Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [275]
Rat-a-tat-tat.
The person was still there.
It must be the postman.
He shuffled over to the door and opened it. It was not the postman, it was a woman wearing a yellow plastic raincoat.
She greeted him with an exclamation: “Is it really you, Fong? You look so old! And you’ve got a limp!”
Kam Shan looked blank, then stammered: “You know me?”
The woman pushed her way past him. As she took off her coat, she said: “Making me stand out in the rain is not the way you Chinese usually greet your guests.”
Under her outer coat, the woman wore a threadbare old black housecoat, its buttonholes gaping and revealing eyelets of bare flesh. She was old, and her hair was grey and her face wrinkled as a walnut. Still, she carried herself erect and her feet were planted firmly on the floor.
Kam Shan shrugged, and asked again: “Do you know me?”
The woman gave a short laugh: “Heavens! Don’t you recognize me? I’m Sundance!”
As Kam Shan looked at her, something seemed to shatter within him: the picture he had cherished all those years, of a young girl chasing butterflies among the bulrushes, the rays of the sun gilding her hair and skin. He had engraved the image on his heart and was sure it would last forever— but with just a few words, this woman had shattered it into small pieces. Even if he picked them all up, he could never put that picture back together again.
As he shook hands with her, he felt her skin rasping his palm painfully.
“Sundance, I spent years looking for you! Why did you wait till I’m on my last legs to come looking for me?”
“Well, at least it’s better than waiting till you’re in hell,” she said. “Why are you so sure I’ll be going to hell?” asked Kam Shan. She burst out laughing: “If we could go to hell together, that would be heaven!”
Still the same old laugh … Kam Shan thought secretly that even if his eyes had not recognized her, his ears would have told him.
Sundance looked at the photos on the mantelpiece. “Is that your daughter?” she asked. “That’s right. I just had one child.” “Your granddaughter?” She pointed. Kam Shan nodded. “Just the one. What about you?” “I’ve got three sons and two daughters, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.” “You certainly know how to make a big family,” Kam Shan said. Sundance pulled a photo out of her bag. “This is my eldest son, Paul, and his grandson, Ian.”
The child was about five years old, and had dark eyes, black hair and flat features. Kam Shan smiled: “Why does he look so Chinese?” “Because he is Chinese! His mother’s Chinese. She’s called Mei.”
“Why are there no pictures of your wife?” asked Sundance. “She’s been dead for years. What about your husband?” Sundance pulled out a newspaper cutting and pointed to a brief death notice. “He died just last month.” “So sorry.…” Kam Shan began, but Sundance smiled. “It was a good thing. He’d been ill for years.” Kam Shan wanted to ask if that was the reason she had not looked him up, but did not.
Suddenly there was nothing else to say.
Under the easy small talk yawned an abyss of more than half a century. Their words floated briefly on the surface then vanished into its impenetrable darkness. Sundance got up. “I’m off to collect my great-grandson from school,” she said. “Where do you live?” asked Kam Shan. Sundance mentioned the name of a street not fifteen minutes’ walk away from his house. There must have been thousands of chances over all that time that they would bump into each other—yet they never had.
That’s destiny, he thought to himself.
He opened the door for her. “Goodbye,” she said, with a glimmer of hope in her eyes. He knew what she was hoping for, but he could not give her any reason to hope. He had spent many years longing to see her again, but when it happened, he wished it had not.
He shut the door behind her and went back to the living