The Ancient Ship. Zhang Wei
just like you. Hot blood that had flowed through his veins all those years suddenly pooled in his throat, and it burned. Although he barely spoke to her, he kept looking over. As a lively, cheerful girl, she’d have loved to talk to him, but he refused to give her the opportunity. What he wanted was to squelch her cheerfulness and turn her into a different kind of girl. The second day passed the same way, and then the third. On the fourth day, as he was once again cutting brambles, he had a perverse desire to chop off his own hand. At about midafternoon, Jiansu shouted to her, “Look, a thorn pricked my hand!”
The girl shrieked, threw down her scythe, and ran up to him. “Where? Let me see!”
“Here, right here!” he said. Then, when she was close enough, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to him.
She squirmed like a snake, struggling to break loose. “Brother Jiansu!” she said. “I’ll scream. Let me go!” she demanded. “Let me go!”
For some strange reason, all Jiansu could do was mimic her: “Brother Jiansu!” he said. “Brother Jiansu!” To calm her down he began stroking her hair, basking in the feeling of its silkiness. As he stroked, he could sense a change in her movements. Slowly she stopped resisting, and after a moment, she laid her head on his shoulder.
There was only dim moonlight that night as the girl slipped quietly into the compound, where Jiansu was waiting for her beneath the broad-bean trellis. He carried her into his room, where the only light came from the hazy moon. She sat down and reached out to touch his face with both hands. “I won’t let you see me,” she said.
He touched her face with one hand. “And I won’t let you see me,” he said.
Brushing his hand away, she said, “But that’s why I came here, to see you. I’ll look at you awhile, but then I have to go.” Not tonight, Jiansu was thinking, you can’t go away tonight. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. Thrilled by the kiss, she kissed him back—on the neck and on his eyes. Touching the fuzz that grew on his upper lip, she said, “Very nice.”
Jiansu was trembling all over. “Are you ill?” she asked anxiously. He shook his head and began to undress her. She asked him to let her go, but he was breathing too hard to speak. By then she was no longer speaking either, as she took off everything but a pair of knit underpants with purple and yellow stripes. Jiansu clenched his fists; his muscles rippled as she bashfully laid her head against his arm, pressing hard against him, as if she wanted to wrap herself around him. Her skin was slightly dark and chilled, but amazingly soft. Her body reminded him of a sash—long, thin, and soft. Her skin shimmered in the moonlight; her small hips were round and firm. “You can’t leave,” Jiansu said softly. “Why would you want to do that?” The girl began to cry, and as she wept she wrapped her arms around his neck. She kissed him and she cried. Tears wetted Jiansu’s face, but they were her tears, not his. After a while, she stopped crying and simply gazed at him.
A wind came up in the middle of the night. Jiansu and the girl slipped out of his room. They stopped beneath the trellis to say good-bye. “If your parents ask, just say you lost your way,” he said.
“Um,” she muttered. Then, before she walked off, she said, “You’re the worst person I know. You’ve ruined me. I won’t say bad things about you behind your back, but I won’t do anything with you again. You’re terrible, you’ve ruined me…”
Jiansu tried to console her: “You’re not ruined. You’re lovelier now than ever. I won’t forget you, not till the day I die, and I’ll never forget tonight…remember this, you’re not ruined, not by a long shot.”
The next morning Jiansu met his brother at the neighborhood well. Baopu sensed a change in his kid brother—he was more upbeat than usual; he studied Jiansu as his brother filled the buckets and then carried them inside for him. Baopu invited Jiansu to sit for a while; Jiansu turned down the offer, and when he stepped out the door he raised his arms and exclaimed, “What a beautiful day!”
“What did you say?” Baopu asked. Jiansu just turned and looked at his brother, grinning from ear to ear.
“What a beautiful day!”
The lamp in Jiansu’s room often stayed dark, its occupant missing most of the night. He began losing weight, and his face and hands were permanently scraped and bruised from work; his bloodshot eyes, which were retreating into their sockets, showed the effects of a lack of sleep, though they were still bright and lively. For Baopu it was a particularly bad time. Guigui had been stricken with consumption years before, and though she struggled to keep going, she did not make it through the year. She died in his arms, feeling to him as light as a bundle of grain stalks. Why, he wondered, did she have to die now, after having lived with the disease for so many years? Back then they had been so desperate to find food that he was reduced to removing talc weights from an old fishing net and grinding them into powder. Their uncle spent his days sprawled atop rocks on the bank of the Luqing River trying to catch little fish. Baopu recalled how, toward the end, Guigui had been too weak to even chew a tiny live shrimp, and how it had squirmed down into her empty stomach on its own. Thrilled to see that the bark of an elm tree was edible, Jiansu had shared his find with his sister-in-law. Baopu would have chopped the bark into tiny pieces if his cleaver hadn’t been taken away the year before to the outdoor smelting furnaces. The family wok had met the same end. So he chewed it up first and then fed it to his wife to keep her alive. But only for three years or so, until she left the Sui family for good. Baopu slowly climbed out of his grief a year after burying Guigui. By then Jiansu had nearly grown into a young man, and one day, when Baopu went out to pick beans, he spotted Jiansu hiding beneath the trellis with a young woman.
The noodle processing rooms on Gaoding Street reopened that year. Since there had been no mung beans for years, noodles had been out of the question. But now the old millstone was turning again, and that’s where people could find Baopu, sitting on a stool, just like all the old men who tended millstones, a long wooden ladle resting in his lap. White liquid flowed into buckets, to be carried away by women. One of them, called Xiaokui, regularly showed up earlier than the others and waited in a corner with her carrying pole. One morning she brought over a cricket cage and hung it up in the mill. When he heard the chirps, Baopu went over to take a look. Xiaokui was standing beside the cage, leaning against the wall, her hands behind her. Her face was red, bright red, and her nose was dotted with perspiration. The ladle in Baopu’s hands shook. With her eyes focused on the little window in front, she said, “You’re very nice.” Then she added, “Such a lovely sound.”
Baopu stood up and hit the millstone with his ladle. The old ox looked at him, concern, if not fear, in its eyes. The bucket was nearly full of bean starch. Two young women came in, hoisted it up on their carrying pole, and took it away with them, leaving a little pool of water on the spot where the bucket had sat.
As he glanced down at the water on the dusty floor, for some reason he thought back to when he and Xiaokui were children out catching loaches in the bend of the river. Wearing similar red stomachers, they laughed as the slimy loaches slipped out of their hands. He also recalled going over to the noodle factory and seeing her sifting bean residue, turning the white mixture into a ball. She held one of them up when she spotted him. What would he do with one of those? he wondered. But now, thinking back, he recalled the somber but reserved look on her face as she held it up for him.
Xiaokui returned to the mill and caught Baopu’s eye. She stood calmly, blushing slightly, her dark eyes glistening. Not particularly tall, she had a slender figure. His eyes fell on her breasts, which were heaving rhythmically, as if she were in a deep sleep. The air was redolent, not with perfume, but with the smell of a nineteen- or twenty-year-old virginal young female, the unique aroma of a gentle young woman who knew what it meant to love and was instinctively good natured. Baopu stood up and went to look at the trudging ox. The aging animal shook its head in a strange fashion. Baopu fed mung beans into the eye of the stone, the ladle in his hand in constant motion, and it was all he could do to keep from flinging it away. But then it fell out of his hand and landed on the stone, which carried it along until it was opposite Xiaokui, where it seemed to turn into a compass needle and point directly at her. She took a step forward. “Baopu,” she said,