Paths. Chapter Five

Morning came with a phone call, harsh and inappropriate in the gray dawn light.

Yang Zixuan’s voice in the receiver sounded different from yesterday — there was neither steel nor fatherly condescension in it, only dry, businesslike energy. As if a night conversation with his own conscience had ended with a business decision being made.

“Xia Desheng,” he said without preamble, “I’ve been thinking about your interest. You should go to Nanjing. Visit the Massacre Memorial. It’s important for understanding the context. My classmate, Zhang, is ready to meet you this weekend. He’s that journalist.”

Desheng remained silent, trying to process this sudden turn.

“And one more thing,” Yang Zixuan added, as if putting a checkmark on an invisible to-do list, “I asked for photographs from the old school archives to be found and scanned. I’ll email them to you as soon as they’re ready. Maybe it will help. That’s all.”

Short beeps. Desheng held the phone to his ear for a long time, listening to the silence.

In the evening, they sat in Yi Pin Guo again. The restaurant was almost empty, and in this evening quiet, their words sounded especially weighty. The rain had passed, leaving behind the smell of wet asphalt and cleanliness.

“Strange,” Desheng said, looking into his cup where a jasmine flower floated, “in that newspaper article… a broken plum branch. In his notes, Teacher Chen also compares her, Mei Lin, to a flowering plum, to Mei Hua.”

He looked up at Xiangliu. She looked at him with irony, but her eyes were attentive, like those of a person waiting for an answer.

“Are you in love with her? With Mei Lin?” she asked.

The question was quiet, almost playful, but it hung in the air like smoke from an extinguished candle. Desheng found no answer. He simply remained silent, and this silence was louder than any word. And his chest felt hollow and anxious — the way a room feels after the guests have gone.

In love? How can one fall in love with a name on paper, with a whisper, with a shadow? But didn’t I fall in love back then, at school, with the way the light lies on her hair, with the sound of her laughter? Is love not an attempt to read in another’s eyes what perhaps isn’t even there? I look at Xiangliu, but I see her — Mei Lin, and they merge into one image, into one sadness, and I drown in this…

Xiangliu looked away, breaking the prolonged pause.

“And your parents,” she asked, addressing both of them, “do they say anything about those times? About the Cultural Revolution?”

“Mine are silent,” Desheng replied. “Father says remembering is like re-digging the trenches where you nearly died.”

“Mine too,” Xiangliu sighed. “Mom just says, ‘Those were hard times. All kinds of things happened.’ And that’s it. As if closing a door… But they were just children back then.”

They turned to Wenbo. He was turning his phone over in his hands, his face impenetrable. He was silent for a long time, and then suddenly said, looking not at them but at the dark screen:

“Fang and I want to leave for the States. She’ll study there, at university. And I can work remotely. There are no borders on the internet.”

Xiangliu nodded, unsurprised, but there was something final in her movement, like a period at the end of a letter.

Leave. For the States. To Desheng, these words sounded like an announcement of exit from their world, from their shared history, from their quest.

That evening, when they parted ways, he felt distinctly for the first time that their trio, their unspoken alliance which had seemed so unshakable to him, stood on a slippery, sloping path. He watched his friends walking away — each in their own direction — and realized that Wenbo was already mentally there, across the ocean, Xiangliu — here, in her world of the restaurant and filial duty, and he… he remained alone, alone with a box of strangers’ manuscripts and the ghost of a woman with a voice like snow. The path led each of them to their own “nowhere.” But perhaps it is precisely there, in this “nowhere,”» that what they are seeking lies hidden.

Chapter Six →
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