing. And for a village girl, at that age, during that time – Beijing felt like the very ends of the earth.’
‘But if you didn’t have any jewellery …’
‘Your grandfather was an old goat. But he was an honourable goat, in his strange, sullen way. He made it clear from the start that he didn’t like me. And I wasn’t too happy about being offered up to him like an item of livestock fresh from the market. But in the end he honoured his commitment. He abandoned his studies. And we got married.’
‘And lived happily ever after?’
My grandmother guffawed.
‘Did anything about that story make you think that?’
I blushed. On the one hand it was exciting when an adult talked to you in this way about real things. But on the other, my grandmother often left me feeling out of my depth.
‘No, there was no “happy ever after”. But there was an “ever after”. I was stubborn, mulish. Your grandfather was distant and aloof. He, no doubt, had his dreams about what his future would be. And I wasn’t part of them. But he never mentioned that to me. We didn’t like each other. But eventually we learned to get on. He’d sit in that chair exactly there. He’d rock back and forth. Smoke his pipe. Hardly say a word. When he got really old, I was the only one he’d let cut his hair. I’d be tutting the whole way through, telling him to be still. But … towards the end … I kinda liked doing it.’
I don’t really think I ever saw my grandmother misty-eyed or emotional. That ‘I kinda liked doing it’ was about the strongest protestation of emotion I ever saw her give, and even then it was to the memory of a man she hadn’t liked all that much. But there was something there. Even as a kid, I got that.
‘But,’ I asked timidly, ‘what about the Beijing Children’s Hospital? What about the dead children?’
My grandmother, removed from her reverie, seemed to see me again, in the present.
‘I didn’t like your grandfather all that much, and he wasn’t always so sweet on me. But we got used to one another. And when he was gone … it was … different. Sometimes, in the years following his passing. When the window was open at night. I’d be sleeping. But even though it was hot and there was no wind, his rocking chair would be moving just a little bit …’
I looked at the chair. My face must have grimaced in horror, and if that wasn’t enough, I lurched back automatically.
My grandmother chuckled. She reached out one leathery hand and placed it on my arm. I could feel the warmth of her, the blood rushing underneath her skin; it was as though something in her spirit transferred itself, calming my own clammy agitation.
‘What I am saying to you, Little One, is that I didn’t feel afraid. I would be in the midst of dreams – I’d see faces of people who lived centuries ago, I’d see the reflections of my past selves looking out at me with silent words, and I would feel … confused and … alone. And then I’d wake up in this room. And I’d feel your grandfather there with me. Brooding in silence, the way the bad-tempered old goat always used to do. And I wouldn’t be … so alone. I’d feel him still.’
She put a thick, withered hand to her heart. The gesture was brief, tentative. But it filled me with an emotion I was still too young to understand. For a moment all the child-questions that had been jostling in my mind were silenced.
She looked at me.
‘I don’t really know if what your friend told you was true. But you shouldn’t be afraid of death. You are not going to die for a very long time. And Qiao is not going to die for a very long time. And neither will your mother and father. But when that time eventually comes, it won’t be the end. You will still be here. Smoke stealing across the sky, maybe. Or in the movement of a chair, back and forth, by the bedside of someone you once knew!’
She spoke so calmly. Somehow it put me at ease. So much so that I forget the manner in which she had promised my little brother and me long life, and both our parents, but had not included herself. Like so much of life, the full import of someone’s words is often only revealed many years later, by which time that person has already slipped into the past.