Chapter 420: That Row Behind the Village Committee Office

The concrete road gave out on the second switchback. After that it was gravel and wheel ruts pressed into yellow earth. The minibus climbed, tires slipping in the grooves. Cai Qingru corrected the wheel; the front end wobbled, then steadied.

Rooflines appeared over the slope in tiers—white walls, gray tiles, solar water heaters bolted onto a few roofs, their glass tubes glinting in the sun. On the east side of the village stood a blue-roofed walled compound. Inside it, a chimney rose, no smoke.

"Village entrance's up ahead." Cai Qingru said. "I'll stop by the market. You go up; I'll head back to the ditch road. I'll be back at one-thirty to pick you up. Back down by two, on the road out by three."

"Just wait in the car." He Xiufen said. "Don't burn gas going back and forth."

"The gas is the Center's." Cai Qingru pulled to a stop and set the handbrake. "It's my legs burning. Mind your own."

The car parked under an old locust tree at the village entrance. Beneath the tree sat a freezer chest draped in blue plastic tarp, two plastic stools beside it, one propped up on half a brick under its leg.

The shop door was open. A man sat behind the counter working an abacus, pushing the beads softly.

Shen Zhixia bought two bottles of water and a pack of crackers.

"Boss, you know the old man who used to watch the pumphouse?"

The man looked up at her, then at He Xiufen standing outside the door.

"Old Pang. Pang Chunlai." He pointed toward the village with a finger. "That row behind the village committee office. Third house."

"Still lives there?"

"Still there. Lives with his son; the son works up at the plant on the hill, so he's alone in the daytime." He pushed her change across the counter. "Pumphouse has been out of use a long time now. Running water came in the year before last. What do you want with the pumphouse?"

"Visiting family." He Xiufen said from the doorway. "A distant relative. Haven't kept in touch for years."

"Oh." The man went back to his abacus. "He doesn't talk much. Years ago, bring up the pumphouse and he wouldn't say a word."

"Is the well still used?" she asked.

"Long stopped. Running water's piped to every house. Two wells were capped; the one left is for watering the vegetable patch." The man raised his chin toward the east side of the village and gave a small smile that didn't quite finish. "Bad water. Everyone in the village knows."

They walked in from under the locust tree. Courtyard walls lined both sides of the road. Two quilts air-dried atop a wall—one floral. The breeze came and flipped a corner over, then back. Chickens on the road pressed against the wall bases when people passed, scattering only after they'd gone by.

"Remember," He Xiufen walked to her left, unhurried, "once you're inside, don't ask anything first. Say who you are. If he asks, you answer. If he doesn't, don't keep talking."

"I know."

"What you know is the stuff on paper." He Xiufen said. "Up in these hills, they don't hold with that stuff."

The village committee office was a two-story building, white tile. A glass notice board hung by the entrance, a few papers posted inside, red seals stamped in the lower right corners, edges curling. Out front a concrete yard, a blue cloth drying on a wire. Behind the building was that row of old single-story houses—brick walls, asbestos roof sheets, a stone stool in front of each door. She counted from the east end: one, two, three.

The third door was wooden, green paint mostly flaked off, a length of red string nailed beside the frame. A small window to the left of the door, one pane patched with plastic sheeting. No sound from inside the yard, only an iron bucket at the eave edge, scraping the wall when the wind pushed it. Heat seeped through the door crack, the smell of boiled noodles.

She tucked her notebook into her bag, freed her hands, and knocked three times, not hard.

No sound from inside. She waited. Footsteps—from the inner room to the door, slow, pausing every couple of steps.

The door opened halfway.

An old man, hair shaved very short and completely white, dressed in a faded blue cloth jacket. One hand braced against the doorframe; the other held an enamel mug with a chip missing from its rim. His eyes landed on her face first, lingered, then moved up to her brow, then back to her eyes. The mug leaned against the doorframe and clinked.

"Uncle." she said. "I'm Shen Qian's daughter."

The four questions she'd rehearsed the night before—none of them reached her lips.

He said nothing. The shadow inside the threshold fell across his cloth shoes. The fingers holding the door moved, then pressed back against it. In the yard, the iron bucket scraped the wall again.

"Don't know you."

The door drew closed. The gap narrowed to a sliver, the light inside went dim, and then the door shut. A soft click from inside—the bolt dropping into place.

She stood as if nailed to the ground in front of the stone stool. Her hand came up halfway, then stopped. She didn't knock again. She wanted to say one thing through the door—just one—to say she'd come all the way from the city by bus, to say she wasn't here to bring trouble on anyone—He Xiufen reached over and gripped her wrist.

"Don't shout outside the door." He Xiufen said. "If you shout, he'll be even less likely to open."

"He's behind the door."

"He is." He Xiufen released her. "So we don't shout. If he won't open, we go. And when we go, don't look back."

He Xiufen walked to the stone stool, took a pack of dried noodles out of her cloth bag, the paper band still tied around it, and set it in the center of the stool, straight, the paper end facing the house.

"Never arrive at a door empty-handed when the door won't open." She brushed the flour dust from her hands. "Leave it here. If he throws it out, that's him throwing it. But if we don't leave it, it's as if we never came."

"There's another pack in the bag."

"That one's for the next visit." He Xiufen folded the bag opening down twice and pressed it flat. "Up here nobody lacks food. What's missing is the thing called 'someone came by.'"

The concrete steps in front of the building had been baking in the sun all day; they were hot even through her trousers. The two women sat on the bottom step. He Xiufen unwrapped an oil-paper packet—two flatbreads, still faintly warm, plus a small bag of pickled vegetable shreds. She tore a flatbread in half and handed one piece over.

"You said, 'I'm Shen Qian's daughter.'" He Xiufen chewed.

"Yeah."

"He didn't ask who Shen Qian was."

Her jaw slowed around the bread.

"A person who really doesn't know you asks first thing: who are you looking for?" He Xiufen tipped the pickles onto the oil paper. "He didn't ask. He just said he didn't know you."

"Then why wouldn't he listen."

"He heard you." He Xiufen broke off another piece. "The door opened halfway and stopped. A door opened halfway is a door held open to hear the next sentence."

"And what was I supposed to say?" She squeezed the bread in her hand. "That my dad's dead? Or that I'm going to put what he saw that night in front of a court?"

He Xiufen swallowed before speaking: "Neither. This time you say nothing. Next time you come back, same sentence—I'm Shen Qian's daughter."

Wind came around the back of the building and snapped the blue cloth on the wire twice. Someone upstairs opened a window, glanced down, closed it. A woman pushing a bicycle crossed the far end of the concrete yard, a plastic crate hanging from the handlebars. She looked at them once, never slowed, and went out the gate.

"Dad used to come back to the city on this road." she said.

"He did." He Xiufen said. "On the six-forty bus from town."

"How do you know?"

"He told me himself." He Xiufen gathered the crumbs back into the paper. "Said someone on the bus recognized him. All the way back, nobody said a word. He came home and ate his noodles like always. Not one extra word."

She took the notebook from her bag, braced it on her knee, flipped to the back, and wrote:

June 24. Baixi Village. Pang Chunlai. The row behind the village committee office. Third house.

The door opened. I said I'm Shen Qian's daughter.

He said he didn't know me. The door closed.

One pack of dried noodles on the stone stool.

She stopped there, pen point pressed against the paper, leaving a blot of ink. She'd meant to add a line—"ask next time"—but the pen never came down. She closed the page.

She drank half the water, then stood and walked around to the back of the building.

The pumphouse stood at the east end of the back row, a small room of red brick, asbestos roof, an iron padlock on the door, its keyhole packed with dust. Two wooden strips were nailed across the window at a slight slant. At the base of the wall, a white plastic water pipe emerged from between the bricks and ran along the ground, half a brick wedged under it at the bend. Grass grew from the cracks in the steps at the door, half a foot tall.

She pressed her palm against the door. It was hot. She didn't push.

Two steps west of the pumphouse was the back gate of the village committee—an iron door with a concrete ramp, faint twin ruts worn into the surface by wheels.

She looked over that row of houses one by one: grass growing on the asbestos roofs; two of the households had new thresholds, light-colored wood. The third house's wall was a section lower than its neighbors, bricks pressed on top. There were three small windows along the back wall. The one patched with plastic sheeting was the third house's.

That page from Volume Eight replayed in her mind: pump house, the pump keeper, one person, surname not asked. The margin had no "see volume three." Her father had left the place on paper and taken the name away with him.

She'd thought about writing a phone number on a slip of paper and pushing it under the door. But the moment he picked it up, all he'd see was a row of numbers—a city number. He didn't trust paper. There was only one person who'd ever wanted his name written down, and that person had already given it back.

At one twenty-five she came back around front. He Xiufen tucked the oil paper away, swept the crumbs into her palm, shook them into the roadside grass, and patted the step clean.

At one-thirty, a horn sounded under the old locust tree.

Before getting into the car, she looked back at the stone stool. The pack of noodles was still there, paper end facing the house.

The minibus reversed, left the village entrance, and turned onto the gravel road. Cai Qingru drove slowly; the wheels dropped into a rut and the whole vehicle swayed.

"Three days from now, we'll have to come again." He Xiufen said from the back seat. "Don't call in the meantime. One phone call and he'll think the city's coming to deal with him."

"What time's the bus?"

"Six-fifty. Then a motor-tricycle from town, puts us here around ten." He Xiufen lifted the cloth bag back onto her lap. "Bring dry noodles again. You're not to come empty-handed, and you're not to bring more than that. If you bring more, he starts keeping books in his head."

The car reached the first bend, where the road curved around under the row of houses at the village edge. She looked back.

The roofline of that row behind the village committee office had dropped out of sight, the grass on the asbestos sheets whitened by the sun. On that small window of the third house, the plastic sheeting had been lifted at one corner.

A figure moved behind the window. The plastic fell back into place.

Cai Qingru glanced at her in the rearview mirror but didn't ask.

As the car rounded the second bend, she pulled her hand back from the window. The glass had left a faint coolness in her palm.