Air (or Have Not Have)

were over his eyes and he creaked like an old leather chair.

Born in poverty, die in poverty. Born in shit, die in shit, die without hope. Oh, but live in hope, oh yes, only to have those hopes broken, ground down. And for what? To want to slit the throat of a poor animal because it is alive and your daughter is not?

To break your back, weep into the earth, be beaten by the sun, and for what? For the sometime song of the nightingale? The once-a-year feast? The sometimes-full belly that is mostly empty? Love? When love is what makes it hurt when someone is destroyed?

Edrem began to sob – great, heaving, heartbroken, helpless, useless sobs. His skinny, bent body, his wide, flat shoulders swelled and shuddered. Mae hugged him too and smelled sweat, old hides, smoke, bread and yogurt. Like his wife, he was beyond being hugged.

Mae was useless too.

So Mae stood up and stepped back out into the last of the starlight, looking up at the stars, so perfect, so white, so cold. The Dragon's Breath was still blasting and hot. People still stood in silent circles, kicking the ground. The Haj was still at his post, trying to tell Dawn and her friends a story, but looking – looking as the sun rose, for anyone coming up the road.

The rooster cried, saying, Work. Work should begin.

Mae climbed up her friend's stone steps. The steps belonged to others as well, to a thousand years' worth of families. Mae's legs were made of bags of wet earth. Fire burned in her belly. Kwan sat exhausted on a chair in the diwan, hand buried in her hair. Kwan did not see her.

Mae climbed up farther.

Footsteps followed.

Mae turned and on the landing of the staircase, three men looked up at her. She pieced together who they were. Joe and Mr Ken were lined up side by side, as if for a firing squad. Behind was Siao. Siao's eyes were full, and full on Mae.

Beautiful men, so much alike really. Useless. Useless, their beautiful brown eyes, their fat male hands, their lean legs.

'Mae,' said one of them, 'Joe and I have been talking.'

'About the weather?' Mae asked with a crooked smile. 'Everyone talks about the weather.'

'We have decided not to fight,' said Joe. 'Mae. You are expecting a child?'

'It is expecting me,' she replied. She had to sit on the stairs.

Joe walked forward. Joe, she thought, you are beautiful again. Maybe you become beautiful when you are really needed. Maybe somewhere, you are always beautiful. Maybe if you had been born rich…

'I was the one who left,' said Joe. 'I will leave again.'

He leaned forward and kissed her. He took her face in his hands. 'My little Mae.'

His shoulders said: You don't need an idiot like me. I have ruined everything. I lost my father's farm. I want to wander the earth in shame.

'Don't feel useless, Joe,' Mae pleaded. 'We're all useless. We just do things and hope.'

'Lung thinks I'm a fool,' he murmured. 'I am a ghost here.'

The teenage boy had suddenly found cracks in his face. Who needs a teenage village hero in his fifties? What could he do? Nothing. Except to be someone's sharecropper.

'I could buy you some land,' Mae said.

Joe paused. 'I hate farming,' he said, smiling. 'I think I want to drive a truck.'

'So did I,' said Mr Ken, in recognition.

But you grew up, thought Mae.

So, I still love my husband. And I am going to let him go. She stood up.

Everything was very suddenly clear, as if washed clean by flood-water. She looked at her old husband, who was going away; and at faithful simple Mr Ken who had fathered her last-chance child; and at Siao, who was wise.

'I am going to live with Siao,' Mae announced. 'I'm sorry.'

Without a glance at Mr Ken, Mae climbed again. She remembered her first day at school, and seeing the older boys playing football. The captain of one of the teams stopped the game and began to fight. 'That is not fair,' he bellowed.

A little boy Mae's own age came up and stood beside her. He was the first child in the school to talk to her. 'That's my brother,' little Siao said proudly, quietly. 'Are you going to live here?' he asked.

'Until I'm grown up,' little Mae had answered.

Mae went into her old, high room, and there was the machine in front of the high window and she looked out over the courtyard. The sky over the broken roof and the bowl of the mountains was already blue-grey against silver. Somewhere farther down the valley, in the future, the sun was bright, but Kizuldah was still in shadow. The rooster was crowing over and over, having sensed at last that something was wrong.

And there was her old friend, Kwan's TV.

'Chung Mae. Wake. Full audio and video, no queuing, sent in real time and saved to Bugs at Nouvelles. Also to Bedri at Metoff.'

A flick and buzz. The little seeing, detachable eye. Mae held it up in the palm of her hand.

'Hello, Bedri, hello, Bugsy, this is Chung Mae. There has been a flash flood. This is our village now at seven- fifteen a.m.'

The bowl of the shadowed mountain was no longer in orderly lines. White rocks were spread in wedge- shaped lines down the hillside. They rested at crazy angles like eggs in the mud. The treasured and nurtured earth had escaped, wasted itself in bursting down the hillside.

'It may not look too different to you,' said Mae. 'But yesterday it was covered in snow. There was snow on the high hills, and today, looking at the hills across the valley, there is no snow. That is the first time I have seen that.'

She swallowed. She traced the two parallel streets of Kizuldah with her eyes.

'It will not look different to you, but our stone bridge was washed away from Upper Street into Lower Street. I can remember…'

Mae had to break off, and swallow – she felt her eyes swell and heat up. But this was real time; she could not afford mistakes.

'I can remember when the Chinese engineers visited, to volunteer to make the bridge. They came with trowels and concrete because Kizuldah had none. We were too poor.'

Her voice, like a carpet, was worn thin. It straggled away like torn thread. Mae swallowed and continued.

'We loved the Chinese because they were told not to be snobbish, to mix in, and they did, and they worked hard, and they left that bridge behind. And those of us here who are Chinese, thought of them every time we walked across it. The big handsome men, the happy women, who lived in our homes and praised the food. How we all admired them and their bridge. And see the house next to it? Oh!'

Mae had to stop again. She hauled back in moisture and sadness, for she had to keep talking.

'That was Mr and Mrs Kosal's house, but it was the house on the square, and on its benches we spent our lives sitting. Old men played dominoes, our Haj would talk about his travels, and Old Mrs Kosal, now gone, would come out and give the children bonbons. In the square we had the harvest. We would pile up the hessian sacks full of rice, and build bonfires for barbecues. Year on year we would lay out rugs and hire a band, and all of us – the old women, the boys, the little girls – danced and ate our fill of roast and yams and new rice. We sat under the tree. We called it the One Tree. It had been planted there so long ago and was big and huge; it was like a friend, it was like all our fathers taken root. And it's been washed away. It had a swing on it, and all the children – the children of the 1950s, and the 1960s and '70's, '80s, '90s – all of us swung on that swing. So high, so hard, I think some of us must have tossed our spirits into the air. And they are still in the air. The spirits of the children, playing.'

Mae had to wring the moisture out of her eyes.

'The gully is where we kept our ducks and geese. Maybe some of those lived. And the house that has fallen across Upper Street, that was my friends' house, the Dohs' house, and they have lived there for one thousand years. The Dohs were Chinese warriors who stayed, and the house is older than the One Tree. And just above it, that was our new mosque. Every morning our Muerain would sing, and he sang so