‘Actually,’ he continued, ‘it’s not exactly the same. But we have a sculpture like this in our village, a fish’s body with a human’s head. It’s been there a long time, ever since I was a child, carved from a big log next to the stream in the forest. According to the stories, an old man we call Grandpa once saw the shape of a fish in the log, and decided to make it into a sculpture. How do you know about it?’
‘Did Chen Hang see it as well?’ Jia Jia asked.
Her earlier dread vanished as though it had never existed. The dead end was an illusion; she had found another road. This sculpture, whatever it was, must have had something to do with Chen Hang’s dream. He must have seen it.
‘Let’s go. Let’s leave now. Meet me at the car in ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to your village.’
‘I think it’s too late today. It’s already getting dark, it’ll be better to stick to—’
‘What do you know about the fish-man?’
‘What fish-man?’
‘The one you were just talking about! The fish-man on the log in your village!’
‘Fish-man? Oh, fish-man!’ He threw his head back and laughed. ‘That’s a great name! I should tell Grandpa about it. We’ve always referred to it as “the sculpture”. The “fish-man” sounds so much more mythical. I’m going to come up with stories about the fish-man to tell the kids in the village. They’ll love it.’
Jia Jia walked up to him and gripped both of his shoulders in her hands, shaking him hard. He must have understood how determined and desperate she was, because he went quiet, slackened his posture, and caved his chest in to make himself smaller. Then he rushed out of her room to prepare the car, without saying a single word more.
*
The moon glowed behind a thin veil of clouds, and the night was wet with a fresh breeze blowing. They were high in the snowy mountains. As T.S.’s Jeep curved around the bumpy road, Jia Jia saw a handful of villagers drinking and dancing next to a bonfire, its flames lighting up prayer flags attached to poles in the ground, and hanging from the tops of houses.
An old man with braided grey hair, dressed in a tan robe, made his way slowly towards the vehicle. T.S. parked it and called out to him in Tibetan. The old man gestured back and T.S. yelled towards a two-storey farmhouse, built from white bricks, not far from where he had parked.
‘That’s the old man we call Grandpa – he can’t speak,’ the guide explained. ‘He’s like a real grandfather to me. I think he came to our village when my mother was young.’
Momentarily, Jia Jia was able to see the old man’s face clearly in the light from the fire. There was something that felt familiar in his stare, which penetrated through her as if she were glass. It was as though he was a long-time neighbour with whom she had never spoken, someone who knew everything about her yet kept it all a secret. She caught his eye and looked away.
A stocky, middle-aged woman came out, with a surprised expression, and guided the old man back towards the house. As she walked, she kept turning to look at Jia Jia.
‘That woman is my mother,’ T.S. explained as he pulled Jia Jia’s suitcase towards the farmhouse. ‘Nobody really knows where Grandpa came from. My mother told me that he just turned up one day, but she doesn’t remember when exactly. She was still a child. Our village used to be much more isolated. Now, since the highways have been built, we get many more cars passing by. My mother thinks that Grandpa came during the time when they first started to build roads connecting to the larger villages. Maybe he came from another village nearby.’
The family managed to spare a room for Jia Jia. T.S.’s mother offered her some stir-fried cabbage and scrambled eggs, apologising for the fact that she only had a little food left from dinner. The walls in the house were a teal colour, and on the section of wall next to the shrine for Buddha statues, there was a painting of yellow Tibetan horns. Almost all the furniture was made out of wood the colour of raisins – the sofa, the tables, the shrine. The entire house smelt like goat’s butter mixed with incense – a pungent smell that had been soaked up over the years by the bricks and the wood.
Jia Jia had immediately wanted T.S. to show her to the river bed to see the log, but it was late and she felt reluctant to disturb what seemed like a long-awaited family reunion. Anxious for the next day, she slid open the window to let in the cool, moist air. The bonfire was dimming and only four men remained, drinking qingke wine. They each held a cowboy hat in their lap. Jia Jia sat down on an embroidered cushion and tried to decipher what the family was talking about next door. Grandpa seemed to live with them; for Jia Jia this was strange, as her family would never have taken in an unrelated elderly guest. She dug out a cigarette from her bag, rested it between her lips for a moment, and then struck a match and lit it.
Ren Qi had not phoned her. Jia Jia trusted that he would keep to his promise, because he seemed like an honest man. Perhaps he had not found his wife yet? Might he have told her this, at least?
While she recalled her conversation with him, she rubbed through her skirt at the kite-shaped birthmark on her thigh. She still found herself fidgeting with it like this, as if she could erase it. Her headache came pounding back harder than before and she gently brought her legs towards her chest and hugged them. She watched the men leave the bonfire, and the fire die out, until the throbbing pain faded and numbed. Hearing the laughs and chatter floating in from the living room, she covered her legs with a blanket woven by T.S.’s mother and leaned against the wall, until the half-moon faded into daylight.
13
The fish-man was not big. Jia Jia could easily have missed it, had she gone searching for it herself. It was part of a tree trunk about knee-high, balanced on a large rock next to a stream. The fish-man was carved onto the surface of the wood, apparently without much care; it was not really a sculpture at all. It was barely a fish or a man, and without T.S. pointing it out to her, she would probably have failed to recognise it. Someone had tied a red string around its neck and fastened it into a bow.
‘It’s been here for a long time, for as long as my memory goes back,’ T.S. told her. ‘Grandpa comes down once in a while to make sure it’s still here. What do you think is so special about it? Grandpa would never tell me.’
‘Did my husband come here?’
‘Not that I know, but he could have.’
Jia Jia squatted down in front of the log and ran her fingers over the eyes of the fish-man, which were made from oval holes with stones wedged into them. The log had no branches and no trace of having had any cut off. The deep wood grain made the creature look as though it had wrinkles all over its face and body, so that it appeared much older than she had imagined. Jia Jia tried to move the log but it remained stubbornly fixed to the rock beneath. On its blank side a large number ‘1’ was carved out.
Jia Jia stood up. She needed to clear her head. On their way back to the village, T.S. suggested that she should help out in the qingke fields in order to, as he put it, ‘experience farming at least once in your life’. And so for the rest of that day she did, more than anything to keep herself grounded, to feel the soil on her hands and the earth beneath her feet.
Yaks roamed everywhere in the village, feeding on grass or whatever was left in rubbish bags on the streets. Jia Jia wrapped a scarf over her head to shade herself from the sun while T.S. taught her how to weed. She had never even gardened before.