The Curve They Made Room For

By the time He Fengqiu arrived, Gu Qing had four sample sprays ready to deliver. She put them in a small paper box, intending to go to the Wens’ first to settle the colors and then come home to cut the remaining petals. As soon as the mason arrived, though, he asked them to cover the well and pointed to her worktable. It would have to go indoors, or the dust from taking down the wall would land all over it. Standing in the doorway with the paper box, she could only hug it a little higher.

She hadn't been idle all the days they waited for the bricklayer. She'd sorted the twenty bamboo stems by length, cut the petal blanks, and given them a thin coat of starch. Once the colors were chosen, she could dye and curl them. She'd put the separate parts that had yet to become flowers into shallow baskets, expecting to reach for them when she needed them. It hadn't occurred to her that even where the baskets sat would become entangled with a wall.

They had waited ten days or so for the wall, and it did not immediately rise in the curve they had all drawn. He Fengqiu braced both sides of the old wall with wooden slats and started lifting bricks from a stretch well away from the tree. When one layer came away, it exposed mud from a different age underneath. Gu Qing had thought the old wall was gray through and through, but the more they took down, the more it reminded her of Grandmother’s padded jacket. Some parts had been replaced altogether, and others still held a little of the original material.

Where the plum trunk rested against the wall, the edges of the bricks had pressed an uneven groove into it. A new laborer reached for a broken bit of brick wedged in the groove, but He Fengqiu told him to stop and turned to ask whether the gardener the Wens had called for was there yet. Gu Qing looked out the gate at once, as though any delay on his part could make something go wrong with the tree. He Fengqiu glanced at her and said that whenever the man got there, they would only take down what needed taking down today. Nobody had asked her to nail herself to the spot beside the tree.

In the end she stayed. She could make the twenty stems once the samples had been chosen, but she brought the box back under the window and kept going out to ask how things were going. Her grandmother was cutting radishes inside and told her to wash the rice if she had so much time on her hands. Gu Qing said she would. She put her hand into the cold water, still listening to the hammer beyond the wall. As she stirred the water and the grains rolled over her palm, she sent two drops splashing onto the box of silk flowers beneath the window.

Qiu Shen arrived just before noon, with a short spade and a coil of straw rope on his shoulder and shoes even older than the bricklayer's. He walked the lime circle before looking at the flowers, then crouched by the well in the Gu courtyard, brushed aside a little loose soil, and felt how damp the earth was. Shen Su came out and asked whether the root was too delicate to touch. He said living roots could take the damage that had to be done. It was when people kept telling themselves as they dug that everything was fine that the damage often turned out worse than they thought.

Gu Qing asked whether the tree could survive if they dug it up along the original circle. Qiu Shen neither gave her his word nor tried to frighten her. It depended on the season, how much soil came up with the roots, and the spot it was going to, he said. With the flowers in bloom, this was hardly the easiest time to move it. Even if it survived the move, no one could say yet how it would flower next year. Wen Jichang stood listening, his hand closing into a fist inside his sleeve. He was evidently realizing that all the extra work of keeping the tree was more than a consequence of his own caution.

“And if we leave it here, will it definitely be all right?” he asked.

Qiu Shen looked at the old wall and said that if the tree stayed, its roots would still need room to breathe. The cracks in the old wall were just where water could pass between the wall and the soil. If they laid the new wall without a single gap and blocked the drain as well, leaving the tree where it was would bring other problems. He said nothing about what the tree was worth. He just asked who lived here in summer, where they kept the firewood, and which spot got wet first when it rained. Gu Qing remembered the few lines she had written down and suddenly no longer dared say she’d always taken good care of it.

After hearing him out, He Fengqiu laid the wooden strips out again to mark the curve. The stretch they'd meant to keep close to the tree needed to give a few inches on the Gu courtyard side, and a small opening beside the well platform would spare them from having to take things apart every time they cleared the drain. Gu Qing saw the wooden line cross a corner of her worktable and said without thinking that she'd already moved the table back. He Fengqiu pulled the line in again. He could build closer to the tree, he said, but he wouldn't vouch for it. If some part got pinched later, they couldn't say nobody had seen it coming.

Shen Su came over and felt one of the table legs. Gu Qing’s father had made the table from an old door panel. The ends had always been uneven, and the family had used it for years. She said that if they sawed off this corner, there would no longer be room for two to sit at it against the wall, though it would still be enough for Gu Qing to cut flowers on her own. Gu Qing immediately said they weren't sawing it. How could they ever put a good table back the way it was after cutting it up just to make that little bit of room? Only after she said it did she hear that her tone was almost exactly the one she had used in speaking up for the tree a few days earlier.

Qiu Shen stayed crouched without hurrying her. Xu Tan moved a bamboo basket aside on the other side of the wall and said her own courtyard had lost a spot that would have been just right for stacking hemp sacks, so nobody should be too quick to say anyone else had it easy. She showed Gu Qing the wooden spacers that went beneath the sacks. An empty space looked empty enough, but once things went into it, there was always more than one sack. Gu Qing pressed her lips together and finally asked He Fengqiu to lay the wooden guide out again. She would move the table herself and hold off on sawing it. Whatever materials wouldn't fit inside could go in another basket.

So another half day went into moving things. The silk had to stay off the floor, the bamboo stems had to stay dry, and the box of thread had to stay well away from the lamp. Gu Qing had been annoyed at how much room Grandmother’s old paper patterns took up, but now she discovered that the biggest basket held her own leftover petals. She had wanted to save a bit of every color, and once the basket was full it was hard to shift. Grandmother helped her sort out the pieces she could use, though she kept picking out the ones that came apart at a tug and putting them in another little bowl first. Neither of them could bring herself to say outright that they should throw anything away. In the end the room was messier than it had been before the move.

Amid the disorder, work at the foot of the wall crept forward. He Fengqiu picked out old bricks that could be reused, had his helper brush the mud off, and set new bricks where they would bear the load. Watching him use a plumb line, Gu Qing could not help asking why the wall had to be so straight if they were keeping the tree. The mason laughed. A curve and a crooked wall were two different things, he said. She could hardly call a flower natural just because its petals were stitched any old way. Gu Qing had no answer, but now that he had brought up flowers, she could not resist stepping closer to see how he lined things up.

By the fifth, the brickwork had risen past the rim of the well, and the Gu courtyard had never been so bright. With the old wall gone, the broken corridor in the Wen courtyard and their own clothes pole stood under the same stretch of sky. As soon as Shen Su stepped outside she buttoned her coat, saying it felt like sitting in the street. Gu Qing had meant to laugh at how self-conscious she was, yet as she cut out flowers she kept looking back herself, afraid someone over there might see the jumble of colors she hadn’t sorted on the table. She hung the curtain halfway across, screening them a little without cutting off her grandmother’s light.

A child came to stand in the opening in the wall and look at the tree, asking whether the Gu family would open a garden now. Gu Qing smiled and said no, but the child stayed, his eyes following the four silk plum sprays. She let him touch the smallest and warned him not to pull. After touching real plum blossoms and then artificial ones, he asked which branch was alive. Before Gu Qing could answer, her grandmother said both needed care. Being alive did not mean it could withstand a rough hand, and something not alive had not simply appeared from nowhere either.

The words softened Gu Qing. She went inside and set the box of thread for the little camellias beside her grandmother, meaning to ask her to wrap a few turns. But Shen Su said she wanted to rest just then and left it untouched. That soft feeling caught. Gu Qing almost asked how tiring a little wrapping could be, then turned and saw her grandmother rubbing her fingers inside the cotton cloth. She brought the box back to her side. Someone outside called to borrow water, and she went to fetch the bucket. What she'd been about to say stayed unsaid.

A light rain came down on the afternoon of the sixth. The mortar might wash away, so He Fengqiu had them put up a piece of old oilcloth, and at last the bamboo ribs Zhou Jiping had sent came into use. Gu Qing held one corner up with a bamboo pole, her arm quickly growing sore, while Xu Tan directed the drips on the other side away from where people walked. The rain pattering on the oilcloth sounded close to them, yet each still had a dry patch in the courtyard. Gu Qing suddenly understood why those bare umbrella frames had to be measured rib by rib when they came in. Having something propped up was only the start of making a roof.

Supper was later than usual. She brought her grandmother hot porridge and left her own by the stove. By the time she sat down, a skin had formed on it. Her grandmother asked whether the flower colors had been chosen. Only then did Gu Qing remember the paper box and run to check it. A small water stain still marked the bottom. On two of the four samples, the silk near the base had been pressed into faint creases. They were still usable, but the first thing Xu Tan would see was her carelessness. She fussed with them half the night without turning it into a question of who else should have looked after her sample box.

On the seventh she finally delivered the flowers. Xu Tan chose equal numbers of pale red and ivory and asked whether Gu Qing could meet the later delivery dates. Gu Qing said she could, and only after the words were out did she realize how little she'd got done over the past few days. Xu Tan didn't check for a scent again. She simply slipped a stem into an empty earthenware jug that still hadn't been set straight in the counting room, and looked to see how close it was to the window. Gu Qing wanted to tell her that the base of the flower had got wet, and in the end she spoke up before leaving it there. Xu Tan took a look and said she wouldn't count it toward the delivery. She'd keep it as a sample and count the rest as they were made.

She came out of the counting room feeling a little reluctant to let the two stems go. She had already spent time making them, but intending to put them toward a payment couldn't turn that labor into money. She didn't ask for them to be counted toward the total. Back home, she cut new petals and only realized evening had come again when she heard tools being put away beyond the wall. Since the table had been moved indoors, there was less room to sit. She bumped her grandmother as she turned for the thread, and their shoulders pressed together, as though she were back in the years when she was little and learning to sew.

On the eighth, He Fengqiu finished the last stretch of the curve. He wiped the excess mortar from the brick edges with a wet hand and kept Gu Qing from coming close to touch it right away. A small length of the tree had been freed from the old wall. The rough bark still bore the marks of where it had been squeezed. Neat new brickwork would do little to make it younger. Wen Jichang stood looking at it from his side for a long time and said that from now on this space would have to stay empty. Hearing him across the wall, Gu Qing thought of her own half worktable and kept to herself the question of what there was to miss.

That evening she and Grandmother finished sorting the last basket of silk scraps. Shen Su pulled a pale yellow piece from the cream-colored pile and said it would be perfect for a flower center. Gu Qing wanted it for the edge of a new plum blossom, where it would look a little warmer in sunlight. They argued for a bit and kept half each. On that first night when they paused beside the new wall, each kept something for herself. Beneath the window, the two little piles of silk shone separately in the lamplight.