“My body is crying for you,” you say.
Most beautiful sentence I heard in my life.
My bad English don’t match your beautiful language.
I think I fall in love with you, but my love cannot match your beauty.
And then daytime. Sun puts light through garden to our bed. Birds are singing on roof. I think how sunlight must make people much happier in this dark country and then I watch you wake up. We see each other naked, without distance. In light of reality. “Good morning,” you say. “You look even more lovely than yesterday.” And we make love again in the morning.
fertilise
fertilise v. 1. to provide (an animal or plant) with sperm or pollen to bring about fertilisation; 2. to supply (soil) with nutrients.
You take me to garden. Is very small, maybe ten square metres. One by one, you introduce me all the plants you have put there. Sixteen different plants in a ten square metres garden. In my home town in China, there only one plant in fields: rice.
You know every single plant’s name, like they your family and you try tell me but I not remember English names so you write them down:
Potato
Daffodil
Lavender
Mint
Spinach
Thyme
Dill
Apple tree
Green beans
Wisteria
Grape vine
Bay tree
Geranium
Beetroot
Sweet corn
Fig tree
Then I tell you all these plants have very different names and meanings in Chinese. So I write down names in Chinese, and explain every word at you.
You laughing when you hear the names. “I never knew flutes grew on trees,” you say. It seems I am big comedy to you. I not understand why so funny. “You can’t say your Rs. It’s fruit not flute,” you explain me. “A flute is a musical instrument. But your Chinese name seems just right: a fig tree really is a fruit tree without flowers.”
“How a tree can just have fruit without having flower first?” I ask.
Like teacher, you describe how insect climbs into fruit to fertilise seed.
What “fertilise”? I need looking in Concise Chinese-English Dictionary.
“Fertilise” make me think Chairman Mao. He likes fertiliser. Was big Mao thing increase productivity, increase plants. Maybe that why China, biggest peasants population country, still alive and become stronger after using fertiliser on the soil.
I ask: “How long a fig tree has figs after insects fertilising it? Like woman have ten months pregnant?”
You look at me, like look at alien.
“Why ten months? I thought it took nine months,” you say.
“Chinese we say shi yue huai tai
.
It means giving the birth after ten months pregnant.”
“That’s strange.” You seem like want to laugh again. “Which day do you start to count the pregnancy in China?” you ask seriously. But how I know? We never being taught this properly in school. Too shameful to teach and to study for our Chinese.
Standing under your fruit tree without flowers, I pick up piece of leaf, and put on my palm. A single leaf, but large. I touch the surface and feel hairy.
“Have you read the Bible?” you ask.
“No.” Of course not, not in China.
You fetch a big huge black book from room. You open the pages. “Actually the fig tree is the oldest of mankind’s symbols.” You point at beginning of book:
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
“What is that?” I am curious.
“It is about Adam and Eve. They used fig leaves to cover their naked bodies.”
“They clever. They knowing fig leaves bigger than other leafs,” I say.
You laugh again.
Your gardening machines everywhere in disorder.
Suddenly I bit shocked, stop. There are some nudity in your garden.
“What this?” I ask.
“Those are my sculptures,” you say.
Sculptures? A naked man no head, facing to ground of the garden. Body twisted, with enormous hands and enormous feet. Close to ground, between the legs, two beautiful eggs, like two half of apples. In the middle of apples, a penis like little wounded bird. I walk to him and touch. Is made of plaster. I amazed by this body, is huge, looks suffered. I remember picture from Michelangelo’s David on your bookshelf, a very healthy and balanced body. But yours, yours far different.
Beside this body statue, some other smalls clay sculptures. Ear, big like basin, in brown. Shape of that ear spread like a big flower. Then more ears, different shape, different size. They lie on the grass quietly, listening us.
Under fig tree another penis made from clay, gentle, innocent. Then another one, looks harder, lies down beside honeysuckle roots, in soil colour. Little clay sculptures there, like they live with plants hundred years.
The noisy London being stopped by brick wall. The grey city kept away by this garden. Plants and sculptures on sunshine. Glamorous, like you. Maybe all mans in London green fingers. Maybe this country too cold and too dim, so plants and garden can showing imagination the spring, the sun, the warmth. And plants and garden giving love like womans warm mans life.
When I stand in garden with sixteen different plants, I think of Chinese mans. Chinese city-mans not plant-lover at all. Shameful for Chinese city-mans pour passion onto those leafs. He be considered a loser, no position in society. But you, you different. Who are you?
instruction
instruction n. 1. order to do something; 2. teaching-pl. information on how to do or use something.
We have so much sex. We make love every day and every night. Morning, noon, afternoon, late afternoon, evening, early night, late night, midnight, even in the dreams. We make love in sun, we make love in grey afternoon, and we make love at raining night. We make love on narrow bench of garden, under fig tree, on hammock covered by the grape leafs, by kitchen sink, on dinner table, on anywhere we feel like to make love. I feel scared towards your huge energy. You come into me strong like a storm blowing a wooden house in the forest, and you come into me deep like a hammer beating the nail on the wall. You ask me if it feels good, and I say it make me feel comfortable.
“Only comfortable!?”
“Yes,” I tell you. “I find your body is very comfortable, like nothing else I find in this uncomfortable country.”
Do I feel shame about sex? Yes, I do, in beginning. A lot. Is such taboo in China. I never really know what is sex before. Now I naked everyday in the house, and I can see clearly my desire. Recent I dream few times that I am naked in street, in market, and even on highway. I run through busy street fast as I can to get home. But still, everybody in street surprising to see I am naked.
What this dream about?
You say this dream about shame or fear of being exposed.
Every time we make love you produce so much sperm on my skin like the spring on the Trafalgar Square, you are worried sometimes that maybe I get pregnant. We only want have each other and we don’t want let the third person take over our love.
You say we need use the condom.