Salt on the Threshold

When Xu Zhiwei reaches the old house, her phone says 3:10.

She stands outside for two minutes. Paint has peeled from the blue iron gate; the number plate hangs crooked. Beneath it is a white line. At first she thinks it is cement. When she crouches she sees that it is salt, laid from one side of the threshold to the other and hardened into coarse grains by the night damp.

She does not step over it. Her grandmother used to say that salt on a threshold meant someone in the house had not gone far.

The keys are behind the third loose brick on the right: three of them. The large one opens the iron gate, the middle one the wooden door, and the small one has no label. Zhiwei puts the small key in her pocket and goes inside.

The sitting room has not changed. A cane chair faces the window; cups are turned upside down on the tea table; her grandmother’s dark-blue coat is draped over a chair. It smells of camphor, wet wood, and dried fish. When Zhiwei opens the window, Aunt Wu next door immediately leans out.

“Back to clear things out?”

“Yes.”

“Selling the house is best. No one left in it; an empty house only draws the tide.”

“I haven’t decided.”

Aunt Wu looks at her and says nothing more.

Her aunt gave her a list: deeds, bankbooks, medicine, jewellery, old photographs. On the first afternoon Zhiwei finds only two bowls. One has a chip the size of a grain of rice; the other a faded peony on its base. Her grandmother always ate from them. As a child Zhiwei had asked why, when the house had new bowls. “Two are enough,” her grandmother said.

Then there had been only her grandmother in the house.

On the second day Zhiwei climbs to the attic for the deeds. It is low under the hot iron roof. At the back is a wooden chest whose lock fits the unlabelled key.

Inside are seven keys. Each is tied to an aluminium tag stamped with a date: June 1978, September 1983, the first month of 1987. The oldest is bent. Under them lies a bundle of letters without stamps or addresses, each addressed only to A-Yuan.

The first says: The port is closed today. You said never to put to sea in fog. I remember.

The second, written five years later: I changed the lock. I left the old key behind the brick. If you come back, don’t scold me.

The third was written in the year Zhiwei finished primary school. Her grandmother writes that Zhiwei has grown taller, refuses fish, and has her father’s temper. The letter ends: You needn’t come back. Just let me know.

At nine that night Aunt Wu brings soup. Seeing the letters, she nearly drops the bowl.

“Why are you going through that?”

“Who is A-Yuan?”

Aunt Wu closes the window before she answers. “Your grandmother’s younger brother. He worked at the harbour. Then he was gone.”

“Missing?”

“More or less.”

She says the grandmother claimed he went aboard a boat; others said he left of his own accord. Zhiwei’s father, Aunt Wu adds, had never wanted to know. He left at seventeen.

On the third morning an estate agent is due. While mopping, Zhiwei sees that the salt line continues behind the cupboard. It ends under one heavy foot as though someone has pinched a road shut. With a crowbar she moves it and finds a small door painted the colour of the wall. The unlabelled key turns in its lock.

Behind it is a store room scarcely two square metres wide: coal, empty bottles, an old suitcase. In the suitcase are a man’s white shirt, a harbour pass, and a cassette tape. The young man in the photograph has her grandmother’s eyes.

Zhiwei takes the tape to Aunt Wu. Aunt Wu will not touch it. “There is no tape recorder here,” she says.

“You know what is on it.”

“I don’t.”

“Then why are you afraid?”

Aunt Wu goes pale. At last she says A-Yuan did not go aboard a boat. He came back that night to collect something. Her grandmother begged him not to go; he said staying would endanger the whole family. They fought, and he left by the back door before dawn.

“Why didn’t anyone report it?”

“Report what? In those years everyone was afraid of trouble.”

Her grandmother wrote every year afterward, Aunt Wu says. She was not unaware he was alive. She did not know whether he still counted this place as home.

When the agent arrives, Zhiwei does not open the gate. He calls three times, then sends a message about other clients next week. She does not reply. In the afternoon she buys a new lock and a tin of blue paint.

Before dark she pushes the cupboard back. She does not seal the store room; she only closes its door and hangs the key from a nail in the kitchen. She sweeps the salt into a small dish and puts it back at the left side of the threshold.

The next day, after locking the gate, she remembers the tape in her bag. At the mouth of the lane, beside the hardware shop, an appliance-repair stall has an old grey recorder at its door, the cassette lid half open. The owner sits inside soldering a radio. Zhiwei stands there for a while and does not go in.

She presses the tape deeper into her bag and walks towards the station. Some voices can wait. The door is still there. So are the keys.