Inheritance Read online

“Good. You’ve got one.” And for some inexplicable reason, Pu removed the spectacles from Li Bing’s startled face and tossed them into the shadow of the camphor tree.

  “What did you do that for?” Li Ang exclaimed. He half turned toward the tree, thinking to find the spectacles, but remembered his position. He turned back to his brother. What he saw made him forget what he had been thinking. Li Bing had put both hands against the wall. He stood, exposing his thin back, ear to the wall and eyes shut, whether in an instinctive gesture of protection or in a fear of what would happen next, Li Ang never knew. But he was stunned by the raised hands.

  The door pushed open and two other men burst out of it.

  “Hey!” Pu shouted. He moved toward the men.

  Just as quickly, Li Bing broke free of the wall and darted toward Pu, tackling him at the knees, a move from childhood so familiar to Li Ang that he almost cried out.

  Pu, a sturdy man, threw Li Bing like a water buffalo calf and pinned him face down on the ground. “I’ll take this one,” he said. He put his pistol to the back of Li Bing’s head.

  For a moment, Li Ang stood frozen in place. The air rang with the unsaid cry, “My didi! This is my didi!” But in the same instant, he understood what his brother had just done. Li Bing had taken advantage of his own surprise. He had turned his head to the wall and listened for his friends. He had allowed the other two men to get away. He was resigned to being captured. Li Ang understood that his brother was a Communist.

  AT THE END of the day, although it was so hot that he desired nothing more than a cold bath, Li Ang hired a rickshaw and asked the man to let him off on the main road, a slight distance from the dormitory. He walked the rest of the way and went around to the back. There stood the familiar wall, pale in the evening light. Despite the turmoil and the seizure of their books, many of the students had returned. There was steam coming from the kitchen, and he could smell rice porridge. An older man, a servant, sweated as he hauled his creaking water buckets through the kitchen door. Li Ang spat on the ground. He felt reluctant to go near the place again. He tried to remember where the captain had been standing when he had tossed away the glasses. He returned to the old camphor tree, with its drooping and indifferent leaves. He searched along its base, then in the dirt, but found nothing.

  At the jail, he asked to speak to the warden.

  “There’s been an error,” he said. “The man caught in the dormitory raid wasn’t a radical. He wasn’t one of the troublemakers. He was only on kitchen duty. I was about to let him go when I was ordered to give pursuit to the others.” There was an expectant silence. Li Ang knew then how silly this was. The warden needed no excuses, only money. Li Ang pulled out what he had, three silver dollars. The warden took the coins and went back to his newspaper.

  Li Bing squinted, his eyes curled like dry shrimp. This time he said nothing.

  “I went to search for your glasses, no luck,” Li Ang said. “Is there anything else you need?”

  “How about a cigarette?”

  Li Ang took a deep breath. “Tell me,” he said. “Were you one of them—the radicals, I mean?”

  Li Bing smiled. “I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you.”

  Li Ang tried again. “Listen,” he said. “I can probably get you out of here. But what I want to know—”

  “Who asked you to get me out of here?”

  “When did you change? When did you become like this?”

  “I’m not aware of having changed.”

  Li Ang couldn’t think of a reply. After a few more minutes, he left the prison.

  THE NEWSPAPER HEADLINES described the latest negotiations with the West; once again, Chiang Kai-shek declared the need for money and supplies. An article claimed the latest Japanese attack on Changsha had been met with stiff resistance. On the bottom of the page, Li Ang found a small story about a successful raid upon a student dormitory the day before. Many pounds of subversive materials had been destroyed, and the head of a gang of dangerous student radicals had been arrested. He was being held on bail of eight hundred silver dollars.

  For a moment he thought with hope of his uncle, sitting in his little shop gazing at his favorite poster of a sexy woman smoking a cigarette. But Li Ang knew Charlie no longer had that kind of cash. There was almost no profit in the distribution work. Li Ang could have arranged to sell some goods on the black market. But he lacked the time to do it properly. There was only one alternative. He went to Army headquarters.

  DEAR WIFE. MUST HAVE 800. POSSIBLE TO WIRE.

  LI ANG.

  He hadn’t seen Junan in eleven months. He’d been disappointed at the sex of the child—a second daughter—but now he found himself truly missing his wife, and the nature of his longing was specific and surprising. It was not passion or love he thought about, but the clarity and order that surrounded her like a serene climate. She had a way of being able to see straight into a situation. He wished she were there with him so that he could tell her what had happened and ask casually, “What do you think?” She would’ve had shrewd advice.

  Her reply came back immediately.

  HUSBAND. FINANCES COMPLICATED. CAN ONLY

  SEND 200. JUNAN.

  This wouldn’t do. She could easily raise the sum. He wired back.

  POSSIBLE TO RAISE CASH? NEED ALL 800. LI ANG.

  All afternoon he waited at the headquarters. Finally, the answer came.

  WHAT IS THE MONEY FOR? JUNAN.

  He straightened, threw his shoulders back. How could she possibly refuse? Who did she think she was? It occurred to him that he might have gotten his way by telling the truth—appealing to her sympathy and belief in family—or by adopting an attitude of submission. But he was not that kind of man. And he didn’t want Junan to see how little he had, with his own brother in prison, and he himself requesting money like a beggar.

  He wired back.

  FORGET IT. MATTER SOLVED.

  He left the headquarters and walked into the city. He didn’t hire a rickshaw. He wasn’t sure where he was going, and he didn’t want to betray his agitation to any human soul. He strode quickly through the heat, the houses on either side of him shimmering as he moved farther into the city: ornate walls giving way to the shabbier bricks of smaller houses, more frequent streets and alleys. In the last few months, the population of Chongqing had doubled. All around him was evidence of overpopulation: crumbled buildings inhabited, beggars moaning, families camped by the road. He heard a cacophony of dialects; singsong local voices taunted belligerent newcomers. The stink of cooking cabbage assailed him, mingled with the darker stink of sewage. Now the street grew more crowded: a group of women flinging their sweaty net of gossip into the well; small gangs of boys, let out of school and holding kites; old men, whose lives were over, sitting and watching from the edges. The call of a traveling tea seller rang out, followed by the wailing flute of a blind fortune-teller, a high, mournful sound that pierced the air. The man sat beneath an eave, exposing plaintively the worn, dusty soles of his shoes.

  Why hadn’t he simply told Junan that Li Bing was in trouble?

  He couldn’t explain to her his shock at the recognition of his brother’s face. He couldn’t explain it to himself. He thought of the early gray light, the shadowed doorway with cracked tiles on the steps. The sound of feet against the stairs, the leap toward the fugitive, pushing him against the wall, his raised hands. The quiet voice, “Gege.” The way his brother said “gege” different from ten thousand other younger brothers.

  It could hurt his position for Junan to know that Li Bing was in trouble. What if she let the information slip, as women did, over the mahjong table? Those women told each other everything, and later they shared the information with their men. The Communists and Nationalists had joined to fight the Japanese. Now that the enemy had stalled, old animosities were breaking the alliance
. Li Ang had heard rumors of civil war behind enemy lines.

  But most importantly, it was the principle of the thing: a wife should obey her husband.

  After seven years of marriage, he knew that he’d been lucky in his match. Other women were often foolish, unable to run a household, squandering their husbands’ income on extravagance or opium. Other women aged badly and threw shameless scenes. They couldn’t leave a man alone. Junan had none of these flaws. She was pragmatic and self-contained, yet beautiful and loyal. She must have known that he occasionally went to chaweis and had slept with other women. He had been so long away from her, away from home. But she wasn’t possessive. She rarely tried to hold him back.

  She had submitted to him physically, but was it enough? The image rose to his mind of Junan satisfied, lying against the pillows with her breath coming fast and a quick pulse still gleaming in her long white neck. Now she had revealed the truth: she was holding back on him. He didn’t have the power to get what he wanted. Or perhaps he’d never had a need; he’d simply taken whatever she had wished to give. It disturbed him that he was married to a woman to whom every action, every observation, was so entirely strategic. This was not the way that she had first appeared to be.

  He went back to his office. His clerk from Canton spoke garbled Mandarin and his local assistant Sichuanese. The two men could communicate only by spitting, gesturing, and throwing wild notes at one another. They attempted to describe to him a nightmare of inefficiency in the supply lines from Burma. The Burma Road had just been opened, but it was already a quagmire of delays: substation managers needing bribes, papers to be filled out, equipment breaking down, the necessity for confirmation of pointless details. Again and again he went over the lists of supplies that Sun required, and found that he could not get most of them. They had been counting on the Burma Road.

  As he sorted through the mess, he felt his anger circling around some dangerous point. He tried to push it away. But he recalled the way her upper lip sometimes drew tight during their conversations. She had never before told him that she was dissatisfied or critical of him. But now he knew. She did not trust a single thing that she could not control by her own hand.

  For the first time, he saw how entirely different they were. From his earliest memories, back in a time when he still wore split pants, he had understood the benefit of holding many options open, keeping his wishes loose and easy like a fisherman’s net, waiting for whatever might swim into it. By this method, he had gained much. He had gone into the Army; he had been promoted; he had married Junan. It had never occurred to him that his method might be seen, by someone else, to be undeserving or unreliable. Nor had it ever occurred to him that there might be a contradiction between any two desires that he held.

  Junan didn’t operate this way. He had never given much thought to the nature of a woman’s mind, but he had grown to understand a certain level, stubborn look of hers that meant she wanted something. Once she really wanted something, nothing else would do. He began to comprehend that she practiced the art of holding one desire, that she chose a pattern and made her wish and flung it into the sky like a great kite, teasing it, testing it out in the world’s winds, using more rope, more rope, until it hung over her like a star. There she stood on the earth, holding one thought in her mind with all her will.

  Was it possible that he himself might simply be another thing that she had made up her mind about? He’d always considered it a sign of his own strength and luck that he had married her; it hadn’t occurred to him that the glue between them might have been her desire and her strength. She might have cast her eyes upon him and decided; and from that moment on there was no hope for him. Now they were husband and wife. She had gotten what she wanted. And yet, he knew, she was unhappy with him. Not because he was any worse-looking, or more ill-tempered, or less promising than he had been a few years ago, but because he was bent on going against her will.

  HE WOULD TURN TO General Hsiao. He wondered how on earth he might explain the situation. It was clear that the truth—and only the truth—would be accepted. He reminded himself again that the Communists and the Nationalists were no longer officially at loggerheads; the truce had been reached three years ago and it still held. It would not be seen as unpardonable to have a Communist brother. Still, he must ask the general not to tell anyone. The next morning, he hurried to headquarters.

  “I am deeply sorry to have to trouble you for this favor,” he began. At the sound of these words, he saw Hsaio’s little eyes flicker. The rest of his face—round bones and pale cheeks flecked with smallpox scars—split into a grin. The general assured him there would be no problem with releasing Li Bing. No problem whatsoever. As for the favor, he was certain that someday Li Ang himself would be in a position to grant him some little thing or another. Li Ang recalled Pu’s warning, but he felt better immediately. He left the room in good spirits.

  Later that week, he received a message from Hsiao Taitai, requesting that he escort her youngest daughter, Baoyu, and her friends, to the National Opera.

  GENERAL HSIAO, INDIFFERENT TO DAUGHTERS, HAD LEFT THE naming of each girl to the authority of his old mother, who had grown up in the countryside and favored flowers. And so it was Juyu (Chrysanthemum Jade), Meiyu (Rose Jade), and Baoyu (Jade Bud) who had combed their grandmother’s thinning hair and spooned her porridge. The old woman had been failing for half her life, and had surprised the family by dying suddenly the year before; her stern, wrinkled face still watched the household from a black and white portrait over the incense table. In the season when Li Ang moved to Chongqing, the Hsiao daughters had recently begun to wear colors again, and there hung over the entire household a glaze of relief.

  The power in that family rested in the wife; Li Ang had heard this from a few local women, who, upon learning that he was married, had confided in him. Hsiao Taitai held the reigns despite the fact that she had borne no sons, despite the general’s hot temper. He had not taken a concubine; they said that Hsiao Taitai would have made his life too difficult. Hsiao Taitai held social power in the capital. She had attended a missionary school and befriended key Americans. She spoke fluent English and held frequent dinner parties, hosting her American friends and other foreigners. The more ambitious men all wanted to attend these dinners. The evening he arrived to pick up Baoyu for the concert was the first time Li Ang had been to their house.

  General Hsiao lived on the safer side of a hill; in its base he was excavating a personal bomb shelter. Li Ang climbed up the steps onto a spacious porch, where the doorman met him and directed him into a front room. Hsiao Taitai greeted him. She was a short, plump woman with small features, powdered pale. When she smiled, her eyes widening with delight and sympathy, Li Ang saw that she must once have been extremely beautiful.

  “My apologies, my daughter is very slow. She’ll be ready in a moment.”

  Hsiao Taitai introduced Li Ang to her two older daughters. The eldest, Juyu, had recently been matched to one of her father’s favorites. Colonel Tang had waited patiently throughout the mourning period, although, Li Ang considered, he’d had a powerful incentive. He had in the meantime been promoted to the rank of brigadier general. Now at last the couple was to be married. Juyu was rather tall, and there was something of her father’s masculinity in her attitude and in her round cheeks, but everyone spoke of her beauty.

  Her sister Meiyu was small and slender, with exquisite alabaster features. Meiyu had learned to read and write both English and classical Chinese poetry. She sang in the Methodist choir and played the piano. She was the most intelligent and beautiful of the three sisters, and for several years she had been quietly winning the attention of most of her father’s junior officers. But Li Ang disliked Meiyu on sight; she had a way of pursing her full lips that he thought prudish and judgmental.

  He was pleased to find young Baoyu lively and daring, nothing like her sisters. Her cheeks dimpled, her red lips cur
ved, her small eyes sparkled. The government had declared permanent waves immoral and illegal, but Baoyu’s hair was cut and crimped like a Western movie actress’s. Li Ang wondered if it was stiff to the touch. Baoyu’s round breasts and hips hinted at a pleasure in the senses. When they walked out to meet her friends, he turned toward her to say something and caught the strong, sweet smell of flowers.

  Later, he told his brother that Baoyu was, in comparison to Junan, a more common sort of girl, but very friendly, easy to talk to.

  “Stay away from her,” Li Bing said. “I haven’t even met her, but I don’t understand your General Hsiao. He knows you’re married, and an outsider, so why would he wish to connect you with his own daughter?”

  “She’s quite attractive,” Li Ang said. “She likes going to the opera and her friends are rather fast. It’s safer that she be escorted by a married man.”

  Li Bing shook his head. The brothers were sitting at a local teahouse, where the servers poured tea from a long, thin spout, Sichuan style, standing back three feet from the table and dropping the tea into the cups from high above as if it were a lethal substance. Li Ang was in high spirits. His night out with Baoyu and her young friends had buoyed his mood, and he was happy to see Li Bing out of prison.

  Li Bing had been released immediately upon General Hsiao’s request. Although Li Ang had been obliged to tell General Hsiao that the prisoner was his brother, he now felt unable to reveal to his brother his own role in the release. He wished, instead, to find out what Li Bing had been doing there; how could he have gotten mixed up in a radical action? Li Ang was the gege, responsible, and he had finagled Li Bing’s release. He had the right to know what was on Li Bing’s mind. But now Li Ang suspected that his hopes for an easy conversation with his brother had been too optimistic. Li Bing sat, thin shoulders drawn up, looking cold and surly, stuffing his cheeks with peanuts.

  Li Ang began. “What exactly were you doing in the student dormitory?”