The Ancient Ship. Zhang Wei
swung the ax handle and knocked Li Zhichang to the floor. Li struggled to his feet and was promptly knocked down again. With his hands on his hips, the older man swore, “I must have been blind to befriend such a coward!” Li hung his head and said he was too ashamed to go outside.
“What’s the big deal?” Sui growled.
After getting Li Zhichang to wash up and comb his hair, Sui Buzhao told him to step outside and walk with him, holding his head high. This time the people looked on with sober expressions; no one laughed.
In a word, what happened that day nearly destroyed Li Zhichang. But Sui Buzhao’s ax had indeed given him a new lease on life. At night, as the golden gears turned above his head, he experienced both excitement and agony. He dared not try to touch them. He knew that sooner or later he would install them in the noodle factory, but impatience lay just below the surface, the same sort of impatience that had overcome him that day when he’d sought pleasure in the willow grove. Maybe, he thought, the passion he was experiencing now was an offshoot of the same force that had nearly destroyed him. It was sheer agony, and there was nothing he could do about it. What he needed to do was join Technician Li in setting up a generator for Gaoding Street and turning Wali into a town where the lights shone brightly. Too many people had suffered as a result of insufficient lighting in town.
A resident had once gone to the Wali Emporium to buy one of Zhang-Wang’s clay tigers, and she had taken advantage of the weak light to sell him a cracked model. Then there was the fellow named Erhuai, who was responsible for maintaining the floodplain; he was known to run like the wind through the shadows, a rifle slung over his back, reminding people of Zhao Duoduo as a young man. Li hated the way the man scurried through the darkness.
Li often stood outside the old mill on the riverbank. That is where the first gears were already turning. The millstone rumbled like distant thunder. By looking through the window he could see the most taciturn member of the Sui clan inside. He too was beginning to take on the man’s disinclination to utter a sound. The man seemed to contain as much power as the millstone itself as it tirelessly ground everything in its path, smoothly, steadily. But he did not utter a sound.
On one occasion the man stood up and, with his long wooden ladle, broke up a clot of mung beans on the conveyor belt. On his return to his stool he glanced out the window and raised his ladle. Li Zhichang looked in the direction of that glance and saw Jiansu, who was walking lazily up to the mill, pipe in hand. Once inside, Baopu offered his brother the stool, but Jiansu said no. “I was afraid you were getting drunk the other night,” Baopu said, “so I waited for you in your room…”
Jiansu just smiled. Then, abruptly, the smile vanished. His face was slightly pale, much the same as that night on the platform. He hung his head and knocked the ashes out of the bowl of his pipe. In a soft voice he said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. I was going to mention it when the idea first came to me, but I got drunk that night and had no desire to sleep the next day. People said my eyes were bloodshot. I decided I wouldn’t come see you after all. I didn’t want to tell you what I had on my mind.”
Baopu looked up at his brother, a pained look on his face. He stared at the tip of his ladle, dripping with water. “Go ahead, don’t hold back. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Nothing. I’ve changed my mind.”
“Go ahead, let’s hear it.”
“No, not now.”
The brothers went silent. Baopu rolled a cigarette. Jiansu lit his pipe. The smoke clouded the air in the mill as, one puff after another, they created layers of smoke, all of which slowly settled onto the millstone, as it turned slowly, taking the smoke with it, until the swirls stretched into a long tube and drifted out through the window. Baopu smoked on and on, finally flipping away the butt. “Keeping it inside will only make you feel worse. As brothers we ought to be able to talk about anything. I can tell it’s something serious, and that makes it even more important to tell me.”
Jiansu paled. The hand holding the pipe began to tremble. With difficulty, he put away his pipe and uttered a single, softly spoken sentence: “I want to take the noodle factory back from Zhao Duoduo.”
From where he stood just beyond the window, Zhichang heard every word. As soon as that sentence was uttered, a crack from somewhere inside the mill gave him a start; it sounded like someone had smacked against a steel rod. He thought something might have happened to one of the gears, but the mill kept turning. Baopu stood up, his eyes lighting up beneath the heavy ridge of his brow. He nodded. “I see.”
“The noodle factory has always carried the name Sui. It should be yours and mine.” Jiansu’s eyes bore into his brother.
Baopu shook his head. “It’s nobody’s. It belongs to the town of Wali.”
“But I can take it back.”
“No, you can’t. These days no one has that power.”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t. And you shouldn’t have such thoughts. Don’t forget our father. At first he thought the mill belonged to the Sui clan. This misunderstanding ruined his health. Twice he rode his horse out to pay off debts. He returned home the first time, but the second time he threw up blood, staining the back of his horse. Our father died in a sorghum field—”
With a shout Jiansu slammed his fist down onto the stool. Then he crouched in pain, holding the stool with both hands.
“Baopu, you, you…I didn’t want to but you made me tell you! You’ve taken the fight out of me, put out the fire, like smashing your fist into my head! But I’m not afraid. Don’t worry, I won’t stay my hand on this. You want me to spend the rest of my life sitting in the mill, like you, listening to the millstone rumble tearfully in circles, is that it? Never! That’s something no member of the Sui clan ought to do. None of our ancestors was ever that gutless…I won’t listen to you. I’ve held this inside me for decades. I’m thirty-six this year and still not married. You were, but your wife died. You should have a better life than most people, but you just sit in this mill, day in and day out. I hate you! I absolutely hate you! Today I want to make this perfectly clear: I hate the way you spend your days in this old mill…”
Zhichang stood beyond the window, stunned. He saw large beads of sweat roll off of Jiansu’s forehead and cheeks.
Sui Baopu recalled how little time his father had spent at the factory during Baopu’s teen years, preferring the solitude of the pier, where he could ponder things and gaze at the reflections of ship masts in the water. He would not return home until dinnertime. His stepmother, Huizi, was in her thirties. With her lips painted red, she would sit at the dinner table eating and keeping a worried eye on her husband, while Baopu watched anxiously to see if she swallowed the color on her lips along with her food. His stepmother, the pretty daughter of a rich man from Qingdao, liked to drink coffee. Baopu was a little afraid of her. Once, when she was in a good mood, she took him in her arms and planted a kiss on his smooth forehead. Sensing her warm, heaving breast, his heart raced as he lowered his head, not daring to let his gaze linger on her snow-white neck. “Mama,” he blurted out as his face reddened. She murmured a response. That was the first and last time he called her that. But he stopped being afraid of her.
One day Baopu found Huizi crying bitterly and writhing on the kang, nearly breathless. It wasn’t until later that he learned why his stepmother had been so grief-stricken: Her father, it turned out, had been murdered in Qingdao, caught selling land and factories for gold bullion to take out of China. Baopu was at a loss for words.
After that he began spending time in the study, which held many scrolls and more books than he could count. He found a date-colored wooden ball, so red it shone, and when he held it in his hand it felt incredibly smooth and very cold. There was also a box that played a lovely tune when he touched it.
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