The Colour

Paak Mei had a high laugh and she loved to giggle, as though giggling intoxicated her, as though by laughing more and more, she could arrive at happiness. The secret she revealed, amid a soaring flight of giggles, was that her husband, Pao Yi, was what she termed ‘a connoisseur of love’.

Pao Yi, startled as he was when he overheard this, immediately realised that the three women friends were fascinated by Paak Mei’s revelation. ‘If he’s a connoisseur of love,’ they asked, ‘from whom did he learn his techniques?’

Pao Yi had to strain to listen to Paak Mei’s answer because her voice subsided to an amused whisper, as though the laughter-bird had fluttered down and landed somewhere, as she said: ‘He was once the lover of the concubine of a war lord. I don’t remember her name. But she taught him all her artistry. When you meet Pao Yi, you see, you assume he’s just a poor fisherman from Heron Lake, but in fact, in the nights, he is an artist of love!’

A cascade of delighted laughter greeted these disclosures. Two of the friends said they wished their husbands had been the lovers of concubines. But then the third friend asked: ‘How do you know that Pao Yi is an “artist of love”, Paak Mei, if he is the only man who has ever touched you?’ And there was a moment’s silence, during which Pao Yi pressed his ear even closer to the wall.

After a little while, Paak Mei whispered: ‘Because he is so attentive to my pleasure. Sometimes, we never sleep at all, but make love over and over again until the sunrise. And then I feel so light and free and contented, it is as though I were floating on the tops of trees, as though Heron Lake and all the fish in it and all the water-lilies that grow in its shallows were mine.’

For some reason, this idea that little Paak Mei, with her minute and shuffling feet, could suddenly become the owner of Heron Lake amused the friends more than anything that had so far been said and the room was then filled with laughter so musical and prolonged that Pao Yi also found himself smiling.

But then, as he walked away from the house towards his boat, he began wondering where the story of the war lord’s concubine had come from and why Paak Mei had decided to invent it and then boast about it.

The truth was, Pao Yi had been the lover of many women in his mind, but Paak Mei was the only one he’d ever truly known. Perhaps, he decided as he began to gather up his fishing nets, his imagination had served him better than he’d realised? Perhaps – because he had so often ‘seen’ the soft curve of a woman’s thigh, the pearly beads of sweat between her breasts or on her lip, and had found it easy to transport himself to wherever it was this woman lay waiting for him – he had learned all a man needed to know about love from his own reveries?

It occurred to him that in these reveries, time, which is the enemy of love, had always been entirely accommodating. As a young man, Pao Yi had been able to sustain a love-reverie through all the deep hours of the night or all the shallow hours of the dawn. His imaginary concubines had had fantastic names, Indigo Bird, Scarlet Tigress, Emerald Flower, and he had always been certain that these beautiful beings would be capable of feeling sexual pleasure as intense as his own.

So Pao Yi searched their bodies to try to discover precisely how that pleasure could be arrived at, and where the true source of it lay, because he saw that to imagine pleasure on the faces of Indigo Bird and Scarlet Tigress and Emerald Flower increased by several degrees the intensity of his own ecstasy. And by the time he married Paak Mei, he had found it.

On their wedding night, he lay with his head on Paak Mei’s belly, lapping at the tiny bud he found among the perfumed tangle of her pubic hair, and Paak Mei – as she later admitted to her envious friends – thus became in her mind the Empress of Heron Lake, the one who could lie on the tops of trees and look down upon all her silvery endowments.

That the snow was falling delighted him. For he saw that now, provided it kept on falling, the way back to the sea, the way back to the real world, would soon be closed. All that would remain here would be the bed where they lay and the fire which they tried to keep burning day and night, and the food that they cooked and the white light of day at the window and the cave at their backs, blocked up with its wall of stones.

Heron Lake disappeared from Pao Yi’s mind. He could no longer see it, no longer imagine his boat floating on it nor his house standing on its shore-line. Even the graves of Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming became like faded pictures, or like clothes he’d once worn as a child and grown out of and could barely remember. And from the house itself, there was no sound at all, no sign of anyone moving, no whisper of Paak Mei’s feet shuffling across the floor, no flute of laughter from the place where she cooked.

And Paak Shui, too, was absent most of the time. Pao Yi thought that no doubt his son still massaged his mother’s feet with lavender oil, still gathered water chestnuts from the river, still flew his scarlet kite on Long Hill, still struggled with his calligraphy, but he could no longer see him do these things, nor hear his voice, nor remember the sweet smell of his hair.

All Pao Yi knew and all he wanted to know was that he had found his perfect woman and now he would love her. For her, he would be a real ‘connoisseur’. He would find the bud of her pleasure and make it flower. He would discover every inch of her and caress it with his hands and his lips and his sex and his mind. He would sleep inside her, with his head on her breast. He would press her to him so tenderly, with such human gentleness, that she and he would become like dancers, moving to the same intoxicating rhythm. Everywhere she moved, his eyes would follow. Everywhere he moved, her eyes would follow. There would be no stumbling or falling, no hurt, no shock or damage or dying. There would only be this: Pao Yi and Hal Yet; Hal Yet and Pao Yi.

That the world would disapprove of his love and would attempt to destroy it was something which Pao Yi knew with absolute certainty, but he put this from his mind. It was part of the future, and he willed himself to live in the present and give the future no thought.

The most extraordinary thing that he did (and even at the time Pao Yi knew that it was extraordinary) was to take down his pictures of his family and hide them behind the wooden board on which were written the names of his ancestors. To do this, to consign the people he had loved to the dark space between the wall and the ancestor chart, should have terrified and shamed him, but it did not. He didn’t want them to see where he was or what he was doing and so he hid them away.

And it seemed to Pao Yi that Harriet, too, inhabited the room which contained their existence in a way that was absolute, in a way which refused both past and future. If he found her staring out sometimes, it was only, he believed, to reassure herself that the snow was still falling, that the paths to the sea were buried, that nothing and no one would come to disturb them.

Now and again, she put on the clothes she’d been wearing when the flood came and which she’d washed and hung to dry on the trees. But mostly she wore Pao Yi’s grey cotton jacket and trousers, or she wore nothing at all and Pao Yi would gaze at the whiteness of her body, made whiter in daylight by the icy light at the edges of the sacking window which was the light of the South Pole, of a clean vastness, of a glittering, empty, untravelled world. He knew that this sight would live in his memory for as long as he was alive.

As Pao Yi guessed, Harriet, too, understood the role played by time in their love. She knew that in the Land of the Long White Cloud she and her lover had arrived by pure chance at a sequestered place and that the past had no business there.

Sometimes, it infiltrated her dreams, that recent past of the goldfields, and an image of Joseph drowning when the fresh came down upon the Kokatahi mine. She seemed to see his ghostly, suffering face. But when she woke up and discovered that she was lying, not with Joseph, but in Pao Yi’s arms, she put everything else out of her mind.

Harriet was too wise, too rational a person not to understand that, one day, a different future would arrive. Sometimes, when Pao Yi went out of the shelter, closing the makeshift door behind him, Harriet forced herself to imagine that he had gone for ever. She imagined walking alone the long and difficult miles to Hokitika and the sea and waiting for a boat and then getting on the boat and not caring whether she survived or whether she drowned because her lover was gone. And sometimes the anxiety that she felt was so great that she would open the door of the hut and look down on the snow-covered garden, just to see him, just to hold him with her eyes. But there were times when even this wasn’t enough and she had to call to him or go to where he was, as though he were about to disappear, as though, if she didn’t feel the warmth and solidity of him and enfold him with her arms, he would vanish away into the snow.

The smallness of their world, its absolute simplicity, marked every object within it as precious to Harriet. Even the fire, which seemed to embody the ceaseless flickering of time, was touched with significance, and Harriet fed the fire as tenderly as she would have fed a child, to make sure that it wouldn’t die. And beyond the fire, the arrangement of cooking pots and sacks and panniers and garden tools was etched on Harriet’s mind with such clarity, had about it such an intense primacy, that it became in her imagination the only arrangement her life would ever require. She was amazed to remember what a quantity of furniture, objects and commodities had cluttered the rooms where she’d once lived and that even in the Cob House, she had considered as necessities things which now appeared to her as valueless.

And she concluded that passion of this kind effects an alteration on the material world so absolute that it could be said to resemble a long hallucination or dream, from which the lovers hope never to wake.

Harriet looked out and saw the sun begin to melt the icicles on the solitary plum tree. She had no idea how many days and nights had gone by, nor what month they were in. She remembered that, after Beauty’s death, the deep snow had melted away very fast.

So now it seemed to her that she and Pao Yi were no longer sufficiently hidden and walled away in their shack and she went to him and told him that they should move their bed into the cave.

Pao Yi remembered his opium reveries. He remembered the yellow flickering of the candlelight on the roof of the cave and the things he saw in the shadows and it frightened him. Deliberately, he had never lain with Harriet in the cave, because he was afraid that in there, in that silent space which nobody but he had ever entered, carnal love would become ungovernable and have no end and that it would feast upon itself until it died.

Stone by stone, he unblocked the wall. He placed a candle on a rocky ledge and together he and Harriet pulled the thin mattress into the narrow space that was just wide enough for their two bodies to lie side by side. It was so cold in the cave that Harriet almost faltered and changed her mind, but then she asked herself which she would choose – the icy darkness of the cave or the loss of her lover – and she told herself that she would get used to the cold, that she and Pao Yi would keep each other warm, that nothing mattered, only that they should not be discovered.

But Pao Yi knew that the cave in winter couldn’t be endured except with the help of opium. He lit a pipe and they lay down together and the pipe passed from the one to the other and Harriet felt for the first time that stretching away of her being into fragments of extraordinary lightness which could rearrange themselves into any shape or form she might desire.

And she desired to be a white bird with warm soft feathers and a heart that beat in time to its own song and as a bird she lay on her lover’s body and covered him with her wings and she felt him rise up in her as though he were growing there and she told him that they were one.

And Pao Yi, who had been afraid to abandon himself to her, who, until now had held on to his separate and private self, now called to her to kill him, to let him pass to oblivion through desire, and she acquiesced, and he felt come into him an animal rage to mate without ceasing, like the wild stags on Long Hill in the springtime, and in a torrent of language he cursed her as a demon, as a reptile who had tempted him away from all that had been precious to him and now he was lost in her, lost in darkness, and all that remained to him was the horror of his own dying.

He sat up at last and saw, from the remnants of the firelight outside the cave entrance, that Harriet was awake. She was lying beside him and staring at the ceiling and she reached out and touched his shoulder and then she pointed upwards and her long arm almost touched the roof of the cave and in a voice which sounded melancholy and quiet, she said: ‘There is gold.’

Pao Yi was shivering. He pulled a blanket round himself and lay down again and tried to pull Harriet to him, to warm him and she held him for a moment or two, but then she said again: ‘Pao Yi. This cave is made of gold.’

In his own language he said that, when the winter ended, when the snow was all gone, when the river fell, when the way to the sea was open once more, then would be the time to consider whether the cave was made of gold. But until then, they shouldn’t concern themselves with it, just as he had never concerned himself with the golden nugget that he’d buried under the seventeenth onion.

Pao Yi doubted whether Harriet could understand any of what he was saying, but he kept on talking and she lay beside him and listened and he told her that all the while it was becoming clearer and clearer to him that the yellow light he’d seen in opium reveries and which he’d thought had been made by the candle-flame, had been a golden light. But now it had to remain as a light and nothing more because he knew – he, the fisherman Chen Pao Yi from Heron Lake in Guangdong Province in south-east China knew as surely as he knew his own name – that the day on which they decided to steal that light would be the day on which they would have to part.

After this, they returned to the shack and made their bed again close to the fire. Pao Yi walled up the entrance to the cave. He put the opium pipe away on the high shelf, next to his ancestor chart.

The weather taunted them with its wild variety. The winds of June and July came funnelling down the makeshift chimney, blowing smoke into their faces, tearing at the sacking on the door. The snow melted and the smooth tops of the cabbages emerged like a line of old men’s heads, not dead, not quite; only patiently waiting under a shroud.

Hail pelted the roof, like falling shingle. Violet and orange rainbows shone an ethereal light into the room. The river roared one day and was almost silent the next. Rain seeped into the thatch and began dripping on to the floor. Then they heard the trees sighing and clicking and knew that the rain had turned to ice.

Now, the cold began to torment them. They went outside only to relieve themselves or to claw vegetables out of the ground or to bring in firewood or fish from the nets. They wondered if they would die here. They knew that the fire kept them alive. They longed for furs or sheepskins, but had neither, only their arms to wrap around each other.

After their night in the cave, their passion calmed, as though they had crammed into one night the experience of a year, and what they settled into now was something which resembled an affectionate marriage, one without prudery or secrets or shame. Together, they fussed over the fire, prepared their soup, tried to comfort each other when one of them was ill or in pain, taught each other songs, told stories, suffered boredom and sadness and joy, made love slowly and tenderly and tried, above all, to keep the cold at bay.

One morning, Pao Yi was walking down to the river to see what fish had been caught in his net, when he heard a familiar sound in his mind, one which hadn’t surfaced for a long time; it was the sound of Paak Mei’s laughter.

Pao Yi pressed his rabbit-fur hat more firmly on to his head. He strode on and took off his shoes and waded into the water. He thought, to his relief, that the laughter was fading, but then when Pao Yi’s hands came into contact with the fishing net, he found that the familiar feel of it transported him back to Heron Lake so vividly, it was almost as though he had arrived there. And when he looked around, all he could see was devastation.

His house, once brightly painted, appeared faded and neglected and there was no smoke coming from its chimney. The door was closed and the hinges looked rusty and the dark heads of dead sunflowers knocked against the window frame.

Pao Yi’s boat was resting in the water some way from the quayside, but its red hull had turned a dull greenish-brown, and sitting in the boat was a thin, dejected figure Pao Yi was appalled to recognise as his son, Paak Shui. He tried to call to Paak Shui and Paak Shui looked up for a moment, just as though he had heard a voice calling to him, but then the boy resumed his former posture and remained there without moving.

It was at that moment that Pao Yi understood that he’d been wrong about the sound he had just heard: Paak Mei wasn’t laughing, she was weeping. She was weeping for the shame of being abandoned, for the shame of being promised riches and instead losing what little she had, for the shame of being betrayed by her husband with a white woman.

The morning was almost warm, with a pale sun sparkling on the water, but Pao Yi was frozen. If Harriet had been watching, as she sometimes watched him when he went to check his net, she would have seen him put out a hand and clutch at the tree to which the net was attached and lean towards the tree, as though he were faint or dizzy, and then stay like that without moving.

But Harriet wasn’t watching. She was trying to count the days that had passed since the night in the cave and to work out whether it had been on that night or on some subsequent night or morning that the baby she now knew she was carrying had been conceived. She knew it made no difference to the fact of the pregnancy, yet she wanted it to have happened then, so that whenever she looked at the child, far into her future when she would be alone again, she would be able to remember the wildness of that night and her beautiful reverie of being a bird, a bird with a heart almost stopped by desire, and the crying and calling of her lover to this bird across the darkness of continents.

So absorbing was Harriet’s memory of this that she was startled when she heard the door open and she saw Pao Yi returning with a basket of fish. She saw him set down the basket and she was about to get up, to go to him and tell him her secret, which was the secret of the child, when he turned suddenly and went out again. And when he came back, a moment or two later, he carried a pickaxe in his hand. And he walked by her, not looking at her, but only at the mouth of the cave, and then he knelt down and began taking out the stones from the doorway.

She saw that he was weeping. So she went and knelt down beside him, with her skirts on the dusty earth, and she asked him if the time had arrived to take out the gold, and he nodded and kept on with his task of moving the heavy stones and his tears ran down his cheeks and began to dampen the top of his shirt.

She wanted him to try to talk to her, to tell her what he was going to do, but she saw that he couldn’t say anything. She reached up and tried to stop his hands from bringing away the stones, but he wouldn’t be deflected from his task, and so Harriet understood.

They worked side by side without speaking. Pao Yi kept clawing at the rocks with the pick and Harriet tugged them away. Inch by inch, the cave was revealed to them again, their opium cave, and they felt the chill of it and remembered its darkness and its mystery.

They stopped and rested a moment and then began lighting candles and they took the candles into the cave and crouched there, staring up, seeing the veins of gold running over the ceiling and down into the walls.

It was in this moment’s pause, before they began to tear out the colour from the cave, that Harriet considered telling Pao Yi about the child – his child – so that he would take this knowledge away with him when he returned to Heron Lake and hold it for ever in his mind. But she kept silent.

Now the pickaxe began smashing into the veins of gold. The sound of iron on precious metal seemed to echo all through the mountain. But the rock was more porous and brittle than Pao Yi and Harriet had imagined, yielded more easily to its breaking, so that it became possible to tear flakes and chunks of it away with their bare hands, and pieces of it split of their own accord and fell in showers all around them and into their hair, and their faces became coated with a black and shiny dust.

Their hands were bruised and their fingers began to bleed and, in the flickering candlelight, Harriet picked up a bright shard and saw the staining and mingling of the two colours, red blood upon a vein of gold, and she felt the unearthly wonder of this and its human sorrow.

She gazed at her lover, at his face turned away from her, at his back, his strong legs, his arms still resolutely wielding the pickaxe, and at the stones and dust that kept falling on to him. She wanted to cry out to him to stop, wanted to beg him to wall up the cave once more, to return with her to their shelter, to press her hand to his mouth, to enfold him, to pretend that no thaw had come and that they could live like this, on the edge of this mountainside, together for ever.

She thought that she should begin to sort through the jagged lumps of fallen rock, before so much had come down around them that they would scarcely be able to move. So she took up the pieces streaked with gold and laid the rest aside. She was wearing her old clothes that day, her skirt and petticoat, her chemise and shawl. She took off her shawl to use as a pannier. She crawled backwards and forwards to and from the cave, tugging the shawl, bringing the gold out from the flickering darkness into the white light of this new spring day.

She spread out the pieces and stared at them. She took up a single jagged stone and brushed the dust aside from the vein which threaded it. She tried to guess what Pao Yi would buy with this one golden vein. She could not imagine. She knew almost nothing about his life. But from far away, she could now see his son, Paak Shui, come running towards him and, behind the boy, was his wife, Paak Mei. Paak Mei was unable to run, but she came shuffling as fast as she could towards her husband and she held out her arms to him. And Harriet could hear a melodic sound, like bubbling water, and she knew it was the laughter of Paak Mei, echoing round a wide bowl of hills.