Soul Mountain (48 page)

I find an office with the door open. The cadre, in a singlet with his feet crossed on the table and leaning back in a cane chair, is engrossed reading the news. I ask if this was the institution for the solitary aged during the years my grandmother was in such a place.

He puts down his newspaper and says, “It's all changed again, today there are no institutions for the solitary aged, they are all called homes for the aged.”

I don't question if there are still institutions for the venerable aged but simply ask him to check if such and such an old person who was already dead had once lived here. He is easy to talk to and without asking me for identification papers takes out the register of the deceased, looks up the years, stops at a page, and asks me the name of the deceased again.

“Female?”

“Yes,” I confirm.

He pushes the register over so that I can have a look. It is clearly my maternal grandmother's name, and the age tallies.

“She has been dead for ten years,” he says with a sigh.

“Yes,” I reply. “Have you been working here all this time?”

He nods to affirm that he has and I then ask if he remembers what the deceased looked like.

“Let me think.” He leans back to rest his head on the back of the chair. “Was she a short thin old woman?”

I nod, but then I recall from the old photograph hanging at home that she was a very plump old woman. It was a photograph taken some decades earlier and it showed me by her side playing with a top. After that she probably didn't have any photos taken. With the passing of a few decades people can change completely in appearance even though their bone structure does not change. My mother was quite short so my grandmother couldn't have been very tall.

“When she spoke did she always shout?”

There are few old women of her age who don't shout when they talk but what is important is that the name is correct.

“Did she ever mention she had two maternal grandchildren?” I ask.

“You are her maternal grandson?”

“Yes.”

He nods and says, “I think she mentioned that she had grandchildren.”

“Did she ever say they would come and fetch her?”

“Yes, she did.”

“But at the time I was in the countryside.”

“It was the Cultural Revolution,” he explains on my behalf. “She died of natural causes.”

I do not ask how those who did not die of natural causes died but simply ask where she is buried.

“She was cremated. Everyone is cremated. It's not just the old people in homes for the aged, even when we die we will be cremated.”

“The cities are over-populated, there's no room for the dead,” I bring the conversation to an end for him, then ask, “Have you kept her ashes?”

“It's been dealt with. The people here are all old people without relatives, their ashes are dealt with together.”

“Is there a common grave?”

“Er . . .” he thinks about how he can reply.

It is this unfilial grandson who is to blame, and not him, the only thing I can do is to thank him.

I come out of the home for the aged, get on my bicycle, and think to myself that even if there is a communal grave it will in future not be of archaeological significance. Nevertheless, I have finally visited my deceased maternal grandmother who once bought me a spinning top.

You are always searching for your childhood and it’s becoming an obsession. You want to visit each of the places you stayed during your childhood, the houses, courtyards, streets and lanes of your memory.

Your home was once upstairs in a small solitary building on a vacant lot with a big pile of rubble at the front: the building that once stood there had been destroyed by a bomb or a fire and had never been rebuilt. Green bristlegrass grew in the rubble and broken walls, and crickets could often be found when the broken tiles and bricks were turned over. There was a very clever type of cricket called Black Satin Cream and when their shiny ink-black wings vibrated they made a clear, resonating sound. There was also another kind called Locust which had a big body and a big mouth and was good at fighting. As a child you had a wonderful time on that rubble heap.

You also recall that you once lived in a courtyard compound which went a long way inside. It had a big heavy black door at the entrance and you had to stand on your toes to get to the metal ring-latch. When the door was opened you had to go around a carved screen. The horns and the heads of the stone unicorns on each side of the screen were shiny because children would touch them whenever they came in or out. Behind the carved screen was a damp and mossy courtyard onto which water was regularly thrown out, so if you were not careful you would slip and fall. You had a pair of albino rabbits at the time. One was savaged in the wire cage by a yellow weasel and later on the other one also disappeared. Days later, when you went to play in the back courtyard, you discovered it had drowned in the urine pot and its once white fur was now stained and dirty. You looked at it for a long time but from then on, as far as you can remember, you did not go into the back courtyard again.

You also recall that you once lived in a courtyard complex with a round gateway. Yellow chrysanthemums and crimson cockscombs grew in the courtyard and perhaps because of these flowers it was always bright and sunny. There was a little gate at the back of the courtyard and behind it, at the bottom of the stone steps, was the lake. On the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival the grown-ups opened the gate and laid out a table with moon cakes and melon seeds and, with the lake before them, they admired the moon as they ate and drank. A bright full moon hung in the sky over the deep, serene, far side of the lake while in the lake its elongated reflection wobbled. One night you passed by there on your own and pulled open the bolt: you were terrified by the lonely deep waters of the lake, its beauty was too deep, more than a child could bear, and you ran away as fast as you could. Thereafter, whenever you passed by the gate at night you were always very careful and did not again ever dare to touch the bolt.

You also recall that you once lived in a house with a garden but you can only remember the patterned brick floor of your big downstairs room on which you used to play marbles. Your mother wouldn’t let you play in the garden. You were sick and spent much of your time in bed and could only play in your room with your box of marbles. When your mother wasn’t home you would stand on the bed and, holding onto the windowsill, look at the colourful flags on the steamers and on the wharf. There were always strong winds blowing along the Yangtze.

You revisit these old places but find nothing. The rubble heap in front of the small two-storey building is not there, nor is the heavy black door with the metal ring-latch, nor even the quiet little lane in front of the house, and certainly not the courtyard compound with the carved screen. Probably that place has already been turned into a bitumen road heavy with traffic – trucks with full loads honking their horns and sending up dust and ice-block wrappers, and long distance buses with missing windows carrying on the roof an assortment of bags of local products, clothing and foodstuffs to be resold elsewhere – and itself covered in melon seed husks and chewed up sugar cane spat from bus windows. There is no moss, no round gateway, no yellow chrysanthemums or crimson cockscombs, no elongated moon in the lake, nor terrifying stillness and loneliness. Instead, there are only the same standard red brick buildings with economy-coke stoves lining narrow corridors like sentries at the door of each apartment. Along the banks of the Yangtze the noisy flapping of flags in the wind can no longer be heard. Instead there are only warehouses, warehouses, warehouses, silos, warehouses, silos, cement in tough paper bags, chemical fertilizer in thick plastic bags and loud shouting or singing blaring from speakers.

You wander in a daze like this from city to city, county town to district capital then to provincial capital, then from another provincial capital to another district capital, then one county town after another. Afterwards you pass through a certain district capital then return to a particular provincial capital. Sometimes, in some small lane which city planners had missed, or couldn’t be bothered with, or had no intention of doing anything about, or which they couldn’t do anything about even if they wanted to, you suddenly see an old house with the door open, and you stop there and to look into the courtyard where clothes are drying on bamboo poles. It is as if you have only to enter and you will return to your childhood and those dim memories will be resurrected.

When you go in you discover that wherever you go it is possible to find remnants of your childhood. Ponds with floating duckweed, small town wineshops, windows of upstairs rooms overhanging the street, arched stone bridges, canopied boats passing under arched bridges, stone steps at back doors of houses leading to a river, and a dried up old well are all linked to your childhood memories and evoke irrepressible sadness, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you had actually stayed in these places as a child. The old slate-roof houses in a small seaside town and the little square tables outside where people sit drinking cold tea arouses this homesickness of yours. The tomb of Lu Guimeng of the Tang Dynasty, probably containing nothing but his clothes and headwear, is a grave covered with creepers and wild hemp in the back courtyard of some anonymous old school next to fields and a few old trees, yet the slanting rays of the afternoon sun are stained with your inexplicable grief. The lonely compounds in the Yi districts and the wooden houses on pylons of the remote Miao stockades halfway up mountains, which you had never dreamed about, are telling you something. You can’t help wondering whether you have another life, that you have retained some memories of a previous existence, or that these places will be your refuge in a future existence. Could it be that these memories are like liquor and after fermentation will produce a pure and fragrant concoction which will intoxicate you again?

What in fact are childhood memories? How can they be verified? Just keep them in your heart, why do you insist on verifying them?

You realize that the childhood you have been searching for doesn’t necessarily have a definite location. And isn’t it the same with one’s so-called hometown? It’s no wonder that blue chimney smoke drifting over roof-tiles of houses in little towns, bellows groaning in front of wood stoves, those translucent rice-coloured little insects with short forelegs and long hind-legs, the campfires and the mud-sealed wood-pail beehives hanging on the walls of the houses of mountain people, all evoke this homesickness of yours and have become the hometown of your dreams.

Although you were born in the city, grew up in cities and spent the larger part of your life in some huge urban metropolis, you can’t make that huge urban metropolis the hometown of your heart. Perhaps, because it is so huge that within it at most you can only find in a particular place, in a particular corner, in a particular room, in a particular instant, some memories which belong purely to yourself, and it is only in such memories that you can preserve yourself fully. In the end, in this vast ocean of humanity you are at most only a spoonful of green seawater, insignificant and fragile.

You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures.