A Map for the Missing(42)

She finally came, with her hair flying everywhere in the wind.

“Sorry to be late,” she said, sitting an arm’s distance in front of him. “I got caught up picking these.” She unrolled the pouch she’d made of the hem of her blouse, sending handfuls of chestnuts rolling onto the ground.

“We never could get chestnuts this fresh in the city. I couldn’t help myself when I saw them on my way up. Come, help me crack them open. It’ll be easier to bring them back down that way.”

To help her, he dropped the book he carried. Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, the last book she’d given him.

“Did you know, I almost burned this book?” she said.

“Why?” He couldn’t believe she could be so callous or violent with a book.

“Because the Soviets were supposed to be our enemies. There were campaigns to burn books all the time. The Red Guards called a meeting and they were going to make a huge bonfire. We were supposed to bring all of our bourgeois Russian books to burn. I collected all the ones I could find, but my mother prevented me from going. She told me it was stupid of me to burn them.”

He took the chestnut she was struggling with from her and hit it against the decaying bricks of the abandoned well. The spiky green shell cracked open easily and he passed the chestnut inside to her.

“So your mother also loves books?”

“It’s not that, exactly. I never understood why she cared so much about them until I came here. She never read anything herself. I think I’ve figured it out now. It’s that she thought keeping the books was my way to live a stable life.”

“What does that mean?” He’d never heard this word, stable, used the way she had, to describe a life.

“She thought that if I read all those books, I could go to college. Then I could get a job in a technical field, and I’d be protected from the campaigns forever.”

“Do you think that’s true, what your mother said?” He broke chestnuts while they spoke, finding that they were a good excuse not to look at her.

“Well, I’m not sure we’ll ever have the chance to go to college, anyway. But”—she hesitated, causing him to look up at her—“I do like the idea of safety, I think.”

There was something uncertain on her face, the first time he’d seen her unsure with her words.

The sudden silence made him uncomfortable. He scrambled to find something to say, eyes landing on the crumbling well. “Do you know why no one ever comes up here? Look at that monastery.” He pointed west from the hilltop to a small compound of eaved buildings in a state of dilapidation. “There used to be monks living there. Apparently, one of the monks went crazy trying to learn chan, and one day he came up here in a fit and threw himself into the well. So everyone avoids this place now. They think it’s bad luck.”

“Except for you.”

“I don’t believe in luck.”

“Why is that?”

“History is the domain of diligence and knowledge, not luck.” This was something his grandfather said. “You must hate living here,” he said suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“I can only imagine what it’s like to live here, after Shanghai. No books, no one interesting to talk to. . . .”

“Oh, I see. Some days I do feel like that. It seems like I’ll die if I have to eat another meal made with that awful cottonseed oil. Other times, I think I can understand life here better, in some way. Sometimes life in the city is so”—she shook her head and squinted her eyes, deciding on a word—“complicated.”

“How?” He did not understand the words she used to describe lives. First stable, now complicated.

“The political meetings they had all the time. First someone is an old revolutionary, the next day they’re a capitalist roader. At least, here and now, things are a bit quieter. I just tell myself, I’m not here forever. It’s just a break from my real life in Shanghai.”

“What do you miss most about Shanghai?”

“I miss . . .” She started, then stopped. “It’s not a specific thing, rather—I miss the feeling that there’s a greater life waiting for me. When you live in the city, you believe you can become something, something even more than who your parents had been. My mother told me I could become an engineer. There’s no possibility like that here. When I look at the villagers, they seem to have always been the same,” she paused abruptly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“You didn’t offend me.” She’d given words to the feeling he had whenever he looked at his father or Yishou.

“These things make me sad to talk about.” She tilted her head up to the wind, then turned back to him and asked, “Will you tell me another story? No one has told me any of the legends of this place.”

“They’re silly. You wouldn’t like them. All animals and magic . . .”

“No, please!”

So he repeated a story he heard from his grandfather, one all the villagers knew, about Bao the Fifth Elder, who had been so smart he passed the old imperial exams and went to Beijing to be a confidant of the emperor. When he finished, she asked for another one, so he recited the legend of the island in the middle of Lake Chao, which was said to be formed from the sad teardrop of a mother who’d lost her daughter.