такое кино
A Road of a Thousand Years. Prologue
On the day Chen Wang closed the door of the old school behind him for the last time, he knew that the new blocks of Beijing would soon rise here, yet he would long remember this moment, just as one remembers the final dream before awakening.
He understood even then that he would never return — not for lack of will, but for lack of anywhere to return to: the walls, steeped in voices and footsteps, would be razed, just as old houses are razed to make room for a future that holds no space for the past.
The classroom was uncharacteristically empty, and his every step responded with a barely audible echo. Outside the window, beyond the clouded glass, the city carried on with its new life: excavators clawed at the earth as if seeking forgotten bones within it, while the wind chased scraps of old notebooks across the courtyard like shreds of other people’s memories.
Chen Wang slowly ran his hand over a desk where names had once been carved, and felt that trembling beneath his fingers was not wood, but memory itself. He knew that all of this was predestined: his departure, the school’s vanishing, and even this evening, with the sun setting as if bidding farewell not only to him but to everything that had ever been here.
He sat at his table, opened an old, tattered volume of Russian poetry — the very one that had accompanied him his whole life — and suddenly realized that the words on the pages were no longer written for him, but for someone else who might come later, if anyone came at all. It had all happened already: this classroom, this sunset, and even his loneliness, which no longer seemed personal, but part of some ancient, inexorable history.
The wind behind the broken window stirred the curtain, and in that rustle, he thought he heard a voice — not anyone’s in particular, but the voice of everyone at once: all who had ever sat within these walls, all who had loved, waited, lost, and forgotten. He knew that on this final evening, he had to remember everything: not because he wanted to, but because otherwise, he could not leave.
He closed his eyes. And then Beijing, this new, merciless Beijing, receded. Only dust remained — not merely the dust of time, but the dust of memories, twisting into strange, invisible whirlwinds. And in this dust, in this dance of non-existent particles, he saw her. The one whose name was written in his heart long before he ever knew her.
She. Mei Lin. A name like a tiny bell from a distant, forgotten garden. Or perhaps this name is not a name, but the garden itself? And in it, birches bloomed — birches that had never grown here. My teacher. No, not just a teacher. My compass. My road. A road tens of years long. Or merely an instant? Fifty years — how many steps is that? And a thousand years? How many falls? How many times did I have to be mistaken to arrive here, in this empty classroom smelling of chalk and the past? I was a fool. An eternal fool who sought in another’s eyes not a reflection, but an entire universe. Her eyes — two inkblots on the pristine sheet of destiny, and I, the fool, wanted to read in them everything that had been foretold.