A Road of a Thousand Years. Part Four. Chapter Two

That evening in the old school was particularly quiet.

Outside the windows, excavators continued clawing at the earth, preparing for demolition — and it seemed the city itself was expelling everything it remembered of the past. Chen Wang sat in the empty classroom, where it once smelled of chalk and children’s voices, and remembered the day he had never been able to forget.

It was in the camp. There, time did not pass — it dripped, like water from a rusted pipe, and every day was like the one before. One morning, the foreman came and said they were tasked with burying several executed enemies of the people. No one asked who they were. No one asked what for. No one was surprised.

They dug a mass grave beyond the camp fence, in the damp, heavy earth. Then a truck arrived, and bodies began to be unloaded from it — like shapeless, heavy sacks — faceless, nameless. They were dumped into the pit, the workers trying not to look, not to think, not to remember. Everything happened quickly, almost neatly, as if it were ordinary work — no scarier than hauling bricks or peeling potatoes.

When his turn came, Chen Wang took hold of one of the bodies. It was lighter than he expected. He looked up — and saw her. Mei Lin. Even in death she was beautiful, only now her face had become completely transparent, and her wide-open eyes — even blacker, even more indifferent than ever. He did not scream. He did not cry. He felt nothing — only weariness, only emptiness, only the cold that had not let him go for many years.

He looked at her as one looks at a stranger’s photograph found on the street: with surprise, with disbelief, with that strange indifference that comes when everything inside has already burned out. He gently lowered her body into the pit, as one might lower a paper boat onto still water — far too gently for such a place — and immediately forgot that it was someone’s boat, someone’s voice, someone’s life.

That day he spoke not another word.

And now, years later, he sat in the deserted school, where everything was ready for disappearance. He found a piece of chalk on the windowsill, went to the blackboard, and with a trembling hand began to write those poems he had been writing all his life — since the first meeting with Mei Lin, since the first lesson, since the first glance.

These were the lines that remained when everything else had vanished.

He wrote slowly, letter by letter, as though he were not just reviving words, but memory itself. Outside the window, it was already getting dark, and in this twilight, it seemed the classroom was filling with shadows — shadows of those who had once studied, loved, waited, lost, and been forgotten here.

When he finished, he stood at the blackboard for a long time, unable to tear himself away from what was written. Then he placed the chalk on the windowsill, ran his hand over an old desk — and walked out, without looking back.

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