Paths. Chapter Ten

The voice in the receiver was young, with a slight Muscovite drawl, but in it one could hear the echo of another voice — the one that had once resounded in Beijing corridors.

Desheng sat in the darkness of his room, pressing the phone to his ear like a shell in which a foreign sea murmurs.

“Who is this woman in the photo?” he asked immediately, without preamble. “Is it Mei Lin?”

A pause. Rustling, as if the person on the other end shifted the receiver from one hand to the other.

“I don’t know her name,” Sergei Morozov finally replied. “It was never spoken in our house. But Grandfather cherished that photo. It always lay in his desk, in the top drawer, under papers. As if he were hiding it both from us and from himself. Sometimes he would take it out, look at it for a long time, but then put it back.”

The voice traveled across distances, across years—carrying the scent of old wood and all the words left unsaid.

“Mom told me,” he continued, “that Grandfather returned from China somewhat… different. Sad. No, not sad — absent. As if part of him had remained there. Grandmother tried to talk to him, but he stayed silent. Then we moved from Sverdlovsk to Moscow. New apartment, new life. He worked, went on business trips. Spent a couple of years in Poland. But Mom said — he always wanted to return to China. Always.”

Desheng listened, and in the darkness of his room, the outlines of another room began to emerge, another life — the life of a man who carried a foreign country inside him like a shard.

“Grandmother even wondered if he’d started another family there,” Sergei’s voice trembled, either from laughter or from something else. “Children, maybe. She was jealous of this China, as one is jealous of a woman.”

“We think she worked as his translator,” Desheng said, and his own voice seemed alien to him. “Mei Lin.”

“Translator? Possibly. Grandfather spoke little of that time. And why are you looking for her? Is she your relative?”

“No. But it’s a long story.”

And silence again, in which one could hear the breathing of two people separated by continents but connected by an invisible thread of someone else’s memory.

“You know,” Sergei began again, and now his voice held that special intonation of a person telling a family legend, “many years later, in the late nineties, he was finally sent to China again. On a diplomatic mission. He left for a long time, but returned unexpectedly quickly, about six months later. And retired soon after. After that, he withdrew completely. Moved to a dacha near Moscow. Said he would write memoirs.”

The voice grew quieter, as if the narrator were approaching something difficult to speak about.

“He moved to the dacha. Near Moscow, in Malakhovka. Said he would write memoirs. We visited him on weekends, brought groceries, paper — he didn’t know how to use a computer. He had an old typewriter, still from Sverdlovsk. A ‘Leningrad’, I think. But he never showed what he was writing. He would say: ‘When I finish — you’ll read it.’”

A pause. Desheng heard someone walk across the room on the other end, a floorboard creaking.

“And when he died, we found only reams of blank paper. Neat, unopened reams. And one sheet. And on it, handwritten, was just a single word: ‘Forgive.’”

There was a rustle in the receiver, as if Sergei had moved away from the window.

“That’s the whole story,” he said. “If you find anything about her, about that woman — write to me. Maybe then I’ll understand why Grandfather spent his whole life asking for forgiveness from a blank sheet of paper.”

“Thank you,” Desheng said quietly. “Thank you for telling me.”

The connection broke. Desheng remained sitting in the dark, holding the cooling phone in his hand. Outside the window, dawn was breaking — gray, Beijing dawn, smelling of rain. And somewhere out there, in Malakhovka, perhaps the old typewriter still stood, and a sheet of paper lay, on which a lonely word waited for its addressee across years and distances.

Chapter Eleven →
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