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In the evening when the maid was helping her down the stairs to di
Her eyes fixed on me, and after a long pause she said, "I heard your footsteps this afternoon."
I let my wife greet Great-Grandmother. Clutching our son, she stood nervously, if not fearfully, before Great-Grandmother. For a moment, I didn't know what my son should call my great-grandmother. Since he could not speak yet, I could address her for him only as Old Ancestor. Great-Grandmother stood in front of my son for a long time. She felt around inside his diaper, then she smiled. When she smiled, it was like an irregular chink that had opened in parched ground. I knew she must have touched his little penis. She drew back her hands, spit on her fingers, and pressed them between my son's eyebrows. My son cried. Irrelevantly, Great-Grandmother shouted "Old Ancestor" at him. I thought she had made a mistake, but I was incapable of deciphering the mystery and the profundity of her universe.
Great-Grandmother said, "They've all left us." I knew she was referring to our neighbors of old. "Your great-grandfather told me that our days as neighbors were limited," she said. When Great-Grandmother spoke, her perfect mouthful of teeth shone like fossils. "When this house was built, the Chong Zhen emperor had not yet ascended the throne." When she finished speaking, she heaved a long sigh and said nothing more for the rest of the night. Piercing my ears and her silence, that long sigh was like the light of a comet falling back across the ages to the Ming dynasty.
I saw our house moving in the fluid of time, and the shore upon which the arcing waves broke was Great-Grandmother's teeth. That's really weird.
After seeing Great-Grandmother back to her garret, Father said, "You've been on the road all day, better go to bed early If there is anything to do, it can wait till tomorrow. You two sleep in your mother's and my bed." When he finished speaking, Father opened the lattice door to the east wing. I remembered that Great-Grandmother's coffin had always been stored there and that every year Father applied another coat of black lacquer tinged with red For decades, the coffin had calmly followed the revolutions of the earth around the sun with Great-Grandmother, both exchanging positions of responsibility, looking forward to each other. They had a mutual understanding that each would give the other its or her significance and eternal ending.
"Where are you going to sleep?" I asked Father.
"In your great-grandmother's coffin," said Father.
My wife gave me a nervous look. Unsure, she refrained from talking. Father quietly closed the door, and the east wing quickly became black as the giant pupil of an eye.
Once in bed, my wife said, "Why does he sleep in a coffin?"
"It doesn't matter, we're all one family. Dead or alive, we're all together."
"The living can't live with the dead, no matter what," said my wife.
To comfort her, I said, "That's the way our family does things. There's nothing unusual about sleeping in a coffin; sometimes we even fight over who gets to sleep in it. I had an older brother and an older sister who died young. Great-Grandmother wouldn't permit them to be buried outside, so we buried them under the bed."
My wife sat up immediately. "Where?"
"Under the bed." I tapped on the wooden planks of the bed with my foot, making a hollow sound. "Right under this board."
My wife's eyes shone with fear. She clutched my arm and said, "Why did your family do that?"
"It's not just our family," I said. "Every family is the same."
My wife held me tightly by the waist. "I'm scared," she said. "I'm scared to death."
I called you home for Great-Grandmother's sake."
"Is she going to die soon?" I asked.
Silently, Father shook his head. "If only that were the case," said Father. "I don't care what anyone says, all I wish is for the old lady to die."
I asked him what was the matter and how he could say such a thing.
Father lowered his head and said nothing. Father's silence reminded me of Great-Grandmother at another time.
"In another ten days or so, your great-grandmother will be one hundred years old," said Father. It looked as though Great-Grandmother had become a wooden cangue on him. Father lifted his head, looked at me, and asked, "Did you see her mouthful of teeth?"
I didn't understand Father. I couldn't figure out what he was driving at.
Father tugged at the cuff of my Western-style suit and, lowering his voice, said, "If a person lives to a hundred and still has all her teeth, she'll become a demon after she dies."
"How can that be?" I asked.
"Why shouldn't it?" asked my father.
"Who ever saw anyone become a demon?"
"Did anyone ever not see a person become a demon?"
How could that be possible? I asked myself. My back seemed to go numb and felt all prickly. I saw in Father's eyes the same look I had seen in my wife's. She was afraid of death, but my father was afraid of life.
Explosions were heard all around our house. Several dynasties were reduced to rubble and dust in the strong smell of dynamite. The state of relative rest between buildings and debris is what the history books call a dynasty. The workers had done their utmost to ensure that a building would last. Later, people would complain, "What's the point of making it so solid? Dynasties are like buildings and teeth-they grow, and they crumble." The smell of dynamite is like incense in a Buddhist country-it alters the mystery present in the redeemer's posture.
My son walked haltingly around the courtyard. Holding on to the same small redwood stool that I had held on to when I was a child, he played by himself in a corner of the courtyard. He was absorbed in playing with a bamboo chopstick. After two hours, he was drooling and humming a hymn only God could understand. Great-Grandmother stood in another corner of the courtyard, eyeing my son and listening to him sing. It must have been because of him that she hadn't gone upstairs. Great-Grandmother approached my son, and they conversed with a natural affinity in a language not understood by other human beings. On their faces played an essential correspondence given to man by Nature, echoing each other like sunrise and sunset, relying on each other's heartbeats to transmit spring, summer, fall, and winter, making of humanity the most wonderful quintessence of the universe. They talked. There was no interpreter. It was the way the wind understood the sound of the leaves, or the way water guessed the direction of the waves, or the way light saw the mirror, or the way one pupil could contain another.
"They seem to be having fun. What are they playing?" my wife asked.
Great-Grandmother turned and said to me, "When I die, take a piece of cloth from your son, wrap some of his hair in it, and sew it into the cuff of my sleeve."
"What is all this talk about death? You're still young."
"Don't forget," said Great-Grandmother.
"All right," I replied.
"It doesn't matter how long you live-as soon as you open your eyes, it's time to close them," Great-Grandmother said, smiling. "If you talk about long life, then it will be among the shadows. Remember-a piece of cloth. Don't forget."
Great-Grandmother's hundredth birthday was slowly drawing nearer. My house was shrouded in fear like the dust that silently covered the table and porcelain.
That night, Father's twelve brothers gathered at our house. I sat to one side. In my imagination, Great-Grandmother's teeth emitted a sound like breaking ice. The men smoked quietly. In their preoccupation was the solemn atmosphere of having arrived at a juncture in history. No one spoke. At a silent juncture in history, the first conclusion is the direct equivalent to the outcome of history. This is our accustomed way of doing things. At that moment, a rumble was heard outside. The sound reminded me that the road home had sent me back to the Ming dynasty, which caused me to tremble even more.