Inheritance Read online

  In the morning, early, he walked among the market stalls. The heat had barely receded in the night, and now the sun rose, enormous, the color of a blood orange. He had not noticed how few supplies were being sold. Dry beans were scarce; the vegetables were scanty. He stood before a tub of rice; the tub was less than half full, and the old woman seated next to it watched him with a suspicion that made him uncomfortable, conscious of his broad chest and the slight belly that filled out his uniform. “Hello, auntie,” he greeted her, and her expression turned sour. It was the pout of a younger woman, and he realized that she was no crone, as he had first assumed, but a woman grown to look much older than her years. He turned hastily away. Near the entrance to the market were men reselling the furniture of the newly arrived who had exchanged their goods for rice: useless finery, precious heirlooms, carved rosewood chests, and lavishly embroidered tapestries, their silk tassels dragging in the dust.

  By the time he left the marketplace, the sun had become a bright, delirious yellow.

  Later in the afternoon, the sky darkened with thunderclouds; the sun periodically emerged, brassy and strange. Halfway home, it began to rain; the first drops fizzled on the hot stones of the stairs, but by the time he reached the house the stones were slick and dark. He was thinking of his brother, alone in the north, and the telegram on the table surprised him.

  Rain had darkened the window; he could barely read the type. Absently, he opened the front door to let in light.

  HUSBAND. SHE CAN MANAGE. JUNAN.

  From the corner of his eye he glimpsed someone standing there, and he glanced away from the letter to see Yinan in the yard. For years, she had been wearing mourning colors for her father; under the dark sky the bow in her hair looked like a white moth. The sight of her disturbed him. Perhaps the death of her mother in childhood had made her melancholy. He had once heard his neighbors whispering, on the day his own mother had died, that some children did not recover from such loss.

  When he left the house a few minutes later for the officers’ club, she was still standing by the miserable camphor tree. As he stepped down from the stairs, he felt the drops splash his forehead.

  He gestured toward the house. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wrote your sister to see if you might go back to Hangzhou, but she wants you to stay here.”

  Almost imperceptibly, she shifted her gaze down, hiding her thoughts. How ridiculous. Junan had no right to browbeat the two of them like this. He thought that perhaps he should command Junan to accept her sister home, but he imagined that Yinan’s life would then become even more difficult. He felt somehow at fault. But there was nothing to do, no consolation he could give. He wished he could leave her standing there.

  “Meimei,” he said finally, “come inside.”

  “Thank you, Gege, but I’ll stay here right now,” she said. “The air is fresh and it smells sweet.”

  “Your dress is damp.”

  “Jiejie has made me receive the latest vaccinations.”

  Li Ang smiled. “And me as well,” he said. “With Junan around,” he said to her, “you must have never been sick a day in your life.”

  For a moment he thought she might return his smile. “Only once,” she said. “I was sick once. I couldn’t go to the wedding. Do you remember? But that wasn’t her fault. It was the shuidou. You see, I have a scar.”

  Then she turned and pointed to her brow. He leaned closer, thinking for the thousandth time that Junan had been right, that her sister was a little too sensitive, a problem, and he wondered what on earth would become of her. Then he forgot why he was leaning toward her. He was not so very close, but he had become acutely aware of the clear gray light, the texture of her eyelids, the curve of her forehead, and, hovering in her breath, the scent of the pressed tofu with garlic sprouts that they had both eaten the evening before at dinner and that she must have eaten again at lunch. Yinan pointed again and he followed her narrow finger with its bitten nail to the faint mark on her forehead, a shallow crater, barely visible. As he stood there, gazing at the frail scar, it seemed to him that he was recalling the visage of a long-forgotten place, a geography he hadn’t traveled for a hundred years, but that had once been imprinted deep into his mind. He seized her by the shoulders, felt the shock of her warmth through his fingers. Then he let go her and hurried away.

  HE LEFT THE HOUSE early, before the women had awakened, but in the evening he came home, drawn back by the feeling he’d forgotten where he had put something and needed to search for it. In the kitchen, Mary was eating her own dinner. She peered at him over the rim of the bowl, surprised. She jumped up and brought him food, which he took into his room. On the way, he glanced into Yinan’s open doorway. She had forgotten all about the evening meal and was seated at her table, reading and chewing the end of her long braid. She didn’t notice him, and after a minute or two he walked away. After he had finished eating he stayed resolutely in his room, at the desk, and took out a sheet of paper to write to Junan. Perhaps a letter, detailing his reasons, would convince her. But he sat without writing for several minutes, staring at his pen and hand.

  “Dear Wife,” he finally wrote. “Yinan must leave.” With these characters, his heart beat so violently that his hand shook and he splattered ink onto the paper. He stood up then, still holding the pen, and backed out of his room.

  He went to the officers’ club, and returned several hours later. He lay unable to sleep, afraid to close his eyes. He fixed his gaze upon the blowing curtain at the window, until he grew tired. But the moment he closed his eyes, he was overtaken by the vision of the girl standing below him in the courtyard, the white bow in her heavy hair. It was an unusually quiet night. There were no sirens, nothing to distract him from this image that silently returned to him.

  The next night, he went to the officers’ club for dinner. He sought eagerly the noise and companionship of his colleagues. But even as he joked with General Hsiao and sparred with the others, he could not help keeping one ear open, listening.

  “What is it?” they asked, and he told them that he thought he had heard an airplane—a common enough answer, but everyone knew the skies were clear; the enemy was at that moment bombing Changsha. They joked with him that he was becoming a nervous wreck and should go to the front. He could not stop listening. Over the sound of the men, over the clink of dishes and the laughter and banter with the maids, he could hear it: the silence, swelling from her room, stretching out into the air and drifting toward him. He would go home eventually. It was where he lived. But he stayed until the last minute possible, until after all of his friends had gone and only the most drunken and incapacitated men remained. Then he took one look around him, shivered, and followed the call of that grave silence.

  It was almost dawn when he came to the house. He circled the building, once, twice, staking it out, and he remembered for an instant the morning before dawn when he had lain in wait on the dormitory where Li Bing was inside. Thinking about his brother, he felt suddenly overpowered by a new and frightening belief that his own life had been a mistake, that all of the opportunities he had taken and considered to be his own good luck were nothing but a series of foolish errors, terrible choices made in moments of weakness.

  Inside the flat he felt again the expectant silence pressing him into the hallway. Her closed door drew him as if he were a metal filing. He felt like an intruder. And yet nobody had asked him to keep away. The flat lay open to him; it was his. There wasn’t the slightest reason for him to stay apart from it. He walked back and forth, trying to be quiet at first and finally wishing she would wake. He stopped abruptly in front of her door. He flushed; again he felt he had forgotten something. Suddenly he seized the doorknob. It turned easily in his hand.

  All day he had felt swollen between the legs. It was not the fierce, strong lust he felt toward strangers, or the proprietary lust he had felt toward his wife, but a desire filled with
pain, like the pain of an old injury.

  He entered the room. She stood in front of her desk, and he came in and faced her.

  “How are you?” he asked, and he could hear his voice was strange, out of breath, as if he had been running.

  She held still for a moment, then abruptly turned away. Her hair was tucked behind her ears, and he wanted to trace a finger along that delicate line where it pulled away from the nape of her neck. As if she could sense his thoughts, her hand rose slowly.

  “Do you miss home?” he asked. “Do you want to go home?” His words came forward in a rush. “I stopped by to see—You don’t seem happy here. You seem—lonely.” He took her hand. “Hush. It’s all right. Really, I can send you home, if that would make you happier. It doesn’t matter what your sister says.” Now he was unable to let go of her hand.

  Then, at last, she tilted up her face and raised her eyes to his. They were the eyes of a stranger, dark and altered by desire. He jerked toward her. The smooth cloth of her dress was warm against his palm. He braced himself against her shoulder, shaking a little, and began to undo the three fastenings at her shoulder. She had turned her head away from him, and he could see the tips of her lashes against the cheek; her breath came fast. The last fastener came open in his hand, and he stopped. Then the scent of her flesh rose—a little salty, a little sweet—and he slid the tips of his fingers through the opening, beneath her undershirt, around the curve of her small breast. The skin there was almost liquid, but he could not be certain. For some reason he had lost the feeling in his hands; they were huge and numb. Cautiously, he slid his palm against her chest; he could trace the shape of her bones beneath it, the ribs coming together in a sort of wishbone, and her heart fluttering so violently that he felt a little frightened. With his other hand, very slowly, he let go of her shoulder and grasped her chin, bringing her face to his. Her face was flushed, her ears pink. Her eyes were pressed closed, her lips drawn tight, set against some feeling—was it fear? No; she was simply concentrating on the movement of his hand.

  Years later, when he remembered that night, pondering it as if it were the story of another man’s life, it seemed to him that there had been a brief moment when he was present, separate from her. But then, when he tried to recall what happened next, he felt that he had been drawn into the silent world of a dream, as deep and smooth and all-encompassing as water.

  No sound, no comprehension, only water.

  THE NEXT MORNING, LI ANG WASHED HIMSELF METICULOUSLY and left the flat with high hopes that in the evening, when he returned, everything would be put back into its place and he and Yinan would once again be like brother and sister. Surely she would tell no one. Soon she would be married off and it would be as if nothing had happened.

  But as the hours passed, he felt his concentration thinning. At noon meal with Pu Sijian, he sat and laughed and nodded, but all the while he could feel himself leaving the scene, his mind little by little stealing away. In the afternoon he went through a stack of letters. He was unable to focus on more than two or three words in a sentence without his mind’s eye flashing back to that vision of her door. A few minutes later it would happen again. It was as if the sun were burning the haze off of his mind and revealing its true subject. Over and over again, he saw himself walking toward her door. He knew she would be there, reading, chewing the end of her braid. When he put his hand upon the doorknob, the metal would be smooth beneath his fingers. Inside, there would be cool and dark. There would be solace. By the end of the day he was unable to keep still. He left the instant it was excusable and hurried back, impatient to run up the stairs and open the door and soothe himself against her skin.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, he received another telegram.

  HUSBAND. PLEASE CONFIRM SAFETY AFTER

  THE LAST ATTACKS. JUNAN.

  He did not answer.

  Soon he sent Mary back to Hsiao Taitai. “She’s no longer needed,” he said. “My sister-in-law will find someone she knows.” Hsiao Taitai raised her eyebrows, thin as inked lines, and said that this was no doubt a better thing for his sister. That night, he was assigned to the same dinner table as Baoyu. She greeted him; for a moment he couldn’t remember who she was. Then he recognized her. He nodded and showed his teeth. She smiled also, but all of the expression left her eyes. She wasn’t seated next to him again. A few weeks later he heard she was engaged to a new colonel from out of town.

  HUSBAND. HAVE NOT HEARD FROM YOU.

  PLEASE REPLY. JUNAN

  He felt as if he’d fallen into a well. Above him, all around, he could hear the voices of other people. He had lived among them for many years, but now they were unreachable. Later he would recall the events of their nights together as a series of jumbled images. Her thick braid across the pillow. Her face shining in the faint light from the window, grave and unguarded. In the evenings, when he walked into the room, she would sometimes turn to him and hold out her arms. When had he felt this way before? What was it she recalled in him that felt so precious? Sometimes, when he lay with her, there came over him a sudden and terrible need to get away from her, to leave the rumpled bed, their unkempt rooms, and walk out in the world. But when he thought of the street outside their house he remembered the steps clustered over with debris, the sound of planes, the cries of merchants, and the moans of beggars. Only inside, with Yinan, did he feel safe.

  He shared with her the dreary details of his job. They spoke about Hangzhou, about the occupation and before. He had never thought about what Yinan had experienced during those years. Now she told him about her match, about her fear of marriage to Mao Gao, and the way his death had made her even more afraid. She hadn’t wanted to be married, but without that end point, without that destination, the future now stretched before her like an empty road.

  “Of course that’s not true,” he said. “It might be a peaceful life, not to be married.”

  She understood him instantly. “But what else can I do? I’m too old for the university. I’m no intellectual.”

  “You read. You’re always reading.”

  “It’s sheer laziness.”

  “Would you like to be a poet?” he asked.

  “Of course. But poetry has never solved anybody’s problems. And sometimes I feel that all of the greatest poems have been written. Although I think about these times we’re living through—and I know that someday, someone must attempt to capture them. They must be transformed into beauty—and ugliness, and terror. It would require a brave person, and I’m not that strong.”

  “What are you writing now?”

  “Stories, poems, fairy tales. I’m a specialist at taking on useless projects.”

  At this he had to laugh. In a moment, Yinan joined him in a light peal that rang against the walls.

  ONE NIGHT, SHE wouldn’t let him into her room. “You mustn’t,” she said, holding on to the door with both hands.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She looked away. “My period has come again.”

  “But I only want to chat. Women are allowed to talk every month, you know.”

  “You’re not supposed to want me now.”

  “I do want you.”

  Finally he was allowed to lie in bed with her, but no more. He lit a cigarette. Together they watched the moon sail up the sky like a fiery lantern. Yinan began to speak, slow and wondering at first. There was a pause before each phrase, as if her thoughts were traveling up from some deep cave.

  “Once, I dreamed about you,” she said. “It was when we were living in Hangzhou, before Junan was married. I dreamed there was a soldier trying to get into our garden.” A dim memory seized him—of walking through a dark courtyard on his wedding night, with a bit of light escaping from a solitary window. Now he lay and stared at the round moon like an enormous eye trained down at them.

  “Did you want me to come in?” he a
sked.

  “No.”

  He turned to look at her. She lay on her back, with the summer coverlet folded down against the heat to cool her small breasts, casual, as if they were two young brothers sharing a room on a summer evening. He hadn’t expected her to be so matter-of-fact about nakedness; certainly, her sister was much more careful. He smiled. “Now, why didn’t you want me to come in?”

  Yinan’s gaze strained at some imperceptible presence in the dark spaces near the ceiling. “In my dream,” she said, “the moon was shining on you as if you were a hero, but your shadow on the ground looked bent, as if you were a broken man.”

  Li Ang reached for a cigarette. He had seen her through the window, her face in her hands. It had been the posture of a person filled with dread.

  “But you still wanted the poor, broken man?” He kept his voice light.

  “Yes.”

  There could be no reply. With his free hand, he gently yanked the tangled braid that lay on the pillow. She smiled, and then she gave a little sob. “It is gone now—gone beyond repair.”

  “Your sister loves you very much.”

  “She won’t love me now.”

  July 18, 1940

  Dear Husband,

  Please pardon me for having made this decision without having consulted you, but our communication channels seem to be disrupted. I have not received replies to several telegrams.

  I have decided to close the house and bring the children to you. It is less and less safe here for us living alone, and your second daughter longs to be with the father she has never met. She has learned to say “Baba” and it is time that she met you.

  I will be arriving in a few weeks. Please do not make any special arrangements for me. I am certain that your current rooms will satisfy me. As for the Hangzhou house, your uncle is looking after it. I am selling some of my father’s possessions, and you may trust that I have put most of our other important things into safe hands.