Yinchuan is empty.
It was not destroyed by anything. The houses are still there. The tiles are still on the roofs, the walls still stand — only the people are gone. The roads have been eaten back by grass. The smithy's forge went cold decades ago. The village school's blackboard is still on its wall, and the chalk tray holds a layer of dust. It is like a classroom after school: the desks are all in their places, and the students have all gone home. No one remembers when the people left, or why. Perhaps they moved to cities that had lights. Perhaps, one by one, no new people came. The village has become like an old tree after its leaves have all fallen: it stands quietly, and waits for the wind to fill the soil back into the hollow where it grew.
The courtyards have gone back to being fields of weeds, and the weeds are slowly going back to being forest. A traveler would find it peaceful. Only someone who had known it before would hear what is missing: the hammer, the recitation, the arguments that used to ride the noon heat out of open doorways. The valley holds silence the way a well holds water — easily, and all the way down. The empty schoolroom is the truest picture of the place: everything in its place, and no one left to use it.
At the mouth of the village, the evergreen tree is still standing.
It is green. It is the same in every season. No one waters it. No one hangs red cloth on it. It lives well on its own — it has always lived well on its own. The old scars are still on it: where names were carved, where cords were tied, where clothes were hung. And on the highest branch, the remains of a kite are still tied — its paper rotted away long ago, nothing left but the bamboo frame and a line the wind has pulled at for years, still tied firmly, in three knots.
No one knows who tied those three knots. The tree knows. The tree remembers.
Since that equinox, the tree has simply stood there. It is still green, still the same size, its leaves still dense. But something about it is different — not in a way you can see. The people who pass it have gradually stopped feeling that it was "waiting for something." In the old days, anyone passing this tree felt a nameless thing: that it was watching, listening, waiting. That feeling is gone now. The tree is still here, green, like a very good piece of timber, or like a very good mountain. It is no longer waiting for anyone.
It only stands. It lives out its days the way a tree lives out its days.
Years moved over it without names, the way years move over anything that has stopped keeping count of them. Snows came and went. The seasons taught it nothing it did not already know, and it asked nothing of them back. Once there had been watchers to remark that the tree was the same in every season; now there were only the seasons themselves, and the tree went on being green in all of them, for no witness but the weather.
On the equinox, its two stone fruit fell.
No one remembered how long they had hung there. In the old days the village children called them the toad-warts, the growths of an old tree that never bore fruit. That spring, the two fruit cracked open, one after the other, and out of them fell a single thing. One seed. In its whole life, the tree had made only this one seed.
The seed was very small — little bigger than a grain of rice — and its color was the palest green, as though it had just woken from a very long sleep and had not yet decided what color it meant to be. It fell on the small patch of soil at the tree's roots. Spring was coming. No one saw it fall. The wind came and did not carry it away. The rain came and pressed it down into the soil. And there it waited.
When Xing came back, she was an old woman.
Many years after that equinox, she walked back to Yinchuan alone. She walked slowly; her hair was white and her back was a little bent, but her eyes were still the child's eyes. She walked and looked as she went — at the empty village, at the grass-grown roads — and none of it surprised her, as though she had always known it would come to this. She reached the mouth of the village and stood for a long time under the evergreen tree.
She looked up at the bamboo frame of the kite on the highest branch.
"You're still here," she said. Her voice was old. The sentence was the one her grandmother had said that year, at the roots.
She crouched down, and she saw the seed beside the roots, on that small patch of new soil. It had sprouted. A very small seedling, two leaves, green so pale it was almost transparent — green that had only just learned to be green. She looked at it for a long time. Then she lifted it, with the soil all around it, whole, very gently, the way you carry something that might break and, at the same time, cannot break.
She planted it on the mountain.
Not back at the mouth of the village. She climbed a long way, up to an open place on the hillside where you could see all of Yinchuan, and the evergreen tree at the mouth of the village. There she planted the seedling, worked the soil around it, pressed it firm, and poured a little water over it. She did it slowly, carefully — the way a person who has done one thing her whole life does the last thing she will ever do.
She sat a long time beside the little tree before she went down. The wind came up the slope, and the seedling leaned with it the way all young things lean, and steadied itself. She watched it do this for a while, and then she nodded once — the way you nod at a person you have decided to trust — and she began the long walk down.
Perhaps someone asked her, later: why did you plant it on the mountain? Wouldn't it be better down below, under the big tree?
"It wasn't planted for me," she said.
She looked at the seedling. "I didn't plant it so that I could rest in its shade one day. I planted it for the ones who will never sit under that tree. When they come, I'll be gone, and so will Da Qing. But there has to be a tree up here, waiting for them."
When she had said that, she went back down the mountain. She never came back. The seedling grew on the hillside by itself.
Many years later — no one knows how many — the tree on the hillside had grown into a young, ordinary tree. It is not tall and not short. In spring it puts out buds. In summer it is deep green. In autumn it drops some of its leaves. In winter it stands bare, waiting for the next spring. It has no three-hundred-million-year memory. It has no two sentences stored away. It has made no vow for anyone. It does not know what a guardian is, or a graduation, or a bloom-signal. It is only a tree.
When the wind comes, it moves with the wind. When the rain comes, it catches the rain and lets it run down its leaves into the soil. Birds build their nests in its branches. And under it — perhaps a very long time from now — a child will climb it and speak to it, and it will not answer. It will not need to answer.
It does not need to remember anything. It only has to be green in the spring.
Down in the empty village, the evergreen tree at the mouth of the village is still standing. Year after year it stays green, and it grows greener, more and more like a silent mountain. No one calls it Da Qing anymore. But if someone walks up to it and looks closely, among the patterns of its old scars — the carved characters, the cord marks, the traces of the hung clothes — there is one very shallow scar, running across a place where no other pattern lies, as though a long time ago, someone measured it with a measure.
That tree does not remember what that was. But it carries, on its body, that mark of having been measured.
As though, once, in this world, there was a man who believed in nothing, and when the moon was past its highest point, he looked at a tree, seriously.
And that tree's whole life was worth it.
