When the spring rites ended, the village seemed hollowed out, a layer deep. The oil lamps went out one by one, the windows went dark, and all of Yinchuan slept down into its own breathing. Tomorrow was the equinox. Tonight, the people called it the night before.
Xing did not go home.
I received her foot on my first branch just as the moon was coming up. She was carrying a small bundle wrapped in blue cloth. She climbed hand over hand to her old place, the fork of my third branch, and shook out an old quilt from the bundle, spread it over the fork, and sat down with her feet dangling. She was going to sleep in the tree tonight. She had told no one. She had brought only the quilt, and a pouch of food, and nothing else.
She sat looking at the village for a while, and then she said, very quietly, "Da Qing. If you're here tomorrow morning, I won't be afraid."
I could not answer her. But I took that sentence and kept it in the branch nearest to her. She leaned against my trunk and pressed her ear to my bark. She listened for a while, and then she said, "There's water inside you." And then: "That's good. You're alive." She said nothing more; she just leaned there, the way you lean against a river that is still moving.
When the moon was higher, Meng Guan came.
He carried no lamp. His step was light, as it had been the first time he came in the deep night. He held his old star-rod against his chest, and he walked to my roots and sat down — not far off, but against my roots themselves, in a patch of moonlight. He looked up at the sky for a while, and then he looked down at the rod in his hand, as though asking it, or asking himself: what will tomorrow morning be like.
Xing saw him first. She leaned out over the branch. "Uncle Meng?"
Meng Guan looked up. He had clearly not expected anyone in the tree. He paused. "What are you doing up there?"
"Sleeping," said Xing. "What about you?"
"...Sitting."
Neither of them spoke after that. One was a child who had come up into the tree to sleep; one was a grown man who had come to sit under it. Between them stood most of a tree, and each kept their own night. After a long time, Xing said, "Uncle Meng, will you go to the observatory tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"Then if you don't sleep tonight, will you be able to see clearly tomorrow?"
Meng Guan was silent for a while. In the moonlight he touched the rod at his chest. "Clear or not," he said, "I'll only know it when I see it." And then he added, very softly, as though he were not saying it to Xing at all: "In my whole life, I have never been so afraid of a sunrise."
Xing did not press him. She has spent many nights in this tree; she knows that some questions cannot be asked. She only slid down two steps, closer to him, and said, "If you're afraid, you can sit here." She patted my bark. "It's very steady."
Meng Guan did not answer her. But he did not leave. He leaned against my roots, and Xing leaned against my branch, and all night, from two directions, they kept watch over the same tree.
I received that night the way you receive a very slow rain.
Meng Guan used his hands. His fingers did not stop all night — moving over my bark, along the old scar, along the places where people had leaned during the rites, section by section, the way you recite from memory a text you have studied for a long time. He believes in no god, and his fingers believe in nothing but touch. But he touched all night, and nothing he touched matched the "tree" he had been taught.
Xing used her feeling. She lay against me the way you lie against something alive, listening to the water inside me, and her fingers found an old mark — the scratch she had made when she was very small, with her fingernail, on my branch. It had grown smooth years ago. Only she still knew where it was. She pressed her cheek to me and said, "Da Qing, your heartbeat is so slow." She moved her ear to another place. "It's faster here. Do you have something on your mind?"
One used her hands. One used the measure. One was counting my heartbeat and one was measuring my bark. Neither of them told the other what they were doing. But in that one night, from two directions, they arrived at the same place.
The moon sank west. The night reached its darkest hour. Xing sat up suddenly, and she asked me, and she asked the night:
"Da Qing — what are you waiting for?"
When I received that sentence, the whole tree went quiet.
What was I waiting for? I was waiting for the living souls to graduate. I have waited one hundred million years, two hundred million, three hundred million. I made my vow to stay and watch the whole performance through — to wait until the last enrolled soul had graduated, until this school let out, and then I could leave. That was the whole meaning I had assigned myself. I guarded one mouthful of first light, waiting for a day when I could set it down. I waited so long that waiting became my growth rings. I waited so long that I believed I had been born in order to wait.
And tonight, a twelve-year-old child, sitting in the high fork, asked me what I was waiting for.
Suddenly I had no answer.
I looked down at her — I cannot look down. I "see" her with my roots, with my heart. She was waiting for my answer the way you wait for a leaf that ought to fall. She did not know she had asked me the question I had never dared to ask myself.
I always believed it was I who was waiting for the living souls to graduate. I have stood here for ages, waiting for them to live out their lives, walk out, and return to the soil — waiting until they no longer needed me, and then I could be dismissed.
But tonight I saw, suddenly, that this was not so.
They have been waiting for me.
Xing waits here for me to hear her speak. Meng Guan waits under this tree to measure me clear. Granny Liu waits for me to keep her basket of clothes. He Song waits for a tree to hold the fear of the village. Everyone in this school waits, in their own way, for one thing from me: that I watch them through to the end, and then consent to stay for them — or consent to go for myself.
I was waiting for a dismissal. All their lives, they have been waiting for a presence.
That guarded mouthful of first light understood, tonight, one thing it had never understood: I was not waiting for anyone to graduate. I was afraid of leaving first. I stood up the word wait like a city wall and guarded it for ages — and on the far side of the wall there was not the dawn I had been waiting for. On the far side of the wall, all along, were their lit, brief lamps — lamps that, once out, can never be lit again.
The longest thing I have ever done is wait.
But tonight I decided to do the one thing I have not done in three hundred and twenty million years. Not wait. Depart.
Tomorrow morning, I will say those two sentences. The two stone fruit carry sentences I put away when I was young and never said. They have grown on me for ages, hardened into two stone hearts. I always believed I would carry them to the final dismissal. But tonight I understand: a sentence kept unsaid grows hard. Stone is not a heart. Stone is a sentence that was never finished.
If I truly waited until the day of dismissal, no one would ever hear those sentences. And then what would all this waiting have brought?
Before dawn, in the darkest hour, my two stone fruit — both at once, softly — cracked open along a seam.
There was no sound. Like two seeds in the soil, deciding by themselves to begin.
Meng Guan lifted his head at the roots. He thought he had heard something. He looked at me for a long time, and then he said, very softly, "...You're waiting for daylight too?"
I did not answer. But I felt that after the light came, something was going to be different.
Xing turned over on her branch, and murmured something in her sleep. I received half of her dream. It was one word. She was not counting anything — she never counts — and yet what she dreamed was the thing that would happen in the morning, the thing she did not yet know: she dreamed of the flower.
In the east, the sky turned green.