The next day, Liusu, Ah Li, and Ah Li's child shared the last biscuits from a tin. Liusu was weak and exhausted, each crack of a screaming bomb slapping her hard in the face. The lum­bering sound of an army truck came from the street. It stopped at their door. The doorbell rang, and Liusu answered it. It was Liuyuan. She grabbed his hand and clutched his arm, like Ah Li clutching her child; then she fell forward, hitting her head on the porch wall.
Liuyuan lifted her face with his other hand. "Frightened? Don't worry," he urged her. "Go get your things together. We're going to Repulse Bay. Hurry!"
Liusu ran back in and started rushing around. "Is it safe in Repulse Bay?"
"They say a navy can't land there. Anyway, the hotel has huge stocks of food. There'll be something to eat."
"Your ship ..."
"The ship never left. They took the first-class passengers to the Repulse Bay Hotel. I tried to come yesterday, but I couldn't get a car, and the buses were jammed. Today, I finally managed to get this truck."
Liusu couldn't think clearly enough to pack her things, so she just grabbed a little bag and stuffed it full. Liuyuan gave Ah Li two months' salary and told her to watch the house. Then the two of them got into the truck, lying facedown and side by side in the truck bed, with a canopy of khaki oilcloth overhead. The ride was so bumpy that their knees and elbows were scraped raw.
Liuyuan sighed. "This bombing blasted off the ends of an awful lot of stories!"
Liusu was filled with sorrow. Then, after a moment, she said, "If you were killed, my story would be over. But if I were killed, you'd still have a lot of story left!"
"Were you planning on being my faithful widow?"
They were both a little unnerved, and for no reason at all they began to laugh. Once they started they could not stop. But when they were finished laughing, they shuddered from head to toe.
The truck drove through a rain of bullets back to Repulse Bay. Army troops were stationed on the ground floor, so they stayed in their old room on the second floor. After they had set­tled in, they found out that the stores of food were all reserved for the troops. Besides canned milk, beef, mutton, and fruit, there were sacks and sacks of bread, both whole wheat and white. But the guests were only allotted two soda crackers, or two lumps of sugar, per meal. Everyone was famished.
For a couple of days all was quiet at Repulse Bay, then sud­denly the action heated up. There was nowhere on the second floor to take cover, so they had to leave. Everyone went down­stairs to the dining hall. The glass doors were opened wide, with sandbags piled up in front: the British troops were firing artillery from behind the sandbags. When tbe gunboats in the bay figured out where the shooting was coming from, they re­turned fire. Shells flew over the palm tree and the fountain in both directions. Liuyuan and Liusu, along with everyone else, squeezed back against the wall.
It was a dark scene, like an ancient Persian carpet covered with woven figures of many people-old lords, princesses, schol­ars, beauties. Draped over a bamboo pole, the carpet was being beaten, dust flying in the wind. Blow after blow, it was beaten till the people had nowhere to hide, nowhere to go. The shells Pew this way, and the people ran over there; the shells flew that way, and the people all ran back. In the end, the whole hall was riddled with holes. One wall had collapsed, and they had nowhere to hide. They sat on the ground, awaiting their fate.
By this time, Liusu wished that Liuyuan wasn't there: when one person seems to have two bodies, danger is only doubled. If she wasn't hit, he still might be, and if he died, or was badly wounded, it would be worse than anything she could imagine. If she got wounded, she'd have to die, so as not to be a burden to him. Even if she did die, it wouldn't be as clean and simple as dying alone. She knew Liuyuan felt the same way. Now all she had was him; all he had was her.
The fighting ended. The men and women who'd been trapped in the Repulse Bay Hotel slowly walked toward the city. They walked past yellow cliffs, then red cliffs, more red cliffs, then yellow cliffs again, almost wondering if they'd got­ten lost, and were going in circles. But no, here was a pit they hadn't seen before, blasted out of the road and full of rubble.
Liuyuan and Liusu spoke very little. It used to be that when­ever they took a short trip in a car there was a dinner-party's worth of conversation, but now, walking together for miles, they had nothing to say. Once in a while, one of them would start a sentence, but since the other knew exactly what would come next, there was no need to finish it.
"Look, on the beach," said. Liuyuan.
"Yes."
The beach was covered. with tangled coils of barbed wire. Past the barbed wire, the white seawater gurgled, drinking in aud spitting out the yellow sand. The clear winter sky was a faint blue. The flame of the forest was past its flowering season.
"That wall ..." asked Liusu.
"Haven't gone to check."
Liusu sighed. "Doesn't matter."
Liuyuan was hot from walking, he took off his coat and. slung it over his shoulder, but his back was still covered with perspiration.
"You're too warm," 'Limu. said. "Let me take it."
Before, Liuyuan would never have agreed, but now he wasn't so chivalrous; he handed his coat to her.
As they walked farther, the mountains got taller. Either it was the wind blowing in the trees, or it was the moving shadow of a cloud, but somehow the greenish yellow lower slopes slowly darkened. Looking more closely, you saw that it wasn't the wind and it wasn't the clouds but the sun moving slowly over the mountain crest, blanketing the lower slope in a giant blue shadow. Up on the mountain, smoke rose from burning houses-white on the shaded slopes, black on the sunlit slopes-while the sun kept on moving slowly over the moun­tain crest.
They were home. They pushed open the half-shut door, and a little flock of pigeons took wing and fled. The hallway was full of dirt and pigeon droppings. Liusu went to the staircase and cried out in surprise. The brand-new trunks she had put in the rooms upstairs were strewn about wide open, and two of them had slid partway down to the ground floor, so that the stairs were buried in a flowing mass of satins and silks. Liusu bent down and picked up a brown wool-lined cheongsam. It wasn't hers. Sweat marks, dirt, cigarette burns, the scent of cheap perfume. She found more women's things, old magazines, and an open can of lychees, the juice dripping out onto her clothes. Had some troops been staying here? British troops who had women with them? They seemed to have left in a hurry. The local poor who'd turned to looting hadn't been here; otherwise, these things would be gone. Liuyuan helped her call for Ah Li. A last gray-backed pigeon scurried past, whirred through the sunlit doorway, and flew off.