A Road of a Thousand Years. Part One. Chapter One

Spring arrived early in Beijing that year, awakening something that had not yet fully stirred but was already preparing to spill out onto the streets.

The city froze, as if lying in wait, anticipating something unknown. The school smelled of books, wet wood, and something subtly new — a scent that appears only at the onset of impending, as yet indistinguishable changes. The morning light filtered through unwashed windows, painting the maps and the portrait of the Great Helmsman in faded tones.

It was on such a day that the new teacher arrived at the school. She was unlike the others: tall, with a straight back, in a simple gray dress, with thin, almost transparent hands. Her name was Mei Lin.

The principal, a short man with a wary gaze, spoke of her “valuable experience” gained in the Soviet Union, where she had spent “her entire childhood” and received her education, as he introduced her. For him, that was enough. She spoke Chinese without an accent, yet her speech sometimes held strange, unfamiliar intonations, as if the words were borrowed from another, distant life. But when she uttered her first Russian words, it seemed the very air filled with a crystalline chime — like a stream that had long sought its path to the ocean, suddenly finding it and speaking to you.

“Today we will speak of a great Russian poet,” Mei Lin began, and her tone was surprisingly lyrical, almost intimate. “Of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin.”

She spoke of his poems, full of light and sorrow, of his fate, cut short as suddenly as many fates in this world. The class fell silent, mesmerized by her voice, by her accent, which seemed to carry echoes of distant forests and boundless fields.

Chen Wang sat at the third desk by the window, and his pencil, instead of noting facts from Pushkin’s biography, traced thin lines on the margins of his notebook of its own accord — lines resembling branches and shadows. He was not listening to the words — he was listening to the sound of her voice, simply feeling her presence. He was a sixteen-year-old boy, and his entire world, so understandable and predictable until this minute, suddenly drifted, spinning in the whirlpool of an inaudible melody.

“What are you drawing there, Chen Wang?” she asked. There was no judgment in her voice, only mild curiosity. “Is Pushkin not interesting to you?”

He started and closed the notebook. His desk mate, Li Zhong, smirked:

“He is drawing you, Comrade Teacher.”

Someone in the class giggled quietly. Mei Lin smiled — not sternly, but somewhat kindly, a little sadly.

“Better to draw Pushkin,” she said softly. “Or at least his muse. That would be far more useful for the lesson.”

Chen Wang blushed but did not look away.

“Why do you tell us about a Tsarist poet?” he asked, unexpectedly defiant, even to himself. “Why not a proletarian one — Mayakovsky?”

Mei Lin tilted her head slightly, as if listening to something within herself. She did not answer immediately; her gaze wandered somewhere out the window, beyond the gray roofs of the city. And it seemed her gaze lingered there longer than necessary. As if she were searching there for the words she had to say to her students.

“There are many fine Soviet poets, Chen Wang,” she said quietly, and that detachment which always set her apart from others appeared in her voice. “Those who wrote of the revolution, and those who wrote of the war, and of the simple human soul… Sometimes poems are not only about power. They are about the human being. About what one feels when everything around is collapsing.”

She turned to the blackboard, wrote a few Russian words, and then, as if obeying an inner impulse, opened a notebook and began to read. Her voice changed, becoming deeper, almost prayerful. These were verses not played on the radio, not printed in newspapers. These were words brought by her alone, like shards of someone else’s unhealed wound.

A sleep broken by a blast,
Someone’s death, someone’s gasp
— Repeats again…
Burnt flesh, and the earth, like a swing,
— Is swaying…
No retreat, and no forgetting,
— It remains…

The houses burned, the streets are bare,
And silence booms like the echo of a flare.
Where laughter was and children played — now crosses stand,
Where lives once were — only ruins of the land.

But do those who started it see this plight?
They draw their maps, divide the towns in might,
While somewhere a mother sobs for her child,
And this pain stays with her, forever wild.

They call it “collateral damage,” a phrase so cold,
But words cannot soften the pain untold.
Every number is someone’s name,
Every death — a fresh puddle of blood and shame.

Here, all heroes are victims and executioners too,
Here, there is no victory — only tears and rue.
Hope’s light falls silent in the smoke of war,
And people perish here, and dreams are no more.

Under a weeping sky, the earth conceals
Those who left silently, without farewells,
Who did not wish to fall on a bed of pain,
Marked by this war, again and again.
Who counted these tears that fall in the hush,
Stories that never had time to rush,
Lives that can never be brought back to be?

And what of those who stepped beyond the brink?
Those who drowned, yet managed not to sink?
—  aving known heaven and hell,
Stepped over that line,
Where man became inhuman…
— They are silent; they are dead inside.
They are dead.

When the poem ended, silence hung in the classroom. No one knew what to say. Even Li Zhong did not make a joke.

The bell rang unexpectedly loud. The students began gathering their notebooks, but no one was in a hurry to leave. Mei Lin stood by the blackboard, looking out the window where the last drops of winter moisture trickled down the gray roofs.

Chen Wang was the last to leave. On the stairs, he looked back: the teacher was still standing by the window, and her silhouette seemed to him part of another world — one where poems are more important than slogans, and words can be heavier than stone.

On the way home, through dusty and as yet sparsely populated streets, Chen Wang walked as if in a dream. The world around him was the same — red posters on the walls, silhouettes of rare passersby, the familiar smell of street food. But inside him, something had changed.

I don’t know how it happened. She spoke — and the air instantly became different, as if someone opened a window to another city, where it smells not of coal, but of snow, where people speak a language I am only beginning to understand. I was drawing her, but it wasn’t a portrait, but an attempt to catch a shadow, a gleam, a reflection in a puddle after the rain. She read poems, and every word fell into me like a drop of water onto dry earth. I didn’t know one could speak of war like that — not as a victory, but as pain, as someone else’s pain. As pain that doesn’t pass. I wanted to ask why she is sad, why her voice trembles when she speaks of long-dead poets. But I stayed silent. I always stay silent when I want to scream. I went out onto the street, and the road was empty, as if the city had died out. Only water dripped from the roof, and in every drop there was something of her voice — quiet, stubborn, relentless. Drip-drip. In childhood, I was afraid of water — not the kind in the river, but the kind that drips from the ceiling when it rains. Mama used to say: “The house is crying.” I thought: if the house is crying, it means it’s alive. And if it’s alive — it means it hurts too. Drip-drip. I walked home, and it seemed I was walking not on a street, but on a thin thread stretched between the past and the future, between her eyes and my fear.

The evening wind of Beijing, the very one that would soon carry completely different, furious shouts, already bore within it echoes of an unfamiliar melody, and Chen Wang, then still unaware of it himself, stepped onto a new road he did not understand, which could lead him nowhere but to her, and to that sorrow which would accompany him for the rest of his life.

Part One. Chapter Two →
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