Lost in Translation Page 0,70
she chose kitchen goods, a tiny chest for wardrobe, and a paper Victrola. Then there was Lucile. The women were connected now in her mind. Every prayer, every ritual, would be for both of them. For Lucile she selected a tiny bed, a pile of paper linens, and a little paper man. He was meant to be wearing old-fashioned Chinese robes, but it could have been the raiment of a priest. It could have been Teilhard.
"These things," she said, and handed them to Master Tang.
The Temple to Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy, was on the edge of the old Chinese quarter. It was a Qing-era building with elaborate red-and-blue frescoes painted along the curving eaves, ornate but run down. Inside Alice found no one except a novice monk, a boy no older than fifteen with a saffron robe and a close-shaven black fuzz covering his head.
"Wo lai bao-miao, " she said to him tentatively, I’ve come for the ritual of reporting a death at the temple.
He looked at her blankly.
"My friend has died," she explained.
He removed a packet of incense wrapped in red paper from a pile of supplies on a side table, and handed it to her. "Si mao san," he said absently, Forty-three cents.
She counted out the coins.
He waved her toward the altar, a bank of Buddhas rising up behind a sweet-faced, larger-than-life statue of the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin.
She lit the incense, stuck it into one of the sand-filled bowls, and bowed three times. "Meng Shaowen," she whispered, "on July fourteenth of this year, you drifted away from this world and went to the Yellow Springs. There you met Old Woman Wang, who gave you the wine of forgetfulness to drink. In this way you could go on to your next life with your sins, your memories, wiped away...." Another start, Alice thought. It was what she needed too.
She stood silent, staring up at the statue. Guanyin had a beautiful face, shaped like an almond, narrow black eyes, and a rosebud mouth. She stood with her hands outstretched, her colored robes swirling gracefully around her.
It occurred to Alice, for the first time, that Guanyin looked exactly like the Virgin Mary.
Strange she’d never noticed.
A note from Guo Wenxiang was slipped beneath her door at the Number One:
Mo Ai-li, I am happy to inform you that I have obtained some information about the Dutch missionary Abel Oort.
He died in Yinchuan in 1934. Tomorrow evening, if you are free, I will take you and Dr. Spencer to his grave.
She wrote the English translation beneath the spidery characters and slid the note under Spencer’s door.
Back inside, her door locked, she removed all her clothes and stood in front of the mirror. Too boyish, that was her problem. A spare, narrow-hipped frame that rose from slim, wiry legs. Not much of a waist. Her breasts swelled out only slightly. Well shaped, though, she thought, twisting her body to put one of them into silhouette. And she had a reasonably good-looking bottom. She turned and looked at it over her shoulder. Her pigu, as the Chinese called it. Round and white and no droop. Not yet. She faced front again. Her eyes trailed down her pale belly past her legs to her feet, knotty and curiously strong looking. Too long for her small body, not soft and white as they should have been, but at least they were not all wide and splayed out.
Feet were important to Chinese men, or at least they had once been. Alice, as yet another way of achieving separation with herself, had often imagined herself with bound feet. Three inches long, that had been the ideal, and the helpless woman with soft pleading and submissiveness in her eyes would sway above them in that lotus-foot gait. Take me. Alice had read that the most profound sexual act in old China was when a woman actually allowed a man to remove her foot bandages and do things with her deformed foot. She knew that many women were married to men all their lives, bore them many sons, and never let them do it.
Often Alice had imagined it: the soft-eyed woman finally saying yes, the yards and yards of white bandage spiraling into a heap on the floor, the tiny wrinkled hoof, bare, the smaller toes bent under, sometimes fallen off. The strange smell of decayed flesh mixed with sweet talcum. The foot, pitiable, longed for, lifted at last in the man’s ivory hands.
"Horace," she said, glancing at her watch in