The Middle Kingdom. Andrea Barrett

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СКАЧАТЬ once said something that made me sure the Temple of Heaven lay within the Forbidden City, so when I broke away from Walter and hired a cab to bring me to Dr Yu, I didn’t even check my guidebook.

      At Tiananmen, I dismissed my cab like a fool. The great gate guarding the grounds was still intact, as were the watchtowers guarding the corners, and after I paid my ten fen I stood inside the gate, right where Uncle Owen had been a score of times. I had a picture of him standing here, dressed in scholar’s robes and holding a sprig of flowering plum, and I had forty-five minutes in which to see some of what he’d loved.

      Only when I entered the first building did I remember the rest of Uncle Owen’s tale: the palaces had been looted twice, once by the Japanese and then again by the Kuomintang. Nothing was the way I’d pictured it. In the Three Great Halls, the surviving Ming and Qing relics were jumbled with treasures brought from all over China to fill the gaps. Song and Yuan paintings, water clocks, jade seals, cooking vessels, archeological finds; none of the rooms were intact, and they had the feel of a junk shop or of a museum exhibit hastily arranged by an amateur. The things were only things, dusty and out of place, and I couldn’t recapture Uncle Owen’s rapt appreciation.

      As I wandered past the Dragon Throne and the great bronze turtle whose mouth had once billowed smoke, I tried to feel the ghosts of the emperors and empresses, the eunuchs and the concubines, but the rooms were dead for me. I put my lack of interest down to tiredness and overexposure: I had seen too much in the past week, too much, too fast, too false. I turned away from the turtle and then I heard Zillah’s voice again: Of course you don’t like it, she said. The whole place is a lie.

      Seven days since I’d last heard her; her reappearance frightened me. I knew my bronchitis was getting worse and that the waves of heat and cold flooding me weren’t a good sign, but I wanted so much to see Dr Yu that I willed my hands to stop trembling and refused to acknowledge what I’d just heard. So I’d heard a voice; it was only a voice. Maybe I was starved for English words.

      ‘Where’s the Triple Sounds Stone?’ I asked out loud, as if someone might answer me. ‘It’s almost five.’

      A group of women stared at me warily.

      ‘Ni jiang Yingyu ma?’ I asked. ‘Do you speak English?’

      The women shook their heads and moved away.

      ‘Triple Sounds Stone?’ I said to everyone who passed. No one knew what I meant. I walked from hall to hall, up steps, down ramps, past carved pillars and painted dragons and another large bronze turtle, and still I couldn’t find the stone or Dr Yu. Five o’clock came and went, and then quarter past. I was trembling and weak and beginning to get concerned.

      A man with a black and red eye and a strangely twisted mouth approached me near the Dragon Throne, after I’d circled past for the third time. ‘You are lost?’ he said in English. ‘I may be of help?’

      I was so glad to hear his voice that I reached out and shook his hand. ‘I’m supposed to meet a friend,’ I said. ‘At the Triple Sounds Stone.’

      ‘You have no guide?’ he said. ‘You come here alone?’

      I nodded. I couldn’t help looking at his mouth, and he caught me. ‘My mouth twist from sleeping near open window,’ he said. ‘A draft. Please excuse this way I look. My eye – I have acupuncture for curing this mouth, and instead comes this coloring. You are American?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      ‘Your friend you meet is Chinese?’

      I nodded. ‘And I’m late. Already. And actually, I haven’t been feeling so well.’

      He looked at me gravely. ‘This is visible,’ he said. ‘You appear to have a deficiency of yin – your nose and throat feel dry?’

      ‘All the time,’ I said.

      He shook his head. ‘Many fluids,’ he said. ‘Increase secretions. Also certain herbs are very helpful. Come – this stone is perhaps near south of compound.’

      We rushed through the halls at great speed, and only after a hot and sweaty thirty minutes did I think to mention to him that the Triple Sounds Stone was part of the Temple of Heaven. ‘I know it’s here,’ I said. ‘I just don’t know where. The stone is somewhere in the temple.’

      He groaned and pressed his small hands together. ‘Temple of Heaven?’ he said, his voice rising in real anguish. ‘Not Triple Sounds Stone – you are looking for Triple Echo Stones, in temple – is not here, is across city, twenty minutes at least by car, and how you will get a cab …’ With that he rushed me back to the main gate. There were taxis parked there, but all of them were spoken for, and after a long argument with two lounging drivers he dashed into the streaming traffic of Changan Avenue and tried his hardest to flag down one of the passing cabs. Finally he went to the white-coated policeman who stood on an island above the traffic, and by the time he’d finished shouting and throwing his arms about he’d convinced the policeman to step into the traffic himself and commandeer a cab. The driver resisted, pointing to me and then shaking his head, but he gave in when the policeman bundled me into the back seat.

      ‘Temple of Heaven?’ my rescuer said. ‘You are sure?’ I nodded and he gave directions to the driver. ‘How can I thank you?’ I asked.

      ‘You will get there,’ he called, as the car eased into the traffic. ‘No thanks are needed. But you must be more careful.’

      Careful wasn’t high on my list just then. If I’d been careful I would have spent the day in bed, tending to my bronchitis; I wouldn’t have left the hotel, unarmed with guides or books, in search of Dr Yu. All week I’d been listening to the humming voice of caution: Don’t drink the tap water; don’t even brush your teeth with it. Don’t eat any fruit or any street food. Don’t lose sight of the tour bus. Don’t go out without your passport. Don’t buy jade without an expert’s advice. That voice didn’t belong to Lou, our guide – it was the voice of breakfast, all the scientists and their spouses gathered at the long tables in the hotel dining room, exchanging warnings before they split up for the day. Don’t, don’t, don’t – the list was endless and expanded each hour, and it brought out the worst in me. It made me want to stick my head under the faucet and gulp the water down, to sink my face into one of the smoked ducks that hung by their twisted necks in the smeared shop windows. Our hotel room – large, clean, privileged – had come to seem like a cage, and even when I ventured outside I carried it on my back like a turtle’s shell.

      I wanted to leap from the cab and find my own way across the city, but instead I sat and watched the back of the sullen driver’s head. I was late, I reminded myself; I was an hour late already. I let the driver drop me off near the Triple Echo Stones, and I tried not to notice how he hovered until he saw Dr Yu reach out for me. She moved through a rushing stream of people, and she laughed when I apologized for being late and told her what had happened.

      ‘You must have been meant to go there,’ she said. ‘The places are separate, but also connected. In the old days, the Emperor marched out of the Forbidden City each October with his elephant carts and lancers and musicians and high nobles, and all of them headed here. The Emperor meditated in the Imperial Vault of Heaven, stayed all night in the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, and made a ceremony next day at the Round Altar, which decided the future. People hid behind their shutters and prayed again and again for everything to go well. It is an ill omen if anything goes wrong here.’

      ‘Have СКАЧАТЬ