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.’