Coming Home

When Su Jin flew from Cannes to Italy, Su Heng's private plane spent less than two hours above the clouds.

By the time the plane landed at Milan Malpensa Airport, two dark blue Rolls-Royces were already parked on the tarmac. Their license plates were Swiss, not Italian, from Lausanne, and bore a single digit-the number "1."

Six people stood beside the cars, all dressed in dark gray suits. They stood ramrod straight, hands at their sides, like six motionless cypresses planted on the tarmac.

One of them came over and opened the car door for Su Jin. Another took the suitcase from Fang Ying, while the other four remained where they were, scanning the tarmac around them. Occasionally, faint, indistinct instructions came through their earpieces.

Su Heng walked ahead and opened the door of the second car for her. As it opened, cool air poured out, carrying the scent of leather and cedar.

The seats were upholstered in light beige leather, with hand stitching spaced evenly from one stitch to the next. A closer look revealed minute differences in their size-an old Italian craftsman had sewn them one stitch at a time. It took one person six months to sew the interior of a single car.

A white ceramic cup stood in front of the seat, filled with ice water. Fine droplets clung to its sides, and a slice of lemon covered the rim, cut so thin that the pattern of its flesh showed through. A small patch of green rind remained on the edge, left there deliberately-peeling it completely would have looked too neat. A touch of green was prettier.

Su Jin picked it up and took a sip. The water was cold, and the lemon was sour, sour enough to make her squint.

Su Heng sat beside her, pulled down the sun visor for her, and asked if she had slept well last night. She softly said she had.

He nodded and said nothing more.

The car headed north from Milan and joined the highway.

Plains stretched along both sides of the highway, planted with corn. The corn had not grown tall yet; short and green, it stood in rows like soldiers in formation.

In the distance, the Alps showed a white, saw-toothed edge against the horizon. The snow on their peaks shone dazzlingly bright in the afternoon sun.

After about an hour, the car turned onto a narrow road lined with cypresses. The trees were tall and slender, their trunks straight and their crowns narrow, like two rows of dark green pillars that would never fall.

At the end of the cypresses stood an enormous iron gate, with two leaves, each five meters wide and eight meters high. Its gray pillars were built of stone, and a stone eagle stood atop each one, wings spread in the moment before flight. Each eagle held a shield beneath its talons, and the shields bore the family crest-a mountain, an eagle, and a line of Latin.

Su Heng said the Latin meant

"Stand on high, see into the distance."

The iron gate opened without a sound. There was no creak, no hum of a motor; it simply opened, quietly and slowly, like a person taking a deep breath.

The driveway was so long that its end was out of sight.

Lawns spread out on either side. They were not ordinary lawns, lush and green and neatly trimmed, but lawns that had been tended for hundreds of years, dense as velvet and green as emerald. Several oak trees stood scattered across them, each hundreds of years old, their trunks so thick that it took four or five people to reach around them. Their crowns spread like enormous umbrellas, with white stone benches beneath them.

Names and dates were carved into the benches. Each one commemorated a member of the family. The oldest dated from sixteen-something, and wind and rain had worn its inscription until it was illegible.

At the end of the lawn was a lake-not a swimming pool, but a natural lake, oval in shape. Its water was dark green, light nearby and deepening farther out, almost black in the distance, where it blended into the shadow of the mountains.

Several white swans floated on the lake, their long necks curved and their heads tucked beneath their wings as they napped.

A forest stood on the opposite shore, growing all the way from the water's edge to the mountaintop. Its densely packed crowns joined together like a dark green sea that never flowed.

Above the forest were mountains, above the mountains snow, above the snow clouds, and above the clouds a sky so blue it seemed brittle.

The car climbed the road along the lake. It was paved with gray gravel, pressed flat, and the wheels made a fine crunching sound as they rolled over it, like footsteps on dry leaves.

Olive trees grew on either side of the road. They were very old, their trunks so thick that it took two people to reach around them. Their gray-brown bark was cracked into patches like crocodile skin.

Behind the olive trees ran a low stone wall, only waist-high, covered in climbing roses. The roses had yet to bloom; there were only dense, dark green leaves and tiny, hard thorns.

Behind the wall was a riding ground, half the size of a soccer field, enclosed by a white fence. Inside, several horses-brown, black, and white-grazed with their heads down, swishing their tails at invisible flies.

Beside the riding ground stood the stables, built of gray-white stone with a red-tiled roof. Brass plaques hung on the stable doors, each engraved with a horse's name. Some were Italian, some French, and one was English: "Silk," brocade.

Su Heng said Grandpa had chosen that name.

He had had a horse bought in China, a white mare. Every afternoon, he came to see her and feed her apples.

The apples had to be peeled, quartered, cored, and placed in his palm before she would eat them.

Unpeeled, she would not touch them.

Su Jin looked at the brass plaque without speaking.

The estate stood at the highest point of the hillside.

When the car stopped, Su Jin pushed the door open and stood on the gravel road. Tilting her head back, she saw the entire mountain.

The estate was not a house, but a castle.

Its outer walls were gray-white stone, not the dazzling white of fresh masonry, but a soft, warm white, faded by centuries of sun and rain. A fine layer of moss covered the surface, but the stone beneath was still solid.

The castle's main building had six stories and fifteen windows across its facade. Every window had dark green shutters, all closed, concealing the interior.

To the left of the main building was a round, eight-story tower. Ivy covered its stone walls, dark green leaves wrapping it densely from top to bottom. Only a small patch of stone showed around the uppermost window, with a line of words carved into it, too indistinct to read.

To the right of the main building stood a church. It was small and built of stone, with a pointed roof. At its peak stood a copper weather vane shaped like an eagle, wings spread and head facing east.

Beside the church was a bell tower, taller than the church, with clock faces on all four sides. The faces were gold, the hands black, and they moved very slowly. Su Jin watched for a long time before one moved a single notch.

The front door was oak, two palms thick. Its surface was unpainted, covered only by a thin layer of wax. The grain showed clearly in the sunlight, like a frozen river cut open.

There was no handle, only a brass plaque engraved with the family crest, the eagle and mountain exactly like those on the flag.

Su Heng pushed the door open. It made no sound.

The entrance hall was as vast as a church.

The floor was made of large gray stone slabs, each a meter square. They had been worn very flat, but their surfaces were not smooth; they had a fine texture like orange peel, so they were not slippery underfoot.

The slabs were not new. They had been quarried from a mountain near Florence hundreds of years ago. Rough when first cut, they had been walked on, worn down, and rubbed over centuries until they became what they were now-not bright, but warm; not even, but comfortable.

In the very center of the hall stood a huge black rectangular table. Its top was a single slab of black granite, not pieced together, but cut from one stone, leveled, polished, and set there.

The sheen on the tabletop was not the shine of lacquer, but a light emerging from within the stone itself after centuries of polishing.

A white porcelain vase stood on the table, holding several green olive branches. Their small, oval leaves glimmered silver-gray under the lights.

The vase was from the Ming dynasty, Su Heng said, from the Yongle era. Grandpa's grandfather had brought it back from China. It had taken two years to ship them, and a boatload had broken, leaving only this one.

On the left side of the hall was a staircase wide enough for six people to walk abreast. Its steps were gray stone, the edge of each one worn to a faint shine, like jade polished by water.

The railing was black wrought iron, patterned with intertwining olive branches and eagle feathers that climbed from the first floor all the way to the sixth.

At the end of the staircase was a round stained-glass window depicting an eagle with its wings spread, swooping down from the sky toward a mountain beneath its talons. The mountain was dark green, as deep as the waters of Lake Como. Sunlight streamed through the colored glass onto the stairs, the floor, and Su Jin's shoulders, red and blue and gold, as though someone had overturned a box of paints.

Su Heng led her up the stairs.

He said the house had been built over three hundred years. Each generation had added something. No one had ever torn anything down.

The old was kept, and the new was added. That was why it had grown bigger and bigger.

Su Jin walked up the stairs with her fingers resting on the wrought-iron railing. The olive branches and eagle feathers were cool and hard beneath her fingertips. Countless hands had touched them over hundreds of years, wearing their edges round, so they did not cut into her hand. It was like touching a stone washed by a river for too long.

The corridor was on the fourth floor.

Su Heng opened the door at the end of the passage. Su Jin walked in and stopped.

The corridor was so long that she could not see its end. Its floor was dark oak, laid in large, wide boards worn very flat and coated with a thin layer of wax. Under the lights, they had a warm sheen, as though touched for many years.

The floor was not new. The oak trees had been felled in the forests of Slovenia hundreds of years ago, sawn into boards, dried, and laid down. Centuries of footsteps had worn curves and patterns into them, until every board remembered the shape of a foot.

Pictures hung on both sides of the corridor-not pictures, but portraits.

From one end of the corridor to the other, one hung every three paces, life-size, half-length, in profile or facing forward.

Men, women, the elderly, children. They wore clothes from different eras-sixteenth-century armor, seventeenth-century velvet, eighteenth-century silk, nineteenth-century tailcoats, twentieth-century suits.

Their faces were different, but one thing was the same-their eyes.

The eyes in every portrait were amber. The exact same amber as Su Jin's. Light and dark, pale and rich, but all amber.

Around every pupil was an extremely fine golden ring, distinct in some, almost invisible in others, but present in them all.

Su Heng walked ahead, his footsteps echoing dully on the floor like a heartbeat.

He said, "These are members of our family.

"Every generation has a portrait, from the first to the present. One is painted while they're alive and hung here after they die. The one at the very end is four hundred years old."

Su Jin walked down the corridor, passing the portraits.

When she reached the middle, she stopped.

That portrait hung beside an open window. Wind from Lake Como rushed in, making its frame sway slightly.

The woman in the painting was young, in her early twenties, wearing a white cotton dress. Olive branches had been embroidered around the neckline in extremely fine silver thread.

Her hair was woven into a braid that hung over her chest, tied at the end with a dark blue silk ribbon. The ribbon formed a bow, its wings lifted as if about to fly.

Her skin was very fair, luminous, with a faint pink rising from beneath it over her cheekbones, like a camellia dampened by rain.

Her eyes were amber, the exact same amber as Su Jin's. An extremely fine golden ring circled each pupil, densest near the center and growing sparser farther out, like a slice of agate under a microscope.

Her lips curved almost imperceptibly, and she was beautiful all over, as though painted.

Su Jin stood motionless before the portrait.

She saw her own face. It was not that it looked like hers; she saw her own face.

She stood there, looking at the woman in the painting, and the woman in the painting looked back at her.

A two-hundred-year-old canvas, a three-hundred-year-old castle, a four-hundred-year-old family stood before her.

She reached out and touched the edge of the frame. It was silver, polished so brightly that she could see her fingers reflected in it.

A line of small Italian words was engraved in the lower right corner of the frame. She could not read them.

Su Heng stood behind her and said, "That's our great-grandmother. She died in nineteen-twenty-something. She was very young when she passed."

Grandpa said she was the most beautiful person in the family.

He paused. "He used to say the most beautiful person was your mother. Then he stopped saying it. After he saw your photo, he stopped saying it."

Su Jin looked at the woman in the painting, and the woman looked back at her. She said, "She looks a lot like me, and my mom looked a lot like her too."

Su Heng's eyes were full of longing. "Yes. Mom looked like her, and you look like Mom. Standing there, you look exactly like them."

Su Jin looked at the woman in the painting for a long time. Wind rushed through the window, lifting the loose strands of hair at her temples. They drifted across her eyes, but she did not brush them aside, letting them float.

She was exactly like the woman in the painting. The same posture, the same hands hanging at her sides, the same curve to her lips.

She looked for a long time, then turned and continued forward. Su Heng followed behind her without speaking.

At the end of the corridor was Grandpa's study.

The moment Su Heng pushed open the door, Su Jin caught a scent-old books, wood, wax, and a trace of coffee's bitter fragrance.

The study was as large as a small library. Bookshelves covered all four walls from floor to ceiling, made of dark brown walnut polished bright enough to reflect the books.

The shelves were crammed with books, not pristine hardcovers that sat there unopened, but books that had been read many times, their cracked spines mended with clear tape that had itself yellowed.

Porcelain stood atop the shelves: blue-and-white, famille rose, and peachbloom.

The moment Su Jin saw the peachbloom piece, her fingers twitched.

It was a brush washer, small, only as wide as an adult's palm. Its glaze varied in shade, the color of a fully ripened cowpea's skin.

Beside the bookshelves stood a huge walnut desk. A dark green blotting felt covered its surface, and a desk lamp stood on the felt. Its shade was green glass, its base brass polished bright by touch.

Behind the desk was a large floor-to-ceiling window, and beyond it lay Lake Como.

In the afternoon sunlight, the lake was dark green, light nearby and deepening farther out, almost black in the distance, where it blended into the shadow of the mountains. A white sailboat sped across the water, its sail full of wind and a long white wake trailing behind it.

Grandpa sat in an armchair by the window.

The armchair was dark green velvet and very old. The pile on its arms had worn flat, exposing the fabric beneath.

He was very tall and very thin. Sitting in the chair, he was far below the top of its back. He leaned against it with his head tilted slightly upward, looking at the lake outside.

His hair was all white, not gray-white but snow-white, bright in the afternoon sun like a hat worn for many years and washed until it faded.

He wore a light gray cashmere cardigan over a white shirt, fastened at the collar with a small silver button engraved with the family crest.

The old man heard the door and turned his head.

His eyes were amber. The exact same amber as Su Jin's, but lighter and paler, as though the same piece of amber had been left for many years and faded a little, though the light beneath remained.

He looked at Su Jin without crying, his whole being seeming to come to a sudden realization.

He only looked at her, like a man who had walked through the desert for a long time and finally seen a lake, but dared not run to it for fear it was a mirage.

After an unknown length of time, he spoke. His voice was hoarse, not from crying but from age, a rasp like sandpaper that more than ninety years had left on his vocal cords and could not be smoothed away.

"Come in."

Su Jin walked in and came to stand before him.

He held out his hand. It trembled, not with nervousness but with age, an uncontrollable tremor left in his bones by ninety-three years, like the lingering vibration of a plucked string.

Su Jin took his hand. It was cool but very dry, with thin calluses on his palm, left from his youth and not worn away even in old age.

"The way you walked over here is exactly like her.

"When she walked into this room, it was just like that. She came in and said, 'Dad, I'm pregnant.' When she said it, her lips were curved, exactly like yours are now."

Su Jin stood before him, tears glistening in her eyes.

She could see how long the old man before her had suffered from longing.

The old man looked at her.

"Your mother has been gone a long time. When she left, she left you here.

"You were very little. You didn't cry or fuss, just looked at me.

"The way you looked at me was exactly the same as it is now. Then you were taken away. I didn't know where they took you. I searched for many years.

"So long that I thought you were gone, so long that I wrote your name over and over, so long that I dreamed of your mother, and she asked me, 'Dad, have you found her?' I didn't answer."

He let go of Su Jin's hand, picked up a photograph from the small table beside him, and handed it to her.

The photograph was large, set in a silver frame polished to a bright shine.

It showed a young woman standing in the castle garden, with the centuries-old oak tree behind her.

She wore a long white dress that trailed along the ground, her hair loose and lifted by the wind. Her eyes were amber, gazing at the camera, her lips curved in a very slight smile that held the eye.

Su Jin looked at the photograph, at the eyes of the person in it.

She said softly, "Mom."

The old man looked at her, his lips trembling.

"At last you've come home, our love."