Atticus Lish: Preparation for the Next Life

She told Zou Lei a story about a girl whose father was taken away by a witch and the only way to be reunited with him was to travel west. Zou Lei’s mother shifted, talking with her hands, describing the witch’s long nose like a sausage. Outside, a sandstorm turned the darkness cloudy. In the morning, they would sweep the rug off, shake the sand out of their own hair, go down to the spigot and wash their feet before praying on the rug, hands to face, her mother’s eyes closed, lips moving.

Her mother told her Clever took seven mulberry seeds, one seed to live on in each of the seven deserts she had to walk through. In the dark, Zou Lei saw the gravel hills, the gorges and caves, places like the moon, the river running dry, the scrubland going on forever, the golden desert. The bandits took a liking to her. There was one desert of glass and one of iron, her mother gesticulated. Clever wore out all her shoes. A journey of seven years. The seeds were gone, no more water in the sheep’s bladder. The iron desert tore the soles off her feet until the fresh blood ran out and boiled to steam on the hot iron. But she kept on, believing in God until the sun blinded her. With death coming, she stretched the bladder over her knees to make a drum and chanted I am a ghost now. She drummed for seven days. A bird came out of the blue blue sky and cast his shadow on her. As long as she sang, he flew with her, running above the steppe on wolf’s legs. They came to a pure blue river and she leapt in and when she came out her sight was restored and she beheld the Fergana valley.

Her father came home — no one saw him coming — they heard his voice at the door and there he was — it didn’t seem real. He picked her up and hugged her. Mama dropped her basket, Oh, God! She pulled him inside. He smelled like gasoline. I’ll cook for you. Thanks be to God! She gripped his arm, wiping her eyes with her dirty suntanned fingers.

Don’t cry. Don’t be hard-up. Look! he smiled, taking ration cards from the pocket of his military blouse and giving them to her mother. Flour, oil, potatoes — for us, eh.

He dragged his sack inside and Zou Lei watched his forearm flex.

They did his washing in the ditch next to the orchard. Zou Lei and her mama wrung his dark wet green uniform out.

Her mother gave her a knife and a potato to peel.

Like this, her sunburned Chinese daddy said and showed her how to cut the skin off in one unbroken spiral. He dug a pit out back with his army shovel and killed a goat. Bring me a bowl from mama. He hung the purple chalky meat up high behind the house — always working, even when he was on leave, a cigarette on his lip, the salt drying on his shirt.

It was summer in the Taklamakan. They would let the tea cool in the kettle overnight. In the day, the sky was clear, magnifying the mountains in the distance, the snowcaps that never went away. The speed of evaporation made the desert seem less hot. The grownups sat on wooden squatting stools in front of the door and drank their tea from the day before in the afternoon. A wind came, picking up curtains of dust that moved down the street like giants in dresses.

Zou Lei ran back from playing. It’s kicking up!

Looks like it.

Her father picked up his chair. Come on. They went inside and she helped him shut the door.

It’s a bad one! her mother laughed.

The door banged and her father moved the table in front of it and it still banged. Dim blue night fell as the sandstorm swept against houses. They lit the lantern and moved their dinner away from where the wind was getting in. Her mother tore the bread in three pieces.

Eat so your hands don’t ache.

The bread was warm. Zou Lei leaned on her father’s tan arm.

In our army, we say don’t be slow. Slow one cleans the pot.

Are you slow? her mother asked him.

Me? No. What do you think?

I don’t know. I was thinking about my husband cleaning the pot.

Your mama likes to think.

Yes, I like to think. I think all the time.

I don’t think so much myself.

Oh, you’d be the first man who didn’t think so much.

No, I just follow orders.

Oh, you’re the first man of your kind!

The door had stopped banging. It got later at night. The lantern kept up its glow, red through the hanging curtain. Her father looked like a tiger with his crewcut and muscled limbs, talking about his job to both of them. In the mountains, it was flat and strange, a tarn. His regiment had camped where the Yellow River ended. We carry rifles, but we carry shovels too. The pipeline work is like mining and, though it’s dangerous, we’re committed to it, because we want to make the country go forward. A Kazak wanted to give him his horse for settling a dispute over livestock, but her father, a soldier, couldn’t take it. We’re here to serve the people. He didn’t know he was part of us, but he is. The people includes everyone. So then he brought out his daughter in a pretty dress, and all the boys laughed at my embarrassment. Was she very pretty? Zou Lei asked. Her father put her on his lap and she listened to his voice through his chest. Her mother half-lay on her side, listening to him, the flowers on her skirt becoming birds on the rug beneath her.

Zou Lei jogged with him — she was running, her pink sandals slapping — he turned around and jogged backwards downhill, serious about teaching her. The land panned out, past the lot where the bus came in.

Her father balanced on the parallel bars, swinging his legs, holding them out straight, pressing himself up and down. He jumped down. She remembered the sound of his boots landing. Everything he did was correct and simple. He brushed his hands off, helped her up on the bars.

She was lifted. His sunburned face, his crewcut, the smell of his cigarettes, his sweat dried by the desert — a white crystal salt in the center of his chest. One of her pink sandals fell off. She looked down and saw her dirty feet waving. Don’t look down, he said, steadying her. She was scared, but she could hold herself with his help. Her headscarf fell off. Use your arms. He lifted her up and down — she pressed herself. Ha! she laughed. You did it. He lifted her down. Hopping to keep her bare foot off the hot concrete, holding onto daddy. He put her sandal on her little dirty foot. Good soldier work, he said. He went and picked her scarf up off the ground.

Things are coming along, he said. Little by little. Her mother’s hands were covered in flour, baking bread in a clay oven, which her father had wrestled in front of their house singlehandedly.

Melons, peaches, apples, almonds, dates, Uighurs waiting in the shade, waiting for jobs, waiting for a drink of water, minarets above the rooftops. A hot wind blew across the highway. Zou Lei squinted. She had a plastic bag with bread in it. The bus came in and the cloud of dust drifted away. Sunburned women climbed down in headscarves, holding their money in their hands. How much for bread? Zou Lei put the fractions of a dollar in her pocket.

She saw the red banners getting hung across the medieval street and the army drive through and the shoeless children come back out when they were gone. Chinese cadres in glasses and worker’s hats and black plastic shoes posed in the desert with their hands behind their backs, having their pictures taken by other men who looked just like them and nothing like her father, as proof that they had been here and that everything was a success.

The loudspeakers said, Strike down backwardism! and played triumphant music. She saw a fight over livestock. A man hit his neighbor and threw a sheep into a truck and the other sheep jumped up after it bleating. The smell of wood fire blew across the road from the lamb kawap. Her mouth watered. She broke her sandals kicking a soccer ball and mama hit her.