The Ancient Ship. Zhang Wei

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СКАЧАТЬ The horse knelt down in front of the steps and whinnied as it pawed the ground. The animal’s gaze was fixed on the doorway, not the people; its mane shifted, and a drop of liquid fell into Baopu’s hand. It was blood, fresh blood. The horse raised its head and whinnied skyward, then turned and trotted off, the family running after it. On the outskirts of town, the horse ran into a field of red sorghum and followed a path where the leaves were spattered with blood. Huizi’s jaw tightened as she ran, and when she saw the trail of blood she began to cry. The horse’s hooves pounded the ground, managing to avoid all the sorghum plants. Baopu wasn’t crying, didn’t feel sad at all, and for that, he scolded himself. The sorghum field seemed to go on forever, and the horse picked up the pace until it stopped abruptly.

      Sui Yingzhi was lying in a dry furrow, his face the color of the earth beneath him. Red leaves covered the ground around him, though it wasn’t immediately clear if that was their natural color or if they were bloodstained. But one look at his face told them he’d lost a great deal of blood before falling off the horse. Sui Buzhao sprang into action, picking up Yingzhi and shouting, “Brother! My brother…” Sui Yingzhi’s mouth twitched. He searched their faces, looking for his son. Baopu knelt beside him.

      “I know,” he said. “Your heart was too heavy.”

      His father nodded. He coughed, and a thin stream of fresh blood seeped from his mouth. Sui Buzhao turned to Huizi. “The coughing has destroyed his lungs.” Huizi bent down and rolled up her husband’s pant leg. The flesh was flabby and nearly transparent, and she knew that he was dying from the loss of blood. “Jiansu! Hanzhang! Come see your father!” she shouted as she pushed the two younger children up in front of Baopu. Hanzhang bent down and kissed her father, and when she straightened up there was blood on her young lips. She gazed up at her mother with a frown, as if put off by the taste. Only a few minutes of life remained in Sui Yingzhi. He mumbled something and closed his eyes.

      Sui Buzhao, who had been holding his brother’s wrist all this time to check his pulse, let the arm drop. Loud wails burst from his throat; his frail body was wracked with spasms of grief. Baopu, who had never seen his uncle cry, was stunned. “I’m a no-account vagabond,” his uncle said through his tears, “and I know I’ll not die well. But, you, brother, you lived an exemplary life, educated and proper, the best the Sui family had to offer, yet you bled to death out on the road. Oh, the old Sui family, our family…”

      The old horse’s head drooped, its nose spotted with mud; it wasn’t moving. Holding their breath, they lifted Sui Yingzhi up and laid him across the horse’s back.

      “A member of the Sui family has left us,” the old men of Wali were saying. The town’s spirit seemed to have died, and two consecutive rainfalls did nothing to change that. The streets were so deserted it felt as if most of the residents had been swept away. The old man who worked the wooden ladle in the mill by the river said, “I’ve watched the mill for the Sui family all my life. Now the old master has left us to open a noodle factory on the other side, and I should go with him. He needs my help.” He said this half a dozen times, and then, one day, as he sat on his stool, he simply stopped breathing. The old ox kept turning the millstone, uselessly, ignorant of what had happened. The town’s elders narrowed their eyes when they heard the news. Staring straight ahead, they said to anyone who would listen, “Do you still say there are no gods?”

      Huizi bolted her gate and refused to open it for anyone, so Baopu opened a side door to let his uncle, whose room was on the outside, into the compound. Buzhao knew that no one could keep Baopu away from him anymore, but then he noticed a somber look on the youngster’s face. When he spoke to him of his adventures on the high seas, the boy lacked the interest he’d displayed in the past, not regaining it until the day Buzhao took the old seafaring book out of its metal box and waved it in front of him.

      On days when Jiansu came to Buzhao’s room, his uncle would hoist him onto his shoulders the way he’d done with his older brother and carry him out through the side door, down to the river or into one of the lanes to buy him some candy. He could see that Jiansu was smarter than Baopu, a boy who learned fast. He decided to let Jiansu play with the telescope, and he watched as the boy focused on the girls bathing in the river. “That’s really neat,” Jiansu said with a click of his tongue as he reluctantly handed back the telescope.

      Buzhao hoisted him back on his shoulders and sort of stumbled along. “We’re a team, you and me,” he said.

      Jiansu spent so much time on his uncle’s shoulders that people called him the “jockey.” Sooner or later, Sui Buzhao said, he’d leave to go back to sea. That is what made his life interesting and what would make him worthy of the town. He told Jiansu to wait for that day, saying he had to find a flat-bottom boat, since the river was so shallow. Not long after that, someone actually came forward with a beat-up sampan, and Sui Buzhao could not have been happier. He fashioned a tiller, plugged up the holes with tung oil, and made a sail out of a bedsheet. People came to gawk at the boat, maybe touch it, and, of course, talk about it. Excitement was in the air. “That’s called a boat,” adults would tell their children. “Boat,” the tiny voices would repeat.

      Sui Buzhao asked some of the young men to help him carry the boat over to the abandoned pier, where a crowd waited patiently, having heard that something was in the air. Sui Buzhao saw Baopu in the crowd, which further energized him, and he began to describe the boat’s functions to the crowd, stressing the use of the tiller. The people pressed him to put the boat in the water. He just rolled his eyes. “You think it’s that easy? Have you ever heard of anyone putting a boat in the water without chanting to the gods?” At that point he stopped surveying the crowd and assumed a somber expression as he offered up a chanted prayer, thanking the gods for keeping the nation and her people safe and offering up sacrifices of food and spirits to the ocean, island, earth, and kitchen gods to watch over ship and crew.

      A profound silence settled over the crowd as the hazy image of a distant mist-covered ocean came into view, with bare-armed men pulling at their oars, their lives in imminent danger, or of a ship brimming with treasure that disappears in the mist. Truly, the vista is of men and ships, with fortune and misfortune giving rise to each other. The elders could still remember ships’ masts lining the old pier and the fishy smell that hung in the air. Ships old and new fighting for space, one nearly on top of the other, as far as the eye can see. Then thousand sailors breathing on myriad decks, as lewd, murky air assails the face. Commerce is king in Wali, where silver ingots roll in from everywhere. Suddenly a cloudburst, but the rivergoing ships stay put, like a swarm of locusts…

      The townspeople gathered round Sui Buzhao and his boat, making hardly a sound, exchanging glances as if they were all strangers. After rubbing their eyes they saw that Sui Buzhao was already sitting aboard his boat, still on dry land, and as he sat there, he raised the telescope hanging from his belt, an invitation for Jiansu to come along with him.

      With a shout, Jiansu took off toward the ship as if possessed, but Baopu grabbed him by the shirt and refused to let go, no matter how hard his brother struggled to break free.

      Foul curses tore from Sui Buzhao from where he stood in the cabin. With a wave of his hand he signaled them to pick up the boat, with him in it, and carry it over to the water. Bursting with excitement, that is what they did, and the instant the hull touched the water it came to life; a welcoming sound arose from somewhere inside. The sail billowed and moved the boat swiftly away from the bank as Sui Buzhao stood up and let the wind muss his hair. The crowd saw him put his hands on his hips, then slap his thigh and make faces. The women lowered their heads and scolded softly, “Shame on him.”

       The spell was broken when the boat reached the middle of the river. “A fine boat!” the people shouted. “And a fine captain!” “Good for you, Sui Buzhao!” “Come back and take me with you!”…As they shouted their encouragement, the boat began to turn with the current, moving in a slow circle, just like the millstone. СКАЧАТЬ