Binu and the Great Wall of China Read online

  Someone said to Binu, ‘The half-load of mulberry leaves that Qiliang had picked is still lying on the ground.’

  So she went to where the nine mulberry trees stood, despondent, and there she saw the basket of leaves. She sat down and began to count, but her count kept going wrong. Every spot where her hand rested, glistening drops of water rolled off the leaves and fell to the ground, for now her palms too were shedding tears. She carried the basket over to the silkworm shed, splashing water on the sun-drenched path as she walked. When she removed her shoes, she discovered that her toes were shedding tears as well, that they too had learned how to cry.

  Now that Qiliang was gone, the silkworm shed seemed emptier than usual. Binu dumped the leaves into the silkworm pen, wetting it in the process. Worms that had not yet ‘climbed the mountain’ scuttled out from under the covering, refusing to eat tear-soaked leaves. Overnight, many of the silkworms had climbed up onto hemp racks that Qiliang had made, but they stopped spinning silk, disappointed with the last basket of mulberry leaves their patron had picked, and longing for the life-giving promise of the spring baskets. Binu hung the empty basket from a rafter, from which beads of water now dripped to the floor. She spotted Qiliang’s jacket, also hanging from a rafter and giving off traces of his sweat. One of his straw sandals lay by the silkworm shed door; she looked everywhere for its partner, but could not find it anywhere.

  Binu walked slowly out of the silkworm shed, still searching for Qiliang’s sandal; she searched from dusk till late at night, but found no trace of it. Refusing to listen to the counsel of others, she insisted that the sandal was hidden in the folds of dusk. The next morning found her pacing the ground beneath the nine mulberry trees; suddenly a straw sandal came sailing out of the Leng family mulberry grove on the other side of the road. The Leng family daughter-in-law cast a look of pity at her and said, ‘You can stop looking. Isn’t that Qiliang’s sandal?’

  Binu picked it up and, after a mere glance, flung it back. ‘That rotten sandal? I don’t know whose it is, but it isn’t Qiliang’s!’

  The Leng family woman glared at her. ‘You’re a girl who doesn’t know what’s good for her,’ she said angrily. ‘Has your soul fled just because your man is not at home? When a man leaves, his hands go with him, so do his feet, even that appendage between his legs is gone. So what good is a pair of straw sandals?’

  Her face burning, Binu ran out of the grove onto the road, but even then she kept her head down, still searching for Qiliang’s missing sandal, which hid from the sunlight, out of sight. Downhearted, Binu tramped up and down the public road leading out of the mulberry grove every day, always searching.

  Villagers knew she was looking for the sandal, and, when they saw her, they pointed and said, ‘Qiliang took Binu’s soul up north with him.’

  Chickens and dogs, not knowing what was happening, flew off or ran away when Binu drew near, hiding from the woman who stubbornly retraced her steps over and over. Even the roadside grasses acknowledged her sorrowful footprints: an invisible patina of tears overlaid each spot on the road where she had walked, and all the lush day-lilies and calamus along the way bowed down to her as she passed, piously proclaiming that, in their domain, there was no sandal here, no sandal here!

  Binu searched for the missing straw sandal from summer to autumn, but did not find it. One day during the autumn she met a woman washing woven cloth on the riverbank. The woman told Binu that the cold weather would arrive soon, and that her children’s winter clothes were not yet ready. Oh, how she wished she had another hand – one to wash clothes, one to make new clothes, and a third to mend old clothes. So Binu went down to the river to help. Yarn floated gently on top of water that had already turned cold, and as Binu held the still warm white yarn in her hands, she saw Qiliang’s naked back in the autumn wind. ‘The cold weather sneaks up on you,’ she said. ‘They say that there, on the other side of Great Swallow Mountain, they feed people. But do they give them clothing as well? When Qiliang left, he was not wearing a shirt.’

  Washing the fabric also washed Binu’s deepest worry up out of her heart and, with the coming of autumn, she was no longer seen on the road. The people of Peach Village heard that she had stopped searching for the missing sandal, and they assumed that a soul once taken from them had returned to the life of the village. Women came to Binu’s hut, in part to share their thoughts on waiting in an empty house, but also to pry into her private affairs. With discerning eyes, they spotted traces of her tears around the stove and on the bed, and their noses picked up the bitter, sour scent of those tears, which spread through the room.

  Without warning, a large drop of water fell from the thatched ceiling onto the face of one of the women. As she wiped the water from her face, she cried out in alarm, ‘Mother of mine, Binu’s tears have flowed up to the roof!’

  Another woman went to the stove and removed the lid on the cold pot, revealing half a pumpkin. She took a taste. Her brow crinkled. ‘That pumpkin broth has tears in it. It’s bitter and sour. Binu, are you cooking this pumpkin in your tears? Whoever heard of such a thing?’

  Standing in the rain-cloud of her own tears, Binu was wrapping up a large bundle. In it she had placed a finely tailored winter coat embroidered in a colourful pattern, a sash and a pair of boots lined with rabbit fur. That, the women thought, must be a bundle intended for Qiliang. Well, who wouldn’t want to prepare a large bundle for a husband who had left home in such a hurry? They asked Binu how much the handsome coat had cost her, but all Binu could tell them was that she had traded away the nine mulberry trees, plus three baskets of silk from her cocoons and her spinning room.

  The women shrieked in alarm. ‘Binu,’ they said, ‘how could you trade away nine mulberry trees, three baskets of silk and your spinning room? How will you live from now on?’

  Binu replied, ‘Without Qiliang by my side, whether I live or die does not concern me.’

  Then the women asked, ‘Who are you going to get to carry that wonderful bundle to the other side of Great Swallow Mountain?’

  ‘If no one else will take it,’ she said, ‘I will.’

  The women were convinced that Binu’s mind had become confused, that she had no idea that Great Swallow Mountain was a thousand li away.

  Binu said, ‘If I have a horse, I’ll ride it. If I have a donkey, I’ll ride that. If I have neither, then I’ll walk. An animal can walk that distance. Are we not superior to animals? Who says I cannot walk a thousand li?’

  The women, rendered speechless, ran out of Binu’s hut holding their hands to their breasts, not stopping until they were well clear. They turned to look back at the quivering figure of the woman in the hut, and many of them felt a deep sadness. She may have stopped searching for Qiliang’s straw sandal, they said, but her soul has not returned. One envious woman, wanting to hide her feelings, said cynically, ‘A thousand li just to deliver a winter coat? Does she suppose she is the only woman who loves her husband!’

  Another woman could not really say if she had been struck by the power of emotion or if she had been stung by something Binu said, but she was no sooner out of the hut than her head began to ache. In order to dispel her mental and physical discomfort, she spat several times in the direction of Binu’s hut. The others followed her example, and the noise drew a chorus of barking from the village dogs, who howled at Binu’s hut all that night. Children got up out of bed, but were sent back, their little heads clasped firmly in their parents’ hands.

  ‘The dogs are not barking at us,’ the adults told them. ‘They are barking at Binu. Her soul left her the day Qiliang left.’

  Frog

  Binu went to see the sorceresses of Kindling Village, bearing gifts, and told them of her plan to travel north to find her husband. She was anxious to know how to reach her destination before winter set in, so she could take him some winter clothing. The sorceresses revealed that they had travelled great distances north on spiritual wanderings, and one said she had used the feather of a crow
as a compass. Every night she had roamed the three great cities of the north. Another said she had passed over North Mountain by hitching a ride with a caravan carrying tribute to the capital, secretly pasting a strand of her hair on the tribute chest, allowing her to watch the people feasting in Longevity Hall in the light of day.

  The sorceresses cleverly avoided giving Binu an answer; instead, they examined her tongue and cut off a lock of her hair, which they held over a flame with a pair of tongs. She did not know what it was the sorceresses saw, but they knelt on a straw mat, placed bleached tortoise shells in an earthen vat, and then emptied them back out, all the time chanting incantations. Binu stared at their gaunt faces, their expressions a mixture of fear and joy.

  ‘Do not go,’ they said. ‘If you do, you will not return, but will be struck down by illness on the road and die on the plain.’

  ‘Will I die on the way there,’ Binu asked, ‘or on the way back?’

  The sorceresses blinked rapidly as they examined the pattern created by the tortoise shells on the mat. ‘Do you not fear death?’ they asked. ‘Is it your wish that you will die on the way back?’

  Binu nodded. ‘If I can deliver winter clothing to Qiliang,’ she said, ‘I will die happy.’

  The sorceresses of Kindling Village had never before met a woman like this. With censorious looks in their eyes, they said, ‘What sort of men’s winter clothing is worth dying for?’

  ‘Winter clothing for my husband, Qiliang, is worth dying for,’ she replied.

  The sorceresses were speechless. Then, one last time, they placed the tortoise shells into the earthen vat and emptied them out onto the mat. They fell in the shape of a horse. ‘Since you are willing to sacrifice your life,’ they said, ‘then go. Do not forget that you must hire a Blue Cloud horse, for only a Blue Cloud horse can bring you back home.’

  So Binu went to hire a horse at Banqiao, only to discover that the domestic animal market there had closed down. An autumn flood had caused the river to overflow its banks and swallow up temporary bridges erected by the horse traders. Their riverside thatched sheds stood empty, and the fodder and the smell of livestock had drifted off on the wind, leaving only posts standing askew as they forlornly awaited the return of the horses, though indications were that they would not be coming back.

  Water and straw merged to reclaim the riverbank and, in the wake of the plunder, Blue Cloud Prefecture was waterlogged and bleak. Binu stood at the water’s edge, recalling how she and Qiliang had passed through Banqiao on their way to Cinnamon City to sell their silk. There had been many, many horses in the livestock market that day. The half-naked horse traders used to lead the animals down to the river to drink, all the while calling out to the women tending distant paddies, ‘Big Sister, Big Sister, come and buy my horse.’ That is what Binu had come to do, but traders from the Western Regions or from Yunnan were nowhere to be seen. All that was left of their presence was a large, cast-off, chipped vat in front of one of the sheds, filled half with rainwater and half with the remnants of burnt straw; a raven was perched on the rim.

  Binu followed the riverbank, hoisting up the hem of her robe – pink flowers on a blue background – until she met up with the old pig tender, Sude, who stared at her in wonderment. ‘Are you trying to hire a horse? That, I’m afraid, is out of the question. There are so few of them left in Blue Cloud Prefecture that you could try for the next ten thousand years and not be able to hire one.’

  She walked on in despair, thinking of the sorceresses’ prophecy, and was just stepping through a profusion of wild chrysanthemums when a frog hopped out from the water and, inexplicably, began to follow her. She stopped. ‘Why are you following me?’ she asked. ‘You’re not a horse and you’re not a donkey, so go, go, go back into the water.’ The frog hopped back to the river, landing on a raft bobbing lightly on the surface. Someone had cleaved the raft in two, and the surviving remnant was rotting away, its wooden planks sprouting a bed of musky green moss that was home to the frog. Binu recalled how, during the summer, a blind woman had poled that raft downriver, wearing a bamboo hat on her head and the black attire favoured by women who lived in the mountains. As she sailed downriver she called out a name, but no one in the neighbourhood could understand her North Mountain accent. She was like a black egret that lived on the water, never on land. Eventually, the women who went down to the river to gather lotuses came to understand that the blind woman was searching for her son. But no one had ever seen her son, and nearly all the men of Blue Cloud Prefecture had been taken north as forced labour. Some people wanted to tell her that she should not be drifting downriver if she wanted to find him, that she should pole her raft up north. Others wanted to advise her that the first flood would soon arrive, making the river treacherous. But she stubbornly let the flow of water take her downriver, perhaps not understanding the language of those on the riverbank or maybe not knowing how to leave her raft; and she continued calling out for her son, first to this bank, then to the other. For the blind woman, the difference between day and night did not exist, so there were times in the dark early-morning hours when her shrill, mournful cries swirled above the riverbanks as her raft ploughed through, disturbing the crows in their treetop perches and interrupting the sleep of egrets on the sandbars. This night-shattering din startled people out of their pre-dawn sleep, the sounds from the river bringing them an indescribable sense of unease in the darkness. And their discomfort was justified: the autumn floods arrived early, and everyone said it was the blind woman who had set them loose. After the waters receded, there on the riverbank they saw the wooden raft, now torn in half. The raft was empty, the rafter gone, like a single drop of water in a surging river.

  Binu had not expected that what awaited her at Banqiao was neither a horse nor a horse dealer, but a frog. It might well have been waiting there for some time, on the riverbank or in the water, listening for her footfalls, and the moment she left Banqiao, it began hopping along behind the terrified Binu on the road leading to the village. Was it in fact a reincarnation of the blind woman? All the women in Blue Cloud Prefecture had had previous lives, and some of those had come from the water. Wang Jie’s voiceless mother, at one time an aromatic calamus, crawled down into a calamus thicket just before she died, and when Wang Jie ran up to the riverbank, his mother was nowhere to be seen. He could not tell which calamus plant was his transformed mother, so each year at Qingming, the day for sweeping graves, he went down to the river and performed the rites for all the calamus there. If someone could transmigrate into a calamus plant, Binu was thinking, couldn’t the blind woman have transmigrated into a frog? She turned to scrutinize the frog, and was shaken by what she saw. The amphibian’s eyes were like pearls, pure but lustreless. Yes, it was blind!

  Hoisting up her robe, Binu ran like a madwoman and shouted fearfully, ‘It’s her, it’s her, she’s come back as a frog!’ No one was around to hear her – there was nothing but grass and weeds – so not a soul heard Binu reveal the frog’s true identity. As she ran, she dimly heard the sound of wind coming at her from the river, carrying with it the mountain woman’s cries for her son, and a sudden clarity in the indistinct shouts, ‘Qiliang! Qiliang!’ Unable to believe what she was hearing, Binu slowed her frantic steps, then stopped running altogether. She stood still beneath a mulberry tree and thought about whether she should fear the ghost of a frog. She was not really afraid, so she resolved to ask the blind woman the name of her son. The frog hopped wearily toward her; it was indeed a frog, one whose blind eyes held the sorrow of the mountain woman, but its tightly closed mouth uttered not a sound about the life of the departed.

  ‘What is your son’s name? Is it Qiliang? I’m asking you the name of your son.’

  Binu waited patiently under the mulberry tree, until she realized that the frog was unable to answer this simple question. The villagers had said that people who live all year round in the mountains have no proper names and are either called by numbers or named after animals or plants. So th
e blind woman’s son could not be called Qiliang. Remembering this lessened her anxieties, so Binu heaved a long sigh and, with her hands on her hips, looked down at the frog and said, ‘It’s fine with me if you don’t say anything. I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m a raft, and you want to go with me to find your son! Well, you’re quite well informed. The people in Millstone Village do not know that I plan to go to Great Swallow Mountain, but it seems that you know. My husband Qiliang is there, building a great wall. It is thousands of li from here. I am going there, even though I cannot hire a horse. But you, how can you get there? You could try hopping that far, but I’m afraid you’d be a cripple before you got there.’

  She had planned to hire a horse, or if there were no horses or her savings were inadequate to hire one, she would have hired a donkey. But, as it turned out, there were no donkeys either, and now it seemed that there was only this frog. What good was a frog to her? She could not, after all, ride north on its back.

  Returning home empty-handed, she again met up with Sude and his pigs. He laughed when he saw her. ‘I wasn’t lying, was I? All the horse traders were taken away in the summer, and no one can say whether they are men or ghosts today. How can you expect to hire a horse? You traded away your mulberry trees and your silkworms, didn’t you? Well, if you have the money, why not hire one of my pigs? I’ll show you how to ride it. Yes, hire one of my pigs.’