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Paths. Chapter One
On that day, the afternoon light lay on the tables of the Yi Pin Guo restaurant in thick, honeyed layers; dust motes dancing lazily in its rays seemed as ancient as hieroglyphs.
The air was dense with smells: the subtle, almost ghostly aroma of jasmine from the teapot vied with the spicy heaviness of star anise and hot oil drifting from the kitchen, where someone’s future life sizzled on woks. Tan Xiangliu laughed and pushed her empty bowl away.
“You, Wenbo, are a genius,” she said, her voice holding a warm, friendly mockery. “Dropping out of the math department to dig around in this internet of yours. My father says it’s like catching wind with a sieve.”
“Wind is expensive these days,” Wu Wenbo shot back without looking up from his smartphone, his fingers flying across the screen with predatory precision. “And math… that’s for those with plenty of time.”
“He doesn’t even have time to eat his rice,” Xia Desheng chimed in, nodding at his friend’s untouched portion.
He said it, but he wasn’t looking at Wenbo; he was looking at Xiangliu. At how the light tangled in her hair, at the delicate line of her wrist as she reached for the teapot. She was here, wholly — in this moment, in this scent, in this light. She was real.
I look at Xiangliu and think: here she is, close by, and everything is fine. I listen to Wenbo and think: here he is, a friend, and everything is right. I am here now, and at the same time, I am at school, in the back row, and Teacher Chen is saying something about the Russian winter, and I am looking not at the blackboard, but at the back of her head — Xiangliu’s — and thinking that the Russian winter probably smells just like her hair, like something clean and cold, something that never exists here. She laughs, and the sound of her laugh is like drops falling into a deep well, and I try to count how many ripples spread across the water, but I lose count, always lose count…
“By the way,” Wenbo said, putting his phone down so abruptly it was as if he had read his friend’s thoughts in it. He looked at them with a blank, absent gaze. “Did you know that Teacher Chen Wang died?”
The words fell into the silence. Not into silence — into a vacuum that suddenly formed in the middle of their table, sucking out the smells, the light, and the air. Xiangliu’s laughter froze on her lips. Desheng lowered his chopsticks, and they clicked against the rim of the bowl — the only sound in a deafened world.
Died. Teacher. The word was short, dry, like stone striking stone.
“How?” Xiangliu exhaled.
“I don’t know. Last week, I think. His heart. His neighbor told me; I was passing by.”
They were silent. Desheng looked into his cup, where the last unsipped drop of tea had congealed at the bottom — dark as a pupil.
“I hope he was buried decently,” Xiangliu said quietly, looking somewhere aside, out the window, and her voice was the voice of a person trying to find a foothold in the dark. “He lived all alone, after all.”
Then she looked at them — first at Desheng, then at Wenbo.
“Maybe… maybe we should go to his apartment? Sort through his things before they just throw them onto a dump. It would be a pity.”
Desheng raised his head. This thought — simple, correct — seemed like salvation to him.
“Yes,” he said, surprised by the firmness of his own voice. “He was always somehow… not like the others. Always writing something during breaks, remember? Maybe he left some notes. It would be interesting to see.”
Wenbo shrugged, his face becoming impenetrable again. “Fine. This weekend. I’ll have time.”
“This weekend?” Xiangliu asked again.
“This weekend,” he replied.
The decision was made. The silence receded, but the air was no longer the same. Desheng took the heavy ceramic teapot and carefully, trying not to spill a drop, filled Xiangliu’s cup. The stream of tea was dark amber, and for a moment it seemed to him that he was pouring not tea, but time itself — thick, viscous. She nodded almost imperceptibly, without raising her eyes. Her fingers lay very close to the hot bowl.
He looked at her hand and thought of Teacher Chen’s hands — covered in chalk dust, with trembling fingers turning the pages of an old book. And he suddenly felt afraid of how easily the threads of the living and the dead intertwine, and how a casually dropped phrase can trace a new, unknown path on the map of their habitual life.