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Paths. Chapter Six
The “Wall of Grief” greeted them not with silence, but with a silent scream of thousands.
It was made not of stone but of names — and the air before it hung cold and still, like the air inside a crypt. Desheng looked at the endless columns of characters, and it seemed to him that if he touched them, his fingers would be burned by the icy fire of another’s interrupted life.
Xiangliu stepped closer. She was not afraid. She slowly traced the engraved names, not touching them, only following the lines with her fingertips, and her lips moved soundlessly, as if she were reading not a list, but a prayer. She was trying to return their voices to them. Then Xiangliu rested her hand on one of the characters, then pulled her palm away, as if frightened that memory could be contagious. And in that moment, Desheng wanted to crawl into one of the gaps in the wall, to vanish, to crawl away from here, to disappear from this place where the past was too alive, and the present unbearably powerless.
Every name is not just a character carved in granite. It is someone’s voice that fell silent in the middle of a phrase. Someone’s laughter. Someone’s fear. Hundreds of thousands of cut-off stories.
Mr. Zhang was waiting for them in a small, almost empty tea house that smelled of damp wood and cheap green tea. He was a man from whose face all color seemed to have drained. It resembled a dried-up riverbed where only wrinkles remained — traces of long-gone water. He did not smile, only nodded, gesturing to the chairs.
“Did you publish that interview? With Teacher Chen’s mother?” Desheng asked, unable to bear the silence any longer.
“No,” Zhang replied. His voice was as colorless as his face. “The editor said it was too personal. Too gloomy for our era. Readers want success stories, not dirges.”
He reached into the inner pocket of his old, worn jacket and pulled out not papers, but a small plastic audio cassette. An artifact from another time.
“But I kept the recording,” he said, placing the cassette on the table. “Here. Listen for yourselves.”
It lay between their cups — a small black coffin in which a voice was locked.
“Did she mention the name Mei Lin?” Xiangliu asked quietly.
“No. Never.”
“And what… what did she say about her son?”
Mr. Zhang closed his eyes for a moment, as if remembering something.
“I remember she said… that after the camp he became different. Withdrawn. And he studied all the time. He studied obsessively, as if trying to cram his mind with numbers, words, facts… as if he were trying to push something out of his memory with study, something he desperately wanted to forget.”
“Her name was Ming. Chen Ming,” he added. And fell silent. He had nothing more to say to them.
On the way back, in the evening train speeding them back to Beijing, they did not speak. Desheng sat by the window and stared silently into the darkness, where there was nothing but their own ghostly reflection. In his hand, he clutched the cassette — small, black, warm from his palm. He was its new keeper.
Beside him, turned toward the wall, Xiangliu wept quietly, without a single sob. Her shoulders trembled — soundlessly, completely — and in that trembling was everything: the horror of the wall, the sorrow for Teacher Chen’s mother, the dread of the pain sealed inside the small black rectangle they carried home.