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A Road of a Thousand Years. Part One. Chapter Two
The next day, Chen Wang did not go home. He lingered at the school gates, where the janitor was sweeping last year’s leaves and the courtyard was slowly emptying — he knew he had to wait for her.
Finally, she appeared. Mei Lin came out last, in the same gray dress, clutching a small, inconspicuous handbag in her slender fingers. Her steps were light, almost noiseless, as if she were gliding rather than walking. In her eyes, so deep, an even greater weariness lurked today. It seemed she was not surprised to see him.
“Teacher Mei Lin,” Chen Wang called out to her, and his voice sounded higher than he had expected. “May I walk you home?”
She stopped, her gaze lingering on him for just a moment — there was no judgment in it, only that same strange, elusive sadness he had seen yesterday.
“Thank you, Chen Wang,” she said quietly, and in her voice sounded a barely perceptible but unmistakable detachment, like water flowing past. “But I am not going home. I must go to another job — at the Beijing Automobile Works.”
He nodded, not knowing what to say. And she was already walking toward the bus stop, her figure quickly dissolving into the stream of passersby and rare cyclists.
Indeed, Chen Wang did not go home. There was nowhere to go. Home had become a place of silence and frozen pain. His mother, who had survived the horrors of Nanjing, now lived like a ghost — silent, with eyes that reflected only long-past nightmares. After his father’s death two years ago, she had become even more detached, as if the thread connecting her to the world had thinned to the limit. She could stare at the wall for hours, and her love for her son was that thin but strong thread that still bound her to reality. Today, before he left, she had given him some cold rice and a piece of bread wrapped in old cloth. She said nothing, but her hands were attentive, and somehow especially gentle, as if she had sensed something.
Chen Wang turned toward the old National Library. Its heavy doors, having witnessed more than one generation of seekers of truth and delusion, seemed a portal into the past. He hoped to find answers there, to find the keys to attracting her attention, to speak with her in the language she understood — the language of poetry.
The library smelled of old paper and something elusively ancient, like history itself. Sometimes it seemed to him that through this scent something else emerged — a light, almost ghostly sweetness of blossoming plums, as if once, hundreds of years ago, there had been a garden here, and the spring wind still remembered it. Rows of shelves disappearing into the gloom seemed endless, as if they held within them all the spoken and unspoken words of the world. He wandered among them like someone lost in a labyrinth, occasionally glancing at his feet — as if afraid to step on a forgotten book or crush a plum twig.
All the while Chen Wang roamed between the shelves, the librarian did not raise her eyes, turning the pages of the “Little Red Book.” Her lips moved soundlessly, as if she were repeating familiar quotes by heart, and it seemed that even here, among books, there was no escape from other people’s words.
Despite the light, warm spring rain, shouts occasionally drifted in from the street — dull, like blows against a wall:
“Long live Chairman Mao!”
“Down with old thinking!”
“Bombard the Headquarters!”
Water dripped from the roofs, and rare cars drove along the half-empty road, leaving long, trembling reflections behind them. Chen Wang looked at these reflections and thought that perhaps his whole life was also a reflection, a shadow, or a penumbra he was trying to catch, but it slipped away, dissolving in drops of water and in words he dared not speak aloud.
I don’t know why I waited for her. Maybe just to hear her say my name one more time. Maybe to walk beside her, even in silence. But she left — and I remained. As always. On the threshold. Between home and the street. Between the past and the future. Mama looks out the window as if waiting for Father, though she knows he won’t return. I am waiting for someone too, only I don’t know who. The library smells of wood and other people’s lives. I look for her in books, in poems, in lines written by strangers, but I find only myself — someone else, a stranger, not who I was yesterday. What have I found? Only pages filled with others’ dreams, others’ words. Everything is empty. Like this road she drove away on, leaving behind only ripples on the water. My hand slides along the spines. Where are you? Where are the words that will become my bridge? Where are the poems that will make her look at me not as a boy, but as an equal? Every book is a drop fallen into the abyss, and I am drowning, drowning in this abyss. I am not me. I am merely a reflection in this abyss. And she… she is gone. Gone to the factory. There is iron there. There is noise. There are no poems there. And here? None here either. Only emptiness.
He found nothing new that evening, nothing that could become his weapon in this invisible battle. But it was then, it was there, amidst the dust and old books, that those lines appeared in his head: “I am all in you, I am all with you, everything is predestined by fate, as if I am someone else entirely, as if I am a complete stranger, but you too are no longer the same…” They were indistinct, like a sketch, but they already carried within them that sadness and predestination which, many years later, would form into a complete poem.