But people began climbing the stairs and clomping around. Ren Qi thrust his crutch at the door and burst back in.
‘You fell asleep again?’ His hoarse voice erupted into the room.
‘What is it?’ Jia Jia asked.
Without moving, she waited for him to announce the return of his beloved; the ripe fruit of his laborious hunt. She waited for him to tell her that he regretted not being able to accompany her any more on her quest, that he wished her the best of luck for her future endeavours, and that he, unquestionably, would learn from his past and live a life of gratitude from now onwards.
But instead, he said, ‘The old man is gone.’
Jia Jia turned her head to face him.
‘Get up.’ Ren Qi fumbled through Jia Jia’s bag and tossed her a jacket. ‘Hurry.’
Jia Jia did not know what he meant, whether he was speaking about Grandpa or somebody else, and whether he meant that a man had gone missing or had died some time during the night. What lifted her from the floor was the fact that Ren Qi’s wife had, for the time being, chosen to remain missing. Only a few minutes earlier she thought she had been left behind.
Ren Qi, waiting for her at the doorway, impatiently inclined his head towards the room where Grandpa usually slept with the children. The others were nearby, discussing something noisily in Tibetan.
Jia Jia joined him and the two of them walked past the family room and kitchen to the hallway on the other side. T.S. spotted them first.
‘Were we being too loud?’ T.S. asked, and gave Ren Qi a confused look.
‘This is my friend, Ren Qi,’ Jia Jia explained. ‘He arrived late last night and Grandpa told us that he could stay in my room.’
‘You saw Grandpa? He’s gone missing.’ T.S.’s nose was red and his eyes were moist.
‘We saw him outside, two or three hours ago. He hasn’t come back?’ Jia Jia asked.
‘It’s strange,’ T.S. said. ‘My mother woke up and she couldn’t hear a thing. That’s not normal, she thought – usually there are the dogs or the wind or the men snoring. It’s never so quiet. So she checked the house and that was when she found that Grandpa’s bed was empty. The kids were all there, asleep. But Grandpa was gone and nobody heard him leave. We’ve searched everywhere in the village.’
T.S. put his hands on his waist and turned his head to look around the family room, as if Grandpa might suddenly appear again in a cloud of smoke. Ren Qi had left them briefly and was now returning with something clasped in his hand.
‘Look at this,’ he said to Jia Jia.
He held out his palm and revealed a miniature wooden figure of the fish-man. It was about the size of a teacup. On the back, the number ‘9’ was carved.
‘There’s an entire shelf of them,’ he added.
Jia Jia navigated past the family and into the bedroom, Ren Qi limping behind. Indeed, there was a collection on the windowsill next to Grandpa’s bed, some carved from wood, others from stone. The faint gleam from a single light bulb cast the figures the colour of persimmon. In the shadows next to the collection was a stack of photos. The one on the top showed a little boy posing in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt next to a donkey. It was taken at the entrance to the village.
‘Looks like me when I was young,’ Ren Qi commented. ‘Just a bit chubbier.’
Jia Jia picked up the pile and began studying the photos.
‘Grandpa took these,’ T.S.’s mother said as she walked up behind Jia Jia. ‘He saved a traveller from a wolf once, and to thank him, the traveller gave him a camera. Ever since then, Grandpa’s photographed all kinds of people who visited this village. The camera is his little treasure. And he didn’t even take it with him.’
T.S.’s brother entered the room, out of breath, and said something in Tibetan.
‘He couldn’t find Grandpa in the mountains,’ T.S.’s mother translated, shaking her head. ‘We’ll call the police. I can only hope that the wolves haven’t taken him.’ Her voice trembled a little.
The photos came in all sizes and many had all kinds of stains on them. Jia Jia could tell that a handful of them had been taken decades ago, when the village was poorer, and so were the travellers. In the newer ones, most stood with their cars, while some of the more daring seemed to have been high-altitude mountain-biking. Jia Jia flipped through the endless enthusiastic smiles, passionate hugs and exhausted thumbs-up of the tourists, until the most ordinary photo took its turn at the top of the pile. In the frame was half of an army-green three-wheeled motorbike, piles of wet mud on a road, a blurry black dog, and a couple walking away from the camera. On the bottom-right corner was the date stamped in red: 19 06 87.
Unlike the other photos, in which the subjects were all posing for the camera, this one looked like a mistake: a moment not extraordinary enough to be captured. Perhaps it was for that reason that Jia Jia felt attracted to it over the others. The woman was wearing a red cardigan and the man held a beige jacket in one of his hands; his other hand was holding the woman’s elbow to make sure that she would not fall.
‘I remember this couple.’ T.S.’s mother squinted her eyes at the photo. ‘The woman was pregnant. I remember that they were from Beijing too, or was it Tianjin? It was somewhere up north. They stayed for quite a long time, and became good friends with Grandpa.’
T.S.’s mother gently lowered herself to the bed and told Jia Jia and Ren Qi to sit next to her. Since she had woken up in the middle of the night, she was not in her Tibetan robe and her hair had not yet been braided. It was tied instead in a loose ponytail. She wore blue tracksuit bottoms and a white sweater, but she still had her prayer beads wrapped around her wrist. The neighbours seemed to be returning to their homes and the room had quietened down. T.S. and his brother were gone as well; perhaps they were calling the police.
T.S.’s mother picked up a fish-man figure.
‘You wanted to know about this creature?’ she asked. ‘When I was young, Grandpa used to tell me that it is the guide to a world where air is replaced by water and light is replaced by darkness. He called it the world of water. He said that it’s a world where there are no barriers. He was quite obsessed and told everybody about it, especially the few travellers who stopped in our village on their way to Lhasa. He told them about how he was trying to go to the world of water. Do you two want some buttermilk tea?’
Jia Jia shook her head.
A world with no barriers, Jia Jia repeated to herself.
‘I never got used to the taste of buttermilk tea. Even with a Tibetan wife,’ said Ren Qi.
T.S.’s mother continued, her fingers running along her rice-coloured prayer beads.
‘This couple in the photograph were good people. Kind. Grandpa spent a lot of time with them. The woman taught him how to make these little sculptures. But after they left, Grandpa stopped speaking altogether. I don’t know what happened, but he stopped going on about the world of water. He kept making these little sculptures, you see. He even numbered them. The big one that you saw near the river, Grandpa made that too. It was the first one. But I know that even though he won’t mention it, he’s been trying to cross into that world all these years. I can tell, because he’s continued to plant those tulips of his.’
‘Tulips?’ Ren Qi asked.