Читать книгу The Ancient Ship - Zhang Wei - Страница 8

Many years before the old ship was excavated, that is, the spring after Sui Yingzhi died, his second wife, Huizi, followed him in death. The impressive main house of the family estate burned to the ground that day, incinerating Huizi amid the cinders on the kang, a sight too gruesome to behold. Baopu, the only witness, secretly buried her. Jiansu would later ask how she had died, and Baopu would reply that she had taken poison, which was true. But there were many things he did not reveal to his younger brother. Now that the main house was gone, the foundation had been converted into a vegetable garden tended by the two brothers and their sister. Late at night, moonbeams cast their light on the bean trellises, from which crystalline drops of dew fell to the ground.

Baopu recalled how, six months after his father died, Sui Buzhao came to see Huizi. “Sister-in-law,” he said, “I think you should move out of the family home.” She said no. “Now that my brother has passed on,” he said, “you don’t have the good fortune to hold off the evil tied up in this house.” But she ignored him. Several days passed before Buzhao, his face beet red, his body trembling, returned. “Huizi!” he called out after barging into the house. “Huizi!” He fidgeted with his clothes. When she came out and saw him, her surprise was mixed with annoyance.

“What do you want?”

He pointed outside. “My room out there is neat and tidy. I even sprayed perfume on the floor.” She just stared at him, not sure what he was getting at. His chin quivered, and he blinked nervously. Finally, with a stomp of his foot, he said, “Come live with this wretched man, what do you say?” Hardly able to believe her ears, she reached out and slapped him, giving him a bloody nose. “I mean it, you should come with me,” he said, biting his lip. He was obviously not going to be easily put off, so she picked up a pair of scissors. He turned and fled.

“I’m afraid there’s no future for your stepmother,” Buzhao said to Baopu. “She tried to stab me with scissors. Instead of thanking me for my kindness, she treats me like a stranger. I’ve been a useless vagabond all my life, but I’ve never had an indecent thought where she is concerned. I may be dirt poor, but I don’t owe anyone a cent, just what she needs to get through life. Well, to hell with her! She’s never gone to sea, never seen the world. There are plenty of women down south who have moved in with their brothers-in-law after losing their husbands. But, like I say, to hell with her! She has no future!”

Sui Buzhao left and never again entered the main house as long as Huizi was alive. Before long his prediction came true. Some people came to drive her out of the house, which they said now belonged to the town. Baopu urged his stepmother to move, but she set her jaw and refused. She didn’t say a word; she just refused to move. In the end she sent the three children over to side rooms, leaving her alone in that big house. Seeing how stubborn she could be, her brow creased in an expression of strength and hostility, Baopu was reminded of how she had injured her hand by pounding on the table after his father had returned from paying off debts.

After Huizi died along with the main house, militiamen kept watch over Baopu and his siblings for a long time before letting them be. All this time Zhao Duoduo led a team of people in searching the site for hidden treasure, poking the ground with metal poles. To their enormous disappointment they came up empty.

Now that the side buildings were occupied by the brothers and their sister, Sui Buzhao often came over to where the main house had stood. Baopu tried to talk him into moving back into the compound, but he said no. So the three children occupied one of the buildings and used the others for storage. Few books were left from their library, but as political ill winds began to blow, Baopu hid what few remained in a casket. As Hanzhang grew older she more and more closely resembled her mother, but she had the temperament of her father. She moved into one of the other side rooms to be alone.

Around the time of Sui Yingzhi’s death the people who had worked for the family left, all but Guigui, who had nowhere to go. When she wasn’t cooking for the brothers and their sister she sat in the doorway of one of the buildings shelling beans. She was three years younger than Baopu, with whom she’d bathed together when they were both children. Now when she shelled beans she often looked over at him and blushed. One night, after the brothers had fallen asleep, Guigui saw that the lantern was still lit, so she went into their room; she stopped when she noticed Baopu’s muscular shoulders as he lay asleep in the red light of the room. One of his legs was sticking out from under the quilt. She had never seen so much of him uncovered. Worried that he might catch cold, she covered his legs and then his shoulders. The smell of his naked body brought tears to her eyes. She dried her eyes, but the tears kept coming. Then she bent down and kissed his shoulder. He was sleeping so soundly he did not wake up. But Jiansu did, in time to see Guigui bending over his brother’s shoulder. He sat up to see what she was doing. Only half awake, he mumbled, “Hm?” Guigui stopped and ran out of the room. Suddenly wide awake, unable to go back to sleep, Jiansu blew out the lantern and lay there smiling.

From that night on, Jiansu was always on the lookout for contact between Guigui and Baopu, and he discovered that she was actually quite pretty, while his brother was a very strong man. He could have his way with her any time he wanted. A year passed and Baopu and Guigui were married, forcing Jiansu to move into a room by himself, one next to the eastern wall. From then on he could not escape the feeling that his brother’s room was filled with mystery, and he sometimes went in to see what he could see. Guigui had stuck one of her paper-cuts over the window—a crab with a date in one of its claws. The place had a different smell, not sweet and fragrant, but warm. It was a wonderful room.

Jiansu’s own room, cold and forbidding, was only a place to sleep. Most of the time he spent with his uncle, who captivated him with tales of strange things, especially those from his seafaring days, so exciting Jiansu that he listened with his mouth hanging slack. Sometimes he went into the woods to walk aimlessly, searching the trees for birds and daydreaming. As time went on, he could no longer do that; he was like an ox in a halter, tied to a plow with no fun to be had anywhere. He and his brother worked the fields all day long, where he suffered cuts from hoes and scythes and bled like a sapling. His blood was fresh, new, bright red. Scars appeared all over his body as he grew strong from the hard work.

On one occasion the team leader sent him down to the riverbank to cut brambles for a fence. When he got there he spotted a girl of sixteen or seventeen who was also cutting brambles, and when she called him Brother Jiansu, he had to laugh. I’m a brother, all right, he was thinking, one who’s looking for a girl 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, “you, me.” He picked up the ladle, putting the millstone in motion again. “When you finish here, instead of going home,” she said softly, “can you meet me down on the floodplain? When you finish…” Sweat beaded his forehead; he stared at Xiaokui. The next bucket of liquid beans was full, and another young woman came in to remove it. Later that day, when it was time for the next shift, Baopu, finished for the day, left.

Breaking from his normal schedule, instead of crossing the river at the floodplain, for reasons he could not explain he decided to go around it. He walked slowly, his legs feeling unusually heavy. After a while he stopped. The sunset blazed across the sky and turned his broad back bright red. He shuddered in the sun’s dying rays and then took off running back toward the floodplain as fast as he could, muttering things no one could understand. His hair was swept back, he lurched from side to side, and his arms flailed out from his body. Deep imprints in the ground were created with each flying step. Then he stopped abruptly, for there in the densest part of the willow grove stood Xiaokui, her hair tied with a red kerchief.

Baopu stood motionless for a moment before walking slowly toward her. When he reached her he saw she was crying. She said she’d thought he was walking away from her.

As they crouched down in the grove, her tears were still flowing. Baopu nervously lit a cigarette; Xiaokui took it out of his mouth and threw it away. Then she laid her head against his chest. He put his arms around her and kissed her hair. She looked up at him and he wiped away her tears with his callused hand; then she lowered her head again. He kissed her, and kissed her again. “Xiaokui,” he said, shaking his head, “I don’t understand you.”

She nodded. “I don’t understand myself,” she said, “so of course you can’t. You sit there on a stool with that ladle in your hand, never saying a word. You look like a stone statue, but with energy bursting to get out. I have to admit I’m scared of anyone who won’t talk, but I also know that sooner or later I’ll be yours.”

Baopu lifted up her face and looked intently into her flashing eyes. He shook his head. “I’m part of the Sui clan,” he said. “Why…would you want to be mine?”

She just nodded. Neither of them spoke as they leaned against one another until the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Then they stood up and began to walk. When it was time to go their separate ways, Baopu said, “You and I are people who have little to say.” Xiaokui rubbed his rough, callused hand and raised it to her nose to smell it.

Baopu had trouble sleeping after Xiaokui had smelled his hand, he realized. He tossed and turned, and when he finally fell asleep someone came up and lifted up his hand. He held out both hands for her, his heart filled with happiness. She walked out of the room, and he followed. Moonbeams created a haze in the air. She was walking in front of him, but when he blinked she was gone. Then she leaped out from behind, her body as light as a bundle of grain stalks. Oh, it was Guigui. “Guigui!” he shouted “Guigui!…” He reached out, but pristine, pale moonbeams were all he touched.

He didn’t sleep that night, but that did not keep him from going to the mill the next day, where only her cricket cage remained; Xiaokui did not show up to carry off buckets. He fed the crickets some melon flowers. When he went over to the processing room, he saw that she was washing the noodles, her arms red from being submerged in water. He did not call out to her, since Li Zhaolu was sitting above her banging the metal strainer, chanting as he did: “Hang-ya! Hang-ya!” The people below said, “He sure knows how to bang that!” Baopu looked up at the coarse old man, who had his eyes fixed on Xiaokui on the floor below. Without a word, Baopu walked back to his mill, where the stone creaked as it made one slow revolution after another and the ox’s head swayed in concert with the sound.

Baopu forgot what it was like to enjoy a good night’s sleep. How had he gotten through the past twenty years? he wondered. He regularly stumbled into Zhao Family Lane and lay sprawled beneath Xiaokui’s rear window, where no one could see him. She had told him she was to be married to Li Zhaolu, and there was nothing she could do about that, since the decision was made when Fourth Master nodded his approval. Baopu lost hope. That nod of the head had sealed the matter. So he abandoned his fantasies and went back to sitting quietly on his stool in the mill. And yet, desire burned in his heart, tormenting him. When a splitting headache set in, he wrapped his head with a piece of cloth, which lessened the pain at least a little. This reminded him of when the old ship was excavated, since his uncle had worn a headband that day, and he now realized that the old man too had likely been suffering from a headache; he had taken the loss of his boat badly and had been in low spirits ever since.

Not long after Baopu started wearing a headband, Xiaokui married Li Zhaolu. Baopu collapsed when he heard the news and lay numb in his room. Then news reached town that Li Zhaolu had fled to the northeast and slipped into one of the cities there, where he planned to make his fortune and then send for Xiaokui. Sure enough, there was no trace of Zhaolu in town, and Xiaokui had moved back into the family home on Zhao Family Lane.

One stormy night, as thunder rumbled, lightning struck a tree near the old mill. Everyone in town heard the fearsome noise. Wakened by the thunder, Baopu could not go back to sleep and suffered the rest of the night from a headache so bad he had to put the headband back on. As the rain fell outside he imagined that he heard Guigui calling him from far away. So he threw his coat over his shoulders and ran outside, racing across the muddy ground and through the misty rain with no idea where he was going. But when he wiped the water from his face and out of his eyes, he found he was standing beneath Xiaokui’s window. His blood surged. He banged on the window. She was leaning against the sill, weeping, but refused to open the window. Baopu felt the blood rush to his head, turning his cheeks feverish; with a pop, the headband snapped in two, like a broken lute string. He drove his fist through the window.

Suddenly feeling cold, he held her in his arms and felt her heat burning into his chest. Unable to stop shaking or breathing hard, she held her arms crossed in front of her. When he pulled her arms away, she rubbed his rough, callused hands. She was breathing hard in the darkness, almost choking. “Ah, ah,” she said, over and over. Baopu loosened her long hair and removed the little clothing she was wearing. As if talking to himself, he said, “This is how it is. I can’t help myself. I’ve been like this every day. Lightning split something in two. Are you scared that you can’t see anything? Pitiful people, like this, like this. The cricket cage in the mill was blown brittle by the wind. It crumbled when I touched it. A poor, pitiful man. What can I do? You think I’m a terrible person. Like this, like this. Your hands, oh, oh, I’ve got stubble all over my face. I’m so stupid, like a stone. And you, and you. More thunder, why doesn’t lightning strike me dead! All right, I’ll stop talking like that. But you, your hands. What do we do? You, little Xiaokui, my little Xiaokui…” She kept kissing him, and he stopped talking. When lightning lit up the sky, Baopu saw she was sweating. “All I can think of is taking you back to my room, where we would seal up the door and never go out again. The millstone can turn on its own. And that’s how we’d be, in our own home.” Xiaokui did not say a word, it seemed; her eyes reminded him of the night beneath the willow tree that year, and he recalled what she’d said then: “Sooner or later I’ll be yours.” And he had whispered to her: “That’s good.”

For several days after the thunderstorm, Baopu slept through the night. He was also moved to go to his brother’s and his sister’s rooms in order to share his happiness with them. Hanzhang always looked healthy and happy, while Jiansu was in a permanently foul mood. As the circles around his eyes grew darker, he told his brother he’d been spurned, which didn’t surprise Baopu, who just sighed. Apparently, fate had dictated that this generation of the Sui clan could fall in love but that marriage was beyond their reach.

Several days later Li Zhaolu returned from the northeast. After a year of trying to make a living far from home, his skin had taken on a gray pallor and his cheekbones were more prominent. He said he planned to go back, and he’d only returned home to start a family. So he spent a month in Wali, after which he said, “That’ll do it,” and headed back to the northeast. This time he did not return. News of his death arrived six months later. He had been buried in a coal mine cave-in. His widow, Xiaokui, was no longer willing to step foot beyond Zhao Family Lane. Then one day Baopu spotted a woman in mourning apparel. Xiaokui.

Xiaokui gave birth to little Leilei. Meanwhile, Baopu’s health deteriorated, until one day he fell seriously ill. Guo Yun checked his pulse and his tongue, then examined his arms and his back. Lesions had broken out on the skin, he was feverish and thirsty, uncontrollably agitated, and his tongue had changed color. The old man sighed. “The unhealthy external heat has not dissipated,” he said, “and the unhealthy internal heat has risen. The outer and inner heats feed off each other, disrupting the state of mind and internal organs.” He then wrote out a prescription, which Baopu took for several days, improving his condition somewhat, although the lesions did not go away. So Guo Yun gave him a prescription for them: two taels of raw gypsum, three tenths of a tael of glycyrrhiza, three tenths of a tael of figwort, four tenths of a tael of bluebell, a tenth of a tael of rhinoceros horn, and a tael of nonsticky white rice. Baopu followed the healer’s instructions meticulously; once he was on the road to recovery he looked through some medical books. He discovered that Guo Yun had used a formula that produced only temporary benefits and was not a cure. When he asked if that was true, Guo Yun nodded and said yes, stressing the importance of serenity and a moderate use of herbs and tonics. What mattered was breathing exercises and a calm spirit. Baopu met this with silence, firm in his belief that any member of the Sui clan who contracted this illness had no hopes of ever being cured.

Every few days Baopu suffered from insomnia, tossing and turning restlessly, as he had for nearly twenty years. He would get up and walk in the compound, though now he avoided standing beneath Xiaokui’s window. In his imagination he heard Li Zhaolu banging the strainer, he heard the collapse of the mine, and he heard Li Zhaolu’s cries for help. He also saw a look of denunciation in the man’s eyes from beyond the grave. With Xiaokui’s mourning garments floating before his eyes, Baopu walked over to the bean trellis, sometimes recalling that it had been built on the floor of the main house in the estate; his heart would pound. As the only witness to the fire that had destroyed the main house, he had seen Huizi die, had seen the terrifying writhing of her body on the kang. He did not dare tell Jiansu any of this, though he worried that the boy already knew and that it was what burdened his mind. When Jiansu reached adulthood, he had the eyes of a panther searching for prey, and Baopu hoped he’d never see his younger brother pouncing to rip and tear with his teeth.

As the eldest son of the family, he could not rid himself of the feeling that he had failed Hanzhang in his responsibilities to her. She was now a thirty-four-year-old woman who, like her brother, had known love but not marriage. Her uncle had once arranged a marriage for her with Li Zhichang, to which she had agreed. But two days before the wedding she had changed her mind. Li had paced the drying floor for several days bemoaning his fate, assuming that what had happened beneath the willow tree that time had created resentment in her mind. But she begged him to leave her, saying she was unworthy of being part of the Li clan, which she revered. Over the days that followed she grew increasingly wan, until her skin was nearly transparent. She actually grew lovelier by the day, and frailer. From time to time she visited Fourth Master, returning home more obstinate and unruly than ever. She was a dedicated worker, never missing a day. When she returned home from a day on the drying floor, she wove floor mats from tassels of cornstalk to add to the family’s income.

Baopu sat in the mill gazing at the drying floor, thinking about his hardworking sister and growing increasingly melancholy. He was on edge for days after the blowup with his brother in the mill, and he felt as if something were gnawing at his heart. Then one afternoon he threw down his ladle in a fit of pique and walked over to the drying floor, where a chorus of women’s voices came on the wind before he reached it. One horse cart after another drove up to the racks, with their silvery threads waving in the air; the horse bells and the women’s voices merged. Baopu skirted the area of greatest activity and headed for a corner, where he saw his sister standing next to one of the drying racks. She did not see him coming. As her hands flew over the strands of noodles, she was looking up, a smile on her face, gazing through the gaps in the racks at the other women. The sight flooded Baopu’s breast with warm currents of joy, and he decided not to get any closer.

The noodles around her were as clean and clear as crystal, uncontaminated by a single blemish; the sand at her feet shimmered slightly. For the first time Baopu detected the harmonious relationship between his sister and the drying floor. He reached into his pocket looking for some tobacco but left it there as Hanzhang spotted him; by the look in her eyes, she was surprised to see him, and when she called out to him, he walked up. First he looked into her face, and then he turned to look elsewhere. “You never come out to the drying floor,” she said. He looked into her face again but said nothing. He wanted to tell her that he and Jiansu had had a fight, but he swallowed the words.

“Guo Yun says you’re sick,” he said. “What do you have?”

With a look of alarm, she pressed herself up against the drying rack and grabbed threads of noodles with both hands. “I’m not sick,” she said with a grimace.

“Yes, you are,” he said, raising his voice. “I can see it in your face.”

“I said I’m not!” she shouted.

Feeling hurt, Baopu lowered his head and crouched down to stare at his hands. “It can’t be like this, it can’t,” he said softly. “No more…everything has to start from the beginning, and it can’t be like this.” He stood up and looked off in the distance, where the old mills stood at the riverbank, dark and forbidding, like fortresses, and quiet. “The Sui clan,” he said, almost as a moan, “the Sui clan!…” He gazed off in the distance for a long while before spinning around and saying sternly, “You have to get whatever it is treated! I won’t let you turn into someone useless like me. You’re still young! I’m more than ten years older than you, so both you and Jiansu are supposed to do as I say, to listen to me.”

Hanzhang held her tongue. Baopu kept staring at her. She looked up at him and began to tremble.

In the same stern tone of voice, Baopu said, “Answer me. Are you going to have that treated or aren’t you?”

Eyes open wide, Hanzhang looked into her brother’s face without so much as blinking. She held that look for a moment and then stepped up and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She begged him not to mention her sickness again, never again.