Frontier. Can Xue

in his grocery basket, then leapt out and away. It had never crossed Liujin’s mind that such a gentle man would eat frogs—how strange, how barbaric. As the two of them sat in silence, the wagtail that she hadn’t seen for a long time reappeared. Taking small swift strides, it shuttled through the flowers, but it didn’t sing. Liujin felt awkward and impolite, so she forced herself to say something, “Your frog . . .”

      “Did it run off?” A smile floated on his face. “Then water is flowing underground here. It heard it. Frogs are very intelligent.”

      He slammed the basket upside down on the ground, and all the frogs struggled to free themselves and hopped off. They were everywhere. He laughed innocently. Liujin felt tense.

      “I hear that you not only sell cloth, but help your boss stock it—that you know a lot about the merchandise. The snow mountain has been melting slowly for years. On clear days, I can see the snow mountain better by taking off my glasses. I wonder what sort of myopia I have.”

      Liujin hadn’t realized that this person had paid so much attention to her, and so her heart fluttered a little. His protruding eyes were really a little unearthly. He seemed able to see some things, and was blind to other things. What sort of person was he? Was the young woman—the one who had quarreled with him—his lover? It seemed so. So why did he come here? Maybe he was lonely and just wanted someone to talk with. Just then, the wagtail ran up next to her feet, and Mr. Sherman enjoyed this scene from behind his thick lenses. Liujin even felt love radiating from his eyes, but she warned herself: this can’t be true!

      He bent over, picked up the basket, and said he must go. “Your courtyard is really nice.” He looked greatly refreshed.

      After he left, Liujin wanted to find the frogs, but she couldn’t, not even one. They were hiding. Liujin envisioned the chorus in this courtyard on a rainy day: she was enchanted by this image. Did his behavior suggest affection, or was this a prank? Liujin could never distinguish between the two. It was like the night in the poplar grove. Mr. Sherman was an unusual person. He said the snow mountain was melting; this was probably true. The climate was certainly getting warmer and the environment was becoming polluted. In the market, she always smelled the rotting corpses of animals. Once, in a corner, someone had swept out a large nest of dead rats. No one had poisoned them; they had simply died. It was scary. Liujin felt that everyone smelled of corpses.

      Liujin missed Mr. Sherman. She hadn’t thought of him before, though she had known him for a long time. Although she tried hard, she could only recall the twinkling gaze behind his thick lenses. Sometimes, when she came upon Mr. Sherman abruptly, she felt he was ugly and unbearably vulgar. Sometimes, she felt he was manly, gritty, and decisive—making him attractive in an unusual way. Outside the window, the wagtail resumed singing. Liujin thought, This little bird is a messenger between us. The scene under the grape arbor just now had struck her heart like a warm current. The woman who did odd jobs for the Meng Yu family started to sing again: “Snow lotus blossoms, the snow lotus blossoms that open deep in the mountains . . .” Her hoarse voice was an inauspicious omen. Where had this beautiful woman come from? Had both of the Meng Yu geezers fallen in love with her? Did both of them want to control her? One day the year before, Liujin saw her appear silently in the flock of sheep in Meng Yu’s courtyard. She had thought she was a visiting relative of the family. Somehow, Liujin felt that Pebble Town had a big heart. All kinds of strange people could find places to fit in. Liujin, who had been brought up here, didn’t know whether other cities (for example, her parents’ large city) were the same. Was this a virtue? Perhaps it was—if she could solve the puzzle about those people.

      Liujin bent down next to the girl and asked, “What are you looking at, Xiyu?”

      “Your courtyard wall. You don’t know that someone has made a hole on it, do you? It was that boy.”

      “I know. Don’t worry about it. I’ll give you some grapes to take back with you.”

      “Thank you, sister Liujin.”

      The little girl hopped when she walked, much like a frog. The frogs had disappeared from the courtyard without a trace. Or maybe they had gone into the groundwater that Mr. Sherman had mentioned. When the girl reached the gate, she turned around and stood there looking at her. When Liujin asked her what she was looking at, she said someone was standing behind Liujin.

      “Xiyu, your imagination is running wild. Who do you see?”

      “I don’t see. I hear him.”

      Frowning, Liujin thought this over. When she was about to ask her again, the child had already walked away. She started examining the courtyard wall, looking at it section by section, but she didn’t notice anything suspicious. The little girl must have been teasing her. What did she think of Liujin? In her eyes, a thirty-five-year-old single woman must be much too odd. She went back to the house, picked up a pen, and wrote to her mother. After she’d written of some ordinary household matters, she couldn’t go on writing. She looked up to see rain beating against the window. Outside, the gorgeous sun shone high in the sky. Where had the rain come from? She walked outside and discovered that the young boy wearing leaves was pouring water on her window with a watering can.

      Liujin was both annoyed and amused. She charged up, grabbed his watering can, and berated him: “You aren’t selling tea leaves. You’ve come here to make trouble. Where do you live? What’s your name?” The kid didn’t answer; he was still staring at the old-fashioned watering can. A mischievous idea struck Liujin. She raised the watering can and poured water over the boy’s head. He stood there, unmoving, as she watered him thoroughly. He mopped his wet face with his hand, and looked curiously at the furnishings in her house.

      “Go in and change your clothes.”

      Taking the boy’s hand, Liujin went inside with him.

      She told him to go to the bathroom and take a bath. She got out her father’s old shirt and a pair of underpants for him.

      But the child bathed for a long time without emerging. Suspicious, Liujin knocked on the door. There was no answer. She opened the door: he had left, maybe by climbing out the window. The old clothes were still lying on the chair.

      Liujin sat down, stupefied, at the desk, and said to the wall in front of her, “Look at how lonely I am.” But without knowing why, she wrote in the letter, “. . . Mama, life here is rich and colorful!” She’d been writing that letter for a long time, and she kept feeling she couldn’t go on writing. She couldn’t picture her mother’s face. Who was she really writing to? Had her mother really written back, ever? Inside Liujin’s drawer were many letters from her mother. She was convinced that the words didn’t convey her mother’s ideas, but were from the dark shadow behind her mother—her father—because her mother had never paid attention to her. But the letters were actually in her mother’s writing. For the most part, the letters didn’t ask about her life, but simply described Father’s and her hopes for old age. “Your father and I hope to walk around the city on a rainy day.” “We hope to come back to the snow mountain and talk with the snow leopards.” “We hope we can melt into a wisp of black smoke in this smoky city.” “Today we swam in the river. We wanted to be able to walk on water through exercising.” “We . . . we will not vanish, not ever.” But words like these were inserted into much longer letters, in the middle of confused descriptions of the city. Only someone like Liujin could extract their meaning. Now and then, she would ask herself: What is this correspondence for? Her parents didn’t seem to think of her at all, nor did they care whether or not she married: they hadn’t even asked about this. However, another kind of concern showed up between the lines or in ambiguous expressions. Then after all, they still thought about this daughter. What was it that they were concerned about? Liujin couldn’t figure it out; she just felt bewildered. So when she took up her pen, she wrote strange words. When she wrote them, what she thought of were the poplar grove, the filthy sheep, the mysterious woman in the red skirt, and the old man twisting hemp in the starlight. “Mama, I, I am not one person!” Not one person? How many persons was she? She remembered an adventure from her childhood. She and her father had gone to the Gobi Desert. The whole time, they had walked along the periphery of the Gobi. Suddenly, dozens of sand