It was drizzling that day, and Prague was wrapped in a grey mist. The greyness made Tianyi think of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Joke, though this Prague was no longer the gentle Prague of Milan Kundera’s novels. But, as Chun kept emphasising, the Czechs were gentle people. Indeed they are, Tianyi thought. The old sinologist and his son were very gentle. Two days before, when they were visiting the Czech National Library, Tianyi had spoken to a group of Czech students who were studying Chinese, Tony among them. Each in turn explained his or her Chinese name. Tianyi praised each one, hesitating only at Tony’s. She told him it sounded rather ordinary. Tony became anxious, explaining that his father had given it to him, that it had a good meaning. Tianyi rushed to correct herself. Yes, of course, now that she thought about, it did sound like a good name. He gave a shy, gentle smile.
They stood at Dvorak’s grave in the rain. They had brought flowers and a candle. To their surprise, Tony’s elderly father was standing there, waiting for them. The head of their group hurried over to shake his hand. They had no idea how long he had been waiting in the rain.
Tianyi, not anticipating how cold it would be, was inadequately dressed and shivered. Tony removed his down jacket and draped it over her shoulders. Tianyi made a half-hearted attempt to refuse it, but he was insistent, saying in his stumbling Chinese: ‘You … must wear it … because … you are a woman … I am a man … You are a guest, I am a host …’ She accepted it and felt instantly warmer. Well, that was a good enough reason for wearing it, wasn’t it? It made her look rather comical, and their group leader said she looked just like the Good Soldier Schweik.
They all posed for a photograph. Tony put the candle into the candleholder on the grave, and lit it. The small flame glittered like crystal in the rain, making the gravestone glitter in its turn. The gravestone in the rain was a warm, gentle memory, one she would never forget.
Many years later, Tony would come to Beijing. With him came the young Chinese woman who had been washing dishes in the restaurant in Prague, now his wife.
Autumn in Karlovy Vary was bathed in a majestic gold. A golden wind blew golden leaves onto golden rooftops. Under golden rays of sunshine, Tianyi walked past stalls lining the streets, full of glassware that glinted like melting snow on mountain peaks. She spotted a particularly fine and very cheap set of tall-stemmed glasses with gilded rims. Czech glass was famous, of course. But few people knew that the glass from Karlovy Vary was the finest.
The walls of an ancient fortress lined the shady side of the street. Here too were the springs, the most magical part of the town. Drinking from them required a special procedure, starting with the purchase of a ceramic pot. The market stalls around the springs were piled high with these pots, in all different styles. Unlike the clay in Chinese pots, this clay was warm to the touch, and had a mellow gleam like jade in the sunlight. Tianyi bought a pretty one, glazed a dark red, the colour of red bean paste, and decorated with a grey rose. It cost her almost nothing. According to the embassy’s secretary, Gao, people used these pots to scoop up the water from the spring. She tried it and, although the water seemed a little saline, it was warm and tasted pleasant. At the springs, Tianyi saw something very odd: a Czech woman put a rose into the water, and before the eyes of the onlookers, it turned the colour of iron-sand. When she took it out, it was withered and had lost its fragrance, but acquired a strong mineral smell. So this was what Karlovy Vary was famous for! Little Gao told them that all the shops sold these chalky-gray, mineral-covered roses. The town was known for them.
After lunch they went shopping, and saw the roses everywhere. But for some reason, even after examining them more closely, Tianyi could not summon any interest in buying one. These once-beautiful flowers had metamorphosed into something else entirely. It was fun to watch them change colour, but then there was nothing special about them anymore. It seemed her companions felt the same way. The heap of roses, turned iron-grey, lay motionless looking like the slag left behind after iron smelting. Not a thing of beauty at all.
Tianyi sat very still by the hot spring and thought, so this is Karlovy Vary. This was the place where she had won her first-ever prize, for the film The Tree of Knowledge. That drew her to the town, as if they were old friends. The prize had aroused a flicker of hope in her, had awoken her ambitions. But that was all in the past. It would be foolish to hope for anything new to happen in her life now. No changes would be for the good. So many gorgeous fresh flowers in this life ended up as slag.
24
W hen the trip to the Czech Republic came to an end Tianyi returned to China. Strangely, she could not for the life of her remember what her husband looked like. She had forgotten him. It frightened her.
Cooking was now the fuse that triggered Lian’s temper. He no longer wanted to be a model husband. Whenever he was at home he would lie flat out on the sofa watching the television. The house was like a powder keg, even the slightest spark could set it off. Tianyi had always been sensitive, and now she was a nervous wreck. To calm her nerves, she paid someone to come in and help out every day. The woman was from Anhui, and very capable, though a bit rough around the edges. It only took her two hours to do the laundry, cook and tidy up, but it took the pressure off Tianyi. These days she had to do her writing in secret. Lian did not say anything, but she was very tense all the same. Only once her husband and son had gone to sleep at night did she feel free to sit in front of her old Sitong 2403 word processor. She would stare at its small screen, tapping away at the keyboard, noticing how her fingers were looking rougher by the day, like a countrywoman’s. Here, she could enter into another world, one of her own invention. She knew it was entirely illusory, but whatever it was, it was better than reality. At least in that imaginary world she could force herself to go on living.
Lian did not give her a cent; she was now the family’s sole bread-winner. She knew she must not say anything, that Lian was waiting for her to say something. The barefooted don’t fear the shod and Lian had nothing nowadays, so he had nothing to lose if they fought. But Tianyi did. Their building was full of Lian’s colleagues, who could hear Lian’s constant shouting. It was so ignominious.
Lian behaved like a man possessed. He kept coming up with one madcap idea after another. One day he came back with a gigantic fridge-freezer, then started buying the cheapest meat he could find from the morning market. The problem was, he kept forgetting about it, so it went bad and he had to throw it out. Every time, he would shout at Tianyi: ‘What are you thinking of? Isn’t this your home too? I buy all this food for you, why don’t you defrost it and cook it once in a while?’ Every time he had these outbursts, Tianyi would think of her brother, Tianke. Back then, her husband had been such an meek, easy-going character. Now he was as irascible as Tianke. How had that happened? Maybe he had been like that all along, and had just been hiding it.
He would cycle off to the market and buy up all sorts of rags and tatters, even stuffing them underneath their bed. Their home became such a mess that it really upset Tianyi. One day … The thought reminded her of the time before her marriage. She used to think then too, One day … Meaning: One day I’ll get away from the you all, and go to a happier place where I’ll be free of worries and the world will belong to me. Was Heaven the only place you could hope for happiness? The thought made her tremble. She had dreamed about it so many times as a child. Was death what it took for people to enter a world of contentment? She had made the decision, as a young woman, to leave her mother and brother, to find a world that belonged to her alone. But she was no longer young. If she left the people around her now, would she have the energy to create a world of her own? She doubted it, and that frightened her. Really frightened her. She had better hang on, make the best of things. Put up with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. She remembered Lin Biao’s exhortation to the fighters going to Vietnam: ‘Endure.’ But what did ‘endure’ mean for her? Getting old and grey and sinking into dementia? She could not bear to think about it.