Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

She was home very late that day and Lian looked extremely grumpy. Niuniu, however, welcomed her with open arms and sang her a song he had just learned in kindergarten: ‘Mummy, mummy, please sit down and have a cup of tea. Let me kiss you, my good mummy.’ His out-of-tune singing reduced Tianyi almost to tears and she gave him a big hug. He was no longer as pink-cheeked as he had been, nor as sturdy. That was because he was not eating well in the kindergarten. Tianyi thought, kissing his little face. Sweetheart, you’ve been really unlucky to end up with such a restless mother. I’m a bad mother. When you call me a good one, I feel so ashamed.

Lian interrupted their cuddling with a scowl: ‘That’s enough. Stop babying him and do something practical, why don’t you? We’ll eat and you can give him a bath!’ Lian had started being very brusque to her, his past endearments gone for good. Their honeymoon was well and truly over, she thought.

Niuniu was not in the slightest bit musical. When she was four months pregnant, Tianyi did something she had read about in a book on pregnancy and childbirth: she got out an old-fashioned transistor radio, placed it five centimetres from her belly and put on some music. The pieces she played most often was Sibelius, D Major Violin Concerto, and Saint-Saëns, Le Cignes . It was beautiful music but it did not appear to have penetrated the walls of that mysterious thing, the womb.

Niuniu’s first song startled her: apart from the voice, it could have been Lian singing. Genes really were astonishing. Such a tiny sperm, invisible to the naked eye, could invest the embryo with a host of innate characteristics. Many years later, when Niuniu was a young man, she was forced to face the fact that he was a clone of his father. Apart from the face and the voice, he was like him in every way. Was there something wrong with her eggs?

With the first royalties from The Tree of Knowledge she had bought Niuniu a piano, and they scraped enough money together from their meagre salaries to hire a piano teacher. But, three years down the line, the teacher gave up on his pupil. When, the following Christmas, they asked him to play Silent Night on the piano he made a complete hash of it. Under his stubby little fingers, the beautiful tune sounded like the huffing of a bellows. It was as if the piano keys had turned into a computer keyboard; Niuniu could strike the notes but was quite incapable of drawing out any feeling or spirit or beauty. His parents listened, applauded encouragingly, then fell silent.

But when Niuniu opened his little mouth and sang his song, ‘Mummy, mummy, please sit down and have a cup of tea’, Tianyi felt quite differently. It didn’t matter that he sang completely out of tune. The only thing that counted was the feeling he put into the words. The little boy may have murdered the song but he sang right into her innermost being and told her that he was part of her flesh and blood, and the only thing that really mattered in her life was to have that flesh and blood person close to her.

Niuniu may have been a very ordinary little boy in most respects, but he was exceptional in one way: he had an unerring eye for beautiful things. She first became aware of this when he was three and she brought home a French fashion magazine. She turned each page for him to look at and was astonished at his appreciation of the elegant colours, the kind of colours that she loved too. None of their subtle gradations escaped him: silver-blue, golden-brown, olive-green, sunset red … the beautiful hairstyles and the jewellery, all uniquely beautiful. Much later when he grew into a man, Niuniu was, predictably, a snappy dresser, and extremely fussy about the labels and style of her clothes too. In her son, Tianyi had her strictest judge, and every time she had to attend a special occasion, she consulted him for his opinion on her outfit. Without his approval, she would not go out of the door.

During his childhood, she was a real playmate to Niuniu. In those days, computer games had only just arrived in Mainland China, and they were extremely basic. You had to plug one end of the cable into the console, and the other end into the TV. Then mother and son sat down to play together, mostly a game called The Jungle . They became warriors, not only doing battle but crossing mountains, plunging into seas, chasing away fiery dragons, leaping off precipices. In the course of all this, a firm friendship was cemented which went beyond their relationship as mother and son, or friends. They were comrades, and the bond this created drew them together in their confrontations with Lian.

There was one game, however, that Tianyi never got the hang of, though Niuniu was adept at it: A Fistful Of Dollars . An armed guard kills a man and robs him of his money — and revels in it all. Tianyi found playing the game extremely disturbing. When she played the guard, killing and robbing at will, it made her feel that doing evil was immensely pleasurable, stimulating and seductive. But she was never as decisive or as quick off the mark as her son. And if you hesitated for a fraction of a second, the money would be gone. If you did not kill your man, he would kill you. She suddenly thought fearfully that these were the rules by which people played in real life, that moral maxims were no more than a thin veneer, masking the harsh reality beneath — that you had to kill or be killed. Only by understanding this could one become free. And those who had never had any morality or ideals or faith were freest of all. She watched, shocked, as Niuniu well and truly trounced her in A Fistful Of Dollars , as he robbed and killed, robbed and killed. He was not weighed down by any sense of responsibility. He loved money, he was cold-blooded, and that was that.

The whole thing filled her with terror. She sensed that today’s youth were a brand new generation. When they were grown up, she would be truly old.

Zheng’s trial was delayed until August. It was Tianyi who got him a lawyer, a man called Xia Shi. Having consulted a friend at the College of Law, she was told that without any doubt Mr Xia was the best in North China. Tianyi was a simple soul in some ways, and simple souls have a way making the complex utterly simple. She did not even bother asking for his phone number, just got his address and went straight there, not forgetting to take with her a gift, some genuine ginseng from the Changbai Mountains.

Mr Xia’s residence was not the intimidating place she had imagined. The furnishings were informal, the atmosphere casual. The celebrated Mr Xia was something of an eccentric, but prepared to be indulgent to a young woman like Tianyi. He seemed unsurprised when she turned up without an appointment and did not enquire too closely into her relationship with Zheng, as Tianyi had worried that he would. He simply listened calmly to what Tianyi had to say, and gave a simple answer: ‘Yes, I can take on being his defence lawyer. But I need to get my assistant in on this. He’s in Henan province at the moment.’ And he accepted Tianyi’s gift of Changbai ginseng.

Years later, Tianyi realized just how much it had meant to her to find a lawyer like Xia. He was extraordinarily perceptive; his calm questioning told him everything he needed to know, and he could see right into the deepest recesses of her being. After the trial was over, the old man (he was nearly seventy) was left in possession of some potentially explosive documents, the thirty-six folders pertaining to Zheng’s case. He did not give them to Zheng’s wife, or any of his friends, or even to his parents. He handed them all over to her, to Yang Tianyi, a woman who had no blood or other formal ties to the accused. And he did that because he had seen through her. He believed that she was the right person to keep these folders and that eventually they would pupate like butterflies, and take wing in the form of her stories.