Can Xue - The Last Lover

“It’s because of love,” Lara said to her. “His inner heart is a wasteland now.”

Ida panicked at discovering a nest of dead snakes in among the reeds, large ones and small ones, more than ten altogether. It was the striped kind of snake most common to the farm. The site showed no signs of a massacre. It might be death by poisoning. She stood to the side for a while with a weng weng buzzing in her head, as though someone kept on saying something to her. The lake water became so bright, so insidious. She gazed a moment at her face in the water of the lake. That youthful face made her think of her dead mother, especially about the eyes and brow. She thought that it might have been her mother’s wish for her to come here, poor and vagrant. Crows flew past, and the wind fanned by their wings made ripples on the water’s surface. Her face dispersed.

“Miss Ida, don’t you have a home?”

Someone in the water spoke to her. It was a child. She stared attentively, searching, but could not see anyone in the water. The person was behind her. It was Jin Xia’s older son.

“Little one, what are you doing following me?”

Ida looked into the child’s shining wolf eyes and began to smile.

“You have a home, but you won’t go back to it,” she said.

The youth stood there bashfully, looking at the water-logged ground, as if he wanted to say something, but hesitated.

“Miss Ida, tell me, will my dad kill my little wolf?” he finally said.

“No, why?”

“Last year I saw him sharpen his knife and then he cut off one of the little wolf’s paws. His left hind foot. The little wolf howled for three whole days and three nights. He covered the house in blood. Afterward my father cried, and I cried, too. He cried when he told me that this way the little wolf won’t be able to run away. Did you know that little wolves always want to run away?”

He squatted gloomily by the watery ditch, poking at the leeches in the water with a stick. Ida observed from above his fiery-red, babylike hair. The tremor in her heart was indescribable.

Someone rustled in the reeds. It was that Eastern woman again. She appeared in a flash and then was gone.

The boy didn’t raise his head.

“That women has no home. We call her the lunatic, poor woman. One time she lost a shoe at the door of our house and ran away barefoot. Maybe our little wolf scared her.”

“What is your name?” Ida finally asked him.

“My name is Little Wolf. My dad says our family has two little wolves.”

“It sounds nice,” Ida said sincerely.

Little Wolf was suddenly infuriated. He stood up and spoke with hatred: “You woman, why are you complimenting me? I don’t need you to say nice things about me.” He threw the stick, abandoned her, and walked into the reeds.

Ida thought that maybe the manager Jin Xia’s whole family was frightening. Mr. Reagan had brought him in to be the manager, so surely something in Jin Xia’s temperament must have appealed to him. Living in their wooden house eaten by termites, caring for a wolf, this family was not, in reality, a threat to anyone except themselves. Where had Mr. Reagan found this man? Thinking about the family, Ida did not notice her pain easing. It was truly a miracle cure. She stretched her long arms, jumped twice, and filled her lungs with fresh air. Mr. Reagan’s making her live under a tree was a brilliant idea.

Ida stopped drifting around. She felt there were a few things she wanted to do.

A long time ago, when Ida was still at her old home, she’d often watched the people there making bricks out of yellow clay. They baked the bricks in the scorching sun, then built houses with them. Now there happened to be this same clay beside the forest where she was staying. She started by making a brick mold with her hands, then industriously began the manual work. Her sweat dripped into the clay bricks, and her hands became extremely rough. Every day, in the setting sun, she heard the mountain flood scream past in her ears.

“Ida, don’t you like your home to be everywhere and to live out in the open?” Lara asked her.

“I am a wasp, surely you’ve seen how a wasp makes a nest.”

As the walls rose, Reagan looked on from a distance with overwhelming emotions. Ida’s movements were so harmonized, so rich in musicality. She was an innately skilled builder. The original detached wall now became the back wall of her new building. This new building had two rooms, front and back. Lara also took part in the work. She had done carpentry before, and now she was helping Ida make the roof frame, which they prepared to cover with thin strips of Chinese fir.

And so Reagan watched Ida move the cot into the small house she’d built. He knew the crude small building had no electricity or running water, or even a window, and there was only a low wooden door. At midday Jin Xia’s older son, the “wolf child,” always came to the front of the small house and knocked on the door. Ida would make warm welcoming sounds. But the wolf-child never went in. They would chat at the door, and then the wolf-child would bounce away. Reagan took notice of all this. Reagan’s home wasn’t the boat of which he’d spoken. It was an abandoned trailer. Every day Ali brought him simple meals and water.

“Why does Ida want to live in that building?” he asked Jin Xia.

“She wants to become the farm’s witness. The farm is ceaselessly expanding, the borders change and change again, and in her heart she’s uncertain about it.” Jin Xia’s expression revealed satisfaction when he said this.

Reagan saw Jin Xia’s wife holding a basket of clothes as she tottered up and down the stairs. She was going to the backyard to dry the clothes. Her purple swollen feet shuffled. She did not appear to be in a good state of health. Jin Xia went with Reagan to stand under the tree. He smoked one cigarette after another, squinting his long narrow eyes and plotting some affair in his heart. A feeling of uneasiness skimmed across Reagan’s mind as he thought of certain rumors about Jin Xia. “Never mind what they say, this man’s driving ambition isn’t a menace to anyone,” Reagan thought.

Jin Xia’s wife finished drying the clothes in the backyard and came out. When she went up to the house Reagan saw her bare feet running with water, each step a damp print on the stairs.

“Every day my wife and I make up vain dreams inside the house. She tells me our farm could occupy more than half of a country. She wants me to expand into diversified production.”

“I worry about the termites,” Reagan blurted out, then felt a moment of remorse.

A nauseating odor filled the trailer. It smelled like decomposing sea creatures. Reagan didn’t know where it was coming from. He lay on the sofa bed in the dark with his eyes open, waiting for the Eastern woman to arrive. She’d altered her pattern and no longer lay entangled with him. She stood outside the window of the trailer, poking her head in, breathing forcefully, making reveling sounds. So she liked the stench inside the truck. Reagan remembered that the woman walked back and forth under the burning sun all day, coating her clothes with dust, but when she was entangled with him he had never smelled a bad odor on her body. You could say her body had no smell. Even her body’s odor couldn’t be smelled. Then what about her body excited him? When Reagan was with her, he had never managed to attain a clearheaded judgment. Her flesh was like a fish in water, relaxed and smooth, but at the crucial moment it always lacked substance. One time, when Reagan was faint from climax, the woman’s body actually disappeared. His whole body was rapidly dispirited. He felt only dread. Fortunately the situation lasted only a few minutes, then she reappeared. He began that hungry, thirsty lingering with her again. She very seldom spoke, only once, when she told him she came from a small, little-known island in the Pacific called Yellow Fruit Island or some such. Reagan had never heard of this name. At all other times, her speech was just two or three words: “oh my,” “I never thought,” “look,” “love,” “keep on going,” etc., in a thick foreign accent, but Reagan couldn’t guess her meaning. It was as if she were practicing saying these phrases for fun.