by Xu Xu
When I walked over to her, she took hold of my hand, giving the semblance of intimacy and familiarity. I sat down across from her. She asked me if I had slept well the previous night and what time I had boarded the ship, as well as a whole lot of other questions. I am usually not much of a conversationalist, and all I could do as she was quizzing me over breakfast was reply to her questions, even if I had wanted to ask something in return. Only when she had finished breakfast and taken out a cigarette did I finally have a chance. I took out a match and, lighting her cigarette for her, asked, “It must have been close to four when you came on board?”
“Yes,” she said, hastily exhaling her first drag of smoke. “I thought it might bother you if I came on board any earlier. When someone from China sails to Europe, it’s just like when we Europeans travel to China. It’s such a long journey, and there surely were a lot of relatives and friends who came to see you off. Wouldn’t it have raised eyebrows if they had seen you depart with a foreign woman?”
“Miss, but I thought …”
“Now don’t call me that, we are already husband and wife! Husband and wife should not address each other in that way, according to neither Chinese nor Western customs, isn’t that right? You had best address me by my first name. I am called Catherine.”
I blushed a little. I, a thirty-plus-year-old divorced father of a daughter and a son, made to blush by a twenty-something-year-old woman….
I began to have regrets, regretted that I had agreed to her becoming my wife. How had all this come about? It had begun three months earlier. After the Ministry of Education announced that it would send me to Europe to study vocational education, I made my way to Shanghai to prepare for my stay abroad. I had never had the habit of wearing Western-style clothes, and so I had to purchase an entire wardrobe, from necktie to dress shirt. I found a shop on *Avenue Joffre in the French Concession of Shanghai that was comparatively inexpensive. The store was tiny and its owner was accountant, sales clerk, and assistant all in one. My several purchases at the store had led me to become acquainted with the owner, who was named Sherkels. He told me that he was Norwegian and that he was Jewish. He was short and plump, had a mustache, and was in his forties. He told me that he had gotten around quite a bit and that he spoke several languages. My first destination was going to be France and, because my French was pretty rusty, I took the opportunity to practice with him whenever he was not too busy with his store. He usually wasn’t. Business was slow, probably because it was the middle of summer. I would buy a few things, and then chat with him for an hour or two. He liked to talk, and he would often complain that times were bad and that the world was in a depression. No matter which industry or which country, things were tough, he would say. I also asked him a lot about life in Western Europe and about his personal experiences, and I naturally told him that I was going to travel to Europe.
One Sunday, I was going to meet a friend at a café. When I entered, I ran into Sherkels. He was on his own, reading a newspaper in a corner under an electric fan. A bottle of beer stood on the table in front of him, and when he saw me he called me over. I ordered an ice cream and sat down across from him.
“The weather is hot!” he groaned with a laugh.
“It sure is,” I replied. “You are a big man, so it must be even hotter for you. Do you often come here?”
“Yes, I do. When I lived in France I acquired the habit of frequenting cafés.”
“Do you always come on your own?”
“As soon as I get here, I always run into friends.”
I was about to say that he probably had not expected to run into me when his eyes suddenly caught sight of someone behind me. I inadvertently also turned around and saw two women emerge from the back of the café. When I turned around again, I saw that he had gotten up and was waving at them in an extremely affectionate way. I looked again at the two women and noticed that they, too, were smiling and greeting him. Sherkels had already walked over and was talking to them. I felt awkward looking at them from where I sat and turned around again. I picked up Sherkels’s newspaper, but I did not even notice whether it was a Russian, English, or Chinese *paper. Instead, I was wondering what connection Sherkels might have to those two women who most definitely were also regulars at this café. After a short while, he came back to his seat. I glanced at the two women as they left, and I thought that the one wearing a yellow dress was really quite pretty.
“Were those two Jewish girls?” I asked him. “They were beautiful!”
“You think so? I should have introduced them to you. Speaking about beauty, I think the Chinese are more beautiful than any other people.”
And so we kept chatting. The friend I had been waiting for and looked forward to seeing never showed up and I forgot all about him. At some point, Sherkels suddenly said, “Let me invite you for a drink!” and he presently ordered a few snacks and some beer. By the time we finally parted around five in the afternoon, he treated me like an old friend and told me to meet him again at the café.
I did not return to that café. Still, since he had invited me despite us only being casually acquainted, I felt obliged and invited him to a Cantonese restaurant in return a few days later. He drank a lot that day and, with his tongue loosened, talked much about his past and about international affairs. He hated war and cursed the global arms race.
“During the Great War we fought battle after battle, but for what?” he exclaimed. “Was there any gain? And for what price? How many buildings were destroyed, how many people killed? I myself must have killed over a thousand people. Why do we have to kill people, even if we have no ill feelings toward them?” He was clearly getting very agitated.
“You took part in the war?” I asked.
“Who didn’t? At that time, even sixteen-year-old boys had to take part! Of the four years of war, I spent three in the trenches and six months in a hospital. Tens of thousands of people went mad!”
“Then you were lucky that you did not die.” I said.
“No, I did not die, but should I consider myself lucky? Who knows, I might well have to see another war. Besides, life has become dull and empty because of the experience of that long war. You think about it, all my old friends died. I saw them die one after the other, right next to me. They fell to the ground, and I never saw them rise up again. My family was wiped out by the war. My mother, wife, and daughter perished during the war. What is there left for me to live for? The father of one of the girls you saw the other day at the café, the one in the yellow dress, was a good friend of mine. We had been friends since childhood, but he died, without rhyme or reason. If he hadn’t died, he’d surely be a great musician now. He was a musical genius, and he was diligent. Even in the trenches he did not give up his violin. What is there left to say? That genius was sacrificed for no reason, and he was not the only one. What were all those sacrifices for? And what about the man who killed him? He was just like me. Among those thousands that were killed by me, there surely must have been scientists and artists, maybe even a musician. I love music, and if that person had not been killed by me, he might have become my friend and a member of my cultural circle. Tell me, why did I have to commit these crimes? I don’t believe I am free of sin. Even killing one person out of love is a sin, so how can killing thousands of people without rhyme or reason not be a sin? I used to be a devout believer, but when we were told that we were absolved of sin because what we did was for glory or for whatever, I lost all faith in religion.”
He wanted to keep on drinking, but when I saw how agitated he had become, I urged him to stop. When we left, I called a car and took him home. Maybe it was because we had had some fruit for dessert that he was still quite clear-headed.
“I am not drunk,” he said. “I am not drunk, but whenever I drink I get carried away.… I am sorry.”
I went home and thought to myself that he was certainly not an ordinary merchant, but a delightful person with a conscience. From then on, I went to see him at his shop wheneve
r I had nothing to do. I sometimes would also take some friends or relatives who wanted to buy some items of clothing. One day, when I went to see him with a relative who wanted to buy a bathing suit, he exclaimed the moment we stepped into the store, “Mr. Xu, how come you haven’t stopped by these past days? There is something I have to discuss with you.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Let’s talk tomorrow. Why don’t you come to my home tomorrow evening at seven to dine with me and my family?” He took out a name card.
“With your family at your home? Did you not say that your whole family had been killed during the war?” I asked, smiling awkwardly.
“Ah! This here is my new family, the one I established after I came to China,” he said, pointing at the address on the name card.
To tell the truth, I accepted the card and his invitation because my curiosity had gotten the better of me. At the same time, I was also a little ill at ease. What was it that he wanted to discuss with me? I wanted to ask him, but just then some other customers entered the store, and we soon left. I could not guess what it was that he wanted to discuss with me and in the end I thought that maybe, after all, there was nothing in particular and he just wanted to invite me over as a friend.
The following day at six, I went to the address on the card. He lived in a right-facing *apartment on the third floor of a modern tenement building. I knocked on his door and he immediately opened it. There were two larger rooms that served as bedrooms and a smaller one that served as a dining and living room. Then there was the kitchen, which was even smaller, and next to the kitchen was the bathroom. He introduced me to his wife, who probably was close to forty and who must have been very beautiful when she was young. Her manner was gentle and her demeanor almost resembled that of a Chinese.
His wife went into the kitchen and the two of us chatted on the sofa in the living room. He did not raise the matter that he had wanted to discuss with me and instead engaged in small talk about the cost of rent in Shanghai and the like. After a while, I noticed two photographs on the wall. One of them seemed to be a family photograph with him standing in the middle and looking very young.
“Is that your family?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Those are my father and mother, my wife and my daughter.”
“How about this one?” I pointed at the other one.
“Ah, that is me, can’t you tell? And that is my friend, the musical genius, the father of the young lady you saw the other day.” Seeing that I showed interest in his past, he reached for a big photo album from beneath the coffee table. Leafing through the pages, he explained to me who was in the photographs. There were quite a few of his friend, the musician, and of his friend’s daughter from when she was a child. There was one for almost every year, starting from when she was an infant. In some, she could be seen with her mother, on others she was holding a doll or sitting next to her father at the piano, holding a violin. In others still, she could be seen with relatives and friends. These photographs aroused in me a deep-felt sympathy for her, a fatherless child, wandering in a foreign land. Only when his wife brought out dinner did he put away the album. During dinner, I casually chatted with his wife. He never once mentioned the matter that he had wanted to discuss.
After we had finished dinner and his wife had cleared the table, he invited me to sit on the sofa with him. Each of us holding a cup of coffee in our hands and a cigarette between our lips, he finally said, “Aren’t you taking an Italian liner to sail to Europe?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Well, that’s great. If you agree, she can go with you.”
“Who?”
“The daughter of my friend.”
“She wants to go to Europe?”
“Yes, her father’s sister passed away and she is going back to claim an inheritance.”
“I see. Why should we not be able to travel together?” I asked, but seemingly no longer paying attention to my words, he continued:
“Her aunt loved her very much. After both of her parents had died, she lived with her aunt. Later, when her aunt’s husband passed away, her aunt remarried. Eventually, she came to China with her father’s younger brother and his wife. The person whom she was at the café with the other day was her uncle’s wife. She runs a flower shop here in Shanghai and my friend’s daughter helps her out. When her aunt in Europe died, the testament stipulated that she should inherit half of all her aunt’s personal effects, but only after she has gotten married. It has already been two years, but because she hasn’t yet married, she hasn’t gone back.”
“So she should wait until she gets married,” I said.
“But it’s not easy to find the right person, given the circumstances,” he said. “At the same time, she wants to claim the inheritance now. And that’s what I wanted to discuss with you, because there isn’t anyone more suited for this than you.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said.
“It’s very easy: I am asking you to marry her in name only. Once she has claimed her inheritance, you can go your own way again.”
“You do know that I was a married man and that I have children?” I replied.
“What’s the problem? The whole thing is for show only. She will nominally use ‘Mrs. Xu’ in her passport and, once you get to Europe, all you will have to do is go to the attorney together. And that will be the end of it.”
“I will have to think it over carefully,” I said.
“Yes, go ahead and think it over, but please don’t think that I have any ulterior motives. I am only helping her out because her father was my friend. I know a lot of Westerners in Shanghai who are always traveling to Europe, but none of them is a good fit. Many of them would not be able to keep a secret. Others are just crude traders or hoodlums who lack integrity and who cannot be trusted. There is no way of telling what they would …”
He fell silent and took a drag on his cigarette, but I knew what he meant.
Was I thinking it over? As a matter of fact, I had already made up my mind to help her. First, I pitied that young woman; second, I wanted to satisfy my curiosity; and finally, I did believe that Sherkels was not the kind of person who would set me up or use me. After all, there were no ill feelings between us.
“I hope you will think it over and let me know,” he said. “Oh yes, and one more thing: Your steamer ticket. You can purchase it with her, or ask her to purchase it for you, because a relative of her uncle’s wife works for the shipping company and can get a forty percent discount.”
After he had said this, he probably feared that I would get suspicious and hastily said, “It’s not about the money, but you can get a better cabin, and have it a little nicer. Also, you don’t speak Italian and you don’t know your way around Italy. She can take you places.”
It is possible that I was somewhat swayed by the prospect of a discounted steamer ticket, but truth is that I really wanted to get to know that young lady, and so I said, “If all I need to do is really as simple as you say it is, then I am happy to do it. But I am traveling third class.”
“Right, third class,” he said while shaking my hand. “She is also taking third class. It’s silly to take second class anyway, because the cabins and amenities are more or less the same.” He then asked me for my address and phone number. At that time, I was staying in the house of my relatives, and I wrote down the address for him.
“Once the ticket is issued,” he said, “I will let you know and we can go and pick it up together.”
Shortly after, I briefly returned home to see my family in the countryside. On the first day after my return to Shanghai, I learned that Sherkels had already called. I rushed over to see him, and together we went straight to the offices of the shipping company. My ticket had already been issued, and I paid the discounted price.
When we left, Sherkels asked me, “Would you like to go on board and see your cabin?” Naturally I wanted to see it, and so the two of us got on a tram to th
e docks.
Number sixty-one was a double cabin. It had an upper bunk and a lower bunk, and it had plenty of natural light. My ticket was for the B bunk, which was the upper bunk.
“A double cabin?” I asked.
“Exactly! Next door is a cabin for four!” He seemed to imply that a double cabin was of course far superior to a cabin for four.
“So, the lower bunk is …”
“The lower bunk is hers.”
“Why did she have to get one in the same cabin?” I asked. What I meant was that although I was her cover so that she could claim her inheritance, there was no need for us to share a cabin on the steamer.
“Oh, she was the one who ordered the tickets,” he said, “and since no special requests had been made, I guess the company must have assumed you were husband and wife, and a double cabin naturally is a far better cabin.” He seemed not to find anything remotely strange about it. I, however, felt uneasy, and it must have shown on my face.
