by Su Tong
Meng said, ‘It’s an air con machine, not a camera. It doesn’t have an automatic lock.’ He motioned for Diesel to hand him the remote, but was ignored. Diesel was still anxiously hitting the buttons, then he uttered, ‘Young people think they know everything. Just because it’s air con and not a camera it doesn’t have an automatic lock. Is that a scientific way of thinking?’ Meng gave a small laugh, ‘Let me give it a try.’ He held his palm open and asked, ‘Do you think I could have a try?’ He watched as Diesel’s nostrils convulsed for a moment before he suddenly placed the remote in his hand. ‘You want to try? OK, go ahead and try,’ Diesel said. ‘If I can’t get it started, let’s see you do it.’
His totally unnecessary anger reminded Meng once more of the long-ago physics class. It was with exactly that kind of annoyance that he had taught the principle of siphonage. The atmosphere. Pressure. Atmospheric pressure. Meng couldn’t resist joshing him, and remarked, ‘Maybe there isn’t enough atmospheric pressure.’
But Diesel didn’t take it as a joke and sniggered coolly, ‘That’s what young people are like today, throwing around concepts they know next to nothing about.’
Meng suddenly felt himself in a tight corner. Under Diesel’s mocking eyes he pressed the remote control buttons but failed to reanimate the exasperating air con. It seemed to have given up the ghost. Scratching his head, he said, ‘Could it be that it needs a new battery?’
Then he heard Diesel’s pleased voice once again, ‘Impossible.’
‘And why is it impossible?’
Diesel grabbed the remote from Meng’s hands and said, ‘It’s impossible because it’s impossible. We put in a new battery just last week!’
Diesel’s victorious expression irritated Meng. Sitting down on the bed, he looked on at Diesel with the remote in his hands. ‘If there’s no air con, how am I supposed to sleep? You said there was air con. But after all your talk, this air con is a piece of crap.’ Diesel still energetically pressed the buttons on the remote, while at the same time motioning to Meng to be patient for a moment. ‘Don’t keep pressing them if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s definitely broken. Just give me a new room, OK?’
Diesel threw a glance at Meng and, seeing his gloomy expression, he said, ‘This is the only room with air con. There’s nothing I can do; you’ll just have to put up with it.’
Meng gave a strange laugh and said, ‘Great! Put up with a freezing room all night.’
Diesel turned and stared sternly at Meng, then gave a renunciatory smile. With a darting movement, he returned the remote to his pocket and walked out. ‘We’ll take off the fee for air con,’ he said loudly, ‘So I’ll ask you not to regard me as a cheat, thank you very much.’
With that the door was flung heavily back. Meng sat on the bed, thoroughly dejected, not only because of his frosty room, but also because it seemed to him that the experiences of the evening were the wages of a journey conceived in error. He had plainly wanted to go south, but despite himself he had gone north. This was nothing like a reunion with a former teacher ought to be. Perhaps he should tell him the truth, but Meng doubted there was any point now in invoking their common past. No, it was definitely pointless. The reality staring Meng in the face was this: he was compelled to spend a night in this polar room. Only later could he allow this encounter to become a memory.
He entwined himself in the blankets to go to sleep. He was young and actually not all that easily affected by the cold. He had even imagined Diesel would say something to that effect: ‘Young people can put up with a little cold; it won’t kill you.’ But Diesel hadn’t said that; he was someone who made you feel awkward, but he wasn’t harsh or rude. He had been that way in the past, and he was that way now. Meng soon fell asleep. Had he spent a dreamless night, then perhaps things wouldn’t have happened as they did. But Meng dreamed of an exam, and in the dream he needed very badly to take a leak, so he pushed back the examination paper and stood up. He got out of bed and walked in a daze into the corridor, heading towards the bathroom door. Shivering and standing by the piss trough, he heard the sound of a door slamming in a gust of wind. The sound didn’t register with him immediately, but when he got back to his room he found the door wouldn’t open. There must have been a problem with the lock, because now he couldn’t get back in. The night was transforming into a long series of tribulations. He was in his underwear and beginning to shiver in earnest. He hugged his shoulders and, facing down the stairs, yelled loudly, ‘Hurry! Bring the key up! I’m locked out!’
After about a minute, Diesel appeared in the corridor, eyes heavy with sleep.
‘What now? Why did you close the door when you went out? You should keep it open.’
Meng said, ‘I didn’t close it; the wind blew it shut. Everything in this place is broken. Even the door lock is broken!’ Meng gave Diesel a sidelong glance, as if he intended some response, but he said nothing and instead dangled his keychain from his hand.
‘Go to the duty room and put an overcoat on. Watch that you don’t catch cold.’
Meng said, ‘No need for that. Just hurry up and open the door.’ Then came the greatest surprise. Meng watched as Diesel kept passing back and forth through the keys; he couldn’t seem to find the right one. ‘What now?’ Hugging both shoulders, Meng pressed in close in order to look at the keys. ‘Tell me you haven’t lost it.’
Diesel raised his head, and from his dismayed expression he could see that his guess had hit the mark. Diesel exclaimed, ‘It’s ridiculous! Ridiculous! What happened to the key?’
Meng almost leapt to his feet, ‘Everything has to happen to me! What terrible luck! Enough bad luck to last me eight lifetimes!’ He saw that Diesel’s expression had become extremely disagreeable, but he was past caring. He rubbed his hands, stamped his feet and said, ‘Enough bad luck to last me eight lifetimes!’ Diesel stared blankly for a moment, then suddenly took off down the stairs, and as he ran he said, ‘I’ll get that overcoat for you first.’ But Meng was enraged, and he screamed at Diesel’s back, ‘What good is an overcoat? I want to get into my room.’ Shouting was not enough to cool his anger, though, so he delivered a flying kick to the door.
‘They should close down hostels like this, and the sooner the better!’
It was very quiet in the hostel. Except for the sound of the wind outside, Meng could hear only the fragmentary, hectic sounds coming from the duty room. He lifted up his eyes and heaved a sigh heavy with resentment. Before long, a flustered Diesel was hurrying up the stairs carrying a padded army overcoat, which he tossed over to him, saying, ‘Please don’t shout. Shouting isn’t going to help.’ Meng wrapped the overcoat around his shoulders and found that it was still quite warm; Diesel had no doubt been using it as a blanket. Now that he had something to ward off the cold, Meng’s mood took a slight turn for the better. Looking at the keys in Diesel’s hand he said, ‘That’s fine. You made me come and stay here. First-class facilities. First-class service. I didn’t realize you were going to make me stand in the hallway and shiver till dawn.’ Meng saw that Diesel’s head was beginning to sway back and forth and that his eyes were shooting out a dreadful, scorching fury, a fury far exceeding that of the remembered physics teacher. He began to regret his excessive words, but it was too late for regret, for all of a sudden Diesel hurled the keys to the ground. Then, dragging over a chair that stood in the corridor, he sprang on top of it. Meng realized now that he was planning to go through the window above the door; it hadn’t occurred to him that Diesel might resort to such a method. As he watched Diesel clumsily push the window open, Meng felt he shouldn’t let Diesel do such a thing for him, but strangely the words that came out of his mouth were something entirely different: ‘I bet the window’s locked tight, too.’ Diesel’s back, which was hanging in mid-air, trembled a moment, then he suddenly struck the window and it opened with a clatter. Diesel turned his head to shoot Meng a contemptuous glance. Meng evaded his look, turning away in embarrassment. In the periphery of his vision, h
owever, he could see Diesel’s head go through the window, then his legs and chubby torso all squeezed through while his feet kicked and swayed outside. Meng could see Diesel’s old-fashioned, cotton-lined shoes, torn at the toe, and the worn-through nylon socks. Above him, he could hear his panting. Only now did Meng make a tardy gesture, grabbing Diesel’s feet and protesting, ‘Never mind. Don’t go up there. I’ll go through the window myself.’ But Diesel’s feet kicked free of his hands; Meng could feel the anger residing in them. Then he watched as they slowly disappeared through the window; Diesel’s whole body had finally passed through the narrow window. At the same time, dust from the window frame and from Diesel’s coat streamed onto the ground.
Diesel opened the door from the inside. Meng, standing outside, turned sideways, avoiding Diesel’s eyes. Diesel opened his mouth wide to pant and said, ‘Come in then. What are you standing outside for? Huh? I’ve opened the door, haven’t I?’
Meng stood motionlessly. He saw Diesel rush at him, and suddenly fell prey to the illusion that the man would strike him, but Diesel just pushed him into the room. Then he began brushing the dust off his own clothes, saying, ‘What were you standing out there for? You’re the guest; I’m here to serve. You locked yourself out and I climbed through the window to let you in. What is it you’re considering now? Do you want to swear at me some more?’
Meng grew hot in the face, and said haltingly, ‘I didn’t swear at you. Why would I swear at you?’
Diesel again gave Meng a hard push and said, ‘Well, if you didn’t swear at me then that’s all right.’ And then, ‘Now, young man, get into bed and go to sleep.’
Diesel closed the door behind him. Meng heard him pick the keys up outside the door and move the chair back to its original position, then there was silence. Meng stood in the room and had a premonition that the affair would not conclude in silence; and indeed, Diesel’s voice suddenly broke out in the corridor, a voice of suffering and complaint.
‘Young man, let me tell you something. I’m sixty years old this year! You would let me crawl through the window, huh? You let me crawl through the window!’
Meng left the hostel soon after dawn. The woman at reception was only half awake. She showed understanding for his early departure and commented, ‘I guess you didn’t sleep too well. This place used to be quite all right, but they’re about to knock it down and these last couple of business days have been a little chaotic.’ Meng chuckled and said, ‘It was only one night, in any case, it’s over with now. I’ll get a good sleep tonight.’ In the duty room he saw a folding bed with Diesel’s body underneath the overcoat. He couldn’t see his face, though he could hear the light puff of his snoring. Indicating the bed with his mouth, he asked the woman, ‘Is the old man’s name Di?’
The woman said, ‘No, it’s Chen, C-H-E-N. Why? Was there something wrong with his attitude?’
Meng shook his head, ‘That’s not what I meant. Can I ask something? Did he used to teach physics at Eastern Wind High School?’
The woman responded, ‘Well, he used to be a teacher, but whether it was at Eastern Wind, or if he taught physics, that I don’t know.’ The woman looked at him with curiosity. ‘Were you his student? Wake him up and ask him, then you’ll know for sure.’
Meng waved his hand and said, ‘Never mind. I’m not sure myself. He might have been the physics teacher, then again he might not. I don’t really remember.’
The woman seemed quite eager to clear up the identity of her co-worker, ‘Wake him up. I’ll wake him up myself.’
Meng stopped her with a cry that was almost one of fright, ‘No, no!’ he said, ‘Let him sleep. I still have lots of things to see to. I should go.’
Meng opened the door of the guesthouse. Outside, the ground was a single stretch of mire – ice and snow – and the winter sunlight illuminated the city that he hadn’t seen for so long. It was a place he had once lived, but to know whether any trace of him had remained in the disorder of the rubble, you would have had to ask the rubble itself. Meng didn’t know. But in the morning Meng was as vigorous as the morning itself, and yesterday’s moodiness was left behind with yesterday. He walked quickly towards the road, and discovered to his surprise that the sun, which shone so splendidly over the city, hung by some good fortune right over the famous Song Dynasty tower.
A Xiali taxi appeared out of nowhere and turned to approach Meng. The driver poked his head out the window and looked out at him. Meng took a few leisurely steps to the taxi window and asked, ‘Do you have a meter?’
And this time he spoke in genuine Tiancheng dialect.
The Q of Hearts
There are some people whose thieving habits simply cannot be corrected. This kind of problem was especially serious in Mahogany Street, which is where I am from. If you broke your vigil for even a moment, your salted fish, cigarettes or even your broom might vanish from your home. So when I found I was missing the Q of Hearts from my deck of cards, I immediately assumed that someone had stolen it.
You don’t know how I loved those cards. It was 1969, and they were my only toys. My brother and I often played a game called Lucky with them. When you play cards, you can’t afford to be missing even a single one from the deck, and for exactly that reason I had written my name on the back of every card. I had thought that now no one would dare to steal them, but I was wrong. When I asked my brother about the whereabouts of my Q of Hearts he said, ‘Who cares if you lose a card? Fat Man Li’s kid from our school’s lost and no one’s looking for him, who the hell’s going to help you look for a stupid old card?’ But from his expression I could tell that there was something fishy going on. A few days before, he had asked me to lend him ten cents and I had ignored him. I suspected that he had stolen the Q of Hearts in spiteful revenge. Entertaining these suspicions, I extended my hand under his pillow. There was a drawer beneath the bedding, and I began to rummage in it. You should know that my brother has a bad temper and he suddenly cried out, ‘You think I’m a frigging cow demon? You frigging looking through my things?’ And as he spoke he aimed an angry kick at my bum.
After that we started wrestling. Of course I was the one who ended up bawling. My brother, seeing that the situation was beyond help, leaped out the window and landed on the street outside. Through the window, he said, ‘Don’t be a baby. What’s the big deal about a card? It’s just a Q of Hearts. I’ll get you another one sometime, OK?’
My brother was the king of big talk, and even supposing he meant it, I didn’t believe he could get his hands on that Q of Hearts. The year was 1969, and the city was going through some kind of weird revolution. People had abandoned all entertainment, the streets were empty and the shop doors were all left slightly ajar. You could have walked clear through the city without seeing a trace of a playing card. Imagine a day in the winter of 1969: the snow is falling fast and there is a child walking along Clothmarket Street – which was called Red Flag Street then – pausing frequently and pulling himself up to every counter along the way to gaze up at the goods on the shelves. The storekeeper says, ‘Well now, what does the little comrade want?’ To which the child replies, ‘Playing cards.’ Then the storekeeper frowns and says in an aggravated tone, ‘As if we’d stock playing cards. Nothing of the kind.’
The reason I relate my search for the playing cards in such detail is that I want you to believe that everything I say really happened.
I went with my father to Shanghai for no other reason than to buy a new deck of cards. It took about two hours by train to get there from our home city. Though it was the first time in my life that I had been on a train, I have no recollection about how I felt. Besides, a trip of two hours was too short for to me remember anything apart from my father talking about rubber and steel or something to the man sitting next to him. They talked and talked until the train stopped, and then we were in Shanghai.
Shanghai in 1969 was a dusky, dead city. My saying that is actually mostly a literary deduction, since besides the tan buildings with the
clocks and big domes, and the wooden rack for putting bean products on that I saw near the hotel, I have almost no recollection of the streets of Shanghai as I saw them on that trip. My father was on official business, and I followed him down the big streets, looking intently at the displays in the windows of every store we passed. It shouldn’t surprise you that, although it was 1969, Shanghai’s stores were more like real stores than the ones we had at home, with soap, toilet paper, sweets and cakes all neatly laid out on the shelves. A few times, I saw something that at first glance looked like the little cardboard boxes playing cards come in, but as soon as I ran over to take a better look, they would turn out to be either a package of pain-killing cream or cigarettes. Weren’t there any playing cards in Shanghai, either? Shanghai had no playing cards, and this was a discovery that disappointed me through and through. I thought of how the women on Mahogany Street were always cawing and crowing about the things you could get in Shanghai. From the way they talked, Shanghai should have been a city stocked with everything anyone could want. Now it seemed it had been an outright lie.
As I said, my father was on official business, so he didn’t have time to take me into the stores to look for cards; he had to finish up his affairs before everyone got off work for the day. In front of a large beige concrete building covered with hanging slogan banners, my father let go of my hand and pushed me up to the window of the registration room. To the middle-aged woman inside, he said, ‘I have to go up to your revolutionary committee to see about some arrangements; look after my son while I’m gone.’
I saw the woman’s detached glanced sweep over us and a snort issued from her nostrils. ‘Taking your son with you on business! Is that any way to go about things?’
My father was in no mood to justify himself. Carrying his black briefcase, he sprinted up the stairs and left me alone in the strange concrete building, standing in a strange woman’s cold glare.
