David Rotenberg - The Lake Ching murders

Fong followed the sound to the back of the huts. A procession was forming. It seemed that the whole village had assembled. Not the whole island, he noted. The fishers stayed to themselves.

Four young men lifted a scarlet-sheeted body above their heads and started up the path. The red cloth was the most intense red Fong could remember.

A long line of vigorous, work-toughened men walked slowly behind the body. They were dressed from head to toe in white. The old man Fong had seen at the jail – Iman – led the procession.

Fong scanned the men. They shared similar facial features. Almost all were the same height, all had the same square body type – shit they even used the same shambling gait.

The women followed the men. Once again led by an elder. Once again in white. The women were as rugged as the men and resembled them closely. They looked like they’d all sprung from the same set of loins. But there seemed to be no mental deprivation here. Only a sameness – and an undeniable vigour.

The rhythm of the cymbals increased and the procession picked up speed heading straight up the terraced hills toward the centre of the island. As they passed by terrace after terrace, the procession began to sing. The words were ancient. “Death is ancient,” Fong thought. “It invites us all with cymbal and horn – like a Peking Opera performance.”

By the time the body reached a dry terrace, two-thirds of the way up the mountain, Fong had fallen far behind. He knew they’d seen him, but when he crested the final rise he was surprised to find them lining either side of the path. The singing had stopped. The only sound was the blare of the mournful horn – and Fong’s wheezing efforts to supply his lungs with oxygen.

Fong walked slowly between the rows of faces. Up close he saw that some were so alike that he was sure he wouldn’t be able to tell one from the next even after concerted study. Then he was there – at the end of the line of islanders – facing the one called Iman. Behind the vital old man stood the four younger men with the crimson-swathed body of Hesheng on their shoulders. Suddenly, Iman snapped his head downward in a gesture of submission as old as the land upon which they both stood. “You honour us with your presence.”

Fong wouldn’t have been more surprised if the old man had whipped out his penis and sprayed his name in the dirt. Fong nodded slightly, careful to keep his head above the level to which Iman had lowered his. Iman’s eyes held Fong’s for a long moment.

The interment began.

Some of Fong’s acquaintances had passed away, but none of them had been formally buried. No one was put in a box and dropped into a hole anymore in the great Communist state. Even funeral ceremonies were frowned on.

A shallow grave had already been scraped from the moist ground. The body in its scarlet swathing lay beside the hole. The trumpet sounded and the cymbals crashed a-rhythmically. Then Iman raised his hands and cried out, “Take Hesheng back to you. We commit him to your care. We honour you, our ancestors, and now him, by committing him to your care. Take Heshing back to you, our ancestors.”

“Why are rituals always repetitious?” Fong wondered.

Iman paused. His mouth opened then shut.

Fong took a step closer, anxious to hear what Iman would say next. But he said nothing. “Why?” Fong thought. “A man of Iman’s advanced years must have recited the burial ceremony dozens, if not hundreds, of times.” Yet the man stood stock-still, clearly lost as to what to say next.

Finally, Iman signalled that Hesheng’s body should be put in the ground.

Fong backed off and climbed a slight rise at the back of the graveyard. He looked around him. The place was small. Few plots.

Then his eye landed on a grave directly beneath the wall. The soil on top had not yet settled. Night soil-laden dirt did that – took a long time to pack. He looked up. Above him was a hand-hewn terrace wall that no doubt held back an upper paddy’s water. In the rainy season it could overflow, depositing night soil in the graveyard. Night soil.

He looked at the grave. It had been dug recently.

He crossed over to it and picked up a handful of dirt. He let it run through his fingers. Memories of his youth flooded through him – and of the bag of dirt the specialist had taken as evidence from the sunken boat’s runway. Dirt on the stripper’s runway. Night soil-laden dirt. Like the dirt from this grave.

Fong felt a tendril of cold slither up his spine as a possibility – a shocking possibility – presented itself. Then he looked behind the grave’s headstone. And a piece fell into place. There on the ground stood a small column of free-standing stones, one balanced perfectly on the next. Four stones. Stacking stones. “The stones are a way of marking time, Detective Zhong. A way of noting its passage. One stone for each . . .”

“Of my visits,” Fong said aloud. Xian and the Island of the Half-wits – Dr. Roung the archeologist from Xian, and whoever was buried in this grave.

As he reached out to touch the head stone, a foot kicked his hand aside. “Don’t touch that!” The command’s sharp nasal tones broke the silence.

“I intended no . . .”

“Do you want her dug up again?” There was something odd in the voice. Fong caught a glint in the young man’s eyes that he’d seen before in violent men. A madness. A spiralling; anger that had no floor. Fong marked him closely. He looked like the other islanders, but there was something different about him. Something to be feared.

Fong stepped back. He didn’t want to fight this man.

“Jiajia!”

Both Fong and the younger man looked up. Iman strode briskly toward them. “This man is a guest on our island, Jiajia.”

There was a tick of silence. Jiajia gave Fong a hatefilled look then said, “Yes, Iman,” and stomped away.

Iman turned to Fong then glanced at the grave. “Her name was Chu Shi. She was Jiajia’s wife.” Fong nodded. “Death is hard on the young.” Iman made his face into a rough approximation of a smile then returned to the others who were lowering the crimson-sheeted Hesheng into the ground.

Fong watched Iman move – lope was the word that came to him. “When I get old, I want to be that healthy,” he thought.

Fong took a last look at Chu Shi’s headstone, and then at Hesheng’s. Hesheng’s name was on his and the date of his passing, but no other dates. There were no dates at all on Chu Shi’s grave marker.

Fong began down the terraced mountain, suddenly anxious to be alone with his thoughts.

As he approached the waiting boat he didn’t know which was worse – the shocking possibilities he’d found by Chu Shi’s grave or his imminent lake voyage back to Ching.

Dr. Roung stood on the shore of the great lake and watched the sun set. In the distance he could just make out the figure of a lone worker in an upper paddy on the Island of the Half-wits. Well, not really the worker. Just the glint of the fading light off his broad trench-hewer. Then the glint faded. Like everything else on the island. A brightness, a hope, and then no more.

The island. The place that had changed his life. Lifted his eyes from his concentration on small pieces. Showed him new possibilities. Great possibilities. The chance not to recreate but to create – to create something that could last and last. Not for as long as the terra-cotta warriors, but long. Long and alive. Something that was his and could very well carry his identity, his very self, forward through time. As he thought the word – time - he elongated the vowels.

Far to his right was the shoal that had first brought him to this place. The shoal was also the structure on which the luxury boat had floundered and from which it had eventually entered, ice-covered and scorched, into the inky winter water. A lone fisherman with two cormorants on the gunwhales of his boat glided directly toward him. How did he always know? Everything.