"Air (or Have Not Have)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ryman Geoff)

CHAPTER 3

Mae was finding everything funny.

She lay in bed, pushing herself into the corner of the alcove, her face stretched into a grin she could not explain. Her family and friends were crowded around. They knew Mae had been inside Mrs Tung when she died.

Mae's mother sat beside the bed in state and that was funny. 'Allah!' her mother said, calling on the God of the Prophet with hands raised. Mae's mother was a Buddhist.

'A terrible thing,' said Mae's brother Ju-mei, shaking his head. He had put on his best city suit and long city coat for the occasion. He sweated, steaming for his respectability.

Kwan passed Mae tea, and that was funny. Someone dies and so you make a cup of tea?

Kwan intoned, 'Many people say that they did not find death so terrible.'

Mae laughed. It was the soft, hooting sound of heartbreak that was part of her now. 'How can they say anything if they're dead?'

Kwan said, calmly, 'Sometimes the doctors bring them back.'

'Isn't science wonderful?' Mae chuckled. 'Did they ask the people if they wanted to come back?'

Mae's mother cursed the devil. 'It is Shytan, the work of Shytan!'

'We will take care of you now,' promised Mae's brother, heavy-faced.

That made Mae laugh, too. More like you want me to go on taking care of you, she thought.

Mae remembered Mr Ken's wife, lying in the courtyard. 'How is Mrs Ken Tui?' Mae asked.

Everything went silent. Joe, sitting at the kitchen table, lifted up his baseball cap and scratched his head.

Kwan answered. 'Tui is dead, too.' Mae's brother leaned forward and took her hand. Kwan hesitated, then spoke. 'She ran out of the yard. She was crying that she was going mad. She threw herself down into the well.'

Mae squawked with laughter. It was terrible, but she did. 'You all went to see an opera and meanwhile the rest of us lived one.' She was still chuckling when she asked the next question. 'Do they count the Test as a success?'

Mr Wing looked grim. 'No,' he said.

Mae found that funny, too, and chuckled again and waved her hand. 'It would seem not,' she replied.

Mr Wing said, 'They said that the process was proved physically safe but there were still many instances of panic and injury.'

'And no one can drink from their wells, they are so stuffed with the bodies of neighbours.' Mae laughed again, and alarmed herself. She was laughing too much.

Mr Wing kept doggedly informing her, to calm her, which only made things funnier. 'They will not begin Aircasting for another year.'

'So, we have a year to live,' Mae said.

'There is to be an international program of education.'

Mae imitated the voices, out of pure, hilarious rage. You all now have a pigpen inside your head and we do not know how to clean it up. 'The Pig' is called 'Terror.' You also have another area marked 'Death.' Please do not choose 'Death.' You can choose 'Terror' and 'Panic' whenever you like.

'There is also,' Kwan said calmly, 'a world of the spirit. And you have travelled that.'

Mae stopped laughing, abruptly.

The next morning, Mae tried to go back to work.

She tried once more to boil the clothes. It took all morning. She kept dropping things, distracted. She was aware that as a fashion expert she should look her best. She put on a best dress, but it wouldn't hang right, as though it were on backwards. She started to apply makeup in the mirror and burst into tears.

The face was alive but alone.

The brazier was moved outside the kitchen. Mae found herself standing outside in the courtyard, with the long wooden laundry spoon still in her hand, remembering.

She was remembering all the children who had run in that yard, the girls in dirty flowered trousers, the littlest boys in shorts, the biggest lads in sweatshirts, sports gear. She saw them in waves, coming and going. She found herself remembering children like Woo, who had died, caught in a thresher.

Before Mae was born.

Mae was remembering what Old Mrs Tung had seen.

She remembered a farming village owned by a landlord who the Communists later killed. She remembered his car, all polished cream metal, too large and fast for local roads. It was pulled by oxen and the landlord waved from its back seat. He was fat, childish. He gave little Miss Hu a bonbon. Hu Ai-Ling had been Mrs Tung's name 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 receive that thank-you.

Joe came home early, with Dr Bauschu, the county doctor.

'You cannot work, wife,' said Joe, heartsick, as if she were a favourite machine that had broken.

She paused and contemplated what must be true. 'My heart is too full,' she replied.

And suddenly, she remembered him, she saw him. Tiny, mischievous, in shorts – the child Joe. She saw him as Mrs Tung saw him. Oh, what an angel! A beautiful, merry little fellow in shorts, running amongst the others, chuckling and buffing them on the head, still laughing when they cuffed him back. He grew quickly and was too soon developed. Joe had ceased to learn.

There was little enough mischief in Joe now, or laughter.

'Oh, husband! What we have all lost, what we will all go on losing through all of history, it cannot be weighed. It cannot be measured!'

Her handsome, comic husband stood helpless, scratching his head. Whoever had heard of a wife who could not work because she perceived the weight of history?

Dr Bauschu asked her to sit down and roll up her sleeve. He was a hard, thin man who circulated among half a dozen villages with a battered old black briefcase. He had always been highly critical of the fashion expert – she did too much massaging with oils, too much dental flossing, services on the borderline where beauty crossed into health.

He seemed quite pleased that she was ill. 'So, you see, when illness really comes, even you call for the doctor.'

How unpleasant could he be? I am in mourning, fool, for a whole way of life.

Dr Bauschu insisted on taking her temperature, her pulse. He prodded her for lumps and peered down her throat. 'It is a nervous condition triggered by the trauma of that Test. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong. I suggest a drawing-off of humours.'

Even Mae knew that he had ceased to be scientific. He heated her good glasses, and set them on her lower back, to suck and draw.

'The doctor used to come every six months,' said Mae, sleepily, 'in a white van with a red crescent. We would all line up for treatment, even if there were nothing wrong. There always was something to cure: a tooth or a cut or head lice.'

The doctor's glasses gleamed as he snapped shut his bag. She was talking nonsense. The fashion expert had fallen.

That night most of the village crowded into Mae's single room.

Mae's sister-in-law, Mrs Wang, barracked around Mae's kitchen, trying to brew tea by looking in all the wrong places, scattering arrangements. Joe's brother Siao quietly followed her, replacing things. Ten of the Soongs, who were connected to Mae by various marriages crowded into her house. She couldn't even think of some of their names.

Mae's mother exclaimed to Old Mrs Soong. 'It is God's will. We have sinned and gone on sinning, so God punishes us.'

'Nonsense, Mother,' said Mae. 'God doesn't punish. He doesn't reward. He lets us get on with it.'

'Her father was murdered,' said her desolate mother, handkerchief gesturing towards Mae, as if that explained everything. 'She lost her sister and her daughter…'

All the family legends came out. Mae was too tired and harassed for them now. Wasted love was wearisome. Her handsome older sister Missy, who died… Mae's elder daughter, who also died… Why remind her of that now? Being with people, feeling so ill, reminded Mae of the worst of her past. She wanted everything gone. She wanted sleep, but they had all come to make her feel better.

Teacher Shen came, looking solemn. He brought his beautiful wife Suloi, in case anyone misunderstood his friendship with Mae.

'Teacher Shen,' Mae said, pleased to see him. Suloi had Kwan's face, the face of their minority, the Eloi. Mrs Shen was just as beautiful as Kwan. Even now, here, she was merry.

Mrs Shen asked, 'How is our fashion expert?'

'Very confused,' Mae replied. 'I am more a history expert now.'

She looked up at Teacher Shen's face and, lo, remembered him as a skinny, put-upon little boy. Old Mrs Tung had worried so about him. She had wished she had more books to give this solemn child.

'You should have gone for that exam,' Mae said sleepily, 'to be a civil servant.'

Teacher Shen blinked, his face darted up towards Kwan, who nodded once downwards.

'I could not afford the time or the books,' he said quietly. 'So I took the teaching course.'

'Remember the tiny white book? About the rabbits?' Mae murmured. Old Mrs Tung had found it for him, a book of his very own.

His face was a wan smile, his eyes unblinking. He produced from his pack. 'This one,' he said.

It was a tiny battered book, stained by childhood, and it said in the language of their people The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

The Teacher turned to others in the room about him, and his staring eyes were filling. 'It's true,' he whispered to the room. 'It's true.'

Shen's Eloi wife edged closer to Mae, on her knees, smiling. She took Mae's other hand.

'You have become a prophet,' she said, in a very quiet voice.

'Of the past,' said Mae. What would it be like, just once, to have a moment to herself?

Standing among her friends were Sunni and her husband Mr Haseem. He wanted this house.

The next day was Mrs Tung's funeral.

Mae watched impassively as the cardboard coffin was lowered into the rocky ground. The mosque looked small, high on the hill, its whitewash peeling. The whole hillside looked peeling.

It was somewhat strange to see your own body buried, to see people you did not really know daub their faces. To know that you had lived so long that there was no one left to mourn you. Mrs Tung's grandsons were grown men, sad, yes, discomfited in suits. One was a mechanic in Yeshibozkent, another drove buses. They would be back to business by the afternoon.

Mae was not in mourning; for her, Mrs Tung was not dead. A body was only earth. Mrs Tung was with her in Air.

Sunni Haseem came to her and took Mae's hand. 'I am so sorry,' said Sunni, conventionally.

'Why?' Mae asked.

'She led a full life,' Sunni agreed.

And Mae remembered Mrs Tung making love in the middle of battle, in the marsh.

She remembered the tops of the reeds being cut down by bullets as Mrs Tung embraced. Mrs Tung's young man leaned back and smiled, and Mae remembered that smile. It was careless, as if to say, Life is not worth having if it's not worth losing. And Mae knew: The boy was killed.

'She died at an honourable age,' said Sunni.

Oh, fashion wife with your little kitchen and lack of love, what do you know about it? What have you ever given for anything?

'Honourable?' Mae repeated. As if all Mrs Tung had done was darn tea towels. 'She was a guerrilla; she hid soldiers in the school.'

Kwan and Joe came forward, and took her arm. 'Let's get you back home,' Kwan said.

Mae stood her ground. 'Why do people treat the past as if it had lost a battle that the present won?' she demanded, fists clenched. 'Why do they treat it as if it faded because it was weak?'

Joe looked baffled and distressed.

'I don't know,' said Kwan.

'The past is real,' said Mae. 'It's still here.'

'Then maybe so is the future,' said Kwan.

Through those weeks, into June, Mae slept late and long.

She grew plump through inactivity, dreaming of ninety years' worth of human voices: children, adults, the barking of favourite dogs long since dead, the sloshing of water on burnt-out canoes long since rotted away.

Gradually she found she could make meals again, do some tidying-up, or sweep. She managed to banish her sister-in-law from her kitchen. Her husband Joe began to look relieved. His work clothes were ready again for him in the mornings, and his breakfast of steamed noodles.

But Mae would stand near her tiny kitchen window, to catch a glimpse of Mr Ken. Her heart would go out to him, with two young daughters late in life, leaving for his fields in the earliest dawn, long before her Joe. Her heart would go out to him, for the infant and small boy he had been, and for his plump face, thin waist, and the quick, nimble way he did things.

She kept thinking of Old Mrs Tung in the reeds. How the dress had come up, the trousers down, and how Mrs Tung had opened up to her lover, fully, completely, loose and abandoned like a sail in the wind, wanting him to fill her with babies, nothing held back.

Old Mrs Tung had known that, prim and delicate as she may have looked.

The fashion expert had not, for all her talk of beauty.

The lipsticks, the oil in the hair, the flower hairgrips – they were all signals; signals that said, Love me, I have not been loved. That was why they had power over her, why she was drawn to them, why she needed them. She had wanted to festoon herself with flags, saying, Come to me, I cannot come to you.

Now she simply wanted Mr Ken.