'I can't hide from you, Mama. He is there all weekend, every weekend. Sometimes I have to say to him, look, Dad, I am having all the officers over for dinner.'

Dark, dark, and cold, in this attic room not her own.

'And the officers, do they find him interesting?'

'Don't, Mama. No, they don't find him interesting. He gets drunk, and tries to talk up what he has done, and pretends to be a businessman.'

And Tsang, thought Mae, I wonder how you like the overripe peach that people must mistake for your mother.

'But he also visits your sister Ying.'

'Yes, yes, he bounces between the two of us. But she is married to an officer too.'

Mae saw it all: poor Joe, desperate, helplessly in love with his son, yearning only to see Lung and how strong and smart he was, and trying, also desperately, to avoid seeing that he was in his son's way, his daughter's way.

You are not so smart, Lung. You are enough of your father's son, I saw that somehow tonight. This is as far as you will go, and then you too will start, unaccountably, to fade.

'You want some advice, son?' Mae moved through the winter silk of the night. She took the hard band of muscle beside his neck and worked it. 'The army will not like it that you have a Western wife. They will be disappointed in your father. You know what you should do? Though this pains me, I cannot think only of myself. You should be your wife's husband, and go back with her to Canada.'

Lung sighed. 'I know.'

And then, thought Mae, you will not be a spy on all of us.

CHAPTER 18

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audio file from: Mr Hikmet Tunch

16 December

New York Times? How useful. For whom? For me, certainly. Thank you for making such an emotional case against the UN. The government will also be pleased to be shown in such a good light. And your friend Bugsy. How do you serve her? You bring visitors to her superficial and decadent magpie. Do you really think American ladies – for whom a shift from chiffon pastel to black cotton is big news – are capable of being one with your Circle? Remember, Mae, that 2020 is an election year. Your friend is a Democratic journalist. She is using you and your praise of government subsidy to attack the Republican president. You are not a stupid woman, Mae, so it interests me to find that you allow yourself to be acted upon. Finally, you may be wondering who supplied that interesting code that arrived so happily a few nights ago. You should avoid thanking anyone else for it. So who is watching whom?

Breakfast was late and boisterous and prolonged.

Lung was still pumped full of love from the night before and didn't want to go. He joked and kicked his big-booted feet, and accepted one cup of tea after another. He and his men had gone out before anyone was up, and repaired the powerline.

'We found a frame for the wires just hanging in midair. The wires were holding it up and not the other way around. We just stared!' Lung mimed a village dolt scratching his head. 'Then we saw burn marks. Some old farmer had been burning off straw and burned the pole as well!'

Kwan scraped dishes, her lips drawn. There was a vertical grey line down the middle of her cheeks and her hands suddenly looked thin, frail and veined.

'I'll do that,' said Mae. Lung was merry, and oblivious. His cheeks still glowed from freezing morning air. He looked like a polished apple. Kwan sat arms folded, her eyes dim and small.

Finally Mr Wing came in, bundled in sheepskin, his eyes measuring like lasers. 'It's started to snow,' he said.

The little private looked anxious. 'We could get snowed in.'

Lung moved slowly, regretfully. Kwan stood up and delicately shook his hand and could not look him in the face. She was scared.

The sergeant and the private flew up to their rooms and hopped back down, swinging khaki bags. Mae speeded things along by getting Lung's bag for him.

In the courtyard, Lung recovered his poise. Sergeant Albankuh already had the engine running, and Lung had begun to understand that he was not quite at home. He spent time thanking the Wings handsomely for their hospitality, and also – his hand covering Kwan's – for their kindnesses to his mother.

Kwan had recovered as well. She replied with exquisite politeness, knowing that he had come to warn her off and, perhaps, to report on her.

Mae marvelled at them all, the maintenance of form and the retention of humanity.

It is the village that allows us to do this, she thought. We know each other, and we all hope that that knowledge keeps us each in balance, within limits.

Then Lung turned to Mae and both of them seemed to relent. They collapsed into a hug. For Mae it was like hugging some huge stranger. He kissed her forehead, called her his Clever Little Mama. Then he stepped back from her. He shoved on his army hat, and that was somehow heartbreaking. It was a boy's gesture, innocent and eternal. All the soldiers throughout history had pushed on some kind of boot or glove just before they left their mothers to die or to come back for ever changed.

This was the last of her boy. He would swell even bigger, like a great fat boil, and she saw how he would coarsen as he aged until his astounding beauty could not be credited.

'You remember what I told you,' he said, suddenly serious, pointing a finger at her.

'You remember what I told you,' she said, equally serious.

He nodded and hopped into the cab, and nodded to the sergeant to release the brake with – it seemed to Mae – a kind of relief. The truck crept forward, and suddenly Lung's face was flooded with a grin, wide and white between two cheeks like peaches. It was how both of them wanted him to be remembered.

Snow clung to Mae's hair. It seemed to be wrapping the village in lace. Lace was wrapped tightly around things in drawers, to preserve them.

Mae stood in the courtyard for many minutes listening to the rumble of the truck as the snow fell. She heard each acceleration, braking, or change of gears. The sound trailed away, away, farther into the valley, step by step, deeper and deeper down, away from her.

Mae turned to Kwan and said, 'I'm going, too.'

Kwan blinked. 'What? Why?'

Mae said, 'I'm renting my own house from Sunni. I'll move my business there. I don't want to be a nuisance.'

'You're not a nuisance,' said Kwan, and took her hand.

'Then I want to go before I become one.'

She went up the long staircase to the freezing attic room, and packed her bags again. She redirected her mail to the new TV of her own. She went back down to the kitchen. Kwan was putting together an evening meal from the remains of last night's feast.

'You won't have any food in the house,' explained Kwan. 'I thought you might like to have this. We have kindling and shitcakes in the barn. Take some of those, too, to warm the house.'

'You have been so kind.'

Kwan looked sombre. 'We have been through a lot together.'

'Oh! You could say that ten times and it would still not be enough!'

'But we came through.'

'We came through.'

Kwan hugged her. 'You can still stay, you know.'

Mae touched her arm. 'I really do not know what I would have done if my friend Wing Kwan had not been so kind. There would have been nowhere else for me to go. But the time comes, even with family, when one must leave.'

Kwan nodded.

So Mae took her one carpetbag, and another bag of food and fuel, and set out across the courtyard. Her slippers scrunched on the snow, and her breath rose up as vaporous as a fading memory. She knew Kwan would be watching from her diwan. Mae held up a hand and waved goodbye without looking back.