MEMORIES from the EAST

by Abdulla Kazim

  I was myself transformed into a walking open bottle of perfume. I smelled sweeter than usual, but I had lost my old personal essence. Litsea Cubeba would recognize me approaching her, not by hearing my footsteps, but by recognizing the scent she anointed me with. I became more like a pet, I guess, or one of her essential oil bottles that she could recognize with her eyes closed by a single sniff. I hated that and decided to follow the thread of my depression and leave that girl who was so full of scents but had no scent of herself.

  I wouldn’t miss anything about Litsea Cubeba. I had gained a few skills about perfumery, and one memory burned me with craving for two months after leaving her—the memory of the early mornings when she would sit in her garden and sip that myrrh tea, wearing a knee-length skirt flushed with darker and lighter plain pink roses over a shadowy black background. On top she would wear a light pink sleeveless blouse with the chest open wide enough to vividly unveil the lovely white skin, with the top line of her cleavage clearly visible. What enticed me more was the way the blouse fell over her fine mid-sized bra-less breasts, demonstrating the god-sent beauty of a woman’s breasts. That tickling cosy curve was so captivating, and it was as much arousing for me to see it veiled as it would have been unveiled. She never liked to wear bras at home; her reason was that they hindered her breathing. Oh, it might for her, but for me it was a source of pleasure to stare at her chest stealthily, even knowing that I would bed her in the end over and over.

  24

  I went back to China, bearing in mind the two years of my life that remained. I didn’t know where I would get stuck next in my journey to find things of interest, and I preferred to stick to the country where I planned to have the last stop of my life illustrated. I started writing a book, The Way to Suicide, which consists of a collection of essays about the uselessness of life and living and the light that death opens in the eyes of those who select the path of suicide. I didn’t know and I don’t know yet whether somebody would eventually agree to publish it. The same is true of this biographical book that my pen disobeys me in writing. However, I believe that it is all about freedom of belief and expression when it comes to literature. We should be able to speak our hearts and write about the things that eat us up, the things that provide us ecstasy, and the things that implant in us thorns of agony. For me it has always been the agony of death and dying that has drugged my pen. I could have chosen to research and write about painting, guitar, writing, programming, perfumery, or any other subject, but nothing ever affected me as deeply as the art of dying.

  Weakened by a strange hazy feeling of overcoming my hatred, I attended to a call of duty and went to the graveyard where my parents are buried. How beautiful is its spacious green landscape, and the earthy aroma is more captivating than the breezes of beaches. The scattered white rectangles of different sizes add artistic comeliness. How exquisite are the plants of the graveyard and how abundantly the greenery spreads there! I guess the soil of the graveyard is not dead like the corpses underneath, or perhaps it is the dead that provide that vigorous fertility to the normally insignificant soil of earth.

  It took me almost thirty minutes to locate them. The graves of my terrible parents lay flatter to the ground more than most of those around them, and they were heavily covered with husks and dust. I stood there at their feet and in a split second felt I had fulfilled their hungry request to come there. I don’t believe in God and an afterlife, but still I believe that their spirits would suffer under the heavy layers of earth, and I wouldn’t regret a bit seeing them suffer for the evil of their characters. My eyes located the empty space to the right of my mother’s grave, and a strange desire stroke me for my body to be buried there after my death. I hated the thought and idea of it.

  To stir up my dead feelings even more bitterly, I went to the company my father used to work for, a small private software-development company. I provided my CV, which I had updated on the plane to China. It was eleven in the morning when I reached the glass door of the building. A young lady was standing just beside it with a portion of her body covering the push bar, elegantly dressed with appropriately applied makeup, except for a dark pink highlight on the eyebrows. She stared at me and smiled, and I looked at the briefcase in her hand. My initial thought was that she was also seeking a job. I didn’t pay much attention to her. I reached behind her and pushed the bar, forcing the door open. As soon as the opening was wide enough for a normal human body to fit through, the lady slid in without even saying a word of excuse or thanks. It was as if she was waiting for me or somebody else to open the door for her, she being a princess I guess. Once inside, she walked away quickly, and my eyes caught sight of her shaking bottom.

  I walked in and took the stairs, and my eyes just roamed around, trying to recall how the place had looked when first my father took me with him to his workplace. I was very young back then, but still a portion of that memory came to me. My father liked to use stairs always for their health benefits. I recalled him holding my small hand and walking slowly up the staircase. I reached the third floor, the floor that his company occupied, and the small curved reception desk was facing me. My father’s voice came into my mind, introducing me to the young lady there, and I could see the same lady still there with the same thin body but with deeper age lines. I smiled and greeted her, and she returned my greeting the same way she had done before. I asked her where I could turn in my résumé, and as she reached for it, a female voice called her, asking her for all the résumés available. The receptionist turned, and so did I, to see the lady I had met down outside the building. She looked at me and then at the résumé in my hand that I was about to pass to the receptionist.

  “May I look at it?” the lady asked.

  I could see she was not just a normal employee. I handed her my papers, and the receptionist handed her all other résumés she had in her drawer.

  “You can follow me,” the lady said and started to walk back.

  I followed her along the corridor through the office cubes. Some passing employees greeted her with respect. She entered a big glass office and asked me to sit.

  “I am Hua Xu. I’m the manager here.”

  She set aside all the other résumés she was holding and put mine in front of her on the desk. I didn’t say anything. My name was already on the paper and I found it silly to mention it. She went through my papers and kept throwing sharp glances at me as she did so.

  “Writer, programmer, guitar player… and… ha!” She paused and busied herself again with her eyes buried in my papers. “What are you, Gerald Thin?”

  Well, Gerald Thin was the name I had used on my résumé. I just wished to hide my family name.

  “I am anything that fits a post, and I can be anything. For a post in this company, I am a programmer.”

  “A programmer!” Hua said, and then she remained silent for a few seconds while staring at me. “I’m not sure how a creative person like you can fit into such a small company that doesn’t fulfil your ambitions, but I can see you will be needed here. One post only is available for now, and you have it.”

  “Thank you,” I calmly said without any single indication of appreciation.

  “Your work starts tomorrow.”

  She took the rest of the résumés and placed them in the box allocated for recycling paper. How quickly I had got what I had so little hope for! A small part of me was happy for what I saw as a sign of being ridiculously sick in my mind for coming there in the first place. I went out the glass-walled room and walked among the office cubes. An image my eyes had captured years ago appeared in my mind of me holding the finger of my father and walking there with him, making jokes here and there with other employees. My feet stopped at a picture with not-so-good quality. A large group of employees was standing in a green field with a big poster at their back showing the name of the company, “Blooming”. I narrowed my eyes and gazed at the faces. My father was among them.
I withdrew instantly and took my eyes off it.

  “Ho ho ho,” a voice came from behind me, and a hand was placed on the back of my shoulder.

  I turned to see a man in his early fifties, roughly dressed with narrow eyes, most of which was covered with bushy white eyebrows. He wore thin glasses and had a thin smiling mouth.

  “Careful, son.”

  “Sorry.” I said, and I started to walk away when he spoke again.

  “Do I know you, young boy?”

  I paused and looked at his face. It wasn’t a bit familiar to me. I shook my head and resumed my steps.

  When I reached my apartment, I got a call on my cell phone. I answered it. It was Hua. She asked me to come to Blooming the next day by seven in the morning, saying that she would brief me about a few rules of the company. I did reach the company at seven the next day, and strangely no other employee was around on the single floor the company occupied, not even the receptionist. I went to Hua’s glass office, but it was empty as well. I thought that she might have felt too lazy to wake up early as the office hours didn’t start until eight-thirty. I was about to leave when I heard her voice.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  She was holding a cup of coffee. With a half-smile she went into her office and placed the cup slowly on one side of her well-organized desk. She talked to me, but not about any rules of the company. To my surprise she just talked rubbish—nothing related to work, but everything related to me. Many of her irritating personal questions I answered with complete lies. I could see what she was aiming at—to please herself with me. I wouldn’t have any objection to that. I would enjoy having a casual affair with a hot workmate, but I hated the cheapness of her approach in hiring an employee for the sake of lying between his legs.

  As time passed, a number of employees started to arrive, and the middle-aged man who had spoken to me the day before was there as well. He smiled at me, shook hands with me, and greeted me heartily. I returned his greetings, but I had no wish to talk to him in any mysterious fashion, the way he had on my last visit.

  “I had some time yesterday night. My wife had been busy the whole day correcting a heap of exam papers,” he said. “I thought about you and where I had seen you. My mind isn’t as strong as it used to be, you see. I know your face because it reminds me of an old friend of mine, Leo Arsov.”

  It struck me hard to hear him say my father’s name. Under normal circumstances, having a job in a company my father worked in, this would not have been a surprise, but his recognising any resemblance between me and my father was very upsetting. Millions of times have I seen myself in mirror, but I could never see any similarity between us. I couldn’t see how that guy could see any. Is it that when we deny who we really are that we forget who we are? Or it is the truth of us that pure-hearted people see? I wanted to be nothing like my father. I even believed I was one step higher than him in morality, though I don’t trust much in moralities.

  “What’s your name, son?” he asked.

  “Gerald,” I almost whispered.

  “Oh, Gerald Arsov. What a name! Are you the one Leo brought in as child? Yes, I guess you are. Who else would have the same good looks as you? Oh God, my memory gets worse by the day. The memories of your father are escaping my mind. So do all the memories of all the good things I’ve experienced in life.” He scratched his white-haired head and then reached out his hand again. “I am Jian.”

  I shook hands with him again, but I wanted to get away from him, and so I excused myself, giving no more details about myself and him asking for no more. But I felt a liking for Jian because of the pure and kind character he demonstrated. Walking around between the office cubes, I was struck to find that most of the employees there were middle-aged or old-aged. It seemed as if my father alone was missing among his work colleagues. It didn’t matter much that I was working with older people once they accepted me and considered me part of the family. They would call me “son”, which happily replaced my real name which most of the employees there didn’t know any more, and Jian, that quietly smiling character, didn’t speak of my identity to anyone there, as if reading my mind. The current manager, Hua Xu, was the daughter of the deceased earlier manager, whom, unlike others in the company, age didn’t forgive.

  Hua—yes, it is true, reader—became my bed comrade on a weekend basis. Who could ask for more than that from his manager! And as she wished to demonstrate herself as the manager in the office, she did the same in bed. But never mind that! Pleasure was my ultimate aim with her, nothing more.

  After one month of working at Blooming, I could see how badly the company was managed. The aged employees were incapable of keeping up with market demand; the production capability was weak, and the reason was the age of the employees, who would share empathies and cosy chats with each other instead of sharing and talking about actual work. They were getting their salaries cheap, and they were glad of it. Where else could they spend time with friends and get paid for it?

  Once, after bedtime with Hua, I raised the subject of the company’s productivity. What else could she do, she asked. All the employees there were close friends of her deceased father, and they had been very kind with her when she was young. Her heart insisted that she be kind to them. What an answer from an educated manager! If all managers were as emotional as her, I guess the business of the country would be sent to the gallows.

  For six months I lived among those half-dead employees. My work varied from nothing to just little insignificant tasks. I would come to the office and bring books with me; reading was more interesting to me than listening to the old radios throw out their repetitious subjects. Ultimately, being passive bored me, and so I took a new step to add some value to my work. I started developing games for mobile phones, and once a few were ready for use, I went marketing them on the Internet under the company name in the best interests of the company, without any mention of my own name. Well it went well, and the fruits of my efforts started blooming in Blooming. I brought the company customers, young with ideas and expectations, within two months of starting to market the games. It took a hell of effort from me, but it was worth it. Hua Xu was very proud of the achievement and celebrated the event, and my aged colleagues were very happy to see their “son” with such an accomplishment. They were all so glad for what I had done, but I wasn’t.

  “Leo Arsov,” one of them said in the celebration, remembering my father, I guess.

  “Yes,” another answered.

  I looked at Jian among the crowd, and he nodded, but after the celebration he told me that my father had been the best among them all, and like me, he had brought a new change to the company. But the thing was that apart from him, none of those employees noticed the similarity of physical complexion between me and my father. Age played a big role, I guess.

  I discussed with Hua that night in bed the idea of recruiting some new young ambitious employees in place of some of her current employees. She agreed on the first point but discarded the second. Well, she was the decision-maker in the end, and managers normally don’t like to be told to make a certain decision.

  But as I expected, it turned ugly. The company spent money recruiting three young employees, who just happened to have finished college a month ago and who happened to be distant relatives of Hua. There was a big similarity between the new employees and those aged ones; both parties showed minimal interest in work. My efforts to raise the name of Blooming were in vain. It seemed that it was impossible to fix anything in that aging ailing company. I made up my mind and left the company after one full year of wasted time working there.

  25

  The sky was dropping scattered but large drops of rain. When one drop touched the sensitive skin of your face, you would really feel its vigour and weight. The wind from the east was gentle, too weak to disturb the rain drops but it felt lovely and welcome when it brushed the skin. The fragran
ce of the air was slightly disturbed by the smell of soil that covered the sides of the pavement, but it did nothing to affect the pleasant feeling that the overall atmosphere had bestowed upon me. My hair felt freshened and skin enlightened as I walked down the pavement wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I had a smile set deeply on my face. Nature sometimes overwhelms us with its simple beauties that no disastrous plan can withhold.

  I had in front of me a lifespan of one year—one more year to get the shit of me out of the dirt of life. But that wouldn’t sadden me a bit or move me an inch. We all walk to our destinies, and my destiny had been fixed during the days of my childhood.

  I was walking that day to a flower shop near my apartment to liven up my dull brown painted room. Yellow and red roses would fit the brown background well in my imagination.

  When I entered the flower shop, a figure caught my eye—a female body whose complexion was not so strange to me but was stored among the heap of memory files in my mind. Her white blouse was tucked in a long tight pink skirt. Though it was elegant enough to my eyes and taste, my mind seemed to fail me in putting together the pieces as I reflected about who that girl resembled. I wasn’t looking for any new hot figure to disturb the inner peace of my heart, so I just started carefully picking my flowers. At that moment while I was waiting for my flowers to be wrapped, the girl’s voice, paying at the cashier’s desk a few steps from me, caught my ears, and instantly the fine figure of a girl rose to the top of my memory.