Five Bells by Gail Jones Page B

in this simple touch. Pei Xing held her hands out obediently, finger by finger, as though it were a game. It reminded her of how her mother stretched and pulled her fingers before she played the piano, seeing the gift of her own hands, preparing to skim them across the keys.
    She wondered if the recollection was so complete because she had been so happy. Sadness blurs and erases; it cannot bear too many details. But the sight of Lao’s kite aloft, the way he turned to them and called out, wanting to show his skill, the fluttering phoenix visible as a golden mark swooping and risingin the sky, all this was preserved for Pei Xing in a kind of shining delineation.
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    When they rode the tram home, along Nanjing Road, it was full to bursting with Saturday shoppers and all three had to stand, packed in the crammed aisle. The vehicle rocked and shuddered. Pei Xing was wedged between the bodies of larger people, hemmed in by adult legs and arms. Lao held his kite above his head, afraid it would be torn. Mother steadied Pei Xing as they rode. One hand rested gently behind her daughter’s head, the other clasped at a leather strap, so that she held the motion for both of them. All around was chatter and communality and the smell of someone’s fried meat. Pei Xing loved this sense of other bodies containing and encompassing her, the muffled, animal warmth of the moving tram. She loved her new coat. She loved her family. She leant against the cushion of her mother’s belly and felt like singing.
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    At home Pei Xing’s first thought was to show the new coat to her father. She rushed into the house and found him where he should be, at his desk, translating. His face was fixed in concentration. He was somewhere between languages, in a studious and placid world. Pei Xing stood in the doorway until at last he noticed he had company. Father peered at her over his rimless glasses, slowly put down his pen, then smiled and opened his arms so that Pei Xing stepped forward into his embrace.
    â€˜Ah, a new overcoat! Pretty! Let me tell you about Gogol!’
    And as if the day had not enough intimate moments to fill it, he pulled Pei Xing onto his lap and told her the story of The Overcoat .
    In St Petersburg there was once, long ago, an unhappy young clerk, called Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, who wanted nothing more than to own a new overcoat. He scrimped andsaved – he was very poor – and at last the day arrived when he could afford a new coat, a fine-tailored garment with a collar made of cat fur. When he wore this coat he was suddenly popular and successful. But one night, after a party, two thieves set upon him, beat him up and stole the coat, leaving him alone and barely conscious in the falling snow. Poor Akaky Akakievich died, bereft. He took revenge on the people of St Petersburg as a scary ghost, roaming the snow-white city at night, spooking and attacking the people for their winter coats.
    Pei Xing must have looked alarmed.
    But in the end, her father said gently, he attacked one important man who had been tormenting him and then no more: justice was done. Other ghosts roamed around, playing havoc and disturbing citizens. But not Akaky Akakievich. He was not a bad man, Akaky Akakievich, and not a bad ghost, but he cared too much about his coat, and too little about the words he wrote in the office. Words, not coats, are where meaning lies.
    Pei Xing told her father of her mother’s prediction, that the coat would bring snow. He responded that she was a wise woman, her mother, and if she claimed it was so, she was no doubt correct. It would certainly snow.
    At first Pei Xing thought that her father had ruined everything, moralising like that, wanting her to think about ghosts. He had a Russian story handy for every occasion, a literary homily for all events. But his tale added beautifully to the memory of the day. It was there, years later, like breath on a pane of glass, a human trace to see