The Last Sky Read online

  On the map of China the far northern regions are coloured in various shades of brown. Landlocked, no blue line of a river marks these parts, no lake or inland sea. Only tiny circles of khaki scattered on the edges of the desert. These are the oasis towns. There is a vast sand sea and a mountain range whose name translates as ‘The Roof of the World’.

  In one of Joseph’s books is a map that shows the former kingdoms of the desert, the vanished northern cities and the lines of trade routes that once crisscrossed the Sand Sea. The darkest line is Marco Polo’s Silk Road. Circles of colour symbolise the produce and the riches of each region, the goods that were exchanged for gold.

  Joseph tells me about the scraps of life he finds in the desert. A perfectly preserved clay spoon. A felt hat. A baby’s bottle made of stretched goat skin. In the desert you are always surrounded by lost history. And then this prehistoric woman, buried beneath the shifting dunes.

  Today the Beauty of Loulan lies in a laboratory in England. She had to be saved from the Chinese. In her home in the north there are ardent Muslims who gouge the eyes out of statues and destroy sculptures, people to whom the word science is an empty sound. And in the centres of power are men with other reasons to destroy her. With her aquiline features, her red hair and her high, slender nose, she bears little racial affinity to the Han Chinese who claim they are the most ancient inhabitants of the northern deserts.

  So she was carted away to cold countries and teams of forensic archaeologists. They took scrapings from her bones and catalogued her clothing. Every month there were new discoveries. Her age, her weight, a reconstruction of her face in life, complete with the cascading red hair that had made her famous. Joseph greeted every new revelation as if he were learning the intricacies of a lover. One day they will all be in the book he will write about her, a book that will change forever the history of the desert and the people who lay claim to it.

  It is not these stories that interest me. There is another, smaller story.

  In the sand next to the Beauty of Loulan’s desert grave archaeologists found the tiny corpse of a baby. A child less than a year old with perfectly preserved curls of hair and blue stones pressed over her eyes. Carefully folded into the grave was a felt bonnet, a tiny fur cloak and a small cup. Tests showed that the baby was no blood relation to the Beauty of Loulan. The little girl was not her baby. The scientists can think of no explanation for the presence of this child.

  I need a better story. I want to know how the Beauty of Loulan came to die in the desert with another woman’s child by her side. Was her tribe stricken by illness or war? Did a dead mother bequeath this obviously well-loved child to her? Did she try to keep the baby alive with goats’ milk?

  I ask Joseph these questions and he says that archaeologists are scientists, not novelists. They can reconstruct the facts but not the stories of the past.

  ‘Not everything fits, Maya,’ he says, packing away the photographs spread across the table. ‘Not everything has a neat story.’

  Tomorrow he is going away. His work takes him back to the desert, up into China and out of my reach. Already he is distracted, distant, one eye on the desert. I lay my hand on the back of his neck. The skin is warm and smooth.

  ‘Want to go for a gin and tonic? It’s too hot in here,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve got to sort out my notes. I’ll have one with you when I get back.’

  I say nothing and he looks faintly impatient. ‘Cheer up. It’s only a couple of weeks.’

  I take my hand away from his neck.

  Once I asked him to take me to the desert. It is not completely unheard of for a wife to come along on the shorter trips. To sit with a wide-brimmed hat in the shade of the tents, to sketch the sand dunes and pour the men rum mixed with lime juice at the end of the day’s work.

  I will always remember what he said to me. ‘Why do women want everything of a man?’

  It’s always been there in my husband, this old desire for self-sufficiency, the need to slide away and apart. It used to make me angry, the walls he put up around himself, his idea that he could live in a world apart from the mess and mire of human affections, that he didn’t need the words He thought this was a virtue.

  Once he said to me, ‘The best way is to expect nothing of people. That way you can never be disappointed.’ We were lying in bed when he said it and I turned away and slipped out from under his arm. I stood in the doorway and looked down at him in the bed. ‘I think you are inhuman,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘Well, I’ll just be inhuman then and have my peace.’

  His peace. I didn’t speak to him for three days.

  Darkness between us as we sit across the table from each other. We need a garden to walk in, a moon over the water and swerving candlelight. Joseph’s head is bent over his papers, his lips making shapes around Chinese words as if he wants to slip away into his own spell, as if murmuring an incantation.

  ‘Do you remember the races?’

  He looks up. ‘Fighting Fox.’

  ‘And you in your father’s hat.’

  Once we had gone to the races to bet on horses. It was summer, one of the first hot days, and flies clung to the backs of men’s shirts. Neither of us had ever been before. We didn’t know anything about horses or about betting. We sat on a bench beside the track and studied the form guide. We read about the horses’ spirits and their temperaments, their recent wins and failures. The form guide read like someone was talking to you, like an old racing bloke was having a yarn. ‘Not the roughest,’ it said if the horse was a fairly good prospect.

  Joseph and I liked the sound of a horse called Fighting Fox. The guide said he was brave and proud, that he only ran when he wanted to. We went and had a look at him. He glared angrily under his forelock and stamped his hoof cleverly on the jockey’s foot. Joseph went down to the bookies’ circle and put fifty dollars on him. It seemed like an enormous amount of money.

  ‘Remember how excited the crowd was?’ I say. ‘How we laughed at them calling out to the horses, as if they could hear them, but then we were doing it too. We did it properly, grabbing onto each other and yelling at Fighting Fox to go faster.’

  ‘Fighting Fox. He was a good old runner.’

  ‘You were so excited. You grabbed my hand so hard and you had your other hand on your heart. I’d never seen you so concentrated on anything before. And then you kissed me when he won.’

  ‘It was your birthday, wasn’t it? And we went to that restaurant in Northbridge. The Moon. And spent all our money on ridiculous cocktails.’

  ‘We walked home drunk and you sang in French. We were so happy.’

  Joseph stares at me across the table. ‘It’s strange for you here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nods and his body makes a movement of shadow. ‘Aurel Stein thinks there are more mummies out there. Where we found the Beauty of Loulan. Older, maybe.’

  ‘Maybe they don’t want to be dug up.’ I sound petulant, even to myself. The clinging lover. Trailing wives, they call them here.

  Joseph sighs. ‘Do you know how close Stein and I are to proving that the Chinese didn’t get to the Tarim Basin first? What that might mean for the Uighur tribes, for their independence?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were so interested in politics.’

  ‘It’s not just politics. It’s a human rights issue. Haven’t you been reading the papers? All the disappearances, the torture, the brutality?’

  ‘Oh. I must have missed that.’

  ‘Missed it? How do you live here and miss something like that?’

  ‘Chinese politics isn’t my interest, it’s yours.’ Even to myself I sound petulant and childish.

  ‘You used to find politics interesting,’ Joseph says archly. I say nothing.

  He stops and puts his hands on my shoulders as he walks to the bedroom. ‘You’ll find yourself something to do.’

  I can feel the warmth of his flesh through the thin cotton of my dress. This time tomorrow he will
be away in the desert.

  When Joseph is away, it is not sex but simply touch that I crave the most. A pair of hands on my shoulders, the smooth length of his spine on the nights we sleep back to back, skin pressed together from shoulder to hip. The pressure of his ribcage against mine when he collapses on top of me, his hot breath against my neck.

  When I met Joseph he was already famous among the strange international cult of archaeologists. He was the man who spoke the languages of China flawlessly, who had trekked across more than half of the Taklamakan Desert, the protégé of the famous sinologist Aurel Stein. He had published a brilliant monograph on the history of the lost tribes of the Tarim Basin, another on Lop Nor, had already made a name for himself as an eloquent and assiduous scholar.

  But at the university where we both taught all this was half-buried. The Faculty of Arts was in thrall to a particular kind of French critical theory and there was little interest in the arcane world of the men who dug up the desert. Ours was an age of postmodernists. We averted our eyes from fields that clung too closely to the rigours of science. We were not interested in catalogued facts.

  Joseph had occupied the office down the hall from me for over two years and I had only a vague idea of what it was he did. He was a tall man in pale shirts with hair that curled beautifully away from his temples. He was scrupulously polite and formal, distracted-looking at faculty meetings, strict with his students. A man who gave the impression of impatience barely contained. He sat alone in the dining room at University House, buried in a book or a newspaper or staring out at the birds swooping above the river.

  Mornings by the river. I see him there, swathed in light. In the dining hall the light is from the river and the pale sky beyond. He leans forward to pour more tea and the light falls on his neck, his face. His legs are long and crossed gracefully. He brings his hands together, each fingertip touching.

  Once, standing in front of a poster advertising a James Joyce conference on the faculty noticeboard, I turned to see him beside me, holding his leather satchel.

  ‘When I read Ulysses I rewarded myself at the end of each chapter by composing a limerick summarising the chapter.’

  I look at him, at his high, clever forehead and half-smile. ‘How wonderful. You could publish them. A kind of study-guide. Or a substitute for lazy students.’

  ‘Yes, but I might need to find an Irish publisher. I can’t imagine there’d be much of a market for it here.’

  ‘No.’

  He was not popular in university circles. He was too stern and single-minded, so absorbed in his work that he made those around him feel somehow inadequate. He always worked late; there were many nights when his light was on long after midnight. He had an aloof, distant manner with his colleagues. He only occasionally slipped in and out of university functions, always giving the impression that he found the social world around him irrelevant.

  I had peered through the open door of a lecture room once and seen him bent over a book with some students, telling them almost joyfully about the face of a mummy found in the desert. He leaned back in his chair, drawing the shape of the body with his hands, his face flushed with sudden excitement. I had never seen him so animated.

  That summer, inexplicably, he sent me a postcard from one of his field trips to the desert. A picture of a seascape.

  In the desert there are odd echoes of other worlds. Sometimes a fossilised seashell, or the skeleton of a fish.Sometimes a dune that looks like a wave. It is not surprising to find that a great prehistoric sea once filled this place.

  And then his name, scrawled above a line of Chinese stamps.

  In my office by the river, I imagine him in a circle around a campfire, drinking tea with the Uighur guides he has written about, the ones who can find water by the slight discoloration at the foot of a dune.

  In his book he had written that at twilight in the desert there is no sound but the hiss of sand being blown off the ridges. It’s a kind of singing, he wrote.

  He was the anomaly in our midst, the true explorer in a world of words and talk. A finder and namer of things, leaning forward to pour a cup of tea, the light on his face and neck as he stirred his sugar.

  It never occurred to me that light can deceive you, that in the desert things lose their shape and float towards you in trembling distortion.

  I am reading Pliny. In the chapter on the history of sculpture he tells a story about the Corinthian maid, Diboutade. On learning that her lover was to go away to war she had him sit by a wall with the sun behind him. Taking a stick of charcoal she carefully traced the outline of his profile on the wall. Later her father, the potter Boutades, filled in the charcoal lines with damp clay, creating a kind of portrait relief.

  I prefer the daughter’s shadowy souvenir. I want the wavering memory. The nebulous memento. Without the edges firmed up.

  ‘In the beginning,’ says Ken Tiger, ‘the Jews came very slowly. A few men, perhaps a young couple. There was a place for them. There were other Jews, you have to remember. Wealthy ones from Iraq and then from Russia. The ones that came before the war. They had their own world, we never saw much of them. They were just more foreigners to us. But then they started to come by the hundreds. There would be trucks to meet them at the dock. I remember watching them come off the ships. They looked poor. And afraid. I felt sorry for them.’

  I can see them, these people. Their lives have fallen into two pieces, divided by more than an ocean.

  In the beginning, before there were so many, the Shanghai Jews found rooms for them, jobs in their businesses, money to set up their own shops. In the beginning there was a place for them but then, as Europe burned, there were too many for the small community to absorb. By the middle of the war there were more than ten thousand. They set up relief committees, passed around hats, sent telegrams to America for help. But the eyes of the world were elsewhere.

  This is the beginning of Ada Lang’s story. This is the history of a small pocket of Jews in China.

  The bewildered Jewish refugees were hastily packed into abandoned houses, military barracks and empty warehouses. The dwelling Ada is allocated is in an old house on Chusan Road which has been divided with thin sheets of plywood into tiny apartments. She shares a dim room on the second floor with a family of German Jews, the Hakhams. At night she sleeps with the daughter of the family, Hadassah.

  Lying in bed in the early mornings Ada watches the heat form in breath-like clouds on the window pane. Already the thin sheet is sodden, her hair damp and heavy. Shanghai is drowning in the summer monsoon.

  Outside, on the street, the noise is cataclysmic. This is the Chinese city. Horses’ hooves striking the pavement like anvils and the screeching clang of trolley cars. Hawkers shouting, blind men sounding brass gongs, birds squawking in wicker baskets and throngs of people. The noise of the street fills the apartment. It drifts in damp clouds of air laden with dust and pollen.

  Chaim Hakham sits by the window, silent, still and heavy as the statues of Buddha Ada has seen through the gates of temples and on small shrines behind shop counters. Once a year, on the birthday of Lord Buddha, the Chinese take their statues from monasteries and temples and ceremoniously bathe them in water scented with sandalwood, ambergris, turmeric and aloes. Afterwards the water is drunk by the faithful.

  The Jews have their own rituals but there is no space for them here. This is not like the dark ghettoes of Europe but they are painfully poor. Twice a day they take a tin pot and line up by a window where food is distributed by the relief committee. They get one ladle in the pot for each member of the household. Back in their room Naima Hakham stirs in semolina, which can be bought on the black market.

  Naima has things that can be sold for food. One by one she draws her treasures out of the tin trunk. The silver tea service is not in the usual style. The pieces are heavy and slightly irregular with handles that form dramatic curlicues. Ada imagines a long-ago silversmith, tired of small contained gestures, fixing in place a spout that flou
rishes like an elephant’s trunk. There is a gold bracelet inlaid with stone scarab beetles. The enamelled blueness of the beetles is far more dazzling than the dull gleam of the surrounding gold. It seems an odd thing for a German woman to have. There are crystal earrings shaped like small flowers and a necklace made of beads of jet. There are other things that won’t bring any money. Ada runs her fingers across a heavily embroidered cloth, the stitches so small and dense they look like tapestry. The underside of the cloth is filled with small knots where the embroiderer has changed thread. Naima sells swathes of handmade lace to a Chinese grocer for fresh vegetables. With potatoes she makes a kind of goulash. Some onions, some paprika and instead of meat, boiled potatoes. In the evenings they sit around one sputtering candle and Naima tells stories about other candle lit evenings in warm houses by a dark forest. It’s not Ada’s language but the voice, low and soft, is soothing.

  Some of the refugees have gathered enough money to lease an empty hall for a synagogue. They string sheets across the centre of the room to separate the men and women. There are plenty of planks and crates for benches and someone has brought their leather-bound Torah. The leather is patchy and stained where it has been ruined by seawater. On Shabbat the air is thick with sounds of Hebrew and the quiet murmur of prayers. In the synagogue the world is firm and orderly. The Torah is divided into fifty-four exactly composed sections, one to be read each week until the cycle is completed. It is possible to live within a system of elegant and discrete weekly universes.

  Ada sits among the women and remembers the dark wood and stained glass of the synagogues of Russia. She thinks of the line of bent heads that had been the women of her family. Once she had looked over to see her mother’s face lit up with the refractions of light through the coloured glass of the window. Her whole face was speckled with hovering diamonds of green and blue. She had seemed so complete, so enclosed in her own contemplations, so oblivious to her daughter’s errant thoughts. Head bent over her prayer book, she had the composure and self-containment of a prophet, the rapture of a mystic. She had never seemed so separate.