From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 2: "No one is to be told that this arrangement is not real. This includes grandparents, cousins, apprentices, and Tang Rui."
The spring market took over the whole of the old town on the last Saturday of April, and by seven in the morning Wenxi had been awake for two days.
She had not meant it to be two. The rules for Round One had been posted at the committee hall on a long sheet of cream paper, and they were simple enough: each entered couple would run a stall at the market, selling one signature snack of their own choosing, with a display that told their story. Visitors would taste, buy, and vote with small wooden tokens dropped into jars. The judges would walk the lines and make notes. Scores would be announced on the Monday. It was the first test, and in the opinion of Tang Rui, the one most likely to separate the couples who loved each other from the couples who merely owned a stall.
So Wenxi had decided on qingtuan.
It was the obvious choice. It was the spring dumpling of the whole river country, soft and jade-green and faintly bitter, made from sticky rice and the juice of young mugwort, and filled with sweet red bean or sesame paste. Every grandmother in Yunxi made them. They were sold in bundles at every market in the county. And that, she had realised on Wednesday night, sitting on the kitchen floor with her back against the cupboard, was precisely the problem.
"Everyone will do qingtuan," she told Grandma.
"Everyone does qingtuan well," Grandma agreed, from the stove. "That is why it is a good dumpling."
"I need to do something no one else is doing."
"Then do not do qingtuan."
"But I want to. I want to make them better. I want to make them so good that, " She stopped. She did not know how to finish. So good that nobody could look at them and think the girl who made them had failed at anything.
Grandma turned round. She looked at her granddaughter, sitting on the floor with a smudge of green on her chin, and the faint hunted look in her eyes, and did not say a word. She took down a clean bowl, set it on the table, and went to bed.
Wenxi had worked until dawn.
She made the dough forty times. She tried mugwort that she had picked herself from the bank behind the east dock, and mugwort bought at the market, and mugwort dried and ground. She tried a little rice flour in the mix, and a lot, and none. She tried a bit of lard. She tried a drop of osmanthus syrup. She tried steaming for six minutes, and eight, and twelve. The kitchen filled with a green, grassy, spring-morning smell, so strong that Grandma's cat came in at midnight, sniffed once, and left in disgust. At three in the morning she had a batch that was sweet and soft and glossy and, she thought, almost right, and she stood over it with a fork in her hand and her eyes burning, and she remembered a voice saying, in the lamplight, with a piece of cake in its palm: it's too eager.
She put down the fork.
She went and sat in the courtyard. It was cold and starlit and smelled of jasmine, and an owl somewhere was making a small unhappy noise. She sat on the step with her chin on her knees. After a while she stopped trying to make it right. She went inside, and made the dough the way Grandma made it, without a scale, by the weight of it in her hand, folding and waiting, and when she had formed the first dumpling and pressed the plum-blossom mould into the green skin, she set it on the cloth and left it alone.
It was the best one. She knew it as soon as she bit into it.
* * *
Chengyan had been up since five, and he was not thinking about qingtuan.
He was standing in the market square at Yunxi's centre, in the thin gold light, with a hammer in his fist and a long roll of cloth at his feet, trying to put up a stall.
The square was an open stretch of old cobble at the foot of the bell tower, ringed by willows, and it had been transformed overnight into a village of canvas. Awnings in red and white and green rose in long rows. Ropes had been strung. Trestle tables creaked under baskets and trays. Already the smells of the day had begun to rise: frying dough, roasted chestnut, the sharp sweetness of candied hawthorn. Men were shouting to one another across the rows. A small boy went by pulling a goose on a string.
He had been allotted pitch number fourteen, between a stall of paper fans and a stall that, so far as he could tell, sold nothing at all but a very large sign reading COUPLE OF THE OLD STREET: FANG AND MEI, FORTY YEARS.
He was thinking, instead, of the tray.
He had made it on Thursday night, in the workshop, with the lamp low and Zhaoyu snoring in a chair by the stove. It was not a large thing. It was a shallow rectangle of pale pearwood, with a raised rim and a smooth, close grain, designed to carry a dozen dumplings in two neat rows. He had planed it for an hour. He had oiled it with camellia oil until it shone like honey. And then, at the last minute, when he had told himself that it was finished, he had picked up the smallest chisel he owned and, in one corner, with the lightest possible hand, carved a very small plum blossom.
It was just a mark. It was only the width of his thumbnail. He had cut it deep enough to feel, and shallow enough that no one would think to look.
He did not know why he had done it. He had put the tray under a cloth and refused to think about it, and he had not been able to stop.
The stall was going up badly.
He had the poles in the ground and the frame lashed, and the awning in his arms like a drowned sheep, and the wind, which had been quite still a minute ago, had taken a sudden interest in the cloth. It filled. It billowed. It flapped round him in a long white wave, slapped him across the face, and dragged him two paces sideways in the direction of the paper-fan seller, who yelped and clutched his stock.
"Hold the corner!" cried a voice. "The other corner!"
There was a patter of running feet. A pair of small, quick hands seized the loose edge of the awning and hauled it down, and a head popped out of the folds, hair coming loose, cheeks flushed, eyes wide.
"Which corner?" said Wenxi.
"That one. No. The other one."
"You said that on the roof!"
"You didn't listen then, either," said Chengyan, and a shock went through him at his own voice. It had come out warm and teasing and exactly as it used to be, in the long gold summers of his youth, when she had stood on the end of his workbench and told him that he had no sense of adventure.
She laughed. She was wearing her yellow linen apron over a pale green dress, and she looked like something that had been picked that morning. She had dark smudges under her eyes. She held a covered basket on one hip, steaming gently, and she smelled of mugwort and warm rice, and the whole of the square seemed to lean a little toward her.
They got the awning up between them.
It was a good deal harder than it should have been. The ropes had knots. The poles were too short. The ground sloped so that the whole front of the stall tilted a couple of inches toward the paper-fan seller, who stood watching with the stoic misery of a man whose neighbours are about to fall on him. At the third attempt Wenxi, perched on an upturned crate, lashed the last guy rope to the post, and stepped back, and the whole assembly shivered and stood.
"There," she said.
"It leans."
"It has character."
"It leans a lot."
"It's a lean with confidence," said Wenxi. She stood, hands on hips, surveying their stall with great pride. Then her face changed. "Oh no. The sign."
"What sign?"
"The price board. The one you made. Where do we put it?"
He had it under his arm. It was the cedar frame he had brought to her kitchen, a month ago, with its row of slender sliding slats, and on it, in Zhaoyu's tidy hand, were three words: SU & GU. TWO DUMPLINGS. He held it up. They both considered it.
"On the left," said Wenxi.
"On the right."
"Left. The light comes in from the left."
"The wind comes in from the right. It will blow over."
"It won't blow over, it's cedar."
"It's a very light cedar."
"It's your cedar! You made it!"
"It's a sail on a stick," said Chengyan, with the grave sorrow of a craftsman insulted by his own work. "I know where the wind comes from, Wenxi. I have lived here for twenty-nine years."
"And I have lived here for eighteen, and I know where people look," said Wenxi. "They look left. They always look left. It's the way the street runs."
"It does not run left."
"It runs left at the bridge!"
They had both lowered their voices. They had also, he realised, moved a good deal closer, until they stood almost nose to nose over a sliver of cedar in the early sun, hissing at one another in a state of enormous mutual satisfaction. She was glaring up at him with her chin out. A bright wisp of hair had come down across her cheek. He could see every freckle on the bridge of her nose.
A throat was cleared.
"Excuse me," said a voice, high and fluting and cheerful. "Is this fourteen? We were told it was next to us."
They both turned.
A short, round, silver-haired old man in a spotless blue tunic stood on the cobbles beside a handcart. He was beaming. He had a face like a friendly walnut, brown and creased and delighted by everything. Beside him, with one hand tucked into his arm, stood a small, stout, bright-eyed old woman in a floral coat, with a basket in her free hand and a gleaming gold clip in her hair. They were both, quite clearly, extraordinarily happy.
"We are the neighbours," said the old man, "fifteen. Fang Dehai. This is my wife, Mei Lanying. We have been married forty years and eleven days."
"Forty years and twelve days," said Mei Lanying.
"Twelve. I stand corrected. She has the calendar."
"I have the calendar," agreed Mei Lanying, calmly, and looked from Wenxi to Chengyan with enormous interest. "And you are the young ones. The baker and the carpenter. Oh, I have heard so much about you." She seized Wenxi's hands in both of hers. "My dear, you look worn out. You've been up all night. It's the nerves. It is always the nerves, in the first year. I said to Dehai, when we started, it takes forty years for a marriage to learn how to sleep."
"We haven't, " said Wenxi.
"No, I'm sure," said Mei Lanying, with a gentle pat. "But you will. Dehai, show them the sign."
"The sign," cried Fang Dehai, delighted, and hauled it off the cart. It was a huge board, painted in scarlet and gold, with a heart at each corner and the words, in a very florid hand, FORTY YEARS OF LOVE. THE TRUE COUPLE OF YUNXI. Below this, in smaller letters, appeared the words: NO FAKES.
There was a silence.
"Isn't it wonderful?" said Mei Lanying.
"Very striking," said Wenxi, weakly.
"We had it done at the printer's. We think that it makes a statement." Mei Lanying beamed. "Because there are a great many couples in this contest who, well. I'm not saying anything. I would not say a word. But after forty years, one can tell. A real couple has a particular way of standing. They don't look at each other at all. They simply know where the other is."
"Like a good pair of shoes," said Fang Dehai.
"Like a good pair of shoes," agreed Mei Lanying, and her bright black eyes flickered, without malice, from Chengyan's face to Wenxi's and back again. "And you two, now. You look, you look, " she tilted her head. "Oh, I like you. You stand like people who know exactly where the other one is, and are trying not to."
Chengyan, who had been holding the cedar frame like a shield, discovered that he had stopped breathing.
"We'll be across the way," said Fang Dehai, in a tone of great goodwill, and trundled off to fifteen, where a small drama began over whether the bunting should go up on the left or the right.
* * *
By ten o'clock the square was packed.
Visitors had poured in from the county road on every bus, and the whole market had come alive with a roar like surf. Bright hats bobbed. Children ran. Somewhere an erhu was being played, tunelessly and with great spirit. The air was thick with steam and frying sugar and the soft green smell of mugwort, and the queue at their stall had gone from nothing to a long snake that curled round the paper-fan seller and out of sight.
Wenxi had never worked so hard in her life.
She stood at the front of the stall with her sleeves rolled and her hair in a net, taking coins, wrapping dumplings, answering questions at the top of her voice. Yes, they were mugwort. Yes, they were sweet. Yes, there was sesame as well as bean. The plum blossom on top was pressed from an antique mould. Yes, a hundred and twenty years old. No, it was not for sale. A man in a straw hat wanted to know whether they were gluten free. A woman wanted to know whether they were healthy, and whether they were halal, and whether she might have one for her grandmother who had no teeth. A small girl pressed a coin into her hand and stared up at her with huge solemn eyes and said, in a whisper, "Are you the lady from the boat?"
"What boat?"
"The one in the picture."
Wenxi's stomach turned over. "What picture?"
"The one on the wall," said the child. "At the committee hall. It's very big. It's got you in it, and the man, and the man is looking at you like, " She screwed up her face. "Like that." She did an impression of an expression that Wenxi could not possibly have described. It was a mixture of terror and tenderness and something that looked, alarmingly, like a very large dog confronting a very small cake.
Wenxi wrapped three dumplings and a fourth for luck. She did not look up. She did not look at the tall man at her elbow, who was ladling the dumplings from the steamer onto the pearwood tray with an expression of perfect blankness, and who had, she noticed, gone suddenly and completely still.
The queue surged.
She was running out of dumplings. The first basket had gone by half past ten; the second was dwindling; the third was still in the steamer, and she had fifty people waiting and no hands. She snatched at a bundle of wrapping paper. She dropped it. She bent to retrieve it and cracked her head against the underside of the counter, and a stool, balanced on a pile of crates behind her, took the opportunity to tip. A hundredweight of rice flour in a rough sack slid slowly from the shelf above, tilted, hung for a moment in the air, and burst.
She screamed. She had time for exactly one, brief, high, undignified scream, and then the whole stall went white.
It came down like a snowfall. It settled on the counter, on the dumplings, on the pearwood tray. It settled on her hair. It settled in her mouth. When the cloud thinned she was standing in the centre of the stall, gasping, with her hands up and her eyelashes thick with flour, and in front of her the queue was frozen in silent, solemn, delighted horror.
There was a very long pause.
Then a small, low, trembling sound began somewhere on the left, and rose through the crowd, and she realised that fifty people were trying very hard not to laugh.
"I'm fine," said Wenxi, through the flour. "Everything is under control."
They fell apart. It went through the queue like wind through barley. People bent double. A man in a straw hat leaned on a post and wept. In the very middle of it all, standing in a drift of white with the empty sack in his hand, she saw Chengyan, and his shoulders were shaking, and she thought: if you laugh, if you do it in front of all these people, I'll never forgive you.
But he did not laugh.
He set down the sack. He crossed the little space between them in one stride, and before she knew what he was doing he had taken her by the wrist, quite gently, and pulled her round to face him.
"Don't move," he said, very low.
His hands went to her face. They were big and warm and entirely careful. His thumb brushed across her cheekbone, wiping the flour from beneath her eye, and then along the bridge of her nose, and then, with the lightest possible pressure, across the corner of her mouth. She could not breathe. She could hear the whole square roar and fall silent, and then roar again, but it was a long way off, in another room, behind glass.
He was frowning with concentration. A fleck of flour had caught in his lashes.
"There," said Chengyan.
"Is it, " She could hardly find her voice. "Is it gone?"
"Not all."
"Are we, I mean, is this a, is this under Clause, "
"No," said Chengyan. His hands had stopped, resting on either side of her jaw. His eyes, a few inches away, were dark and grave and very still, and under the amusement she thought she saw a flicker of something else, tight and fierce and glad. "This is a rescue."
A wolf-whistle split the air. Then another, and a ragged cheer, and the crowd began to clap.
Wenxi stood in the middle of her ruined stall with her face between his hands and her ears ringing. She did not know what he meant. She did not know what she meant either. She only knew that for a few seconds the whole noisy bright market had vanished, and that when he took his hands away, slowly, one finger at a time, as if the leaving were a matter for great consideration, the empty places on her skin went on burning.
"Dumplings," said Chengyan, to the crowd, in a voice that cracked a little. "Two each. While stocks last."
They sold out by noon.
It was the best business Su Ji had done in a decade. She would count the takings later, and weep. It was the flood of customers that came after the flour, a delighted, hungry, laughing tide, who had heard about the lady in the cloud, and wanted a dumpling for themselves. The line went round the square twice. The jar of tokens beside the stall filled so quickly that Chengyan had to fetch a second one. He worked at her side without speaking, plating, handing, wrapping, a long rhythmic reach of the arm that she began, unconsciously, to match, so that after the first hour they moved like two halves of one machine, and she no longer had to look to know where his hand would be.
At one point, in a lull, he held out a dumpling to her on the carved tray.
"You haven't eaten," he said.
"I haven't had time."
"Eat."
She took it. It was warm and soft and smelled of spring. She bit into it, and her eyes closed of their own accord, and the taste of the mugwort and the sweet bean and the faint grassy bitterness poured over her tongue, and for a moment she was six years old, sitting on the steps with Grandma, watching the green steam rise.
When she opened her eyes he was watching her.
"Good?" he asked.
"It's the best one," said Wenxi, and heard her own voice, a little unsteady. "I made it without trying."
He did not answer. But he looked at her for a long, grave moment, and then down at the tray in his hands, and the thumb of his right hand moved, once, across the little carved plum blossom in the corner, as if it were a thing he did not know he knew.
She saw it. She did not know what it meant. She did not ask.
The judges came at two.
There were five of them: a stout lady from the county tourism board, a thin gentleman with a bow tie, a restaurateur from the provincial capital, an elderly retired teacher, and, a pace behind, in his good grey jacket, with his notebook closed under his arm and his face composed in an expression of pleasant attention, Shen Haoran. They moved down the line in a slow cluster, tasting, nodding, murmuring. At each stall the lady from the tourism board wrote something on a card. At fifteen they paused for a long time, and Fang Dehai made a speech.
At fourteen they stopped.
Chengyan stood very straight. Wenxi, beside him, felt the whole of him come to attention, and her own spine stiffen in answer. The judges took a dumpling each. The thin gentleman bit into his and said nothing. The restaurateur closed her eyes. The elderly teacher, with the air of a man who had waited fifty years for the opportunity, took a second bite and a third, and then took out a handkerchief and dabbed gently at his eyes.
Shen ate his slowly.
He held the dumpling up and looked at the pattern on the top. He turned it a little in the sun. Then he bit into it, and chewed, and a very small change went over his face, a softening round the mouth, a stillness about the eyes. He swallowed. He looked down at the tray in Chengyan's hands, and at the tiny plum blossom cut into the corner of the wood, and for a second his gaze lingered there with an expression that Wenxi could not read.
Then he took out his notebook, opened it, and wrote something. He wrote for a good while. When he looked up, his face was perfectly pleasant again.
"Remarkable," said Shen. "Thank you, both. Do you know, I think this is the best thing I've eaten in Yunxi." And he moved on.
The afternoon went by in a dream.
They sold the last of the dumplings. They counted the tokens, which came to a good deal more than either of them had expected. They took down the awning, which fell on Wenxi, and the poles, which fell on Chengyan, and for a long time they were wrapped in canvas together, hissing and snorting, with Wenxi's elbow in his ribs and his chin on the top of her head, until a passing child came to the rescue and was rewarded with a dumpling they had saved.
At last, when the sun had gone low and the square had emptied to a litter of ropes and leaves, they stood side by side in the empty pitch, packing the pearwood tray into its cloth.
She was so tired that her hands had begun to shake.
There was flour in her hair. There was green on her cuffs. There was an ache behind her eyes that she knew would turn to a headache by evening. But she was smiling, and she could not stop. They had done it. For the first time since she came home, she had done something that had worked, that had not been a lie, a performance, a polished mask. They had stood in a square on a spring morning and made something good and given it away.
She reached for the cloth at the same moment as he did.
Their hands met on the smooth wood. She felt his fingers close over hers, large and warm and still faintly floury. Neither of them moved. The cloth lay between their palms like a thing neither of them had noticed.
They were not in public. The square was empty. There was nobody to see. It was not under any clause at all.
She did not pull away.
He did not either. They stood there in the dying gold light, the two of them, with the tray under their joined hands, and she was aware of the whole length of his arm, and the quick hard beat of his pulse in the wrist, and the way he was not looking at her, but looking down at the little carved plum blossom beneath their fingers, as if it had been put there to tell him something he already knew.
"The count," said Wenxi, very softly.
"It doesn't count," said Chengyan.
"No?"
"No." His voice was low and rough. "There's nobody here."
A pigeon landed on the empty stall and walked about on the counter with its wings behind its back. The bell tower struck six. Far away across the rooftops, in the great scoured sky, the first stars were coming out, one by one, like a thing being put into words.
Neither of them took their hand away.
You've reached the end of this chapter
From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 2: "No one is to be told that this arrangement is not real. This includes grandparents, cousins, apprentices, and Tang Rui."
The spring market took over the whole of the old town on the last Saturday of April, and by seven in the morning Wenxi had been awake for two days.
She had not meant it to be two. The rules for Round One had been posted at the committee hall on a long sheet of cream paper, and they were simple enough: each entered couple would run a stall at the market, selling one signature snack of their own choosing, with a display that told their story. Visitors would taste, buy, and vote with small wooden tokens dropped into jars. The judges would walk the lines and make notes. Scores would be announced on the Monday. It was the first test, and in the opinion of Tang Rui, the one most likely to separate the couples who loved each other from the couples who merely owned a stall.
So Wenxi had decided on qingtuan.
It was the obvious choice. It was the spring dumpling of the whole river country, soft and jade-green and faintly bitter, made from sticky rice and the juice of young mugwort, and filled with sweet red bean or sesame paste. Every grandmother in Yunxi made them. They were sold in bundles at every market in the county. And that, she had realised on Wednesday night, sitting on the kitchen floor with her back against the cupboard, was precisely the problem.
"Everyone will do qingtuan," she told Grandma.
"Everyone does qingtuan well," Grandma agreed, from the stove. "That is why it is a good dumpling."
"I need to do something no one else is doing."
"Then do not do qingtuan."
"But I want to. I want to make them better. I want to make them so good that, " She stopped. She did not know how to finish. So good that nobody could look at them and think the girl who made them had failed at anything.
Grandma turned round. She looked at her granddaughter, sitting on the floor with a smudge of green on her chin, and the faint hunted look in her eyes, and did not say a word. She took down a clean bowl, set it on the table, and went to bed.
Wenxi had worked until dawn.
She made the dough forty times. She tried mugwort that she had picked herself from the bank behind the east dock, and mugwort bought at the market, and mugwort dried and ground. She tried a little rice flour in the mix, and a lot, and none. She tried a bit of lard. She tried a drop of osmanthus syrup. She tried steaming for six minutes, and eight, and twelve. The kitchen filled with a green, grassy, spring-morning smell, so strong that Grandma's cat came in at midnight, sniffed once, and left in disgust. At three in the morning she had a batch that was sweet and soft and glossy and, she thought, almost right, and she stood over it with a fork in her hand and her eyes burning, and she remembered a voice saying, in the lamplight, with a piece of cake in its palm: it's too eager.
She put down the fork.
She went and sat in the courtyard. It was cold and starlit and smelled of jasmine, and an owl somewhere was making a small unhappy noise. She sat on the step with her chin on her knees. After a while she stopped trying to make it right. She went inside, and made the dough the way Grandma made it, without a scale, by the weight of it in her hand, folding and waiting, and when she had formed the first dumpling and pressed the plum-blossom mould into the green skin, she set it on the cloth and left it alone.
It was the best one. She knew it as soon as she bit into it.
* * *
Chengyan had been up since five, and he was not thinking about qingtuan.
He was standing in the market square at Yunxi's centre, in the thin gold light, with a hammer in his fist and a long roll of cloth at his feet, trying to put up a stall.
The square was an open stretch of old cobble at the foot of the bell tower, ringed by willows, and it had been transformed overnight into a village of canvas. Awnings in red and white and green rose in long rows. Ropes had been strung. Trestle tables creaked under baskets and trays. Already the smells of the day had begun to rise: frying dough, roasted chestnut, the sharp sweetness of candied hawthorn. Men were shouting to one another across the rows. A small boy went by pulling a goose on a string.
He had been allotted pitch number fourteen, between a stall of paper fans and a stall that, so far as he could tell, sold nothing at all but a very large sign reading COUPLE OF THE OLD STREET: FANG AND MEI, FORTY YEARS.
He was thinking, instead, of the tray.
He had made it on Thursday night, in the workshop, with the lamp low and Zhaoyu snoring in a chair by the stove. It was not a large thing. It was a shallow rectangle of pale pearwood, with a raised rim and a smooth, close grain, designed to carry a dozen dumplings in two neat rows. He had planed it for an hour. He had oiled it with camellia oil until it shone like honey. And then, at the last minute, when he had told himself that it was finished, he had picked up the smallest chisel he owned and, in one corner, with the lightest possible hand, carved a very small plum blossom.
It was just a mark. It was only the width of his thumbnail. He had cut it deep enough to feel, and shallow enough that no one would think to look.
He did not know why he had done it. He had put the tray under a cloth and refused to think about it, and he had not been able to stop.
The stall was going up badly.
He had the poles in the ground and the frame lashed, and the awning in his arms like a drowned sheep, and the wind, which had been quite still a minute ago, had taken a sudden interest in the cloth. It filled. It billowed. It flapped round him in a long white wave, slapped him across the face, and dragged him two paces sideways in the direction of the paper-fan seller, who yelped and clutched his stock.
"Hold the corner!" cried a voice. "The other corner!"
There was a patter of running feet. A pair of small, quick hands seized the loose edge of the awning and hauled it down, and a head popped out of the folds, hair coming loose, cheeks flushed, eyes wide.
"Which corner?" said Wenxi.
"That one. No. The other one."
"You said that on the roof!"
"You didn't listen then, either," said Chengyan, and a shock went through him at his own voice. It had come out warm and teasing and exactly as it used to be, in the long gold summers of his youth, when she had stood on the end of his workbench and told him that he had no sense of adventure.
She laughed. She was wearing her yellow linen apron over a pale green dress, and she looked like something that had been picked that morning. She had dark smudges under her eyes. She held a covered basket on one hip, steaming gently, and she smelled of mugwort and warm rice, and the whole of the square seemed to lean a little toward her.
They got the awning up between them.
It was a good deal harder than it should have been. The ropes had knots. The poles were too short. The ground sloped so that the whole front of the stall tilted a couple of inches toward the paper-fan seller, who stood watching with the stoic misery of a man whose neighbours are about to fall on him. At the third attempt Wenxi, perched on an upturned crate, lashed the last guy rope to the post, and stepped back, and the whole assembly shivered and stood.
"There," she said.
"It leans."
"It has character."
"It leans a lot."
"It's a lean with confidence," said Wenxi. She stood, hands on hips, surveying their stall with great pride. Then her face changed. "Oh no. The sign."
"What sign?"
"The price board. The one you made. Where do we put it?"
He had it under his arm. It was the cedar frame he had brought to her kitchen, a month ago, with its row of slender sliding slats, and on it, in Zhaoyu's tidy hand, were three words: SU & GU. TWO DUMPLINGS. He held it up. They both considered it.
"On the left," said Wenxi.
"On the right."
"Left. The light comes in from the left."
"The wind comes in from the right. It will blow over."
"It won't blow over, it's cedar."
"It's a very light cedar."
"It's your cedar! You made it!"
"It's a sail on a stick," said Chengyan, with the grave sorrow of a craftsman insulted by his own work. "I know where the wind comes from, Wenxi. I have lived here for twenty-nine years."
"And I have lived here for eighteen, and I know where people look," said Wenxi. "They look left. They always look left. It's the way the street runs."
"It does not run left."
"It runs left at the bridge!"
They had both lowered their voices. They had also, he realised, moved a good deal closer, until they stood almost nose to nose over a sliver of cedar in the early sun, hissing at one another in a state of enormous mutual satisfaction. She was glaring up at him with her chin out. A bright wisp of hair had come down across her cheek. He could see every freckle on the bridge of her nose.
A throat was cleared.
"Excuse me," said a voice, high and fluting and cheerful. "Is this fourteen? We were told it was next to us."
They both turned.
A short, round, silver-haired old man in a spotless blue tunic stood on the cobbles beside a handcart. He was beaming. He had a face like a friendly walnut, brown and creased and delighted by everything. Beside him, with one hand tucked into his arm, stood a small, stout, bright-eyed old woman in a floral coat, with a basket in her free hand and a gleaming gold clip in her hair. They were both, quite clearly, extraordinarily happy.
"We are the neighbours," said the old man, "fifteen. Fang Dehai. This is my wife, Mei Lanying. We have been married forty years and eleven days."
"Forty years and twelve days," said Mei Lanying.
"Twelve. I stand corrected. She has the calendar."
"I have the calendar," agreed Mei Lanying, calmly, and looked from Wenxi to Chengyan with enormous interest. "And you are the young ones. The baker and the carpenter. Oh, I have heard so much about you." She seized Wenxi's hands in both of hers. "My dear, you look worn out. You've been up all night. It's the nerves. It is always the nerves, in the first year. I said to Dehai, when we started, it takes forty years for a marriage to learn how to sleep."
"We haven't, " said Wenxi.
"No, I'm sure," said Mei Lanying, with a gentle pat. "But you will. Dehai, show them the sign."
"The sign," cried Fang Dehai, delighted, and hauled it off the cart. It was a huge board, painted in scarlet and gold, with a heart at each corner and the words, in a very florid hand, FORTY YEARS OF LOVE. THE TRUE COUPLE OF YUNXI. Below this, in smaller letters, appeared the words: NO FAKES.
There was a silence.
"Isn't it wonderful?" said Mei Lanying.
"Very striking," said Wenxi, weakly.
"We had it done at the printer's. We think that it makes a statement." Mei Lanying beamed. "Because there are a great many couples in this contest who, well. I'm not saying anything. I would not say a word. But after forty years, one can tell. A real couple has a particular way of standing. They don't look at each other at all. They simply know where the other is."
"Like a good pair of shoes," said Fang Dehai.
"Like a good pair of shoes," agreed Mei Lanying, and her bright black eyes flickered, without malice, from Chengyan's face to Wenxi's and back again. "And you two, now. You look, you look, " she tilted her head. "Oh, I like you. You stand like people who know exactly where the other one is, and are trying not to."
Chengyan, who had been holding the cedar frame like a shield, discovered that he had stopped breathing.
"We'll be across the way," said Fang Dehai, in a tone of great goodwill, and trundled off to fifteen, where a small drama began over whether the bunting should go up on the left or the right.
* * *
By ten o'clock the square was packed.
Visitors had poured in from the county road on every bus, and the whole market had come alive with a roar like surf. Bright hats bobbed. Children ran. Somewhere an erhu was being played, tunelessly and with great spirit. The air was thick with steam and frying sugar and the soft green smell of mugwort, and the queue at their stall had gone from nothing to a long snake that curled round the paper-fan seller and out of sight.
Wenxi had never worked so hard in her life.
She stood at the front of the stall with her sleeves rolled and her hair in a net, taking coins, wrapping dumplings, answering questions at the top of her voice. Yes, they were mugwort. Yes, they were sweet. Yes, there was sesame as well as bean. The plum blossom on top was pressed from an antique mould. Yes, a hundred and twenty years old. No, it was not for sale. A man in a straw hat wanted to know whether they were gluten free. A woman wanted to know whether they were healthy, and whether they were halal, and whether she might have one for her grandmother who had no teeth. A small girl pressed a coin into her hand and stared up at her with huge solemn eyes and said, in a whisper, "Are you the lady from the boat?"
"What boat?"
"The one in the picture."
Wenxi's stomach turned over. "What picture?"
"The one on the wall," said the child. "At the committee hall. It's very big. It's got you in it, and the man, and the man is looking at you like, " She screwed up her face. "Like that." She did an impression of an expression that Wenxi could not possibly have described. It was a mixture of terror and tenderness and something that looked, alarmingly, like a very large dog confronting a very small cake.
Wenxi wrapped three dumplings and a fourth for luck. She did not look up. She did not look at the tall man at her elbow, who was ladling the dumplings from the steamer onto the pearwood tray with an expression of perfect blankness, and who had, she noticed, gone suddenly and completely still.
The queue surged.
She was running out of dumplings. The first basket had gone by half past ten; the second was dwindling; the third was still in the steamer, and she had fifty people waiting and no hands. She snatched at a bundle of wrapping paper. She dropped it. She bent to retrieve it and cracked her head against the underside of the counter, and a stool, balanced on a pile of crates behind her, took the opportunity to tip. A hundredweight of rice flour in a rough sack slid slowly from the shelf above, tilted, hung for a moment in the air, and burst.
She screamed. She had time for exactly one, brief, high, undignified scream, and then the whole stall went white.
It came down like a snowfall. It settled on the counter, on the dumplings, on the pearwood tray. It settled on her hair. It settled in her mouth. When the cloud thinned she was standing in the centre of the stall, gasping, with her hands up and her eyelashes thick with flour, and in front of her the queue was frozen in silent, solemn, delighted horror.
There was a very long pause.
Then a small, low, trembling sound began somewhere on the left, and rose through the crowd, and she realised that fifty people were trying very hard not to laugh.
"I'm fine," said Wenxi, through the flour. "Everything is under control."
They fell apart. It went through the queue like wind through barley. People bent double. A man in a straw hat leaned on a post and wept. In the very middle of it all, standing in a drift of white with the empty sack in his hand, she saw Chengyan, and his shoulders were shaking, and she thought: if you laugh, if you do it in front of all these people, I'll never forgive you.
But he did not laugh.
He set down the sack. He crossed the little space between them in one stride, and before she knew what he was doing he had taken her by the wrist, quite gently, and pulled her round to face him.
"Don't move," he said, very low.
His hands went to her face. They were big and warm and entirely careful. His thumb brushed across her cheekbone, wiping the flour from beneath her eye, and then along the bridge of her nose, and then, with the lightest possible pressure, across the corner of her mouth. She could not breathe. She could hear the whole square roar and fall silent, and then roar again, but it was a long way off, in another room, behind glass.
He was frowning with concentration. A fleck of flour had caught in his lashes.
"There," said Chengyan.
"Is it, " She could hardly find her voice. "Is it gone?"
"Not all."
"Are we, I mean, is this a, is this under Clause, "
"No," said Chengyan. His hands had stopped, resting on either side of her jaw. His eyes, a few inches away, were dark and grave and very still, and under the amusement she thought she saw a flicker of something else, tight and fierce and glad. "This is a rescue."
A wolf-whistle split the air. Then another, and a ragged cheer, and the crowd began to clap.
Wenxi stood in the middle of her ruined stall with her face between his hands and her ears ringing. She did not know what he meant. She did not know what she meant either. She only knew that for a few seconds the whole noisy bright market had vanished, and that when he took his hands away, slowly, one finger at a time, as if the leaving were a matter for great consideration, the empty places on her skin went on burning.
"Dumplings," said Chengyan, to the crowd, in a voice that cracked a little. "Two each. While stocks last."
They sold out by noon.
It was the best business Su Ji had done in a decade. She would count the takings later, and weep. It was the flood of customers that came after the flour, a delighted, hungry, laughing tide, who had heard about the lady in the cloud, and wanted a dumpling for themselves. The line went round the square twice. The jar of tokens beside the stall filled so quickly that Chengyan had to fetch a second one. He worked at her side without speaking, plating, handing, wrapping, a long rhythmic reach of the arm that she began, unconsciously, to match, so that after the first hour they moved like two halves of one machine, and she no longer had to look to know where his hand would be.
At one point, in a lull, he held out a dumpling to her on the carved tray.
"You haven't eaten," he said.
"I haven't had time."
"Eat."
She took it. It was warm and soft and smelled of spring. She bit into it, and her eyes closed of their own accord, and the taste of the mugwort and the sweet bean and the faint grassy bitterness poured over her tongue, and for a moment she was six years old, sitting on the steps with Grandma, watching the green steam rise.
When she opened her eyes he was watching her.
"Good?" he asked.
"It's the best one," said Wenxi, and heard her own voice, a little unsteady. "I made it without trying."
He did not answer. But he looked at her for a long, grave moment, and then down at the tray in his hands, and the thumb of his right hand moved, once, across the little carved plum blossom in the corner, as if it were a thing he did not know he knew.
She saw it. She did not know what it meant. She did not ask.
The judges came at two.
There were five of them: a stout lady from the county tourism board, a thin gentleman with a bow tie, a restaurateur from the provincial capital, an elderly retired teacher, and, a pace behind, in his good grey jacket, with his notebook closed under his arm and his face composed in an expression of pleasant attention, Shen Haoran. They moved down the line in a slow cluster, tasting, nodding, murmuring. At each stall the lady from the tourism board wrote something on a card. At fifteen they paused for a long time, and Fang Dehai made a speech.
At fourteen they stopped.
Chengyan stood very straight. Wenxi, beside him, felt the whole of him come to attention, and her own spine stiffen in answer. The judges took a dumpling each. The thin gentleman bit into his and said nothing. The restaurateur closed her eyes. The elderly teacher, with the air of a man who had waited fifty years for the opportunity, took a second bite and a third, and then took out a handkerchief and dabbed gently at his eyes.
Shen ate his slowly.
He held the dumpling up and looked at the pattern on the top. He turned it a little in the sun. Then he bit into it, and chewed, and a very small change went over his face, a softening round the mouth, a stillness about the eyes. He swallowed. He looked down at the tray in Chengyan's hands, and at the tiny plum blossom cut into the corner of the wood, and for a second his gaze lingered there with an expression that Wenxi could not read.
Then he took out his notebook, opened it, and wrote something. He wrote for a good while. When he looked up, his face was perfectly pleasant again.
"Remarkable," said Shen. "Thank you, both. Do you know, I think this is the best thing I've eaten in Yunxi." And he moved on.
The afternoon went by in a dream.
They sold the last of the dumplings. They counted the tokens, which came to a good deal more than either of them had expected. They took down the awning, which fell on Wenxi, and the poles, which fell on Chengyan, and for a long time they were wrapped in canvas together, hissing and snorting, with Wenxi's elbow in his ribs and his chin on the top of her head, until a passing child came to the rescue and was rewarded with a dumpling they had saved.
At last, when the sun had gone low and the square had emptied to a litter of ropes and leaves, they stood side by side in the empty pitch, packing the pearwood tray into its cloth.
She was so tired that her hands had begun to shake.
There was flour in her hair. There was green on her cuffs. There was an ache behind her eyes that she knew would turn to a headache by evening. But she was smiling, and she could not stop. They had done it. For the first time since she came home, she had done something that had worked, that had not been a lie, a performance, a polished mask. They had stood in a square on a spring morning and made something good and given it away.
She reached for the cloth at the same moment as he did.
Their hands met on the smooth wood. She felt his fingers close over hers, large and warm and still faintly floury. Neither of them moved. The cloth lay between their palms like a thing neither of them had noticed.
They were not in public. The square was empty. There was nobody to see. It was not under any clause at all.
She did not pull away.
He did not either. They stood there in the dying gold light, the two of them, with the tray under their joined hands, and she was aware of the whole length of his arm, and the quick hard beat of his pulse in the wrist, and the way he was not looking at her, but looking down at the little carved plum blossom beneath their fingers, as if it had been put there to tell him something he already knew.
"The count," said Wenxi, very softly.
"It doesn't count," said Chengyan.
"No?"
"No." His voice was low and rough. "There's nobody here."
A pigeon landed on the empty stall and walked about on the counter with its wings behind its back. The bell tower struck six. Far away across the rooftops, in the great scoured sky, the first stars were coming out, one by one, like a thing being put into words.
Neither of them took their hand away.
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