At the Heart of the Universe (2 page)

It took a month for their assault to work. Someone said that a woman in the village had done it once, two years ago, and knew how. They brought the woman, not the mother—she had not done it herself, for everyone said that was too hard—but the mother-in-law, who had done it for her. They brought the mother-in-law to tell them and forced her to listen. Round-trip it would cost a lot—for the bus and the train and the bus in Changsha and tea, it would really cost a lot, maybe nine yuan—a month's earnings. They handed the money to her wrapped in a knotted kerchief, and told her to count it. She had to put the baby down to do so.



Now, Changsha City is overwhelming. The train station is huge but filled with people running and shouting and jostling and not looking into each other's eyes but looking to the place they are going next. The faces are lighter skinned, tanned but not burnished like country faces. She stands in the midst of the chaos, searching for the bus they told her to take, the bus up the Nan Da Lu. The baby is screaming, and she rocks it and comforts it with a finger and then, again, a breast. Mixed in with the crowd are men in uniforms of various types, soldiers in olive-green Mao suits and beaked caps with stars, and also local police in blue. She goes outside and finds the buses. Dozens of them are lined up with their motors running, others are pulling in or pulling out. She knows heat from the farm, from working all day in the fields, but she has never felt heat like this, a dirty heat, for the air is thick with acrid smoke, engine exhaust, and oil fumes. The honking is incessant. She starts to cough. The baby starts to scream again. She walks from bus to bus and cannot find any that says “Nan Da Lu.” She thinks to ask, but is ashamed, and starts to go up to a woman sweeping the street but stops because she thinks,
Maybe I won't do it. Maybe I'll go back home. No, I can't do that. Maybe I'll keep going, use my last yuan to get back on the train and go out past the other side of the city, find another village, another farm, another life.
This thought lasts only a few seconds before all the impossibilities arise and crowd in. In her despair the only thing that prompts her to go up to the woman is the fact that she is saving her little baby, and that there is hope for life to go on if she has a son.

“Where is the bus to Nan Da Lu?” she asks.

The woman stops sweeping, and stares unkindly at her. She spits in the street. “The bus runs only up and down Nan Da Lu. You have to take a bus to get to that bus.”

“Which bus?” she says, suddenly afraid. No one told her about two buses. It will cost double. Does she have enough money for two buses, back and forth?

“The Shaoshan Lu bus, going south. Walk down Wuyi Lu three blocks. Over there. Wait for Shaoshan bus. Get off at the Nan Da Lu.”

She thanks her, and starts to walk. There are hundreds of bicycles fighting the trucks and buses. The bicycles are carrying not just extra people, as in the roads around the village, but everything imaginable—animals and pots and pans and boxes and even huge oil drums strapped across, and some have trailers or small truck beds attached and are carrying things stacked twice as high as the cyclist. Soldiers and police are everywhere, in uniforms and caps with red stars. Many of the people are in worn Mao clothes, light blue or dark blue. The street is as wide as the river at home. The noise is like no other she has ever heard, like being in a small field with a hundred tractors, each with a differently pitched horn. She can hardly hear or breathe. Her chest feels clogged. She passes a sign: “ONE CHILD FAMILY IS HAPPIER AND BETTER.”

Coughing and spitting, she keeps on, finds the Shaoshan bus, pays, gets on. It is packed, and she has to stand. Suddenly she feels lost, and fights her way to the front, to the conductor—a woman with an astonishing scar across her forehead.

“Can you tell me when we get to the Nan Da Lu?” she shouts over the racket.

The conductor nods.

She stands nearby, waiting.

Maybe one of my mother's gods will keep me from finding where to go to leave her, and I can go home with her. Maybe the Wrong Bus God, yes.

She fingers the piece of jade around her neck, a gift from her mother when she left home to marry. “It's my oldest Buddha,” her mother said, “and is so worn, and so small, that you can wear it in safety—no one but us would ever know it is a Buddha.”

“But I don't bow to the Buddha as you do. That god is yours.”

“Wear it, dear one, and you will know that I am with you.”

Now she fingers the smooth jade, its slight soft contour and worn lines of carving bringing up not so much the shape of any Enlightened One, but the sense of her mother, with her now. She did not even tell her mother of the pregnancy, afraid of what might happen, and when it did, she did not get in touch with her. She had the idea of taking Chun and going back to her mother, to live with her and her crazed father—but she knew that they would never allow her to take Xia. She wasn't ready to give up her husband and child, no. Now she thinks,
How could I brave the shame? How could my own mother have sent me, her beloved, away from her—to this?

“Nan Da Lu!” the conductor announces. “Let her out, you barbarians,” she shouts to the people standing in the way. “Let the country girl out.”

“How did you know that?” she asks, turning before she goes down the steps.

The conductor smiles, and shakes her head kindly. “I was one too. Why did you come to big city?”

“Why did you?”

“To get my scar!” She laughs, crazily. “Good luck.”

“Thank you. How far is the police station?”

The woman glances at the baby. Her eyes widen, and then narrow with suspicion, or understanding. People shout for the bus to get going. “I don't know,” she says. “Try the market. Two blocks up, you'll see it.”

“Try the market?”

“Try the market. They have excellent celery. Like at home.
Safe
to eat too.” More shouts from the crowd. “All right, you animals! We'll move your cage someplace else. Get out now, dearie. And listen: be careful.” She nods her head for emphasis and, glancing around, whispers, “Be careful.”

Try the market?
Excellent celery? Like home? Safe?
She takes this as a sign.



The Nan Da Lu is not as broad as the other roads, the traffic lighter, although the flow of bicycles is undiminished. She focuses on finding the market. The baby is sleeping, comforted by the familiar rocking of her strides. Sure enough, in two blocks there it is, an alley street going off perpendicular to the road, back toward a park, a narrow alley of stalls much like the Thursday market in the village. She wanders along with the crowd, hiding her baby under her dress. She passes down and back the whole length of the alley, glancing at the stalls selling clothes on racks, all bright colors hanging limp in the scorching noon sun, and woks sizzling vegetables and butchers with ducks and chickens and pigeons in cages and a wooden board drenched with blood and a hose and a mangy dog hanging around hoping, eternally hoping, and bicycle repairers and, yes, midway down, the long wooden trays piled with all kinds of vegetables.

This is it. No. I can't. This is why they told me not to do it myself, why the woman in the village sent her mother-in-law to do it. Saying goodbye at home is like not really saying goodbye. I can't do it, no.

She turns and starts to walk out of the alley, but—unused to her plastic sandals—stumbles on a stone and almost falls. Pain shoots up her leg, hot and sharp, but she dares not attract attention and keeps walking on. Out on the main street, she sits down on the curb. She thinks,
If you do it, you have to be sure. But the conductor said, “Be careful.” There are soldiers and police around. Can't ask here. Walk farther away and ask.
She walks back down the road, finds two young girls in bright dresses—perhaps going home for lunch from school?—and asks them.

“Is the Nan Da Lu police station nearby?”

“Yes. Just down there in the other direction. Can we see your baby?”

“Yes.” She unwraps her. The baby blinks in the sun.

“Ohhh! Beautiful! Boy or girl?”

She can barely say it. “Girl.”

“How old?”

“One...” She puts her hand over her face and turns and rushes off, away.

But not far. There is no time to go far and still make it back to the station for the last train home. Her mind fills again with fantasies of ways out, and in each she sees her mother-in-law's face, and in it her husband's face, and her other daughter's face, and the facts and the fantasies go around and around until she thinks she will scream or run out into the traffic on the road with the baby in her arms. The heat and the fact that she has not eaten or drunk anything for hours make her feel dizzy, so that people and things seem part of a dream from which she will soon awaken.

And then something else takes over and it is as if some other hand is leading her back to the alley of the market. Before she gets there the baby starts to fuss again, and saying to herself,
This is for the last time
, she sits in a doorway and takes out her breast and uses her two fingers to help her beautiful one take her nipple in her lips and suck, suck lustily, sending a warm chill through her, and on one hand she doesn't want to look into those eyes set like smooth dark jade in that face but she can't not look, and she forces a smile and the forcing brings a real smile, the smile, at best, of possibility for this little lost one. She takes the carefully calligraphed note and ties it firmly into the swaddling clothes and smells her one last time, that smell like no other, baby-soft and fragrant, like spring's own hair, and puts her lips to the soft skin of her face her little nose her rosebud lips, and then she seems to float over the sidewalk over the dirt of the alley of the market crowded at noon and hiding the baby in a fold of her dress she goes straight to the vegetable stand trying to blend in and yes the celery is piled high and the stalks healthy and easily parted and, yes,
safe
, and she places the tiny bundle in the little nest she makes for her and without looking back rushes off, away, resolving not to watch what happens but then at a safe distance from behind the pile of iron and tires and pumps of the bicycle-repair stall, she watches.

It takes no time at all. Vegetable sellers know their vegetables. She watches a short, stout woman wearing a blue bandanna go to rearrange the celery and suddenly look down, recoil, look again, and realize, and pick up the baby and shout:

“Whose baby? Whose baby?” People turn to look. “Whose baby?”

Mine!
To keep this from escaping she puts a fist to her mouth, jams it hard, smashing her lips against her teeth.

“Whose baby?” the woman shouts. People stare, look around for the mother.

Mine!
Fist to her mouth, she turns away.

“Whose baby whose baby?” echoes and echoes.

Turns back, blood on her hand now, on her fist.

“
Whose baby whose baby whose babywhosebabywhosebaby
...”

Turns away, huddles up inside, crouches over as if the fist is coming down on her head, her back, her belly, runs away.

2

The air-conditioned minibus turns up the narrow alley, swerves to avoid an oncoming motorcycle piled high with live chickens and ducks, and heads toward a skinny ash-gray dog lying in a puddle of shade cast by six bricklayers perched on a scaffold of bamboo, working hard to build just a little bit more of modern China. At the imminent death of the dog the three Western passengers scream, perhaps thinking of their own family dog, Cinnamon, left behind in Columbia, New York. The bus driver hits the horn. They barrel by, listening for the
kuh-chunk!
of the dog's death, but hear none. The bus bounces on over the rutted dirt of the alley. Clutching their seats, the family of three turns back and sees, through the dust, the dog, sitting against a wall of the alley, yawning. The two Chinese—the driver and the tour guide—burst out laughing. The bus rocks on toward what looks like a dead end where the alley walls converge but at the last moment it goes left through an open gate into a small courtyard enclosed on three sides by one-story cement buildings with black-tile roofs, and stops.

“Nan Da Lu Police Station,” says Rhett Wong, the guide. “Everybody out.”

Rising quickly from her seat in the front of the bus, Clio checks on her daughter and her husband and moves with an athlete's ease down the steps and out onto the dusty ground of the courtyard, thinking,
Finally, here. Finally we're facing it, finally we'll find out whatever facts there are. Something else might happen here, of which we three—and she—are a part.

She looks around at the series of one-story buildings edging the bare dirt square. The overhangs of each roof are supported by wooden columns to offer shade—giving the place the feel of an outpost in the Wild West. Here and there a policeman stands or squats, a cigarette in hand or mouth, staring at her, not moving. She finds herself focusing on the open gate, two stuccoed concrete pillars at the end of the elbows of the embracing walls.
This is where she would have come. In the dark, just before dawn, crouching here, the baby in her arms. Looking at the bare bulb over the doorway, there. Waiting. Fearing, hoping. Desperate, both ways. Here, to there. Mine, to yours. She did it. Did she stay and watch, or did she just keep running? Right here, in that gateway. Broken.