Lost In Translation Part 25

Alice craned over. Teilhard's signature! She could not really read French, or speak it, Je sais Je sais me me faire comprendre, faire comprendre, c c 'est 'est tout, she would answer when someone asked her, but this was clearly a note of thanks. She swallowed. Even with her patched-together French she could see the phrasing was not current, but reflected the flowery style of a bygone time. tout, she would answer when someone asked her, but this was clearly a note of thanks. She swallowed. Even with her patched-together French she could see the phrasing was not current, but reflected the flowery style of a bygone time.

"See the date," Spencer breathed.

She swallowed, nodded. May 1945.

"This is the man, then?" The Leader made a small gesture to the men by the walls, and one sprang up and refilled their wine cups.

"Jesus-yes-it's him!" Spencer thrust the note over to Kong and Lin. They erupted into Chinese.

Spencer pressed open his notebook and wrote excitedly, then leaned forward. "Where'd you get this?"

"From my father."

"You mean-"

"Your Frenchman came here in 1945. He saw my father, stayed for many days. He talked of his love for this Banner. Do you know its name? Alashan. And it was as you said. The priest told my father he had been happier here in Alashan than anywhere on earth."

Spencer, Lin, Kong, and Alice exchanged glances.

"But so sorry, according to my father he said nothing about any fossils. The subject of Peking Man was never raised. In fact, my father said the visit lacked any obvious purpose."

"Yet that could be consistent," Kong said slowly.

They all stared at him.

Kong puffed on his cigarette. "Suppose the Frenchman did bring the Peking Man bones? Would he take the Leader into his confidence? Maybe not. It might have seemed too risky."

The three girls swept back into the room with the main courses: shredded lamb with chili peppers; deep-fried carp, hauled overland from the Yellow River; creamy scrambled eggs, and high piles of tomato and eggplant stir-fry, all with huge tureens of white rice.

"Still," said Alice, "he would tell someone where he put it -wouldn't he? Someone?" She translated her words into English for Spencer.

"True," Lin put in. "He was growing old. He wouldn't have wanted the secret to die with him."

Ssanang, the Leader's daughter, cleared her throat and spoke for the first time. "I agree." Her gaze was direct and candid. It affected none of the womanish retreat a Chinese woman would use. "Perhaps there is someone here the French priest contacted-someone with whom he cleared his heart."

"The Mongol family," Lin said.

"Shenmo?" Ssanang asked. Ssanang asked.

"Shuode s.h.i.+ di yici di yici lai, " I'm talking about the first time he came here. And Lin explained how Teilhard had come to Shuidonggou in 1923 and befriended the family of Mongols there. "We did find their homestead," he concluded sadly. "But it was long abandoned." lai, " I'm talking about the first time he came here. And Lin explained how Teilhard had come to Shuidonggou in 1923 and befriended the family of Mongols there. "We did find their homestead," he concluded sadly. "But it was long abandoned."

"Of that family, from Shuidonggou, we would know nothing," the Leader apologized. "It is out of our Banner. You should seek the help of someone on that side of the border."

"We have," Alice told him. She thought about Guo Wenxiang. Would he yet learn anything? Would he even be able to get in touch with them up here?

Food was served around, and in the silence of their temporary impa.s.se they fell to eating. "Is your father still living, then?" Spencer asked the Leader.

"Yes."

Everyone felt the sudden increase in voltage. "Can we meet with him?"

"Oh, no, the Leader doesn't see anyone anymore, especially outsiders. He spends his time in contemplation."

"I thought you were the Leader...." Spencer glanced around the table, confused.

The man shook his head. "No. His son. But I attend to all the Banner's affairs. And I a.s.sure you, he has told Ssanang and me everything. He remembers these events with great clarity." He snapped his fingers for more wine, which was instantly poured by one of his men.

Dr. Lin stood. "Health, long life." They all drained their cups.

Alice put her empty cup down with exaggerated slowness, afraid she would somehow miss the table and send the tiny thing cras.h.i.+ng to the floor. Her mind was a whirl. There. The cup met the tablecloth with a hard b.u.mp. G.o.d, the stuff was strong. She looked at her plate. Had she eaten all that?

"Will you have more?" Kuyuk asked, following her gaze and reaching for the nearest platter, which still held a gelatinous ma.s.s of hair vegetable and green, glisteny peppers.

"No," she said, feeling the word come out of her throat like a bubble and float to the top of her head. "No-I couldn't possibly-"

"The lamb, then!" the Leader cried. "Bring the lamb!"

"What did he say?" Spencer whispered.

"He said, the lamb." Alice closed her eyes, feeling full now, finally. G.o.d, could they really bring more food?

Of course they could, in China.

The Leader had his cup up in the air again. His grinning face seemed to swim at her. "To the friends of the Frenchman!" he called, and upended his cup.

She translated, then drank again. Before, it had seemed like fire going down; now she barely felt it. Just a warm liquid line running from her tongue to her stomach.

"Mo Ai-li," said Kuyuk, leaning toward her. He looked almost sober, although he had drunk every round. "Tell me how you learned to speak."

"In school," she said, and with the two abrupt words a kaleidoscope of her years at Rice rolled over her, pulled into flaccid Edvard Munch shapes by the alcohol: beginning Chinese, intermediate, advanced ... the two hundred and fourteen radicals, streaming down the page in the front of her notebook, the nine thousand characters she had committed to memory, writing each a thousand times, then another thousand times, then more....

Her teacher had been a soft-spoken little gentleman of Manchurian ancestry who wore old slippers in the cla.s.sroom and always b.u.t.toned a sweater vest over his trim s.h.i.+rt and tie, even in the summer months. He had a lined, dark-bronze face and a fastidious way of clearing his throat before he spoke. "See how each character combines the radicals, the component symbols of its basic nature-man, wood, fire, water, rain, the sun, the moon-to form an ideogram for each thing known to man. Thus each time you sit down to write, you review, by inference, the nature of the world itself. It is an unending labyrinth, timeless and secure. Yet never static. For," he told her, "each phrase can be interpreted in different ways-especially in spoken Chinese. Never one meaning, always many. Not like English. And our idioms-the best ones are not literal, no, not at all, instead they are oblique, they make reference to legends, stories, famous dramas, and books. They do not offer specific information, do you understand me or not? They produce a state of mind! Ah, so few of you outside people grasp the pleasure of speaking a truly civilized language -never base, never obvious and therefore clunky and painful, as English is...."

But Alice had understood. Chinese was a huge maze-world : stable yet evasive. Nothing was permanently what it seemed. Yes Yes meant maybe and meant maybe and no no meant maybe and so did everything in between-other Westerners saw this as Chinese prevarication but to Alice it was simply the natural mutation of things. Natural meant maybe and so did everything in between-other Westerners saw this as Chinese prevarication but to Alice it was simply the natural mutation of things. Natural and and welcome-because here in China the self could always be reinvented. She, too, could become someone else. Eventually. Or so she'd told herself all these years. welcome-because here in China the self could always be reinvented. She, too, could become someone else. Eventually. Or so she'd told herself all these years.

"Your Frenchman," said the Leader. He threw a loose, lubricated wave at the letter, which was propped now at an odd angle against a soy sauce bottle next to the wine.

"Teilhard, my good friend!" called Spencer. "Turn my life around!"

Alice did not translate anymore. No one seemed to care.

"The Frenchman," the Leader repeated, but in a different voice, an insistent voice which commanded their attention. Silence settled. He continued: "The Frenchman went to the lamasery during his visit. To the baisi. baisi. It is recorded. This is a sacred place, high up a canyon." It is recorded. This is a sacred place, high up a canyon."

They stared.

"What?" Alice managed.

"Kuyuk will take you there tomorrow."

But just then the doors flew open and the girls in the s.h.i.+ny red lipstick bore in the lamb, still whole except for the head, slow-roasted out in the open air to a dark crackly caramel. The smell was round, pitched, monumental. The men who'd been lounging around the edge bolted from their seats now, and with instant, sinuous grace produced long and copiously decorated daggers from within their clothes. They fell on the meat in a circle. Slices dropped into their hands and were carried to plates.

She whispered to Spencer what the Leader had said about Teilhard visiting a lamasery. He leaned over, intent on her English, eyes fixed in a gla.s.sy stare at the steaming meat in front of him. Then his face broke open in an unfettered smile.

"This is it," he whispered, writing the three words in his notebook as he said them to her. She watched him underline them.

He's drunk, she thought, but he might be right. We might actually find the d.a.m.n thing.

"I have a toast," Spencer announced, pus.h.i.+ng away from the table and standing with exaggerated care. He held his wine cup in front of him. Then he dipped two fingers in the wine and tossed the drops on the floor. "To the earth!" he cried. He dipped again and flicked drops into the air. "To the sky!" The third time, he wet his fingers and drew them across his own forehead. "To the ancestors!" he finished.

There was a stunned silence, broken by a thundering cheer as the Mongols leapt to their feet and drank. "The American!" they called, hoisting their cups. "The American!"

The Leader drank, beaming. "How do you know this toast of ours?"

"Books!" Spencer cried happily. He raised his cup and drank. "History, letters, memoirs of foreigners who have come here."

"Impressive," Alice grinned, toasting him.

They all fell to eating lamb, which was lean and long-cooked and fell apart perfectly in their mouths. When she pushed her plate back she was aware of Lin's gaze and risked a glance at him. He was watching her quite openly, as if there was nothing to hide. He smiled, a smile that seemed magically to target only her.

She smiled back.

"Now!" called the Leader with a hearty clap, and one of the knife men was back in a spinning instant to the table.

On the Leader's signal the man used a quick pirouette of his hand to disengage the glistening suet oblong of the lamb's tail. He deftly cut off a long, paper-thin slice, and bore it to Alice on his open brown palm.

"All Mongols must do this." The Leader laughed.

"Oh, I can't," she said, affecting retreat. It was an accepted ploy in Chinese manners. Women could excuse themselves from any excess by saying, simply, that they could not. As if they were physically unable. This invoked the female frailty that Chinese society, despite the fact that it no longer actually bound the feet of pampered girls, still found endlessly compelling.

Lin smiled at her Chinese decorum and looked away. Whether his smile was one of affection or amused superiority, she could not tell.

"Then to the American scientist," insisted the Leader.

The brown man, his planar face creased by a smile, carried the lamb fat to Spencer.

"To be a man, you must." The Leader smiled.

"All right!" Spencer slapped the table with his palm.

"You should take it all in one gulp," Alice whispered in Spencer's ear, repeating what the knife wielder was declaiming in Chinese. "Don't stop. This is a manhood thing. Don't look back."

He nodded, an intimate glance to her, they were confederates, the Americans.

The Mongol pushed the tip of his middle finger right up against Adam Spencer's pale Caucasian lip. He tilted the blond head back with his other hand, as if in baptism, and then the white slab, with a sickening fat sluicing sound, disappeared down Spencer's mouth. The American contorted a long instant. Then he swallowed hard, grinned broadly.

The room roared with approval.

"The scientist! The friend of the Frenchman!" the Leader cried. "He's as one of the Mongols!"

Alice made it back to her room, across the open courtyard, then the stone-floored empty lobby, then the stairs. Come on, up. Up. Next loomed the linoleum hallway, and her door, then suddenly there was her tufted bedspread, which flew up and slammed her in the face.

Where was she? Eren Obo, the Mongolian desert.

She groaned and turned over. Was that someone knocking on the door? Again. A knocking sound. Yes. "Come in," she said. Now that she was down she couldn't get up.

"Xiao Mo?"

"Oh-Lin ..." She struggled to a sitting position.

"No, no." He held up his hand. "It's quite all right."

She sank back gratefully, closed her eyes. At least she was still fully dressed. She opened one eye to see him looking at her.

"You're all right?"

"Yes." She propped her head on the pillow, aware that she was floating, and he was standing over her. "Dr. Lin," she said. "Do you not think it remarkable that we met like this?"

"You know, Mo Ai-li, what's remarkable is that we came to this place and Dr. Spencer was right: they do know something about Teilhard. He did come here. It makes me think there is hope, where before I had no hope. It makes me think things can change. I thank you for this. You and Dr. Spencer."

"Don't thank me." She rolled her eyes. "It's not like my life is much of an example."

"No, no. You've exerted yourself against the fates. You told me about your father. In our world, Mo Ai-li-our Chinese world-we just endure these things."

"So you do," she said, looking at him. Accept my world, Accept my world, she begged in her mind. My world where I am walled in, where Horace may soon be leaving me. Oh, was Horace going to die? Was he desperately ill right now? "But I get so frightened sometimes," she admitted. she begged in her mind. My world where I am walled in, where Horace may soon be leaving me. Oh, was Horace going to die? Was he desperately ill right now? "But I get so frightened sometimes," she admitted.

"I know. Fear is only fear, though."

"And somehow you live without it."

"No," he corrected her. "You live with it with it." He smiled down at her. "Good-night, Mo Ai-li."

Alone in the hall outside her room, Dr. Lin paused. Could he do this, with this woman? Could he keep advancing toward her? She was so intelligent. He could talk to her, really talk to her. But she was a Westerner. Later she might grow bored, turn to some other man. Lose interest in him. The idea made him sick, even though he had not yet possessed her. He stared down the dimly lit hall, which ended in a square window framing the desert night.

No, he thought finally. She was not like that. Other Western women might follow convenience, but not Mo Ai-li. He could see her character in her face, her words, her actions. She would be a woman he could trust.

It was more than an hour next morning in the jeep, climbing steadily up into the arid, rubble-pile mountains, before they finally turned up a deep, cutting canyon. The ravine was covered with pebbles, the walls so narrow they sc.r.a.ped the jeep. As they climbed they saw smaller tributary washes twist down to join them. Then the canyon opened out to an enclosed plateau and Alice caught her first sight of the baisi temple complex. It was built in paG.o.da style, its vermilion-and-gilt colors howling against the brown cliffs. The repeating, supplicating roofs under the endless blue desert sky.

They got out of the car. Alice breathed deeply the good baking smell of hot sun on rocks. Then over the dry silence she heard a long, mournful note, calling like a boat horn.

A young man in plain terra-cotta robes, barefoot, shave headed, walked out into the light from the courtyard wall. He turned and spoke through the doorway behind him. The horn sound ceased. Another monk emerged, carrying a long metal instrument.

Kuyuk spoke to the lamas, who turned and led the way into the inner courts. One by one they all stepped over the bottom beams of a succession of great round gates, until they came to the central cell of the compound, where loess-brick rooms surrounded the bare yard.

The lamas said something to Kuyuk in Mongolian and he turned to the group, disappointment on his face. "I don't know what we'll be able to learn. These monks have only been here a few years. Records-there are none. The whole place burned in the Chaos and was rebuilt."

That's the fresh paint, she thought. "No older monks remain ?"

"None left living."