The Empress Lover

by Linda Jaivin

  I was as excited and keyed up as anyone else in those wildly vibrant times, when strangers spoke to one another on the street, the pickpockets of Beijing went on strike in support of the students, and the workers cheered the protesters from the scaffolding of buildings. I was with Q on the square when he jumped up and delivered an impromptu speech, saying that democracy was breath, free speech was air. I wiped away tears, the kids cheered, and that was it – he was in the thick of it after that.

  May rolled into June. The military cordon tightened further. The Party’s tone grew fiercer and more threatening. One of the lovely old men I knew through the Foreign Languages Press told me that he’d joined the Party back in the 1940s because the Nationalists were so disgustingly corrupt and the Communists so pure of purpose; now, he said, the corruption was worse than that of the Nationalists in their day, and so he supported the students. I couldn’t wait to tell Q that. He took the news I conveyed as a given – had someone like the old man not been disillusioned by now then he would have been a sad case, if not reprehensible, he said. I felt stupid. He had made me feel stupid. He said it wasn’t about me and rolled his eyes, but not in his usual, indulgent way, with a tempering smile. No, he wasn’t dropping me. Yes, he still loved me, but … this was more important right now. He didn’t expect me to understand. I was refusing to understand. He had to go out there, and he wasn’t coming back until it was over. No, I couldn’t go. It wasn’t my place. I should stay safe. They’d force the government to back down soon enough. He’d come and find me as soon as it was all over.

  We quarrelled. He left. He returned with a rose. He told me he loved me but that I had to understand. He was meeting some of his university classmates for dinner. I should come along. His mother was out so we went to their flat first and we made hasty love, my back pushed against the rough wall, his hands gripping my arse so hard they left marks that, if I could have stopped them from ever fading, I would have.

  That day was the third of June, 1989.

  Liu Xiaobo, Hou Dejian and the others had begun their hunger strike, and the art students had erected their ‘Goddess of Democracy’ statue on the square, reviving the protest movement that had begun to flag under the pressures of time and martial law. Like everyone else, I had taken part in one march or another and hung out on the square. After the government warned that they would clear the square by force if they had to, Chunmei bought us both handkerchiefs that we could use against the tear gas. Some people were saying the government was prepared to use fire hoses and rubber bullets against the demonstrators. Chunmei didn’t believe it. She argued that the city couldn’t afford to waste water and the People’s Liberation Army would never use rubber bullets on unarmed citizens.

  Shugang had been in touch. A bunch of old classmates and friends were getting together for a meal at a newish, privately run Sichuan restaurant at the top of Xidan, close to where it met Chang’an Avenue, before heading out onto the streets. I walked past the square, over which the oppressive heat, the stench of unwashed bodies and the air of martyrdom hung in a heavy cloud. I perspired, and as we approached the restaurant, Chunmei took out her tear-gas-ready handkerchief and gave it to me to mop my brow. She said it had to be wet to work against the tear gas anyway.

  I’d heard that Q had a foreign girlfriend, but I hadn’t met her before that night. When she came in I was a bit surprised to see that she didn’t seem all that foreign. She was petite and her Chinese was very good. She seemed a little shy, a tad awkward in an intellectual sort of way, not really the mental image I had at the time of foreign girls, who always seemed to be big, loud and not as bright as they were sexy. I had the impression she was seeking some kind of reassurance in the way she reached out to touch Q’s hands or his leg under the table when she thought she was unobserved. I could see from the way she looked at Q – the way every girl in history had ever looked at Q – that she was flushed with love and Q, well, I could see that he was fond of her too, even if, like the rest of us, his heart was at that moment in the square. I wondered if he still played around. In our university days, his relationships had a kind of epic, stormy, theatrical quality. I remember him saying that love, aiqing, was made up of two characters, ai and qing, and so one naturally needed both an airen, a wife, and qingren, lovers.

  Under normal circumstances, I might have spent some time talking with Q’s girlfriend, drawing her out. At the very least I would have asked her about the rose she was carrying so carefully, placing it on the table at first and then retiring it to her lap, then worrying it back onto the table. But the events unfolding not far from where we sat picking at our eye-watering food had captured our full attention. Q was particularly revved up, intense, leading the conversation. Rumour had it that the army was rebelling against orders from the Central Government to clear the square. Rumour had it Deng had died. Rumour had it that they were arming ‘workers’ who would come in and beat up the students and their supporters. Rumour had it that some of the students’ supporters were arming themselves as well. What was going to happen? What was to be done about it? Heat, chilli and stress: I mopped my brow so many times during the course of the meal that Chunmei joked that the handkerchief was truly ready to go into battle now. Q showed us a heavy cotton bandana. He put his arm around the girl and said, very fondly, She gave it to me. Something about the look she gave him then, desperate and thankful and loving all at the same time, gave me a terrible sense of foreboding. I can’t believe I’d forgotten all about that until now.

  He looks at her hands, the pale skin spotted here and there, the nails faintly striated under their thin layer of gloss, the skin looser on their bones than when those hands had nervously reached for Q’s in his memory of that night, the last night any of them ever saw Q. The CD that has been playing finishes, but he is loath to get up and put on another.

  Neither of them names the elephant. Neither of them says, I remember you.

  A man, red and swollen with drink, appears out of nowhere with what looks like two under-aged hookers – under-dressed, too, inside their ostentatious, matched furs – and he slurs out a rough demand for alcohol. The Sage rises and regretfully informs the man that the place is a private club, and has closed for the night. One of the girls pouts and the other stamps her feet in childish frustration. The man swears under his breath. The Sage sees them out and locks the door.

  While he is doing this, the cats, suddenly alert, jump off the chair, one after the other, and begin leaping onto the backs of furniture and up onto the shelves and down again, without ever disturbing the clocks or books or anything else but the air. She watches them dumbly.

  He puts on another CD, one she doesn’t recognise, and returns to take over the cats’ chair. He tells her, just to say something, that the CD was a gift from a Romanian woman he knows. She fears she will cry. So far neither she nor he has spoken about what connects them. If she cries, she feels, she will admit denial, anger, mystification and grief back into her life. She doesn’t think she’s ready for that, so she asks how long he’s been running the bar, and he, possibly relieved, he’s not sure, tells her the funny story about how his poetry collection went viral and she exclaims, That’s you! because of course she knew the collection, Duan Mou had even given her a copy. She’d been thinking of him all evening as the Sage, and it hadn’t occurred to her that he had a real name, the name of a poet, as it turned out. She asks if he really is the descendant of a famous Daoist philosopher and he shrugs, which could mean anything. She asks about the clocks and he hesitates. Because sometimes time does stop, he says, and time stops.

  I feel like I’m dreaming, she says finally.

  It is probably four or five in the morning now. He asks if she wants a coffee. He has cardamom and an espresso machine and can offer her a cardamom espresso. A Moroccan friend taught him how to make this coffee that is dense and spicy. When he returns with two small cups of bitter, fragrant espresso and a bowl of sugar cubes, he says softly, We met, almost twenty-five years ago.

&
nbsp; She nods, her words tangling at the front of her mouth, between her tongue and her teeth. Eyes downcast again, he stirs two lumps of sugar into his coffee. She takes one lump. She needs a cigarette. He pulls a packet out of his pocket and they both light up, their hands trembling. Do you remember asking me to look out for Q?

  The name hangs in the air between them, flickering and sparking. She says she remembers asking several of his friends to do this, to watch out for him, but she’d been so overwrought that night she hadn’t really paid much attention to anyone except Q, she’s embarrassed to admit. He says, Don’t be embarrassed, it’s understandable. He had only just recognised her himself. He starts talking compulsively about Q: Q had a heroic bent, don’t you think? She nods. He was like his father in that he had a strong sense of right and wrong. I think he believed that he was charmed, that someone like him could never die. I think we all believed that of him.

  Yes, I think you’re right about that, she says. At the same time, as we say in English (and she switches now to that language), he lived like there was –

  – no tomorrow, says the Sage, finishing the sentence.

  They both laugh, short happy laughs, thinking of Q, and then, thinking of Q, their faces fall again. He tells her that they had headed out onto the streets and into the square. The mood on the street was the most tense it had been since the protests began.

  I remember, she says. I didn’t actually go home like he told me to. I just pretended to, and then I returned. But I couldn’t find him, or you, or anyone I knew, and it wasn’t long before … you know.

  I know, he says. The army. They really … They really, she repeats, they really.They began …

  Shooting.

  And then we lost him.

  A silence.

  I lost him. I feel so guilty.

  You have no need to feel that way,she says. But me, I feel ashamed.

  Why? What do you have to be ashamed of?

  I didn’t want him to go. In my heart I didn’t want him to go. At that moment, I didn’t care about democracy, the students, anything. I cared only about Q, and our relationship. Every time I think back on this, I feel so small, so petty, so selfish, so ashamed. And yet I would have held him back if I could.

  Tears come to her eyes and she blinks, willing them to retreat.

  I’ve never said this before to anyone, she says now. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even said this to myself before, but I’d built such a complete fantasy around our reality that when he disappeared, I could only build a fantasy around that. Do you understand?

  He nods, but he doesn’t really.

  She finds her mobile phone to show the Sage how she even assigned Q a number, and notices that Duan Mou has left her a message: It begins with Tarantino. She deletes it without reading it. Everyone loves other people either a little more or a little less than they are loved back, she says. In my experience.

  His turn.

  He loved you, the Sage says with certainty, unsure if it’s the truth but knowing it is the right thing to say, the only thing. Words are like the marks made on xuanzhi, rice paper, by a Chinese writing brush. There’s no erasing, no painting over, no prettying up, no taking back, no rubbing out.

  She senses the qi with which the Sage writes these words that hang in the air between them. She admires their form, and appreciates the poetry behind the action.

  I remember he’d given you a rose, he says. Or that’s what I assumed. That night. You were holding it. You wanted to protect it, but it was such a hot night. You moved it from your lap to the table. You asked the waiter for a glass of water and you put the rose in it.

  Did I? she asks. She had forgotten the detail of the water. Yang Lian’s words rise up: a sun that will not be contained in the grave.

  You’re shivering. I’ll turn up the heat. Do you want another coffee? He doesn’t want her to go. He worries that the offer might be misunderstood; it is definitely not a hint for her to leave.

  He has already risen from his chair when she says, in an almost inaudible voice, I wanted to search the hospitals but they wouldn’t let me in. I called his mother. She’d been to every one. I wanted to believe he was hiding, that he’d gone abroad. I even wanted to believe he’d been arrested. I didn’t want to listen to the stories of people ground into flesh and bone on the roads by the tanks, of the arrests and summary executions. I saw an English woman I knew running down the street, hysterical, with blood and muck on her shirt. She told me she had been standing talking to a young man one moment and the next a dumdum bullet had blown up his head, splattering her with brains and skull and gore. I didn’t want to hear any of it but I couldn’t stop listening. There is no way, I thought, that someone with such presence could disappear so completely from the world, leaving no trace. She breathes in and out. She says, September 11, bombs in Afghanistan, explosions in Iraq, killings on Tahrir Square, Syria – the news makes me so ill I retreat from it altogether. I say I came back to China because it’s so real, but maybe I’m here because it’s so unreal, because the censorship of the news and of history makes it easier to live in a fantasy world. She tells him she reads a lot of novels. She writes. Sometimes she manages to escape the world – and herself – for months at a time. And then something will happen – a French friend invites her to watch some old films from the Nouvelle Vague and, viewing Hiroshima mon amour, the line Tu me détruit, tu me fais bien, leaves her sobbing. Her friends don’t know what to do when things like that happen but, luckily, they happen less and less. People speak of it less these days as well. It was twenty-five years ago. A whole generation has reached adulthood since then.

  As she talks, he thinks of all the things he’s seen and heard, the friends who disappeared and reappeared, the ones who sat in a prison cell for a while, the ones who went abroad, some to return, some not. Chunmei. Sometimes, he says, I wonder what it was all for. In the end, we didn’t get democracy, or a free press, or an end to corruption. We just got commerce. And most young people don’t know anything about what happened here. No one will tell them. No one is willing to tell them. There are no memorials, no plaques, nothing on TV, nothing in the bookshops. Did all those deaths, all that passion, all those injured and lost and torn lives, did they mean anything? I want it to mean something, but that’s not going to make it happen.

  I just want it to have been different. I want to tell Q that it was okay by me that he went, that I didn’t want him to go but that I understood. Maybe it took me longer than it should have to understand, but … I didn’t want him to think I was some … I don’t know.

  She weeps silently in his arms. He smells male, a little smoky, woolly, comforting. He holds her tightly against his chest and strokes her hair. Watching the mechanical fish loop round and round on their mechanical waves, he recalls something Master Happy Fish said. A line is the shortest distance between two points. A line is a succession of points. Look at the line and see the points. Stand on a point and see the line. If it’s a fishing line, then go fishing. Neither as a student of philosophy nor as a poet, nor even just a man, does he have any idea what this means. He never did. The rice-gruel dawn seeps in through the windows and, from the perspective of the cats, who have settled close by, the light surrounds their joined silhouette with a kind of halo.

  The old man, accomplished of mission, depleted of meaning, slopes back through the crazy-paving of hutong that was old Dashila’r. By the Republican era, Dashila’r was where you’d find the greatest entertainments, the most desperate of addicts, the grandest and poorest of brothels and hundreds of shops and restaurants large and small, thousands of homes, markets, temples and mosques. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, bulldozers had already tamed great swathes of Dashila’r. A Walmart squatted on the site of the execution ground to which the Empress Dowager sent her enemies for a final bowl of wine and an even more final whack of the sharp sword on their necks. But some of the narrowest, dingiest and liveliest of alleyways and junctions have stubbornly resisted the cull
. And it is through these that the old man is going home.

  The sun is nearly up by the time he wearily eases the outsized key into its old-fashioned lock. Developers have chalked the character chai, demolish, onto his doorway; it would not be long before the grim-faced crews of migrant workers arrived with their sledgehammers. Developers have already strong-armed most of his neighbours out of their homes, packed them off to live in distant suburbs in vertical towers of uncertain construction, anxious ghosts pacing out their days. He is not a citizen. He doesn’t even have the right to such a compromised resettlement. Legally, he does not even exist. Legally, he is a dead man. A ghost.

  The door creaks open. It is even colder inside than out and, stamping the snow and slush from his boots in the doorway, he slips his frozen feet into worn slippers. He shuffles with tired footsteps over the old floorboards, which squeak like crickets, gezhi, gezhi, to the coal-brick stove. Clouds of heavy dust rise a few centimetres off the ground and fall back, as though too exhausted to make more of an effort. The house hasn’t been properly cleaned in decades. His ayi, who is nearly as old as he is, spends half her shifts grumbling about the state of her health and the other half scolding him for not looking after his own. This leaves very little time for housework. They are both at ease with the arrangement and neither considers it in need of remedy.

  By the time he succeeds in lighting the stove, there are new twigs on the bird’s nest of broken matches on the floor and a stench of coal dust in the air. The place is derelict. It once served as a brothel in the late Qing and early Republican periods. It hadn’t been the most luxurious or classy of bordellos, just the sort of place where a rickshaw man, warlord’s sergeant or even, in the city’s darkest years, a Japanese private could procure half an hour of cheap comfort. The cell-like working rooms sit off a narrow corridor, one side of which is bordered by a balustrade overlooking a central atrium, or inner courtyard. He has not ventured upstairs for years, leaving it to his cats. Even their feather-light steps can make those uncertain planks creak and groan. Sometimes the sound wakes him and he sits up with a start, certain that the entire toothpick structure is about to come tumbling down around his ears.