Air (or Have Not Have)

once.

Mae remembered weaving pots from reed. She remembered women whose faces were almost familiar, whose names she could almost recall, and she heard them agree that it was best to be a middle wife. First wives were supposed to lead, and lived in fear of being usurped. The youngest wife would always be the lowest in the house. 'So how can you be a middle wife without being the youngest first?' someone asked.

Mae remembered how to make cucumber pickles that would survive crisp and free from vinegar taste for three years. She remembered bean harvests, sitting in groups sorting good from bad, shelling, grilling, drying, pickling. The women had worn quilted jackets, no makeup, and they all smoked chervil in their soapstone pipes. They tried to get rid of teeth; teeth just caused trouble and pain.

Mae remembered the poems.

'Tis the fire of Love that is in the reed, it is the fervour of Love that is in the wine

'Mrs Chung?' It was Mr Ken, standing in front of her.

The reed is the comrade of everyone who has been parted from a friend

His neatly trimmed hair, his round face, all seemed newly widowed and alone. She saw his face as a boy, as a grandmother would see it, the face of the future. Now grown up, now bereft, now without her. The chasm of the future into which we all fall, and decline, and disappear. The hollow that is left in the world by our own missing shape.

'Oh,' she said, and hugged him.

She wept into his shoulder.

'Mrs Chung,' he said again, and gingerly patted her back.

'I… have… your grandmother's memories!' Mae blurted it out all in a rush, fearful, terrified, and she covered her mouth.

'You had a blue plastic truck, I remember that, and you drove the family crazy making truck noises. You wanted to be a truck driver.' Her face was stained with tears. She was shaken with the mystery and sadness of life. 'Why did you never become a truck driver?'

Ken Kuei's round and handsome face was slack, unmanned by the sudden intimacy. The question was a good one. His grandmother had never asked it.

'The farm,' he murmured. The shrug said there was much more to be said. He glanced about the courtyard. Mae was still in her morning robe.

'Come inside, Mrs Chung,' he said, and began to lead her. 'Do you want me to get Joe?'

'I don't know.' She wanted Mr Ken. She wanted to talk to him about his childhood. She had a terribly strong sense of who he was. She had held him as a baby. She had known that even as a baby he was a reserve of quiet, calm strength. He never wept or wailed. He could fight, but only when he needed to. He had been so good at football.

Like Ahmet had been.

All of this made her weep for what had gone, as if Kuei's childhood was the distant shore of some beautiful retreating land. For Mrs Tung, taking care of the family's long-awaited grandson had been the last time she was useful.

'I was a skeleton for years,' said Mae, confused.

Mr Ken's face was seriously worried for her.

'Your grandmother loved you,' said Mae. 'She was so sad when you went away.'

He had managed to get her back into her own house. 'I did not go away.'

'You grew up,' she accused him, and started to weep. 'We should come out of shells,' she said. 'The shells should be the babies, and the babies should be left behind, alive. For the mothers. For the mothers to cradle.'

'Stay here,' said Mr Ken. And he ran.

And Mae was left alone, and she wept; she wept for the village that had already died, the old Kizuldah.

You should be able to turn a corner and find home again, with its undrained marshes in the valley floor. The valley was left unploughed for the waterfowl, the foxes, the stars, and young lovers.

Oh, Mrs Tung, I was a friend of yours, and still I did not know you. I never came close. After you had sat me on your knee and showed me pages of clothes and beautiful women. Even though I saw you every day, still I did not know you. I never asked you about Japanese airplanes. Was it true that the landlord put poachers' heads on spikes?

An answer came from somewhere. Yes.

You see? No one believes that now. People think it was just Communist fairy tales. We lose, we lose so much.

The voice came back. Only everything.

It was as though Old Mrs Tung had come in and sat down.

Once there was a cold snap and I dropped a shirt from the laundry line and it broke.

And Mae saw that world: of rising with the dawn, of bending all day jamming rice plants into mud.

In the morning, you would hear all the men going off, singing songs.

Sing them for me, said Mae in her mind. And stood up to work.

Both of them sang old work songs that only Mrs Tung remembered – simple songs about someone whose work trousers would not stay up, or about the love of the porcupine for the wood louse. She remembered jokes that the villagers had told, jokes about moths. Who was so innocent now to joke about moths, sole leather, or candles?

Mae hung up her laundry, singing to herself in a loud, rough, peasant voice.

'Mrs Chung?' asked a young voice.

Mae turned and had to blink. The round young face could have been from any era: the 1940s, the 1980s, or the 2000s. The low rope collar of the dress told her what year it was.

This was one of Saturday's graduates, Han An. 'I came to thank you for my graduation dress.'

'You are welcome,' said Mae, and bowed. An was the daughter of a woman who had been Mae's best friend when they were children. They hardly saw each other now.

'We heard that you were not well after the Test.'

Mae shook her head. No, she was not well at all.

The young woman looked shaken. 'We all thought that, as fashion expert, you would be most at home with the new things…'

Mae started to say what had happened, and found she could not. It was too complicated and too simple at the same time. She could phrase it, I am haunted by a ghost. She could say: I stole part of Mrs Tung's soul. She could say, I was in Airmail when she died. She could say: I think Airmail is a place.

All of it would be true and all of it false. Language, like Mrs Tung herself, was an old, fragile footbridge, breaking through.

Mae stood with the wet sheets folded over her arm. Everything foxed her. An saw this. 'Let me help you,' said An.

An had bought cakes of gratitude. She passed these to Mae to hold out of reach of Mr Ken's dog, and began to nip clothes pegs onto the sheets.

If I was still concerned about being fashion expert, Mae thought, I would be alarmed. I would be alarmed at this loss of status. But I cannot be alarmed. I cannot help it.

An led her back into her own kitchen. She made Mae tea. Mae unwrapped the cakes, and she began to weep. She wept copiously, like a natural spring welling up out of the depths of the earth.

They were old-fashioned cakes, cakes such as the villagers had baked for each other for hundreds of years; beautiful little cakes made mostly from air, old rice, spare sugar, preserved sweet things in tiny precious slices. A story of hundreds of years of poverty and gratitude was told in those cakes. It seemed to her that Old Mrs Tung, all her friends and her mother's friends, all of the village women from the hard centuries, had clustered around to