Paths. Chapter Nine

Morning came with a message, short as an electric shock.

It tore Desheng from a viscous, gray dream in which he endlessly flipped through black-and-white photographs. It was Wenbo.

“Think I found Morozov’s grandson. On Russian Odnoklassniki. Also Sergei. Born in Yekaterinburg — that’s former Sverdlovsk. Lives in Moscow now.”

So simple. A few clicks — and there it was: a thread spun across half a century, thousands of miles. Desheng looked at the screen, and it seemed to him that this digital ease was a sacrilege compared to the heaviness of the history they were trying to unravel.

I am writing him a letter. No, not her. Him. The grandson. A man whose blood remembers what our books are silent about. I write in Russian; the words come with difficulty, they are alien, viscous as icy water. Hello, Sergei. My name is Xia Desheng. I am a student of a teacher named Chen Wang. Every word is a step on thin ice. Cannot make a mistake. Cannot scare him off. I am still searching for a ghost.

The answer came a few hours later. Yes, it is his grandfather. Yes, he remembers talk about China. And a photograph. A photograph was attached to the email.

The same woman. The same face. But the light in it had gone out. If in the school photo there was sadness in her eyes, here there was doom. She stood next to a tall man in military uniform, and it seemed that between them was not air, but glass. She looked into the camera but did not see it. As if she were somewhere else, beyond an invisible line where light does not penetrate.

They agreed to call on Saturday. Late evening for Beijing, early morning for Moscow.

They decided to meet at Xiangliu’s. But when Desheng and Wenbo entered the restaurant, she did not come to their table. She stood at the counter, her back to them, and methodically, with a kind of fierce diligence, was wiping glasses. Her shoulders were tense.

“What’s wrong with her?” Wenbo whispered.

“I don’t know,” Desheng replied, though he already sensed: something had broken.

They approached her. Desheng took out his phone, showed her the photo sent by Sergei.

“Look. It’s her. Mei Lin.”

Xiangliu didn’t glance at the screen. She slammed the glass down—so hard it seemed ready to shatter. And turned around. Her eyes were red, swollen.

“Find your Mei Lin yourself,” she snapped. “I’m not interested anymore. And don’t come here again.”

Her lips trembled, her hands too… She was trembling all over, like a taut string.

“Xiangliu, what happened?” Desheng tried to touch her hand, but she jerked it away as if from fire.

They led her outside, into the quiet alley behind the restaurant. She leaned against the wall and instantly went limp, her shoulders shaking, and she began to sob — desperately, soundlessly, as one cries when pain no longer fits inside.

“What happened?” Desheng asked again.

She spoke haltingly, choking on tears.

“I… I spoke to the old neighbor. With Mrs. Song. I asked her… why my parents are silent about those times.”

She caught her breath.

“She told me. About my grandmother. Mom’s mom. At school… she was an activist. And when the Cultural Revolution began… She wrote denunciations. On her classmates. On teachers. Half their class then… was taken away. Some never came back. Ever.”

She raised her tear-stained, horror-filled eyes to them.

“Do you understand?” she whispered. “My grandmother… my grandmother was an informer.”

“Did you tell your parents?” Wenbo asked quietly.

“No,” Xiangliu shook her head. “The neighbor said not to. Said they had it hard enough. Said Grandmother was ashamed of it all her life.”

She wiped her tears with the back of her hand, with the same gesture Desheng would see years later in the parking lot. Now he knew where so much pain came from in it.

“Don’t come here again,” she repeated, and now there was no anger in her voice, but a dull, dead emptiness. “Ever.”

They turned silently to leave. They understood: this was the end. And when they had already taken a few steps, she quietly called out to Desheng. He turned back.

“Good luck to you,” she said. There was neither irony nor malice in her voice. Only infinite, all-forgiving sadness. “With your Mei Lin.”

And in that instant, Desheng understood: sometimes the past won’t let go not because you search for it, but because it finds you itself — in strangers’ words, in old photographs, in the tears of those close to you.

Chapter Ten →
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