The Ancient Ship. Zhang Wei

I just have to put up with things the way they are. That’s the punishment for being born a Sui! During the crazy times a few years back, Zhao Duoduo came into our yard with a bunch of men and a steel pole with the idea of digging up buried treasure left by our ancestors. That was like stabbing me in the chest. I watched them through the window and—I’m not joking when I say this—I cursed myself the whole time. Myself, not Duoduo and his men, and I cursed our ancestors for their blindness in setting up a noodle factory on the banks of the Luqing, ensuring that future generations could neither live nor die well. As I grew into adulthood I imagined myself with a wife, just like everybody else. But what woman would willingly marry into the Sui clan? You were married once, so you know what I mean. Nobody gives a damn about us. They see we’re alive and breathing and never give a thought to what our lives are like. You’re my brother, look for yourself, just look!” Jiansu’s face was red. Tossing away his pipe and knocking his pillow to one side, he crawled under the covers to fetch a little book with a red cover. He opened it, and several photographs of women fell out, all local women who had married. “See those? They were all in love with me, all former lovers, and all were stopped from marrying me by their families. Why? Because I’m a Sui! One after the other they married someone else. One married a man in South Mountain who then hung her up from the rafters. I can’t forget them. I look at their photos at night and meet them in my dreams.”

      Baopu picked up the photographs and held them until his hand was shaking so hard they fell onto the bed. Wrapping his arms around his brother, he held his face next to his, where their tears merged. Though his lips were quaking, Baopu tried to console his brother, but even he wasn’t sure what he was saying.

      “Jiansu, I hear what you’re saying and I understand completely. I shouldn’t have come over. I’m just adding to your suffering. But like you, I can’t bear it any longer. What you said about our family was right. But you’re young, after all, you’re still young, and you were only half right. There are other things you don’t know. What I mean is, there’s something else that causes us to torment ourselves. And it might be worse, even harder to bear. That’s what I’m facing, that’s what it is…”

      With Baopu gently patting his brother’s back, they both calmed down after a while and sat down on the kang. Jiansu angrily dried his tears and then looked around for his pipe. After lighting it and taking several puffs, he gazed out the window at the darkness. “Uncle has feasted and drunk like a sponge all his life,” he said softly, “which means he hasn’t suffered the way we have. Papa lived a proper life and died trying to settle accounts. You and I were shut up in our study so you could practice your calligraphy and I could prepare the ink for you. Then after Papa died, you put me back in the study, where you taught me all about benevolence and righteousness and made me repeat the words to you. You taught me how to write the words ‘love the people,’ which I did, one stroke at a time.”

      Baopu, his head lowered, listened silently to his brother. The image of a burning house flashed before him, red fireballs descending from the eaves and burning in all directions. The whole house was engaged as his stepmother writhed on the kang…He jerked his head up as he felt compelled to tell his brother about Huizi, tell him how his mother died. But by gritting his teeth he managed to keep from saying anything.

      They stayed up all night.

      The riverside mill rumbled along. Baopu, wooden ladle in hand, sat motionless twelve hours a day, until he was relieved by an older worker. It was a job for old men who had sat on the same sturdy stools for decades. When one of them, who had worked for the Sui clan all his life, saw that Sui Yingzhi had died, he’d said, “It’s time for me to go too,” and he died there on the stool. With their stone walls, the old mills were like ancient fortresses carved into the riverbank and drawing generations of people to them. Moss that grew on the ground beyond the paths trampled by ox hooves, a mixture of old and new growth, looked like the multihued fur of a gigantic beast. The old man died and a master miller hanged himself because of a ruined batch, but neither drew a sound from the mill itself. They were the soul of the town. During hard times there were always people who ran to the mills to do things in secret. Then during the reexamination period following land reform, whole families fled from Wali after first stealthily performing kowtow rites in the mills. Villagers burned spirit money to memorialize the forty-two men and women buried alive in a yam cellar by the landlord restitution corps, and the mill did not make a sound. It had only a single tiny window, its only eye. Tenders of the millstone gazed at the open fields and the river through that eye.

      The first thing Baopu saw when he looked through that window each day was the partial trunk of the tree of heaven taken down by a bolt of lightning. At the time people had discussed the destruction of the tree, but it was soon forgotten by all except Baopu, who continued to study it. His face darkened when he examined its ruined state. A tree so thick at its base that two people were needed to circle it with their arms was now split down the middle, exposing a white core that had the look of a shattered bone. A lush canopy that had only recently created welcome shade, the branches emitting refreshing moisture, was now nothing but splintered debris. A dark liquid had congealed at the outer edges of the wood core, the bloody seepage from the lightning strike. A strange odor emanated from its depths, and Baopu knew it was the smell of death. Thunder and lightning are bullets from the universe’s rifle. Why had that particular tree wound up in its crosshairs? And why that night? Heavenly justice has a long arm.

      He had bent down to pick up pieces of the tree and carried them back to the mill.

      The abandoned mills were left over from the heyday of the glass noodle industry. Many had rumbled loudly during their youth, but after Father died in a field of red sorghum, the mills began dying off, one after the other. They had been built on the bank of the river for its abundant supply of water. Then one day Baopu stumbled across stone troughs that showed that the millstones had once been turned not by oxen but by water, which was why the Luqing River was shrinking. That discovery had people believing that the excavated ship had sailed down a raging river and that the Wali pier had indeed been the site of a forest of ships’ masts. Vast changes occur as the constellations change places, making predictions of the future impossible. The old mills slowly ground time itself away. Once the mill was mechanized, the conveyer belt and the gears that turned it dazzled the people’s eyes, an example of how abruptly the world can change. People flocked to see the motor-driven millstone, which brought life to the mill. But now that the novelty had worn off and they had stopped coming, Baopu looked out the window and spotted Xiaokui, market basket in hand, and Leilei, the son who never seemed to grow. He called to the boy, but there was no response.