At the Heart of the Universe

Also by Samuel Shem

NOVELS

The House of God

Fine

Mount Misery

The Spirit of the Place

PLAYS

Room for One Woman

Napoleon's Dinner

Bill W. and Dr. Bob (with Janet Surrey)

NONFICTION

(with Janet Surrey)

We Have To Talk: Healing Dialogues Between Women and Men

Making Connections: Building Gender Dialogue and Community in Secondary Schools

NOVELLA/NONFICTION

(with Janet Surrey)

The Buddha's Wife: The Path of Awakening Together

AT THE HEART OF THE UNIVERSE

A Novel

SAMUEL SHEM

SEVEN STORIES PRESS

New York • Oakland

Copyright © 2016 by Samuel Shem

A SEVEN STORIES PRESS FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Seven Stories Press
140
Watts Street New York, NY
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sevenstories.com

“Green Jade Plum Trees in Spring'' by Kenneth Rexroth, from
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
, © 1971 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

“‘A Dream of Night' by Mei Yao Ch'en'' by Kenneth Rexroth, from the original by Ch'en Mei Yao, from
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
, © 1971 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

‘'To a Traveler ‘' by Kenneth Rexroth, from the original by Su Tung P'o, from
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
, © 1971 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

“Written on the Wall at Chang's Hermitage'' by Kenneth Rexroth, from the original by Tu Fu, from
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
, © 1971 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

“South Wind'' by Kenneth Rexroth, translated from Chinese, from
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
, © 1971 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shem, Samuel, author.Title: At the heart of the universe : a novel / Samuel Shem.Description: Seven Stories Press first edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, [2016]Identifiers: LCCN 2016008702 (print) | LCCN 2016015648 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609806415 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781609806422 (ebook)Subjects: LCSH: Mothers and daughters--Fiction. | Americans--China--Fiction. | Adopted children--Fiction. | China--Social life and customs--20th century--Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | FICTION / Sagas.Classification: LCC PS3569.H39374 A95 2016 (print) | LCC PS3569.H39374 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008702

Printed in the United States of America

With thanks to Tianjia Dong, for his wisdom and calligraphy, and to Ross Terrill

For K.C. and her children, and for Janet

And to my dear friend John Updike

CONTENTS

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

It is Spring in the mountains.

I come alone seeking you.

The sound of chopping wood

Echos among the silent peaks.

The streams are still icy.

There is snow on the trail.

At sunset I reach your grove

In the stony mountain pass.

You want nothing, although at night

You can see the aura of gold

And silver ore all around you.

You have learned to be gentle

Like the mountain deer you have tamed.

The way back forgotten, hidden away,

I become like you,

An empty boat, floating, adrift.

—Tu Fu (713–770),

“Written on the Wall at Chang's Hermitage”

PART ONE

For a woman to be without talents Is synonymous with virtue.

—Anonymous, Song Dynasty

1

Sitting on the train, the baby at her breast, the young woman thinks,
They say there's a machine in Changsha City that will tell you if it's a boy or a girl. If I had had one of those machines I would not be doing this now. If I'd made this trip before, I wouldn't have to be making it now. I didn't have to do it. Jiwei said he would do it for me. Jiwei's father said he would do it for me. I said no. I am the only one to do this, I said.

Thinking,
But can I? Maybe there is a way of saving her?

Xiao Lu sits on the hard bench of the train. It is an early morning in late July, already deathly hot, and the train is crowded and stifling. A sign says that the bench seats four, but six are squeezed in. She wears a plain dark-blue cotton dress, without sleeves, and is, as usual in her daily life, barefoot. Her feet rest on the wooden floor, on either side of her pink plastic sandals. No one seems to take any notice of her. She has always been terribly shy, an observer more than an actor. Not one to dress up, or use makeup.

Because of the stain of “landlord” on her family, it was hard for them to find her a husband. Her parents had to look farther away, to farmers living on one of the mountains several hours from their village. She married late—at twenty-two—and in the end her dowry had to be increased by a dozen fat ducks. Her mother would have been happy if she had never married, and stayed at home, especially after what had happened to her two older girls. Her age and shyness did not bother the man chosen to be her husband, Jiwei. He said it didn't matter.

He has a kind streak
, she thinks,
although less so, now
.

She is slender—skinny even, after her month-long ordeal, for she has had no appetite, none at all—with the slight bulge of her belly from the pregnancy. Her arms are strong, hands calloused. Her dark hair, if you saw it in bright sunlight, would have the slightest glint of russet. Her face has a certain modest beauty, although that too has been marred by the recent strain. Her eyes are worried, exhausted, and sad, and her mouth is set so that it won't tremble. It is a face of innocence curtailed and bitterness rising, held back by the pure power of obligation if not of will. All this by age twenty-eight.

She has never been on a train before, never seen a train before. Under other circumstances it would be exciting. But it is just a train—no, now, to her, it feels like a death train.



The journey started at four in the morning. Unable to sleep, she walked with the baby in her arms around the courtyard, up and down the path, even out on the ancient raised soft-dirt paths hemming the rice paddies. It was deep summer, but the mosquitoes didn't seem as harsh as usual. She protected the baby with a piece of old netting. There was no wind, and the stream was silent. “When the wind dies, the moon is clearly seen.”
That ancient text was the first calligraphy she had ever drawn as a schoolgirl. On still moonlit nights, it played in her mind.
My teacher said I had talent. Some talent. A farmer's wife. Living with his parents. On the farm. Maybe this will be better for her. For her, some other life.

Last night by the light of the full moon she wrote slowly, in a neat, patient hand, the characters of the message she would put into her baby's swaddling clothes the next day. Just before four in the morning she awakened Jiwei. She wondered how he could sleep that night, but he did, and he grumbled when he awoke—despite it being almost his usual time to start out to the fields—until he remembered what he had to do. Silently he got the old bicycle and wheeled it out of the courtyard onto the narrow dirt path.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Of doing it?”

“No, of
you
doing it, not me?”

“Yes, I'm sure.” All her life, secretly, she had been sure. Except the last month, plunged into the torment of what to do, now that it had turned out to be a girl. She had a sudden thought that maybe she had said she would do it because then she could change her mind, disappear with her baby, go somewhere else, start again. But no. Xia, her older daughter, was almost two now. She could never do that to Xia. And there had already been one sister who had disappeared. Her own sister, First Sister, the oldest of the three of them, had gone off one day when she was fourteen to a meeting of the Red Guards downriver in the valley, in the town of Tienja, and had never come back. When she had not returned by nightfall, Father, Mother, Second Sister, and she had all gone to Tienja to try to find her. They tried everything, and all they found out was that she had gone into the schoolhouse where the meeting was held, and no one had seen her leave. No one saw her ever again. She was fourteen, then, in 1972.

Now it is 1991. July 25. First Sister would be—what?—thirty-three?
She
is
thirty-three. She is not dead, she can't be dead. I never tell anyone she's dead. I say she's disappeared. My mother and father and Second Sister might as well have disappeared. It is no different. I never see them anymore.

An hour before sunrise, Xiao Lu, holding the baby, got on the back of the bicycle, and Jiwei started off. The road down the mountain from the farmhouse was bumpy, and bumpier as they pedaled over the cobblestones of the village, but she was used to riding this way and balanced out the bumps easily, and the baby slept.
The second is easier
, all the women had told her, and this turned out to be true. An easy birth. A wonderful, beautiful baby, unblemished.
Today, one month old. Fresh as spring.
She remembered the calligraphy she practiced as a girl:
“When spring comes, the plants, unseen, come to life.”
Her name. Chun. Spring.

The bicycle went easily downhill through the persimmon trees for which the village was known, and soon they were pedaling alongside the river. The sights were familiar, but seemed new in their portending. They rode along the river through high-standing sugarcane and ancient lychee trees drooping down over the water. A water buffalo lowed at their passing. Fish flipped, and fell. Sugary ripples in the moonlight.

Within an hour they were in Chindu town. The sun was bringing to life the smell of sewage, spreading a pestilential heat through the silent streets. She had been to Chindu twice, but never farther. She had rarely been outside the village, and never outside the district. On the far edge of Chindu was the bus station. She had never seen a bus, never ridden on any motorized vehicle other than the village's rattling old tractor. Other bus passengers were throwing their luggage up onto the racks on top. She had none. She turned to say goodbye to her husband and risked a look into his eyes. They were as she'd never before seen them, both shamed and terrified. As if it had just sunk in. He was biting his lower lip hard. His face was deathly white.

“Say goodbye to her,” she said. He hesitated. She uncovered the baby's face.

“Goodbye, little one,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

She clenched down on something inside and turned away and walked to the bus.

“I'll meet you here tonight.”

Ever so slightly she nodded, not sure anymore of anything, especially not of the distant uncertainty of “tonight.” She got on the bus. Jiwei pedaled alongside the noisy, dust-spewing bus for a while, waving weakly, then fell behind. The baby had not made a sound. Two hours later the bus let her off at the train in Tienja.

The Tienja station was crowded and confusing. Huge piles of coal glistened black. Coal dust stung her eyes, her throat. By the time she got onto the train there were no seats. Even the standing room was limited. She made no eye contact, but after a while a man tapped her on the shoulder and, gesturing to the baby, offered her his seat on a hard bench. Crammed in, she couldn't see out the windows except when someone got up to go to the toilet. They said the trip was four hours. The odd thing about the train was that it was so smooth, like a boat on the river of her childhood, but for the rhythmic
tick-de-tack tick-de-tack
,
which, when the baby slept, brought sleep to her as well. The other odd thing was that for the first time in her life she was in a crowd where she knew no one, and no one knew her. This made her think back to her mother and father, and, once again, to her sisters.
How much can people stand?

Because of a few fields and a shack they had owned, they had been called “landlords,” and, although her father had not been sent away, he had been shamed. After First Sister disappeared into the schoolhouse in Tienja, nothing was the same. Father went around like a hungry ghost, smoking huge wads of tobacco rolled in inky newspaper, muttering to himself, doing so poorly at the farm that her mother and the girls had had to pitch in. Mother was sustained by her kitchen altar, her little box of gods, her small hidden Buddhas and her bowings and her silent prayers to her ancestors and Kwan Yin and the Earth God and the Sun God, and the Water God and the Rice God and sometimes the new moon itself—and, when there was money enough for it, her incense. When First Sister disappeared, Second Sister began looking around for a man, with a sensual ferocity no one had ever seen in her before. She found a discarded bicycle and with a friend fixed it up enough to ride downriver all the way to Tienja, and she wound up marrying the son of the policeman who had helped them look for First Sister. The policeman's son had taken over a tiny store selling women's clothes. The store became her life, and they saw her at home only for the first few holidays.



Now, every time she looks into her baby's eyes, she starts to weep. If she looks, but tries not to respond to her, the baby gets frantic. The one thing the baby can't stand is a stiff face looking back at her. So she looks, and responds, and weeps—gradually the tears ease. She tries to forget the past month, or what she is about to do. Tries hard.

Cannot.

The more she tries to forget, the more the memories float up and through her mind, and she gives in to them. She recalls the joy she felt at finding out she was pregnant again, with her second child, but at the same moment she felt a jolt of dread—
what if it was another girl?
She tried to talk about it with her husband, but he could not. The official policy was one child per family. They already had a girl, Xia, age two. If it was another girl, to keep it would be a disaster for the family—the cost of the penalty, the shame of still not having a son.

Girls are shame; boys are pride. Girls leave to marry, boys stay to work, carry on the blood and the land, bring status and maybe a better future, bring a wife to care for the grandparents in their old age. A second girl would only bring twice the shame.

“If this one had been a boy,” said her mother-in-law, smiling, “We'd be glad to pay the penalty. A boy would be worth it. He'd pay for himself, many times over.”

The tension of carrying the baby during the pregnancy was almost unbearable, not knowing which it would be. She said that if it was a girl she did not want to see it because if she saw it she couldn't give it away.

The birth was easy. They took the baby away, so she knew. She heard the baby cry, and asked to see it.

“No,” her husband said.

“Bring her. I need her. She needs me.”

Life. Saving a life, her life. Beautiful, more than my first.

And then the hell started. Her husband said he would take her away right then. His mother said it was better that way. His father, she thought, could have done the unthinkable, from the old days, drowned her or let her die somewhere farther up the mountain, and maybe that was why she insisted to see her, to be with her, thinking,
I'll fight to keep her, as long as I can.

It was a month. A long time and a short time. She saw in her husband's father's eyes the not-thereness of the baby. In his mother's eyes, as if little wheels were clicking along inside,
How can I get rid of this one
without fuss.
The touch of her poor baby's lips on her nipple, fists on her breast, made her vow to keep her with her always. They tried to force her not to, even keeping her first daughter away, making Xia view the tiny baby as a thing, like the sow or the little barnyard duckling who, confused and having lost its mother, followed the chickens around thinking it was a chick. Jiwei's mother tried to talk with her, tried to tell her what shame she would bring on the family and on herself, what hardship, for girls grow up and leave, and they needed a strong boy, they were barely surviving, they needed help.

Jiwei started out confused, but as the days and weeks went on, any of the fire she had seen in him, buffeted by the constant pounding of his mother and father, died out under a smothering obedience. Even inside her, there was a sense of losing face in the family for having a girl. They sent her to a fortune-teller, a rancorous, skeletal old woman, who, hearing everything, said the next child was certain to be a boy. A boy that would bring her status, a boy she could keep with her forever so she would never have to part with him as she would the girls—this brought a little flicker of agreement with them. But still she would not let the baby lie in someone else's arms, arms that wanted to get rid of her as if she were a piglet, or a crazy duck.

They worked on Xia, they “reeducated” Xia so that her natural jealousy of being replaced came out in a look on her face never seen before, a look of contempt, and in the way that she avoided her and the baby. The last straw was when her little girl refused to sing with her anymore, and sang only with her grandmother.