Granny Liu came carrying a basket of clothes.
The afternoon sun was at its best. She had not come to wash them. She took the clothes out one by one and laid them flat among my roots, smoothing them, the way you make a bed for someone. I know those clothes. They are a man's clothes — old, washed pale, patched neatly, folded with a precision only a mother can keep up for forty years. Forty years ago the same mother hung a set of clothes on me and said, Watch him for me. The clothes rotted into my bark, and the scar grew into a pattern. These in her hands were the ones she had found over all the later years, one by one, from the bottom of chests and out of dreams — the him she had been retrieving ever since.
Now she is old. She has brought out the things she kept for forty years, and she is giving them back to me.
She lifted her head and looked at me. Her cloudy eyes held a careful joy, the joy of a person afraid that a loud voice would wake the dream. She said:
"You're back."
I know this moment. All these years her forgetting has grown lighter and lighter, the way water runs over a stone: the stone stays the same stone, only rounder. She has mistaken me for him more than once. And every time she calls me by his name, I want to answer. I cannot. All I can do is stand here and let her speak forty years of sentences to a thing shaped like him.
"You've grown thin." She touched my bark with the very lightest hand, the way you touch paper that might tear. "In flood season, you were always thin like this."
I am not thin. I have been the same for three hundred and twenty million years. But I did not argue. The man in her eyes is the young man of forty years ago — the one who, on the seventh day of rain, walked into the river. She has waited for him forty years. The number of years a person can wait is smaller than the number of leaves a tree can drop. She has finally found a thing that looks like him, and she has put all forty years down on it.
She talked on and on. She told me how he climbed trees as a child. How he was afraid of thunder. How his shoes always wore out on the same side first. Sometimes she lost a sentence midway, and stopped, and thought, and found it again. Her forgetting is not a hole. It is a river changing course: the old channel dries slowly, and the new channel finds its own way. She has forgotten that he is dead — that is the river's kindest bend. She remembers that he is still somewhere in the world; she simply has not found him yet. So she keeps looking. Laying the clothes out at my roots is her way of looking: you hang the washing where it can be seen, and the one who wears it will come and claim it.
"Why did you go into the water."
She asked it flatly, the way you ask a small thing that has waited a long time and is finally permitted. For forty years she pressed that sentence down, pressed it so heavily that it grew into the shape of her bones. Now she has forgotten whether she is allowed to ask it, so she asks it. She looked at me without tears, with a serious, uncomprehending face — the way you ask a river why it flows east.
I know the answer. I know which thing she is asking about: that year, the flood season, rain for seven days, the river yellow with mud. Her son had not gone in to save anyone. He had not been showing off. He had not despaired. He went in to reach a sheep. The poorest household at the head of the village had lost its sheep to the water, and the family's whole winter — its food, its hope — was in that one animal. He went into the river to fetch it. He slipped.
To the end, he was reaching for that sheep.
I saw the whole of it. I saw it from the bank, where they shouted at him not to go. I saw the sudden silence under the water. What he reached at the last was the sheep, and the sheep was dead too, and the river carried both of them downstream, past the reach of my roots. I have kept the answer in my soil for forty years. She has asked me for forty years.
I have no mouth.
I tried to tell her with my leaves once. It did not work — the leaves fell, and she picked one up and tucked it against her chest and said, you've grown thin. I tried to let the wind speak for me. The wind does not obey me. I have no hands, no feet, no mouth. All I can do is stand here and let her ask a forty-year-old why to a thing that cannot answer.
She asked, and she did not wait for an answer. She had probably forgotten that she was waiting for one. She leaned against my roots and fell asleep, breathing the way she breathed the first time she ever slept under me, shallow, like a leaf resting on water. The afternoon light came down at a slant and drew her shadow out long. I watched that shadow, and standing there I understood something.
These last days I have been afraid of forgetting. Afraid that the first light would slip from my hold. Afraid that the story of my beginning would be told away, piece by piece. Afraid that at the end I would have to give everything back. I thought of forgetting as the tree going wrong — as the school closing its accounts, as a fault in me. I have guarded one mouthful of light for three hundred and twenty million years the way you guard a lamp that must not go out. And watching Granny Liu, for the first time I tried to see myself with her eyes.
She has forgotten forty years into something light, something warm. Mistaking me for her son is not her illness. It is a bridge she built for herself, and on the far side of the bridge her son is still alive, only far away. She forgot the heaviest sentence she owned into a flat why did you go into the water, and once she had asked it, it stopped pressing down on her. Her forgetting is not a defect. It is her heart deciding for her, setting down one by one the things too heavy to carry, so that she can keep walking.
Forgetting is the archive finally permitted to compost itself — to rot the memories that are too heavy down into something soft, into soil that can grow things. She has not forgotten her son. She has composted him: from a stone pressing on her heart into a handful of soil that could grow flowers.
I watched the mouthful of light I had come up empty on, and I understood. It is not broken. It is the heaviest piece of luggage I have carried in three hundred and twenty million years, and now it is time to set it down — and I am the one who cannot bear to. I am like an old man keeping an empty house: everything was moved out long ago, and still he polishes the lock every day, afraid it will rust.
In the evening, Xing came to take Granny Liu home. By the time Xing reached her, she had forgotten that she had spent the afternoon here. She followed Xing, and at the edge of the village she turned back to look at me the way you look at a new old friend, and she smiled, and she said:
"Da Qing. You're still here."
She knows my name is Da Qing. She forgot her way all along the road, and in the end only one piece of luggage was left on her: she remembers that I am Da Qing.
I stood alone in the night and tried, the way she would have, to forget a little.
I chose what should have been the lightest thing I own — the first light. I thought: forget it. Then I would not have to fear the morning it comes up empty. I tried not to reach for it. Three gusts of wind passed, and I did not reach for it. The dew fell, and I did not reach for it. I did it. For the first time in my life, for as long as three whole gusts of wind, I did not think of that light.
And then I understood. I had been counting. Three gusts, two gusts — to count them was to remember them. Even the act of trying to forget, I did the way a person does who cannot bear to forget.
Suddenly I could not bear it. Not the light itself. I could not bear that I still remember how much I cannot bear to let it go — because I was afraid that if I forgot even that, there would be nothing left of me at all. I have guarded that light for three hundred and twenty million years, until it became me. To give it back would be to give myself back.
So I have lived this long, and I have not learned to forget a single thing.
It is not that I cannot forget. It is that I cannot bear to forget even the thought of wanting to learn.
Granny Liu forgot all her life, and grew lighter with every forgetting. For the first time in my life, I envied her.