A Map for the Missing(103)

The tinkling sound of glass rang through the shop, and Yitian looked back to see the grandchildren rolling marbles, squatting in the corner of the room they’d staked out for themselves. From the back room, where the old woman had disappeared, Yitian heard the sounds of a knife slicing neatly through vegetables. Soon the smell of cooking garlic drifted through the store.

“Time for lunch, time for lunch,” the man said. “So, do you want to buy anything?”

Yitian pointed to the Twenty-Four Histories.

“Just this? Or the whole set?”

“Just the one, please.”

“Suit yourself.”

The old woman returned to say goodbye. In between batting at the grandchildren, who were now swarming her knees, she wrapped the book in thin tissue paper.

“A book like this deserves to be protected, yes?”

She handed the book to him.

“If you find your father, will you let us know?”

Yitian nodded.

“Ask him if he remembers us.”



* * *



—

He felt weak in the knees as they exited the shop. He leaned against his mother and she circled her arm around his waist to steady him.

When he put his own arm around her shoulders, the book fell to the ground. They stood there, two people interlocked and bound. He felt the certainty, and he was sure she did, too, that his father had stood in this place. Wobbling, like them. There was no making sense of this moment; all his equations and models had fled him. He wanted only a single thing. Not the miracle of finding his father now, but only that he’d been there to receive his father’s gift.





Part 6


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Thirty-nine


1993


Before he placed it in his suitcase, he carefully wrapped the book inside a square of cotton padding that his mother had cut for him from an old blanket. She’d also given him an arm-length section of twine, which he bound tightly around the package and knotted around the top. He’d been in a rush for these last few hours, but this very last thing he did slowly.

“You can use that as a blanket for the child, too,” his mother said to him, when he’d protested against her taking scissors to the quilt. “Much more than I need,” she said, gesturing to the piles of blankets folded in the corner. He could recall the year to which each one belonged just by looking at the designs. The peonies against green bushes—those came from when he was five. His mother couldn’t watch him while she worked in the fields, so she sent him to school early and he was the youngest of all the students there. The blue and yellow cranes with their necks intertwined were from the year Yishou had stopped going to school. His older brother had bunched the blankets under his fists in anger when their mother mentioned to him that he might return.

The square his mother cut for him to bring back to America was of blue morning glories against a white background, the simplest of them all, from the year of his grandfather’s illness. The yellow that dribbled out of his grandfather’s mouth had stained the white background. Though his mother scrubbed and scrubbed at it, the remnants of color remained, the spots as pale as sunlight now.

Earlier that day, after they returned from Five Groves, Yitian made up his mind to delay his ticket back. Another week—that was all he would give himself—for his father who remembered him in his last moments. Then, finally, he told himself he had to call Mali. He found a ride into the city and went to the telecommunications building.

“Yitian? Yitian? Is that you? I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

Her sound was so urgent and unknown to him that he almost admitted everything to her, right there. For a brief, desperate moment, he imagined what it would be like if she simply told him not to come back, if he remained in this village forever.

“I was busy saying goodbye to everyone here—” he began to grasp at some excuse, until she interrupted him to say she was pregnant.

And then he understood what he read as urgency in her voice was not that at all; instead, it was excitement at the unknown, an emotion that she almost never showed. It was not because she was an unhappy person, but because there was so little, even within that vast new world, that was truly indecipherable to her. An event had finally caught her off guard.

“Yitian? Yitian?” He heard Mali’s voice through the drumming of blood in his ears. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m very happy.” He realized, as soon as he said the words, that they were, quite simply, the truth. As if his body had separated, he had the sudden awareness that he had a face and was smiling so much that he could feel the stretch of his cheeks.

“Finally,” she said.

“Finally.”

“We shouldn’t give ourselves bad luck right now by telling everyone,” she said. He agreed. “But,” she added, “it’s good you’re with your mother now. You can tell her. Maybe the news will finally make her like me.”

They both laughed. It was true, that all of these years his mother had never stopped holding Mali apart. The two of them rarely spoke with one another after the wedding.

He realized, on his way home, that he still didn’t have any more clarity about what was worrying him before. He still did not know if he would tell Mali about Hanwen. He’d thought about Hanwen since they kissed, but not as much as he would have supposed. When he imagined the scene in the hotel room, he saw her face as if she were still seventeen, rather than as the woman she was now. And he saw, too, that he loved that girl because she came from a time before the worst thing that ever happened to him, and that loving her as she was then was an impossibility, a way of wishing for the past back. Living in that past, he could still believe the future was a perfect place where he would one day arrive. How easy they’d believed it would be! The gaokao, university, their life as scholars together. They’d thought their hope and ambition was enough.