Paths. Chapter Two

The air that weekend was still and gray, like an undeveloped photograph.

The “High Hong Lin” residential complex greeted them with the dreary monotony of concrete panels and blank, identical windows, and its name held a mockery, like an old, forgotten song about happiness. They walked in silence, and the sound of their footsteps on the pitted asphalt seemed inappropriately loud.

Desheng walked first, carrying a small bouquet of chrysanthemums in his hands — why, he did not know himself, it just felt right.

The door to the apartment on the seventh floor was opened by an elderly woman with a face like a crumpled map, and the smell of cheap tobacco and sleepless nights ingrained in her gray cardigan.

“Ah, it’s you — the students,” she said without surprise, as if she had been expecting them. “Good that you came. The district officer left me the key. Take whatever you need.”

She spoke in the even, tired voice of a person for whom both life and death are merely part of an endless night shift. Handing them the key, she added, looking somewhere past them into the vague gloom of the corridor:

“He died right there, in the square. On a bench. Where the plums bloom in spring. Just sat there, they say, just sat looking at the trees, and then his head fell on his chest. His heart, they say. He was a good man. Left quietly.”

They entered. The key turned in the lock with a dry, reluctant click. The apartment smelled of dust and old paper; the scent was so dense it seemed one could touch it. It was not a room, but a labyrinth constructed of books, textbooks, and old school notebooks. Shelves to the ceiling, stacks on the floor, towers on the windowsill. Books seemed to be the only furniture, the only architecture of this place. The light, filtering through the clouded glass, was dim and gave everything the appearance of an underwater kingdom where time had stopped.

They dispersed around the room, moving cautiously, as if afraid to disturb the fragile order of this chaos. Wenbo immediately headed for the desk, briskly assessing the volume of work. Xiangliu froze in the middle of the room, slowly scanning the walls of books. Desheng simply breathed in this air, absorbing it, feeling like an uninvited guest in a stranger’s universe.

“Here, I think,” Xiangliu said, pointing to a cardboard box in the corner tied with twine. On it, in the teacher’s calligraphic handwriting, a single word was inscribed: “Road.”

They sat down on the floor around the box. Wenbo cut the twine with a practiced movement. Inside, tightly packed, lay handwritten notebooks, notepads, and loose sheets. Not a single printed page. All of it — the breath of one hand. Xiangliu reached for the top notebook, but several sheets slipped out and slid across the floor. Before Desheng could move, Wenbo had already bent down, deftly gathered them, and handed them to her. Their fingers touched for a moment. Desheng looked away.

He picked up another stack; the top sheet was of thick, slightly yellowed paper. The handwriting was familiar — that same calligraphy the teacher had tried to teach them — but in the long, descending strokes of the characters, a barely perceptible tremor was felt, as if the brush had struggled against an invisible current. It was a poem. The first stanzas were written cleanly, almost flawlessly. But further down, after the ninth line, chaos began — a dense, furious web of crossed-out words, a black blackthorn in which thought had become entangled and died. And the last nine lines were crossed out altogether.

But Desheng was not looking at them. He was looking up, above the first line. There, like two sad flags over a battlefield, stood two characters. The title.

Mei Lin.

“Look,” he whispered.

Xiangliu and Wenbo leaned in. They stared silently at those two words, then at the crossed-out lines, then again at the name. It hung in the silence of the room, alien and unfamiliar.

“Mei Lin…” Xiangliu repeated quietly, and her voice sounded like a question. «Who is that? He never spoke of her.»

“Maybe it’s his daughter?” Wenbo suggested.

“Or someone he loved,” Desheng said, and was surprised himself at how easily the word slipped from his lips.

Desheng looked at these two characters and felt how this name, like a drop of ink fallen on a clean sheet, began to spread, staining everything around — the dusty room, the books, and the dim light from the window — in the color of the mystery they had just touched.

“Let’s take this,” Xiangliu said quietly. “Everything that’s left.”

Wenbo nodded. The decision was made. They left without looking back, abandoning the chrysanthemums on the windowsill — a small, forgotten offering among the books. The neighbor took the keys silently, not even asking what they had taken with them.

Chapter Three →
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