From Grandma Su's recipe book, page thirty-nine: "The sweetest month is the one you do not count."
It lasted three weeks, though Auntie Zhou swore to the end of her days that it had been a whole month, and nobody in Yunxi had the heart to correct her.
Wenxi remembered it afterwards the way one remembers a very good meal, not as a sequence of events but as a flavour. It had no plot. It had mornings. Each of them began, at ten minutes to seven, with a knock on the back door that was not a knock at all but three small taps of a knuckle, and a voice on the step saying, "Good morning," and she would open it with flour to the elbows and her hair in a cloth, and he would be standing in the grey light with a plane over his shoulder and a loaf from the tea house under one arm, looking as though he had been awake for hours and had saved the best of it.
Then he would come in, and kiss her, and go to work.
That was the whole of it. He went through the green door into the workshop, and she turned back to the table, and between them the old thick wall of plaster stood as it had stood for eighty years, with a hundred small sounds passing through it. She would hear the first slap of his mallet. She would hear the long whisper of the plane. Once, in the middle of a morning, she heard the radio go up to its full roaring height and drop, as if a hand had snatched at the knob, and a moment later a voice, quite plainly, through the plaster, called, "Sorry!" and she laughed so hard that she dropped an egg.
She learned that he sang in the afternoons. It was never a whole song. It was a scrap, an aria or a folk tune or something that had come out of a radio in 1998, carried round the workshop like a plank from bench to rack, abandoned, picked up again. She learned that he talked to the wood. Not in words, exactly. It was a sort of low encouragement, a murmur, the sound a man makes to a horse. She stood once at the crack of the door, with a tray in her hands, and heard him say to a length of pear, "Come on, now. You know where you're going," and went away again very quietly with her face on fire.
And she learned that she sang too. That was the great surprise. She had gone about for eight years with a bright wooden silence in her chest, and now it had cracked open, and music was coming out of it in small unreasonable pieces. She hummed over the dough. She hummed over the till. She caught herself in the middle of a sentence to a customer, humming a bar of something, and the customer, who was Mr. Qian, put down his bun and looked at her over his spectacles with an expression of the deepest solemn joy.
"Do not stop," said Mr. Qian. "My bird has not made a sound all week. He is listening."
* * *
The shop made money.
It began, as everything began, with a small dishonesty that was really an act of courage. On the first Monday after the town meeting, Wenxi stood at the counter at half past five with a pencil and a piece of cardboard, and wrote, in the round uphill hand, SESAME BUN, FOUR YUAN.
She looked at it for a long time. It was one yuan more than the last price. It was a price that the ledger had been begging for since the spring.
She pinned it above the till. She stood back with her arms folded and her heart in her throat, like a woman who has just set fire to a small and beloved house, and waited for the sky to fall.
The first customer was Auntie Zhou.
She came in at seven with her string bag and her round face, and saw the card, and stopped dead. She read it twice. Her lips moved. Then, with an expression that Wenxi could not read, she put down her bag on the counter, and took out her purse, and said, in a voice of immense solemnity, "Four."
"Auntie, you don't have to, "
"A bun," said Auntie Zhou, "is worth four. I have said so for years. I said it to your grandmother in the year of the frogs and she told me not to be vulgar." She counted out the coins, one at a time, with a snap, and slid them across the glass. "Two. For the Wei sisters. They will pay me back on Friday, in embroidery."
Grandma Su, in the doorway of the bake room, with a tray of buns in her hands and a face of the most perfect and bland innocence, said nothing at all. But Wenxi saw her glance at the card, and at the coins, and at the small pile of silver on the counter, and something moved at the corner of her mouth, and was gone.
They did not lose a single customer.
They made the boxes in the second week. It was a thing Wenxi had drawn on the back of a flour form at two in the morning, sitting at her desk under the rabbit, with the lamp low and the old green book on her knee. The box was white, with a lid, and a band of pale green silk that would wrap round it twice and tie in a flat double bow. Inside there were six cakes, each a different shape, each pressed from one of the old moulds of Su Ji: a fish, a lotus, a coin, a peony, a plum blossom, and, in the centre, set a little apart, as a jewel is set in a ring, a small round cake bearing two long drooping branches that crossed and crossed.
On the lid she had written, in her best capitals, with a ruler: SU JI. SEVENTY YEARS OF WAITING WELL.
She priced it at one hundred and twenty yuan. It was an outrageous sum. It was exactly what a ballroom client would have paid, and a good deal less than the box was worth, and she made the first twelve at four in the morning with her teeth set, expecting that they would sit on the shelf until Christmas.
The coach party from the provincial capital took all twelve by eleven.
They came in a wave, in sun hats and sensible shoes, with the particular glazed delight of people who have been told that something is authentic and are finding, to their enormous satisfaction, that it is. They wanted to see the moulds. They wanted to hear about the willow. A woman in a lilac cardigan held the willow cake in her palm, with tears in her eyes, and said that it was the loveliest thing she had ever seen, and was it true that the pattern was the town's, and was it for sale in a single box. Wenxi said that it was for sale in a single box. She said it quite calmly. She stood behind the cracked glass case with her hands folded, and felt, quite distinctly, like a person who has been trying a door for months and has found that it opens inward.
She counted the takings that night at the kitchen table, with Grandma opposite her, the big green ledger open between them and a mug of tea going cold at her elbow.
She did it twice, because she did not believe it. Then she took the fountain pen from its cloth, the heavy black one with the gold nib, and wrote the total at the foot of the page. She wrote it in black ink.
It was the first line in black that had been written in that column in six years.
She sat looking at it. The kitchen was very quiet. The beam overhead smelled of a forest. Across the table Grandma Su had taken off her spectacles, and was polishing them slowly on the corner of her apron, with her eyes lowered. Her small brown hands were not quite steady.
"It's a profit," said Wenxi. Her voice cracked. "Grandma. It's only forty yuan. It's only the first day. But it's, "
"I know what it is," said Grandma Su.
She put on her spectacles. She leaned across the table and laid one finger, very lightly, on the black figure, as one touches the first green shoot in a bed that has lain fallow. She looked at it for a long time.
"Your grandfather," she said, "used to write them in black. Every night. With that pen. He said that a ledger is a kind of letter. He wrote it to the shop." She stopped. "I have written it in red for so many years that I had forgotten it had another colour."
Wenxi put her hand over hers.
"You may keep the pen," said Grandma. "It writes better in a happy house."
* * *
The skiff was finished on the last Saturday of September, and the whole street turned out to see it launched.
It was a very fine morning, high and blue and windless, with the canal lying as flat as a sheet of green glass and every white wall on the water repeated upside down in perfect detail. Chengyan had been at the boat shed every dawn for three weeks. He had steamed the strakes, and clamped them, and driven in copper rivets with a small bright hammer, and planed and scraped and oiled until the whole long hull shone like honey in a spoon. Fang Dehai had not been allowed to help. He had sat on a barrel for twenty-one mornings with his cane across his knees and watched, saying nothing, with an expression that grew steadily stranger.
Now the skiff stood on the slipway at the water's edge, nineteen feet of pale larch and cedar, its prow curved up like the neck of a swan. Someone had hung a garland of marigolds on its stem. Someone else had tied a red ribbon across it, from post to post, as for the opening of a bridge. A crowd stood on the bank, and on the steps, and in the little boats along the far shore, five or six deep in places, and Wenxi, who had come at the last moment with a basket of warm buns, found herself at the very front, wedged between Auntie Zhou and the cobbler, with a clear view of the old man.
He had not said a word for ten minutes.
He stood at the foot of the slipway, in his spotless blue tunic, with his silver hair blowing a little in the breeze, and he looked at the boat. His round, kind, brown face had gone perfectly still. His cane hung from his hand and did not touch the ground. Beside him, with one hand tucked under his arm, Mei Lanying stood in her plum-coloured jacket and her little gold clip, looking not at the boat but at her husband, and in the very bright black eyes was an expression that Wenxi, with a lurch, had seen once before, over a bowl of osmanthus jelly.
Chengyan stood a little apart, on the stones.
He had on his working shirt, with the sleeves rolled, and a smear of oil on his jaw. He had been about to speak. She saw him draw breath, and stop. He looked round at the crowd, which looked back, and then at the old man, and then, in a way she knew, at his own hands. Then, quite abruptly, he took two steps forward and laid his palm flat on the bow.
"It's ready," said Chengyan. "I'd like you to see her. That's all. I didn't, I haven't changed what you built. I only finished it."
Fang Dehai did not answer.
"The lines are yours," said Chengyan. "The frames, the keel, the sheer. I didn't touch them. I only put in what was missing." He swallowed. "I thought you ought to have the, "
He stopped. The old man had put out his hand.
It was a small round brown hand, spotted with age, and it hung in the air above the planking for a moment, trembling like a leaf. Then it came down. It touched the hull, quite lightly, at the very place where the strakes met the stem, and began to travel along it. It went slowly, from the prow toward the stern, a finger's breadth at a time. It paused at each rivet. It stroked each seam, with the tenderness of a man running his palm along the spine of a sleeping animal, and Wenxi saw his lips move, silently, as though he were reading something.
He came to the transom.
There was a small plate there, of brass, no bigger than a playing card, that she had not noticed. It had been screwed to the stern post under the curve of the sheer, so low that one would have to kneel to read it. Fang Dehai knelt. He did it with a great deal of difficulty, and several people moved to help him, and Mei Lanying raised one small hand without taking her eyes from his back, and they stopped.
He put on his spectacles.
The plate said, in plain engraved capitals, no larger than a grain of rice: TWELVE YEARS.
For a moment nothing happened. A moorhen called in the reeds. The whole bank held its breath like a single creature.
Then Fang Dehai's shoulders began to shake.
He did not make a sound. He knelt on the wet stones with his hand pressed to the brass and his silver head bowed, and his whole round body heaved, again and again, in a slow helpless tide. He was laughing. She saw it, and then she saw that he was not, and then she saw that it was both. Tears were running down his face and dripping off his chin onto the stones. He lifted his head. He turned, on his knees, to his wife.
"It took twelve," said Fang Dehai, in a cracked small voice. "You said so. It took us twelve years to learn to breathe."
"It took me twelve," said Mei Lanying. "It took you eleven. You were always quicker."
"He put it on the boat."
"I see that."
"Mei, he, " He could not go on. He put his face in his hands.
Mei Lanying went down beside him. She did it with perfect composure, in her best jacket, on the damp stone, with one hand holding up her skirt, and put both arms round her husband's neck. She laid her cheek on his silver head. And over it, across ten feet of sunlit air, her black eyes met Chengyan's, and she did not smile, quite. She inclined her head, very slowly, a quarter of an inch, as a queen to a subject who has done something that she cannot repay.
The crowd was crying. It was an extraordinary thing to see. The cobbler had his hat off. The Wei sisters were holding each other. Auntie Zhou, beside Wenxi, had both hands pressed to her mouth, and her whole bulk was quivering, and in the pocket of her quilted jacket a small bell was jingling, because she had forgotten that she had put it there.
"Break the ribbon," said Mr. Qian, hoarsely, from somewhere behind. "Someone break the ribbon."
It was Mei Lanying who did it. She rose, with great dignity, and drew from her sleeve a pair of small silver scissors on a chain, and snipped it through. A cheer went up. The boat slid down the greased ways in one long smooth rush, with a hiss like a drawn breath, and took the water without a splash. It lay there, rocking slightly, with the marigolds streaming from its prow and its own reflection beneath it, upside down, like something that had always been there.
Fang Dehai was helped into it. He sat in the stern with the tiller under his hand. His face was wet and shining and extraordinarily young. He said, "She tracks. Oh, she tracks. Do you see her? Do you see the way she sits?" and Mei Lanying, sitting in front of him in her plum-coloured jacket, with her hands folded in her lap, said, "I see, Dehai," and did not take her eyes from his.
Wenxi found Chengyan on the steps, a little apart, with his hands hanging empty at his sides and a look of stunned exhaustion on his face.
She did not say anything. She put her hand in his. He laced his fingers through hers, hard, and they stood there together, side by side, in the sun, and watched a boat go away down a green canal with two old people in it, and a flock of white birds lifting off the water ahead of it in a long, slow, shining arc.
"You put the name on it," said Wenxi.
"He said it. In the shed. The first week." His voice was rough. "He said it took twelve years to learn to breathe. I thought, a boat should know what it's for."
"You are the most sentimental man in the county."
"I am not."
"You have a brass plate."
"It was in the drawer," said Chengyan, with great dignity, and she laughed, and leaned her head against his shoulder, and he laid his cheek on her hair.
* * *
That was the Saturday the street found out about Zhaoyu.
It happened in the night market, in the second row, under the swinging bulbs, between the stall of carved soap and the stall of whistling clay animals, and Wenxi saw the whole of it from the bridge. She had gone up to the crest to look at the town, because it was a clear night and the lamps were coming out one by one along the canal like a string of small yellow stars. She stood with her elbows on the parapet and a paper cone of roasted chestnuts in her hand. Below her, in the yard behind the old customs house, the market glowed and smoked and hummed. And along the second row, quite slowly, quite unmistakably, walked a very tall young man with his hair on end and a very small young woman in a green silk jacket.
They were not holding hands. They were not touching. They walked a careful foot apart, like two people carrying a sheet of glass between them, and every few steps the young man's head came down toward her and went up again, as if he had begun to speak and thought better of it. He was carrying her bag. She had let him. She had a stick of candied hawthorn in her hand, and as Wenxi watched she bit a berry from it, with a small crisp crack, and without looking round held the stick out sideways, at the level of his elbow.
He took it.
He took it as a man takes a live coal, in both hands, with his whole face going slowly and wonderfully scarlet. He looked at the stick. He looked at the single berry that remained. He ate it, with his eyes shut, with the air of someone receiving a sacrament, and a sound went up from the night market that Wenxi could hear all the way to the bridge.
It was a long, low, rising, collective noise, rather like a flock of pigeons being startled. It was the sound of fifty people who had been waiting a very long time and had all inhaled at once.
"Ooooh," said the night market.
Tang Rui turned.
She stood in the middle of the second row, in the swinging light, with her chin up and her fringe in her eyes, and looked at the faces round her. There were a great many of them. The baker was there, and the cobbler's wife, and one of the Wei sisters holding a clay duck. Mrs. Hu was there in her jade-green coat, with an expression of grim triumph. They all looked back at her. Tang Rui folded her arms. She drew herself up to her full height, which was not great, and she said, in a clear carrying voice that reached the bridge, "I have read it."
Nobody breathed.
Zhaoyu opened his eyes.
"The notebook," said Tang Rui, to the night market in general. "The little brown one. He left it in his toolbox in my kitchen. It had a rubber band round it. I am a person of strong character and I did not open it for six days." She paused. "On the seventh I opened it."
Zhaoyu made a small high noise, like a kettle on the point of boiling.
"The spelling," said Tang Rui, "is appalling."
"Tang Rui, "
"There is a page in it," she said, in a voice that began to shake, "which says, things she said on Tuesday. And there are eleven of them. Eleven. About tea. And a, and a pigeon. And one that is only, it's only what I said when I dropped the lid." She stopped. She drew a breath. She was crying, Wenxi saw, quite openly, and not at all like a person who minded. "Nobody has ever written down what I said on a Tuesday."
He was staring at her with the face of a man who has been walking in the dark and has stepped onto a floor.
"I would like," said Tang Rui, in a rush, "to have the notebook. I'd like you to keep writing in it. In the, in the same one. And I'd like it if you could possibly, " Her voice cracked. "Spell Tuesday."
The yard exploded.
It was a roar. It rolled up from the second row and broke against the arch of the bridge like surf, and the cobbler's wife threw a handful of fried dough in the air, and the Wei sisters began, slowly, and then with increasing vigour, to weep on each other's shoulders. Mrs. Hu was heard to say that she had said so in the spring. Somewhere in the crowd, Mr. Qian began to sing.
Wenxi laughed so hard that she dropped her chestnuts.
She leaned over the parapet with her hand pressed to her side and tears running down her face, and watched a tall young man in the middle of a crowd attempt, three separate times, to say something, and fail, and give up, and simply stand there, with his hands out, while a small woman in green took them both in hers. It was the most beautiful and ridiculous thing she had ever seen.
"They've been at it since June," said a low voice at her shoulder.
She did not jump. She had known the step on the stair. She turned her head, and he was there, leaning on the parapet beside her with his sleeves rolled and a smear of larch resin along one forearm, looking down at the market with an expression of dry and profound contentment.
"Tab six," said Chengyan.
"Is he going to survive?"
"He's asking if she'd like some more hawthorn."
"That's not a good sign."
"I think," said Chengyan, "it's the best one he's got."
He put his arm round her. She leaned back against his chest, into the warmth of him, and they stood on the bridge in the blue autumn dusk, above the glowing yard and the swinging bulbs and the whole noisy tender town, and she thought, I did not know that a person could be this full. I did not know that it was possible to be so full and still have room.
* * *
Grandma Su sang on the following Tuesday.
Wenxi came upon it by accident. She had gone into the bake room at four in the afternoon to fetch a tin of sesame seeds, and she stopped in the doorway because she heard it, a thin high crooked old voice, rising and falling over the sound of the ticking oven. It was coming from the kitchen window.
The window looked out across the courtyard. It was a deep one, cut in the thick wall, with a stool in front of it, and on that stool, with her hands in her lap and her white head tilted to one side, sat the old woman, looking out. She had not turned the lamp on. The afternoon light fell across her face, soft and gold and a little tired, and in it she looked at once very old and very young, like a girl who has been told a secret.
She was singing the wedding song.
It was the old one. It was the one that had followed Wenxi through the whole of the summer, through the passage and the shop and the kitchen, round the corner of every moment that mattered, the tune that had gone silent on the morning of the newspaper and been replaced, since the flood, by something slower and older that Wenxi had never known. It had come back. It rose in the dusty kitchen in a thin clear thread, half a tone flat, with its small trills and its long sad drop on the last bar, and it was not sly any more. It was not mischievous or knowing. It was simply a song, sung by a woman who had waited a very long time to sing it, and had not been willing to do so until she was sure that it would be true.
Wenxi followed her eyes.
In the courtyard, under the plum tree, among the fallen leaves, a man and a woman were mending the garden gate. She knew them both. She was holding the gate steady, in her old blue apron, with her hair coming down and her tongue between her teeth. He was kneeling at the hinge with a screwdriver in his hand, and his sleeves rolled, and the light on his bent neck. They were not speaking. They did not need to. Every few seconds she reached out without looking and handed him something, a screw, a washer, the little oil can, and he took it without looking, and they went on, in their own slow silence, like two halves of a single clap.
The old woman sang.
She sang it through to the end. The last bar fell, and hung, and dissolved into the humming of the oven. Then, very slowly, she put up one small brown hand and wiped her cheek with the back of her knuckles, and sat for a little while longer looking out at the garden. She did not know that she was watched. And the thing that Wenxi saw on that kind lined face, in the gold light, was not triumph, or even happiness. It was a quiet rapt gratitude, such as a woman might feel who has set a cake in the oven and watched, for sixty years, and has just, this moment, seen it rise.
It was so beautiful that Wenxi could not breathe.
She stood in the doorway of the bake room with the tin of sesame seeds in her hands. She wanted to cross the kitchen. She wanted to kneel on the flags beside that stool and lay her head in the old woman's lap and say, Grandma. There is something I haven't told you. I've had a letter. I don't know what to do. And her whole body, every muscle of it, leaned toward the saying, as a plant leans toward a lamp.
But the old woman was singing. And it was the first time in nine weeks.
Not today, thought Wenxi. Not this. Let her have it a little longer.
She went away on tiptoe, with the tin held against her chest, and did not make a sound.
* * *
The second email came on the first of October, and she read it standing in the middle of the market with a string bag in her hand.
It was very short. It was, if anything, more courteous than the first. Dear Ms. Su, it began, in the clean grey font. I do not wish to press. I am writing only so that you know that the door is still open, and that the studio is, as they say, warming. We have found a north-facing window. I have put your name on it, on a card, in pencil. I will take it off, with great regret, on the sixteenth.
She stood there for some time.
The market went on round her. A woman was selling aubergines. A child was crying about a balloon. The sun was bright and thin and a good deal lower than it had been a week before, and the air had a new edge to it, a dry sharpness like a sliced apple. She read the email again, to the end. She read the line about the card. And she did what she had done with the first, in the privacy of her own mind, in the six seconds it took her to cross the cobbles to the fruit stall.
She deleted it.
She did it with one thumb, quite calmly. The screen showed her a small grey square that said Message deleted, and she looked at it, and put the phone in her pocket, face down, and bought a pound of pears.
The sixteenth was fifteen days away, she told herself. The finale was on the fifth. There was a roof to be mended, and a prize to be won, and a long ledger of small sweet things that had to be done before anyone could possibly be asked to look at an offer. It was not yet due. It was not even close to due. It was a letter in a drawer, and a letter in a drawer was not a thing that mattered. She had told herself so a dozen times, in a dozen different voices, and she was becoming extraordinarily good at it.
The pears were round and yellow and smelled of honey. She held one in her palm all the way home.
She found him on the bench in front of the shop.
It was a little after four. The sun had come round to the west end of the alley and lay along the whitewash in a long low blaze, and the stones were warm. The whole of Sixth Alley seemed to be asleep. The cat lay on the third flowerpot with its paws tucked under. A single bee went up and down the length of the jasmine. And on the long bleached bench beneath the window of Su Ji, where in July they had once sat a decent foot apart with flour on their sleeves, Chengyan was sleeping.
He had not meant to. She could see that. He had been carrying something, a bundle of pale lath bound with twine, and it had slipped from his shoulder to the ground beside him, and he had sat down for a moment to rest. His head had gone back against the wall. His mouth was a little open. One hand lay on his knee, palm up, with the fingers curled, scarred and floury and entirely relaxed, like the hand of a child. There was a curl of pale wood caught in his hair, over his left ear, and a shaving on his collar, and in the low gold light the lines about his eyes had smoothed themselves away until he looked, for the first time since she had known him, as young as he really was.
She stopped on the cobbles with the pear in her hand.
She had meant to go in. She had meant to put down the string bag and begin the dinner, and she stood where she was, with the sun on her shoulders, and looked.
A man who did not ask for anything was asleep in the middle of the afternoon in front of her grandmother's shop, in full view of the alley, with his hand open. It was the most trusting thing she had ever seen. It was the plain unguarded sleep of a person who had finally been persuaded that nothing was going to be taken away. And she thought of a loft, and a red strip pinned to a wall, and a space at the bottom, left blank, because we might need it.
It came to her then, quite quietly, with no drama at all, like a step that one finds in the dark. She had been afraid for eight years of the wrong thing. She had been afraid of failing. She had stood on a pavement with a cardboard box and thought that nothing could be worse than being found out to be no good, and she had run, and hidden, and put on a smile like a shop window, and it had all been to avoid that single fear.
She was not afraid of it now.
She had been found out. She had stood in a loft in the rain and said, I don't have a job, and a man with sawdust in his hair had said, it's oak. She had been seen, and it had not killed her. It had not so much as dented the floor.
What she was afraid of, standing on the warm stones in the October light with a yellow pear in her hand, was this. The bench and the bee and the open palm. She was afraid of a thing that she could lose.
The pear was very heavy.
He stirred. His head turned against the plaster, and his eyes opened, slowly, still dark and clouded with sleep, and fixed on her face. For a moment he did not seem to know where he was. Then he did, and his whole face changed, like a field when a cloud goes off it, and he smiled.
"You're back," said Chengyan, thickly.
"I got pears."
"I fell asleep."
"I saw."
"How long?"
"Long enough," said Wenxi, and found that her voice was perfectly steady, "for me to look at you."
He held out his hand, palm up, as he had on the stair of the committee hall. She crossed the cobbles. She put the pear in it. He looked at the pear, gravely, and then up at her face, and the smile slipped a little and became something else, a small attentive crease between his brows.
"What is it?" he said.
"Nothing."
It was the word she had used at the workshop door, and at the willow, and over the sink at supper. It came out of her mouth easily now, like a stone from a well-worn path. She sat down beside him on the bench, and leaned her head on his shoulder, and felt him settle against her with a long slow sigh, and the sun lay warm on both their faces, and neither of them said anything further.
But a hand that had been lying open on his knee closed, quite slowly, over hers. And held on a little tighter than the moment required.
You've reached the end of this chapter
From Grandma Su's recipe book, page thirty-nine: "The sweetest month is the one you do not count."
It lasted three weeks, though Auntie Zhou swore to the end of her days that it had been a whole month, and nobody in Yunxi had the heart to correct her.
Wenxi remembered it afterwards the way one remembers a very good meal, not as a sequence of events but as a flavour. It had no plot. It had mornings. Each of them began, at ten minutes to seven, with a knock on the back door that was not a knock at all but three small taps of a knuckle, and a voice on the step saying, "Good morning," and she would open it with flour to the elbows and her hair in a cloth, and he would be standing in the grey light with a plane over his shoulder and a loaf from the tea house under one arm, looking as though he had been awake for hours and had saved the best of it.
Then he would come in, and kiss her, and go to work.
That was the whole of it. He went through the green door into the workshop, and she turned back to the table, and between them the old thick wall of plaster stood as it had stood for eighty years, with a hundred small sounds passing through it. She would hear the first slap of his mallet. She would hear the long whisper of the plane. Once, in the middle of a morning, she heard the radio go up to its full roaring height and drop, as if a hand had snatched at the knob, and a moment later a voice, quite plainly, through the plaster, called, "Sorry!" and she laughed so hard that she dropped an egg.
She learned that he sang in the afternoons. It was never a whole song. It was a scrap, an aria or a folk tune or something that had come out of a radio in 1998, carried round the workshop like a plank from bench to rack, abandoned, picked up again. She learned that he talked to the wood. Not in words, exactly. It was a sort of low encouragement, a murmur, the sound a man makes to a horse. She stood once at the crack of the door, with a tray in her hands, and heard him say to a length of pear, "Come on, now. You know where you're going," and went away again very quietly with her face on fire.
And she learned that she sang too. That was the great surprise. She had gone about for eight years with a bright wooden silence in her chest, and now it had cracked open, and music was coming out of it in small unreasonable pieces. She hummed over the dough. She hummed over the till. She caught herself in the middle of a sentence to a customer, humming a bar of something, and the customer, who was Mr. Qian, put down his bun and looked at her over his spectacles with an expression of the deepest solemn joy.
"Do not stop," said Mr. Qian. "My bird has not made a sound all week. He is listening."
* * *
The shop made money.
It began, as everything began, with a small dishonesty that was really an act of courage. On the first Monday after the town meeting, Wenxi stood at the counter at half past five with a pencil and a piece of cardboard, and wrote, in the round uphill hand, SESAME BUN, FOUR YUAN.
She looked at it for a long time. It was one yuan more than the last price. It was a price that the ledger had been begging for since the spring.
She pinned it above the till. She stood back with her arms folded and her heart in her throat, like a woman who has just set fire to a small and beloved house, and waited for the sky to fall.
The first customer was Auntie Zhou.
She came in at seven with her string bag and her round face, and saw the card, and stopped dead. She read it twice. Her lips moved. Then, with an expression that Wenxi could not read, she put down her bag on the counter, and took out her purse, and said, in a voice of immense solemnity, "Four."
"Auntie, you don't have to, "
"A bun," said Auntie Zhou, "is worth four. I have said so for years. I said it to your grandmother in the year of the frogs and she told me not to be vulgar." She counted out the coins, one at a time, with a snap, and slid them across the glass. "Two. For the Wei sisters. They will pay me back on Friday, in embroidery."
Grandma Su, in the doorway of the bake room, with a tray of buns in her hands and a face of the most perfect and bland innocence, said nothing at all. But Wenxi saw her glance at the card, and at the coins, and at the small pile of silver on the counter, and something moved at the corner of her mouth, and was gone.
They did not lose a single customer.
They made the boxes in the second week. It was a thing Wenxi had drawn on the back of a flour form at two in the morning, sitting at her desk under the rabbit, with the lamp low and the old green book on her knee. The box was white, with a lid, and a band of pale green silk that would wrap round it twice and tie in a flat double bow. Inside there were six cakes, each a different shape, each pressed from one of the old moulds of Su Ji: a fish, a lotus, a coin, a peony, a plum blossom, and, in the centre, set a little apart, as a jewel is set in a ring, a small round cake bearing two long drooping branches that crossed and crossed.
On the lid she had written, in her best capitals, with a ruler: SU JI. SEVENTY YEARS OF WAITING WELL.
She priced it at one hundred and twenty yuan. It was an outrageous sum. It was exactly what a ballroom client would have paid, and a good deal less than the box was worth, and she made the first twelve at four in the morning with her teeth set, expecting that they would sit on the shelf until Christmas.
The coach party from the provincial capital took all twelve by eleven.
They came in a wave, in sun hats and sensible shoes, with the particular glazed delight of people who have been told that something is authentic and are finding, to their enormous satisfaction, that it is. They wanted to see the moulds. They wanted to hear about the willow. A woman in a lilac cardigan held the willow cake in her palm, with tears in her eyes, and said that it was the loveliest thing she had ever seen, and was it true that the pattern was the town's, and was it for sale in a single box. Wenxi said that it was for sale in a single box. She said it quite calmly. She stood behind the cracked glass case with her hands folded, and felt, quite distinctly, like a person who has been trying a door for months and has found that it opens inward.
She counted the takings that night at the kitchen table, with Grandma opposite her, the big green ledger open between them and a mug of tea going cold at her elbow.
She did it twice, because she did not believe it. Then she took the fountain pen from its cloth, the heavy black one with the gold nib, and wrote the total at the foot of the page. She wrote it in black ink.
It was the first line in black that had been written in that column in six years.
She sat looking at it. The kitchen was very quiet. The beam overhead smelled of a forest. Across the table Grandma Su had taken off her spectacles, and was polishing them slowly on the corner of her apron, with her eyes lowered. Her small brown hands were not quite steady.
"It's a profit," said Wenxi. Her voice cracked. "Grandma. It's only forty yuan. It's only the first day. But it's, "
"I know what it is," said Grandma Su.
She put on her spectacles. She leaned across the table and laid one finger, very lightly, on the black figure, as one touches the first green shoot in a bed that has lain fallow. She looked at it for a long time.
"Your grandfather," she said, "used to write them in black. Every night. With that pen. He said that a ledger is a kind of letter. He wrote it to the shop." She stopped. "I have written it in red for so many years that I had forgotten it had another colour."
Wenxi put her hand over hers.
"You may keep the pen," said Grandma. "It writes better in a happy house."
* * *
The skiff was finished on the last Saturday of September, and the whole street turned out to see it launched.
It was a very fine morning, high and blue and windless, with the canal lying as flat as a sheet of green glass and every white wall on the water repeated upside down in perfect detail. Chengyan had been at the boat shed every dawn for three weeks. He had steamed the strakes, and clamped them, and driven in copper rivets with a small bright hammer, and planed and scraped and oiled until the whole long hull shone like honey in a spoon. Fang Dehai had not been allowed to help. He had sat on a barrel for twenty-one mornings with his cane across his knees and watched, saying nothing, with an expression that grew steadily stranger.
Now the skiff stood on the slipway at the water's edge, nineteen feet of pale larch and cedar, its prow curved up like the neck of a swan. Someone had hung a garland of marigolds on its stem. Someone else had tied a red ribbon across it, from post to post, as for the opening of a bridge. A crowd stood on the bank, and on the steps, and in the little boats along the far shore, five or six deep in places, and Wenxi, who had come at the last moment with a basket of warm buns, found herself at the very front, wedged between Auntie Zhou and the cobbler, with a clear view of the old man.
He had not said a word for ten minutes.
He stood at the foot of the slipway, in his spotless blue tunic, with his silver hair blowing a little in the breeze, and he looked at the boat. His round, kind, brown face had gone perfectly still. His cane hung from his hand and did not touch the ground. Beside him, with one hand tucked under his arm, Mei Lanying stood in her plum-coloured jacket and her little gold clip, looking not at the boat but at her husband, and in the very bright black eyes was an expression that Wenxi, with a lurch, had seen once before, over a bowl of osmanthus jelly.
Chengyan stood a little apart, on the stones.
He had on his working shirt, with the sleeves rolled, and a smear of oil on his jaw. He had been about to speak. She saw him draw breath, and stop. He looked round at the crowd, which looked back, and then at the old man, and then, in a way she knew, at his own hands. Then, quite abruptly, he took two steps forward and laid his palm flat on the bow.
"It's ready," said Chengyan. "I'd like you to see her. That's all. I didn't, I haven't changed what you built. I only finished it."
Fang Dehai did not answer.
"The lines are yours," said Chengyan. "The frames, the keel, the sheer. I didn't touch them. I only put in what was missing." He swallowed. "I thought you ought to have the, "
He stopped. The old man had put out his hand.
It was a small round brown hand, spotted with age, and it hung in the air above the planking for a moment, trembling like a leaf. Then it came down. It touched the hull, quite lightly, at the very place where the strakes met the stem, and began to travel along it. It went slowly, from the prow toward the stern, a finger's breadth at a time. It paused at each rivet. It stroked each seam, with the tenderness of a man running his palm along the spine of a sleeping animal, and Wenxi saw his lips move, silently, as though he were reading something.
He came to the transom.
There was a small plate there, of brass, no bigger than a playing card, that she had not noticed. It had been screwed to the stern post under the curve of the sheer, so low that one would have to kneel to read it. Fang Dehai knelt. He did it with a great deal of difficulty, and several people moved to help him, and Mei Lanying raised one small hand without taking her eyes from his back, and they stopped.
He put on his spectacles.
The plate said, in plain engraved capitals, no larger than a grain of rice: TWELVE YEARS.
For a moment nothing happened. A moorhen called in the reeds. The whole bank held its breath like a single creature.
Then Fang Dehai's shoulders began to shake.
He did not make a sound. He knelt on the wet stones with his hand pressed to the brass and his silver head bowed, and his whole round body heaved, again and again, in a slow helpless tide. He was laughing. She saw it, and then she saw that he was not, and then she saw that it was both. Tears were running down his face and dripping off his chin onto the stones. He lifted his head. He turned, on his knees, to his wife.
"It took twelve," said Fang Dehai, in a cracked small voice. "You said so. It took us twelve years to learn to breathe."
"It took me twelve," said Mei Lanying. "It took you eleven. You were always quicker."
"He put it on the boat."
"I see that."
"Mei, he, " He could not go on. He put his face in his hands.
Mei Lanying went down beside him. She did it with perfect composure, in her best jacket, on the damp stone, with one hand holding up her skirt, and put both arms round her husband's neck. She laid her cheek on his silver head. And over it, across ten feet of sunlit air, her black eyes met Chengyan's, and she did not smile, quite. She inclined her head, very slowly, a quarter of an inch, as a queen to a subject who has done something that she cannot repay.
The crowd was crying. It was an extraordinary thing to see. The cobbler had his hat off. The Wei sisters were holding each other. Auntie Zhou, beside Wenxi, had both hands pressed to her mouth, and her whole bulk was quivering, and in the pocket of her quilted jacket a small bell was jingling, because she had forgotten that she had put it there.
"Break the ribbon," said Mr. Qian, hoarsely, from somewhere behind. "Someone break the ribbon."
It was Mei Lanying who did it. She rose, with great dignity, and drew from her sleeve a pair of small silver scissors on a chain, and snipped it through. A cheer went up. The boat slid down the greased ways in one long smooth rush, with a hiss like a drawn breath, and took the water without a splash. It lay there, rocking slightly, with the marigolds streaming from its prow and its own reflection beneath it, upside down, like something that had always been there.
Fang Dehai was helped into it. He sat in the stern with the tiller under his hand. His face was wet and shining and extraordinarily young. He said, "She tracks. Oh, she tracks. Do you see her? Do you see the way she sits?" and Mei Lanying, sitting in front of him in her plum-coloured jacket, with her hands folded in her lap, said, "I see, Dehai," and did not take her eyes from his.
Wenxi found Chengyan on the steps, a little apart, with his hands hanging empty at his sides and a look of stunned exhaustion on his face.
She did not say anything. She put her hand in his. He laced his fingers through hers, hard, and they stood there together, side by side, in the sun, and watched a boat go away down a green canal with two old people in it, and a flock of white birds lifting off the water ahead of it in a long, slow, shining arc.
"You put the name on it," said Wenxi.
"He said it. In the shed. The first week." His voice was rough. "He said it took twelve years to learn to breathe. I thought, a boat should know what it's for."
"You are the most sentimental man in the county."
"I am not."
"You have a brass plate."
"It was in the drawer," said Chengyan, with great dignity, and she laughed, and leaned her head against his shoulder, and he laid his cheek on her hair.
* * *
That was the Saturday the street found out about Zhaoyu.
It happened in the night market, in the second row, under the swinging bulbs, between the stall of carved soap and the stall of whistling clay animals, and Wenxi saw the whole of it from the bridge. She had gone up to the crest to look at the town, because it was a clear night and the lamps were coming out one by one along the canal like a string of small yellow stars. She stood with her elbows on the parapet and a paper cone of roasted chestnuts in her hand. Below her, in the yard behind the old customs house, the market glowed and smoked and hummed. And along the second row, quite slowly, quite unmistakably, walked a very tall young man with his hair on end and a very small young woman in a green silk jacket.
They were not holding hands. They were not touching. They walked a careful foot apart, like two people carrying a sheet of glass between them, and every few steps the young man's head came down toward her and went up again, as if he had begun to speak and thought better of it. He was carrying her bag. She had let him. She had a stick of candied hawthorn in her hand, and as Wenxi watched she bit a berry from it, with a small crisp crack, and without looking round held the stick out sideways, at the level of his elbow.
He took it.
He took it as a man takes a live coal, in both hands, with his whole face going slowly and wonderfully scarlet. He looked at the stick. He looked at the single berry that remained. He ate it, with his eyes shut, with the air of someone receiving a sacrament, and a sound went up from the night market that Wenxi could hear all the way to the bridge.
It was a long, low, rising, collective noise, rather like a flock of pigeons being startled. It was the sound of fifty people who had been waiting a very long time and had all inhaled at once.
"Ooooh," said the night market.
Tang Rui turned.
She stood in the middle of the second row, in the swinging light, with her chin up and her fringe in her eyes, and looked at the faces round her. There were a great many of them. The baker was there, and the cobbler's wife, and one of the Wei sisters holding a clay duck. Mrs. Hu was there in her jade-green coat, with an expression of grim triumph. They all looked back at her. Tang Rui folded her arms. She drew herself up to her full height, which was not great, and she said, in a clear carrying voice that reached the bridge, "I have read it."
Nobody breathed.
Zhaoyu opened his eyes.
"The notebook," said Tang Rui, to the night market in general. "The little brown one. He left it in his toolbox in my kitchen. It had a rubber band round it. I am a person of strong character and I did not open it for six days." She paused. "On the seventh I opened it."
Zhaoyu made a small high noise, like a kettle on the point of boiling.
"The spelling," said Tang Rui, "is appalling."
"Tang Rui, "
"There is a page in it," she said, in a voice that began to shake, "which says, things she said on Tuesday. And there are eleven of them. Eleven. About tea. And a, and a pigeon. And one that is only, it's only what I said when I dropped the lid." She stopped. She drew a breath. She was crying, Wenxi saw, quite openly, and not at all like a person who minded. "Nobody has ever written down what I said on a Tuesday."
He was staring at her with the face of a man who has been walking in the dark and has stepped onto a floor.
"I would like," said Tang Rui, in a rush, "to have the notebook. I'd like you to keep writing in it. In the, in the same one. And I'd like it if you could possibly, " Her voice cracked. "Spell Tuesday."
The yard exploded.
It was a roar. It rolled up from the second row and broke against the arch of the bridge like surf, and the cobbler's wife threw a handful of fried dough in the air, and the Wei sisters began, slowly, and then with increasing vigour, to weep on each other's shoulders. Mrs. Hu was heard to say that she had said so in the spring. Somewhere in the crowd, Mr. Qian began to sing.
Wenxi laughed so hard that she dropped her chestnuts.
She leaned over the parapet with her hand pressed to her side and tears running down her face, and watched a tall young man in the middle of a crowd attempt, three separate times, to say something, and fail, and give up, and simply stand there, with his hands out, while a small woman in green took them both in hers. It was the most beautiful and ridiculous thing she had ever seen.
"They've been at it since June," said a low voice at her shoulder.
She did not jump. She had known the step on the stair. She turned her head, and he was there, leaning on the parapet beside her with his sleeves rolled and a smear of larch resin along one forearm, looking down at the market with an expression of dry and profound contentment.
"Tab six," said Chengyan.
"Is he going to survive?"
"He's asking if she'd like some more hawthorn."
"That's not a good sign."
"I think," said Chengyan, "it's the best one he's got."
He put his arm round her. She leaned back against his chest, into the warmth of him, and they stood on the bridge in the blue autumn dusk, above the glowing yard and the swinging bulbs and the whole noisy tender town, and she thought, I did not know that a person could be this full. I did not know that it was possible to be so full and still have room.
* * *
Grandma Su sang on the following Tuesday.
Wenxi came upon it by accident. She had gone into the bake room at four in the afternoon to fetch a tin of sesame seeds, and she stopped in the doorway because she heard it, a thin high crooked old voice, rising and falling over the sound of the ticking oven. It was coming from the kitchen window.
The window looked out across the courtyard. It was a deep one, cut in the thick wall, with a stool in front of it, and on that stool, with her hands in her lap and her white head tilted to one side, sat the old woman, looking out. She had not turned the lamp on. The afternoon light fell across her face, soft and gold and a little tired, and in it she looked at once very old and very young, like a girl who has been told a secret.
She was singing the wedding song.
It was the old one. It was the one that had followed Wenxi through the whole of the summer, through the passage and the shop and the kitchen, round the corner of every moment that mattered, the tune that had gone silent on the morning of the newspaper and been replaced, since the flood, by something slower and older that Wenxi had never known. It had come back. It rose in the dusty kitchen in a thin clear thread, half a tone flat, with its small trills and its long sad drop on the last bar, and it was not sly any more. It was not mischievous or knowing. It was simply a song, sung by a woman who had waited a very long time to sing it, and had not been willing to do so until she was sure that it would be true.
Wenxi followed her eyes.
In the courtyard, under the plum tree, among the fallen leaves, a man and a woman were mending the garden gate. She knew them both. She was holding the gate steady, in her old blue apron, with her hair coming down and her tongue between her teeth. He was kneeling at the hinge with a screwdriver in his hand, and his sleeves rolled, and the light on his bent neck. They were not speaking. They did not need to. Every few seconds she reached out without looking and handed him something, a screw, a washer, the little oil can, and he took it without looking, and they went on, in their own slow silence, like two halves of a single clap.
The old woman sang.
She sang it through to the end. The last bar fell, and hung, and dissolved into the humming of the oven. Then, very slowly, she put up one small brown hand and wiped her cheek with the back of her knuckles, and sat for a little while longer looking out at the garden. She did not know that she was watched. And the thing that Wenxi saw on that kind lined face, in the gold light, was not triumph, or even happiness. It was a quiet rapt gratitude, such as a woman might feel who has set a cake in the oven and watched, for sixty years, and has just, this moment, seen it rise.
It was so beautiful that Wenxi could not breathe.
She stood in the doorway of the bake room with the tin of sesame seeds in her hands. She wanted to cross the kitchen. She wanted to kneel on the flags beside that stool and lay her head in the old woman's lap and say, Grandma. There is something I haven't told you. I've had a letter. I don't know what to do. And her whole body, every muscle of it, leaned toward the saying, as a plant leans toward a lamp.
But the old woman was singing. And it was the first time in nine weeks.
Not today, thought Wenxi. Not this. Let her have it a little longer.
She went away on tiptoe, with the tin held against her chest, and did not make a sound.
* * *
The second email came on the first of October, and she read it standing in the middle of the market with a string bag in her hand.
It was very short. It was, if anything, more courteous than the first. Dear Ms. Su, it began, in the clean grey font. I do not wish to press. I am writing only so that you know that the door is still open, and that the studio is, as they say, warming. We have found a north-facing window. I have put your name on it, on a card, in pencil. I will take it off, with great regret, on the sixteenth.
She stood there for some time.
The market went on round her. A woman was selling aubergines. A child was crying about a balloon. The sun was bright and thin and a good deal lower than it had been a week before, and the air had a new edge to it, a dry sharpness like a sliced apple. She read the email again, to the end. She read the line about the card. And she did what she had done with the first, in the privacy of her own mind, in the six seconds it took her to cross the cobbles to the fruit stall.
She deleted it.
She did it with one thumb, quite calmly. The screen showed her a small grey square that said Message deleted, and she looked at it, and put the phone in her pocket, face down, and bought a pound of pears.
The sixteenth was fifteen days away, she told herself. The finale was on the fifth. There was a roof to be mended, and a prize to be won, and a long ledger of small sweet things that had to be done before anyone could possibly be asked to look at an offer. It was not yet due. It was not even close to due. It was a letter in a drawer, and a letter in a drawer was not a thing that mattered. She had told herself so a dozen times, in a dozen different voices, and she was becoming extraordinarily good at it.
The pears were round and yellow and smelled of honey. She held one in her palm all the way home.
She found him on the bench in front of the shop.
It was a little after four. The sun had come round to the west end of the alley and lay along the whitewash in a long low blaze, and the stones were warm. The whole of Sixth Alley seemed to be asleep. The cat lay on the third flowerpot with its paws tucked under. A single bee went up and down the length of the jasmine. And on the long bleached bench beneath the window of Su Ji, where in July they had once sat a decent foot apart with flour on their sleeves, Chengyan was sleeping.
He had not meant to. She could see that. He had been carrying something, a bundle of pale lath bound with twine, and it had slipped from his shoulder to the ground beside him, and he had sat down for a moment to rest. His head had gone back against the wall. His mouth was a little open. One hand lay on his knee, palm up, with the fingers curled, scarred and floury and entirely relaxed, like the hand of a child. There was a curl of pale wood caught in his hair, over his left ear, and a shaving on his collar, and in the low gold light the lines about his eyes had smoothed themselves away until he looked, for the first time since she had known him, as young as he really was.
She stopped on the cobbles with the pear in her hand.
She had meant to go in. She had meant to put down the string bag and begin the dinner, and she stood where she was, with the sun on her shoulders, and looked.
A man who did not ask for anything was asleep in the middle of the afternoon in front of her grandmother's shop, in full view of the alley, with his hand open. It was the most trusting thing she had ever seen. It was the plain unguarded sleep of a person who had finally been persuaded that nothing was going to be taken away. And she thought of a loft, and a red strip pinned to a wall, and a space at the bottom, left blank, because we might need it.
It came to her then, quite quietly, with no drama at all, like a step that one finds in the dark. She had been afraid for eight years of the wrong thing. She had been afraid of failing. She had stood on a pavement with a cardboard box and thought that nothing could be worse than being found out to be no good, and she had run, and hidden, and put on a smile like a shop window, and it had all been to avoid that single fear.
She was not afraid of it now.
She had been found out. She had stood in a loft in the rain and said, I don't have a job, and a man with sawdust in his hair had said, it's oak. She had been seen, and it had not killed her. It had not so much as dented the floor.
What she was afraid of, standing on the warm stones in the October light with a yellow pear in her hand, was this. The bench and the bee and the open palm. She was afraid of a thing that she could lose.
The pear was very heavy.
He stirred. His head turned against the plaster, and his eyes opened, slowly, still dark and clouded with sleep, and fixed on her face. For a moment he did not seem to know where he was. Then he did, and his whole face changed, like a field when a cloud goes off it, and he smiled.
"You're back," said Chengyan, thickly.
"I got pears."
"I fell asleep."
"I saw."
"How long?"
"Long enough," said Wenxi, and found that her voice was perfectly steady, "for me to look at you."
He held out his hand, palm up, as he had on the stair of the committee hall. She crossed the cobbles. She put the pear in it. He looked at the pear, gravely, and then up at her face, and the smile slipped a little and became something else, a small attentive crease between his brows.
"What is it?" he said.
"Nothing."
It was the word she had used at the workshop door, and at the willow, and over the sink at supper. It came out of her mouth easily now, like a stone from a well-worn path. She sat down beside him on the bench, and leaned her head on his shoulder, and felt him settle against her with a long slow sigh, and the sun lay warm on both their faces, and neither of them said anything further.
But a hand that had been lying open on his knee closed, quite slowly, over hers. And held on a little tighter than the moment required.
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