Chapter 50

Ning Shu and Gouwa walked through the village. It was called Shangping, and it sat deep in the mountains, poorer and further behind than Pingshui and hard to get to. There were very few women in it. Everywhere you looked there were men with nothing to do, sitting about in threes and fives, smoking and playing chess.

As they passed one of the houses, Ning Shu stopped dead.

In front of her was a brick and tile house, badly run down, with a stack of firewood against the side of it and a few chickens strolling about the yard.

The afternoon sun lay warm over everything.

And a grief came up in Ning Shu's chest that she had no name for, and swallowed her, and behind it came despair. Despair with no end to it.

"Sis, what's the matter?" Gouwa did not follow. "Are you crying?"

Crying?

She put her thumb to the corner of her eye. She was.

The grief did not belong to her. It had come into her out of nowhere and put the tears there.

Gouwa was frightened by the look of her and did not know what to do, so he put both arms round her and patted her back and said the little rhyme their grandmother used to settle them with when they were small. "Hush now, hush now, nothing's going to frighten you."

Ning Shu pushed him gently away and laughed. "Soothing me like a baby."

"I know what it is. You're missing my brother-in-law."

Ning Shu said, "I don't know why. Something in me went wretched all at once, and it isn't about me."

"Not about you? Then who?"

Ning Shu looked at the little yard and her brows drew in. "There's something in there."

Gouwa's first thought was, "Something unclean?"

Ning Shu set off into the yard.

Gouwa caught hold of her. "My good woman, that's somebody's house."

"There's something wrong with this yard. I want to look."

So Gouwa followed her, keeping low, and worked out what he would say if the owners caught them.

There was a jujube tree outside. They had come in to buy jujubes.

Ning Shu went round the front yard and then straight on towards the back.

"Please don't." Gouwa was genuinely alarmed now. "This is somebody's house. Walking in like this, we'll be taken for thieves."

Country yards are sometimes wide open and sometimes fenced or railed, but the gate is hardly ever locked.

In the back yard, in front of a stand of bamboo, there was a small brick room with the walls gone bad and cobwebs under the eaves. The window was barred with rusted iron, and through the bars the room was black and there was nothing to see.

Ning Shu was two or three metres from it when a hand came onto the bars, pale and thin, and took hold of them hard.

"Mother of God." Gouwa got behind her.

Ning Shu stared at the hand.

It was a woman's hand, fair and long and very thin, with the blue of the veins standing up on it.

Slowly, behind the black of the barred window, a woman's face came up, with her hair loose and matted.

She looked filthy and unkempt. Her face was white and thin, her lips dry and split, but her eyes were enormous and round, and they would not stay still.

"Sis, is that a person or a ghost?" Gouwa asked, not certain.

"Where would a ghost come from in broad daylight? She's a person."

Though by the look of her she had less than a ghost.

Ning Shu's brows drew in and she held the woman's eyes for a long time.

There was no doubt about it. The grief and the despair that had come into her belonged to this woman.

The woman shrank back a few steps and went into the dark again.

"Sis, look. There's a lock on the door."

So there was. A heavy iron padlock hung on the door of that black room.

The woman was locked in.

"Sis, somebody's coming." Gouwa heard footsteps. "Let's go, or we'll be taken for thieves."

Ning Shu stared at the bars and could not move her feet. "Why would anyone lock up a living person? Why would you shut her in?"

Gouwa hauled at her and could not shift her, and the footsteps got closer. "Sis, come on. The owners are back."

Ning Shu had just turned when she saw a woman of about fifty or sixty come out of the house next door carrying a bowl, and come into this yard.

She had been having her lunch with the neighbours, by the look of it.

She came in, saw Ning Shu and Gouwa standing in her yard, and asked in surprise, "Who are you? What are you doing in my yard?"

"Ah." Gouwa pointed at the jujube tree. "My sister likes jujubes. We came to buy some."

"They aren't ripe and they're not for sale. Out with you."

"Going now, going now. Sorry." Gouwa pulled at Ning Shu to get her away.

As Ning Shu passed the woman she shook Gouwa's hand off and said, "Why have you got somebody locked up?"

The woman's face changed. "What did you say?"

Ning Shu pointed at the padlocked room. "Why have you shut that woman in there?"

"That's my son's wife," the woman said. "There's something wrong in her head and she hurts people. She has to be shut in."

"If she's ill, why isn't she in hospital?" Ning Shu would not let go of it.

"And who exactly are you? What business is it of yours? Go on, out, or I'll call somebody."

"We're going." Gouwa pulled Ning Shu out of the yard. "Come on. Leave it."

---

On the way back Ning Shu stayed low, and it may have been the woman's feeling still working on her.

Gouwa tried everything to cheer her up and none of it worked.

"That girl isn't mad. Her eyes were too bright." Ning Shu said it half to herself. "That woman was lying to us. No. I have to go back."

Gouwa caught hold of her. "And what good will going back do? Are you going to carry off somebody's wife?"

"That's imprisonment. It's against the law."

Thinking of her own last life, Ning Shu could not stand it.

"Don't go off half-cocked. Going now won't help. If she really is being kept in there, you can go and talk law and reason at them and they won't listen," Gouwa said. "Let's go back and ask about it. There's no wall in a village the wind can't get through. Ask around and we'll know exactly what that family are."

Ning Shu looked at him and had to admit he had thought it through properly.

She put her temper down and went home with him.

---

They were staying with relatives on her aunt's side of the family, and that evening Ning Shu asked Gouwa's aunt about it. She said the family were called Chen. The son was twenty-six and simple, and a year ago they had bought a city girl off traffickers to be his wife. A college girl, by all accounts.

But the girl had a temper on her. Since she had been sold here she had run five or six times, and every time they caught her they beat her bloody, and she still ran, so there was nothing for it but to lock her up.

Gouwa's aunt told it without any particular feeling, as though it were an ordinary thing, and Ning Shu's hands were already shaking with it.

"That's against the law," she said. "Has nobody gone to the police?"

This time even Gouwa could not take it. "That's too much. She's a person, not livestock. How can you buy a person and pen her like livestock?"

"And what would you have all the single men in this village do?" Gouwa's aunt said. "Every girl in the village has gone to the city to work. The men can't find wives. What are they supposed to do but buy one?"

"I'm calling the police." Gouwa was worked up.

"And what good would that do?" his aunt said easily. "Heaven's high and the capital's a long way off. The police don't come out here."

Gouwa was going to say something else and Ning Shu stopped him.

---

"There's no use arguing about it. What matters now is getting that girl out," Ning Shu said to Gouwa out in the yard. "Have you got any ideas?"

"We can't go at it hard," Gouwa said. "We'd make it worse. We wouldn't get her out and they'd be on their guard and hide her somewhere, and then we'd be sunk."

"Do you have a plan?" Ning Shu could not think straight. She very rarely met anything that cost her this much of her calm.

With the heavenly eye open she could feel what other people felt, but faintly and thinly, and unless she set herself to it she could ignore it.

This girl's despair was too strong for that.

She had felt it as her own.

Gouwa said, "Here's what we do. We go back to that house tonight, and the main thing is to get a word with the girl and find out where she's from, and then we get in touch with her family. That way nothing blows up and nobody's the wiser. Her family comes with the police, and they take her out."

"Too slow," Ning Shu said. "I want her out now."

"Sis, my big brother told me something once. More haste, less speed." Gouwa was lecturing her now. "Think about it. My aunt's here, and my grandparents. If we make a scene, how are they supposed to go on living in this village afterwards?"

He was right. Carrying the girl off by force would very likely go wrong. The whole village was buying wives, and they would close ranks against outsiders, and once it blew up there would be no settling it.

Ning Shu took a long breath and made herself cool down, and nodded, and granted that everything Gouwa had said was right.

"We'll do it your way. We'll go and look tonight." Ning Shu rubbed his head. "Your brain does work when it matters."

"Naturally. Look who my big brother is."

"Do you really like Lu Zheng that much?"

"I think he's wonderful." Gouwa said it as though it needed no defending. "He's clever and he's good-looking and he doesn't put on airs, not like the other rich boys with their noses in the sky."

"Doesn't put on airs?" Ning Shu laughed. "Only with you. Try being anybody else. He wouldn't look at you straight."

Lu Zheng was a proud man and there was nobody in his eyes.

Gouwa asked, on purpose, "So what's different about me?"

Ning Shu said, without thinking, "You're my brother."

Gouwa laughed. "Oh. I'm your brother. So that's why Lu Zheng sees me."

"…"

Ning Shu had walked straight into that, and decided to end the conversation at once.

---

That night, with the moon up over the willows, Gouwa and Ning Shu slipped out of the yard and went towards the Chen house.