Now that the final curtain had fallen on this drama, I really did feel as free and easy as I’d ever felt before. Before the night was over I was back home with Mother.
In the days before Mother died, Dalan’s mayor, Lu Shengli, was found guilty of accepting bribes and sentenced to death, with a one-year reprieve. Found guilty of paying bribes, Geng Lianlian and Parrot Han were put in chains and thrown into prison. Their “Phoenix Plan” had been a gigantic hoax, and the loans of millions to the Eastern Bird Sanctuary, guaranteed by Lu Shengli, as mayor, were, for the most part, used as bribes; what little remained was simply squandered. The interest on the loans was never recovered, let alone the loans themselves, but the banks did nothing for fear that the sanctuary would go belly-up; that, in fact, was a worry shared by all of Dalan City. Eventually, this farce of a sanctuary closed its doors, the birds all gone, weeds covering the feathers and bird droppings all over the compound, the workers off to their next employment. But it continued to exist on the books of all the local banks, as the interest mounted.
Sha Zaohua, who had been missing for years, returned from wherever she’d been; she’d taken good care of herself, and looked like a woman in her thirties. But when she went to the pagoda to see Mother, she received a cold reception. In the days that followed, she carried a torch for Sima Liang, who had returned to town. She produced a glass marble, which she said was an expression of his love for her, and a mirror, which was to be her gift to him. She said she’d saved herself all these years for him. But in his penthouse apartment at Osmanthus Mansions, Sima Liang had too much on his mind to give any thought to rekindling the love affair with Zaohua. Yet she followed him everywhere, which nearly drove him crazy. “My dear cousin,” he bellowed one day, “just what do you think you’re doing? I’ve offered you money, clothes, jewelry, but you don’t want any of those. What do you want?” Pulling her hand off of the hem of his jacket, he sat down hard on his sofa, angry and frustrated, accidentally knocking over a flower vase with his foot; a dozen or more purplish red roses lay strewn limply over the now water-soaked table. Zaohua, who was wearing a diaphanous black dress, got down on her knees on the wet carpet and stared up into Sima Liang’s face. He couldn’t help but look at her out of the corner of his eye. She had a small head and a long neck on which only a few fine lines spoiled the perfect texture. Given his vast experience with women, he knew that the neck was the one place that always gave away a woman’s age. How had Zaohua, a woman in her fifties, kept her neck from looking like either like a length of sausage or a piece of dried-out wood? From there his gaze moved down to the hollows just below her shoulders and the cleavage above the scoop neck of her dress, and nowhere did she have the appearance of a woman in her fifties; rather, she looked like a flower that had been kept in cold storage for half a century, or a bottle of fine liquor that’s been buried for fifty years at the base of a pomegranate tree. A chilled flower is just waiting to be picked; a bottle of old liquor demands to be drunk. Sima Liang reached out and touched her gently on the knee; she moaned and her face flushed bright red, like a brilliant sunset. Throwing herself into his arms, she wrapped her arms around his neck and thrust her heated bosom into his face, rubbing her breasts back and forth until an oily substance ran from his nose and tears oozed from his eyes. “Sima Liang, I’ve waited for you more than thirty years.” “Don’t give me that,” he said. “Thirty years. Do you know what that makes me guilty of?” “I’m a virgin.” “A thief
Before walking out of the room, Sima Liang looked down at the aging virgin and said glibly, “Well, I’ll be damned, sure and truly damned. You are a virgin.” Sarcasm aside, a pair of tears filled the corners of his eyes. As for Zaohua, who still lay on the carpet, her eyes were moist with joy and infatuation as she looked up at him.
When Sima Liang returned to the room, Zaohua was seated on the windowsill, stark naked, obviously waiting for him. “Well, am I a virgin or aren’t I?” she said coldly.
“Cousin,” Sima Liang replied, “you can forget the act. Remember, I’ve spent most of my life around women. Besides, if I were to marry you, what difference would it make if you were a virgin or not?”
Zaohua responded with a shriek that caused Sima Liang to break out in a cold sweat. A blue glare, like poisonous gas, emerged from her eyes. He sprang toward her just as she tipped backward; the last thing he saw were the reddened heels of her bare feet, heading down.
With a sigh, Sima Liang turned to me as I rushed into the room, drawn to the bloodcurdling shriek. “Did you see that, Little Uncle? If I follow her out the window, I won’t be a worthy son of Sima Ku. But the same is true if I don’t. What should I do?”
I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
Grabbing an umbrella some woman had left in his penthouse, he said, “If I die, Little Uncle, you take care of my body. If I don’t, then I’ll live forever.”
He flicked open the umbrella, and with a loud “Shit!” leaped out the window and fell like a ripe fruit.
Nearly blind with fright, I stuck the upper half of my body out the window and yelled, “Sima Liang – Sima Liang -” But he was too busy falling to pay attention to me. People below craned their necks to witness the spectacle, ignoring the body of Sha Zaohua, which was splattered like a dead dog on the cement in front of them, and watching as Sima Liang parachuted right through the canopy of a plane tree and into a cluster of holly trees, trimmed as neatly as Stalin’s mustache, sending what looked like green sludge out in waves. The people on the ground crowded around the trees just in time to see Sima Liang emerge as if nothing had happened, patting the seat of his pants and waving to the crowd. His face was a riot of colors, like the glass windows of the church we went to as children. “Sima Liang,” I shouted tearfully. He pushed his way through the crowd, walked up to the building’s entrance, and hailed a yellow cab. He opened the door and jumped in before the purple-clad doorman could react. The cab sped away with a burst of black exhaust, turned the corner, and entered the stream of traffic; then it was gone.
I heaved a great sigh, as if awakening from a nightmare. It was a bright, sunny, intoxicating, and lazy day, the sort that seems filled with hope but is rife with traps. Sunlight glistened off of Mother’s seven-story pagoda at the edge of town.
“Son,” Mother said weakly, “take me to church. It’ll be the last time…”
With my nearly blind mother on my back, I walked for five hours down the lane behind the Beijing Opera dormitory that wound past the polluted stream by the chemical dye plant, until I found the recently restored church. Tucked away among a row of squat houses, it was simple and a bit run-down, no longer the imposing place it had once been. The front of the church and both sides of the lane were packed with bicycles decorated with colorful ribbons. An old woman sat at the gate entrance, looking like a cross between a ticket-taker and a lookout for secret activities occurring inside. She gave us a friendly nod and let us pass through the gate. The yard was packed with people; there were even more inside the church itself, all of them listening to a sermon delivered by a wizened old pastor who slurred his words. His wrinkled hands were folded on the pulpit, illuminated by a ray of sunlight. The parishioners included old people and small children, but the majority consisted of girls and young women, all seated on benches and making notations in open Bibles in their laps. An old woman who recognized Mother made room for the two of us against the wall, beneath the canopy of an aged locust tree, covered with white blossoms like oversized snowflakes. The air was stifling. A loudspeaker attached to the trunk of the tree spread the old pastor’s words throughout the gathering. Hard to say whether the crackles and static stemmed from the age of the loudspeaker or of the pastor. We sat quietly and listened as he droned on and on, exhorting the parishioners to good deeds and a pure life.
When the sermon ended, a chorus of Amens emerged from the teary-eyed crowd, followed by the strains of a pipe organ off to the side, playing a closing hymn familiar to the worshippers. Those who could sing did so loudly; those who couldn’t hummed along as best they could. That ended the service; some of the parishioners stood and stretched, while others remained seated to talk softly among themselves.
Mother sat on the bench, hands on her knees, eyes closed, as if she’d fallen asleep. Not a whisper of wind, yet the white blossoms suddenly fell from the tree above us, as if the electricity to the magnet holding them on to the branches had been switched off. Their fragrance filled the courtyard as great quantities of them fell onto Mother’s hair, her neck, her earlobes, her hands, her shoulders, and the ground all around her.
Amen!
The old pastor, having completed his sermon, shuffled over to the door of the church and, bracing himself by holding on to the doorframe, gazed at the wondrous floral spectacle before him. He had a mass of unruly red hair, deep blue eyes, a red nose, and a heavy yellow beard. Metal caps covered some of his teeth. Startled by the sight, I stood up. Was this the legendary father I’d never known? The old woman who knew Mother hobbled over on bound feet to make the introductions. “This is Pastor Malory, our old pastor’s eldest son. He has come to us from Lanzhou
