“This is unique,” you say.
She asks for some hot water when the woman of the house returns with the bedding.
The woman brings her a small wooden pail of hot water. Afterwards you hear her latching the door.
You strip to the waist, throw a small towel over your shoulder and go downstairs. There is no light, probably the only kerosene lamp in the house is upstairs in her room. In the kitchen, you see the woman of the house by the stove. Her expressionless face, lit by the light of the open stove, is gentler. The burning straw crackles and you can smell the aroma of cooking rice.
You take a bucket and go down to the creek. The last remnants of sunset on the mountain vanish and the haziness of dusk descends. There are spots of light in the clear rippling water — the stars are out. A few frogs are croaking.
Opposite, deep in the mountain shadows, you hear children laughing on the other side of the creek. Paddy fields are over there. You seem to see a threshing lot in the mountain shadows, and the children are probably playing hide and seek. In the thick dark mountain shadows, separated by paddy fields, a big girl is laughing on the threshing lot. It’s her, she’s in the darkness opposite: a forgotten past is re-lived as one of that crowd of children one day recalls his childhood. One day the squeaky voice of the boy screaming cheeky nonsense thickened, became throaty and deep, and his bare feet pattering on the stones of the threshing lot left wet footprints as he departed from childhood to enter the big wide world. You hear the patter of bare feet on black cobblestones. A child by a pond is using his grandmother’s embroidery frame for a tugboat. At a shout from his grandmother he turns and runs off, the patter of his bare feet resounding on the cobblestones. Once again you see the back of her, her single long black plait, in a small lane. In the wet lanes of Wuyizhen the winter wind is icy. She has a bucket of water on a carrying pole and is walking with quick short steps on the cobblestones as the bucket presses on her young frail shoulder, straining her body down to the waist. The water in the bucket wobbles and splashes the black cobblestones as she comes to a halt when you call out to her. She turns to smile at you then goes on walking with more quick short steps. She is wearing purplish-red cloth shoes. In the darkness children are laughing and shouting. Their voices are loud, even if you can’t make out what it is they are shouting, and there seem to be layers of echoes. It is in this instant that everything comes back to life, Yaya …
In an instant your childhood memories become stark and vivid. The roar of dive-bombing planes, then black wings suddenly swoop up and fly into the distance. You are huddled in your mother’s arms under a small sour date tree and the thorns on the branches have torn her cotton jacket, showing her plump arms. Then it’s your wet nurse. She’s carrying you. You like her cuddling you, she’s got big floppy breasts. She sprinkles salt on rice guoba toasted a delicious crunchy golden brown for you. You love spending time in her kitchen. The bright red eyes in the dark belong to the pair of white rabbits you kept. One of them was mauled in the cage by a weasel and the other one disappeared. You later found it floating in the urine pot in the lavatory in the back courtyard, its fur all dirty. In the back courtyard there was a tree growing in a heap of broken tiles and bricks, the tiles had moss growing on them. You could only see as high up as the branch which came to the top of the wall, so you didn’t know what it looked like after it grew over the wall. You only knew if you stood on your toes you could reach a hole in the trunk, and you used to throw stones into it. People said trees have feelings and tree demons are sensitive just like people and don’t like being tickled. If you poked something into the hole of the trunk, the tree would shake all over laughing, just like when you tickled her under the arms and she immediately pulled away and laughed until she was out of breath. You can always remember the time she lost a tooth: “Toothless, toothless, her name is Yaya!” She was furious with you for calling her toothless and went off in a huff. Dirt spews up like a pall of black smoke and rains down on everyone’s head, your mother scrambles to her feet, feels you, you’re all right. But then you hear a long shrill wail, it’s another woman: it doesn’t sound human. Next you are being shaken about on endless mountain roads in a tarpaulin-covered truck, squashed between the grown-ups’ legs and the luggage, rain is dripping off the end of your nose. Mother’s cunt, everyone down to push the truck. The wheels are spinning in the mud, splashing everyone in the face. Mother’s cunt, you say imitating the driver, this is the first bit of swearing you’ve picked up, you’re swearing because the mud has pulled off your shoe. Yaya … The shouting of the children is still coming from the threshing lot, they are laughing and yelling as they chase one another about. But your childhood no longer exists, and all that confront you are the dark shadows of the mountain …
You come to her door and beg her to open it. She says stop making a fuss, leave things as they are, she feels good now. She needs peace, to be free of desire, she needs time, she needs to forget, she needs understanding not love, she needs to find someone she can pour out her heart to. She hopes you won’t ruin this good relationship, she’s just starting to trust you, she says she wants to keep travelling with you, to go right to Lingshan. There’s plenty of time for getting together but definitely not right now. She asks you to forgive her, she doesn’t want to, and she can’t.
You say it’s something else. You’ve found a faint light coming through a crack in the wall. Someone else is upstairs apart from the two of you. You ask her to come and have a look.
She says no! Stop trying to trick her, stop frightening her like this.
You say there’s a light flickering in a crack in the wall. You’re quite sure there’s another room behind the wall. You come out of your room and stumble through the straw on the floorboards. You can touch the tiles of the sloping roof when you put up an arm, and further on you have to bend down.
“There’s a small door,” you say, feeling your way in the dark.
“What do you see?” She stays in her room.
“Nothing, it’s solid timber, without any joins, oh, and there’s a lock.”
“It’s really scary,” you hear her say from the other side of the door.
You go back to your room and find that by putting a big bamboo tub upside-down onto a pile of straw you can stand on it and climb onto a rafter.
“Quick, what can you see?” she asks anxiously.
“An oil lamp burning in a small altar,” you say. “The altar is fixed to the gable and there’s a memorial tablet inside. The woman of the house must be a shaman and this is where she summons back the spirits of the dead. The spirits of living persons are possessed and they go into a trance, then the ghosts of the dead attach themselves to these persons and speak through their lips.”
“Stop it!” she pleads. You hear her sliding against the wall onto the floor.
You say the woman wasn’t always a shaman, when she was young she was the same as everyone else, just like any other women of her age. But when she was about twenty, when she needed to be passionately loved by a man, her husband was crushed to death.
“How did he die?” she asks quietly.
You say he went off at night with a cousin to illegally cut camphor in the forest of a neighbouring village. The tree was about to fall when he somehow tripped on a root and lost his bearings. The tree was creaking loudly and he should have run away from it but instead ran towards it, right where it fell. He was pulverized before he could yell out.
“Are you listening?” you ask.
“Yes,” she says.
You say the husband’s cousin was frightened out of his wits and absconded, not daring to report the accident. The woman saw the hessian shoes hanging on the carrying pole of a man bringing charcoal down from the mountain, he was calling as he went for someone to identify a corpse. How could she not recognize the red string woven into the soles and heels of the hessian shoes she had made with her own hands? She collapsed and kept banging her head