Dragon Games

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  Da Long put his arms under his wife gently and carried her to the couch. Then he picked up the heavy mattress and carried it through the room into the kitchen. It fit exactly into the space between the wall and the stove. He moved the stereo into the kitchen, set it up next to the sink and turned it up.

  He heard Min Fang grunting for breath and hurried to change his clothes. He pulled on a clean pair of trousers and his favorite jacket, brown corduroy, that Min Fang had patched the elbows of so often.

  Da Long carried his wife into the kitchen, lay her on the mattress and put a pillow under her head. He was filled with a sense of ease that he had not felt for months. He walked through the house one last time. The front door was locked and the makeshift curtains hanging over the windows were drawn tightly shut. On the table he had put a letter, with The Book of Changes on top of it, opened to hexagram thirty-three: “When one sees the way ahead so clearly, free from all doubt, a cheerful mood sets in, and one chooses what is right without further thought.”

  He went into the kitchen, closed the door, and pushed the towel against the bottom edge. Propane was heavier than air; it would flow from the canisters like water and drift along the floor at first; that was why the doors had to be especially well insulated at the bottom.

  He turned the music down until it could no longer be heard. Min Fang had always hated it when he had stopped a piece abruptly with the press of a button instead of gradually fading it away. He played the CD of Yin-Yin playing Schubert once more from the beginning.

  Da Long lay down next to Min Fang and turned her on her side so that her right arm was lying over his head and his left arm was under hers. They lay there for a while without moving. His heart was beating wildly in agitation and he could feel hers was too. Gradually they calmed down. He took his time, as though he was waiting for their bodies to be in tune one more time before they took their leave. He reached out behind him and opened the canister. The gas streamed out quietly, with an even hiss. He moved nearer to his wife. Stomach to stomach. Nose to nose. Her warm breath in his face. Her wonderful, beautiful, strong body. Her breasts, which had nourished two children. Her laugh. Her singing. Her happiness in small things, which he had had to learn. That was Min Fang before the poison. He would fall asleep with her in his arms. It was growing dim. The world was sinking. His eyes shut. In the protection of her love.

  Time to sleep. Without fear. To go, without regret. Without grief.

  Free. Thank you.

  You’re closing your eyes. I can’t see it; I feel it, rather.

  Your heart is beating more slowly; the pauses between the beats are getting longer. Will you go before me? Wait for your wife, take me with you.

  Dying in the evening is not a bad thing, Confucius said.

  Here we lie. Deep in the red dusk. Tired from journeying. Hand in hand.

  Is this death?

  TWENTY

  Xiao Hu gazed at his parents, or, to be precise, at what remained of them: two handfuls of ashes in plain wooden urns. He had actually wanted their remains to be kept in just one container, but had been told that was not possible for legal reasons. That was why he had had to take two urns home with him. They stood open on the dining table in front of him now. There was a faint smell of a fire gone cold in the room, or perhaps he was imagining it.

  Xiao Hu gripped his father’s urn with both hands, stood up and started carefully uniting his ashes with his mother’s. A tiny puff of dust rose from the urn and settled in a thin film on the glass table. For a moment Xiao Hu did not know what to do. He could not wipe the remains of his father off the table with a damp cloth. Finally, he took a credit card out of his wallet, scraped the ashes carefully into a little pile, swept them onto a piece of paper and let them trickle into the urn. He closed the urn, held it uncertainly in his hands and began to shake it, hesitantly at first, then more vigorously. His parents had died the way they had lived, Xiao Hu thought; they could only be at peace in a single container. He put the urn on a shelf beneath the television, put down an offering of an orange, his mother’s favorite fruit, for each of them, lit a few joss sticks and bowed several times. He wanted to keep them with him until he and Yin-Yin had decided whether they wanted to scatter the ashes or keep them. It was a question he had not given any thought to yet. Two weeks ago, death had not been a subject that had particularly moved him. Neither his own or that of others. He felt too young to think about his mortality, and he had been spared the loss of loved ones until then. Now, two deaths had hit him at once, and with a force that Xiao Hu himself was surprised by.

  They hadn’t even left a farewell letter. Not a line. After Paul had phoned he had driven to Yiwu immediately. Before they called the police, they had searched the house together, but had not found anything. Only The Book of Changes lay open on the table. The thirty-third hexagram: “DUN – THE RETREAT. The power of the darkness is in ascent.” What did that mean? In that moment, his father seemed as mysterious to him in life as in death.

  “The person of superior character retreats in a spirit of goodwill and withdraws cheerfully. The retreat is easy for him because he does not need to do violence to his convictions by choosing to withdraw . . . The situation is not ambivalent. The inner act of detachment is a clear-cut fact. Thus does one have the freedom to leave. When one sees the way ahead so clearly, free from all doubt, a cheerful mood sets in, and one chooses what is right without further thought. A clear path like this always leads to good.”

  When Xiao Hu had read these lines in the dimness of his parents’ house, he had not understood a word. He had often seen Min Fang and Da Long consult the I Ching; he knew that they valued its advice; later he had referred to it himself, but he had found it difficult to get anything from the coded messages of this book of oracles, with its old-fashioned language full of metaphors. What did his father mean to say to him and Yin-Yin with these words? That he and Mama had gone gladly, or in good spirits, to their deaths? Was that supposed to comfort their children? How could their death lead to anything good? What did “the power of the darkness” mean? It had not played any role in his life so far. The power of light, yes. The power of ascent. The power of positive change. The power of everything-is-possible-there-are-no-limits. Not the power of the darkness.

  His father had not been one to wear his heart on his sleeve. He had been reserved with strangers and had often remained silent even with his children. But for him to have taken his life without taking leave from them, without any words addressed personally to them, was something Xiao Hu could not grasp. He was annoyed and hurt by it. What on earth would his sister say?

  He had had a premonition. That morning. When he saw Paul’s number light up on his cellphone screen he had barely dared to answer the call. The hoarse voice. “Xiao Hu, I’m sorry . . .”Silence. Seconds in which he sensed disaster before it was spoken.

  He had got through the days after that. Gone to work, chaired meetings, organized the cremation, accepted the brief condolences of his colleagues. At the same time, he had felt as though he had been standing outside of himself, as though he were living the life of another person.

  Since the cremation two weeks ago, he had felt worse and worse with each passing day. He slept badly and barely ate anything; at night, he woke up drenched in sweat and he felt exhausted as never before in his life. Finally, he called in sick without really being able to say what he was suffering from. He cited stomach trouble to begin with, and then delayed his return to the office with a series of other excuses.

  He spent the first two days in an almost comatose state in bed. Existing between worlds, sleeping then lapsing into a strange dozing state, floating, waking for short periods before gliding back into the dimness. He had a vague impression of the sounds from the streets – car horns, the sound of traffic, bicycle bells, voices – which seemed to be coming from another reality. He heard cellphones, noises at the door to the apartment, whispers, and calls, and did not know if he was imagining it all. He dreamt peculiar things: about
talking fish, flying cats who only ate bananas, and about his mother, who was suddenly better but could no longer speak, only croak. Like a toad.

  When the noise grew too loud for him, he got up. He got dressed and walked aimlessly through the city. He spent hours in cafés, restless like a person waiting long past the appointed time. He could not imagine what his father’s last thoughts had been. Had he died feeling bitter? Despairing? Or had he done it with a light heart because, this way, he did “not need to do violence to his convictions”? Was that the hidden message? The longer Xiao Hu thought it over, the more he felt, despite his grief, respect for his father’s consistent behavior in rejecting the request that the Party, Sanlitun, or whoever it was, had made of him. He admired his courage; it made him feel respect for his father again, a respect he had thought was forever lost.

  The loneliness was terrible. He felt it particularly at night. The usual stream of thoughts and plans that had otherwise filled his head had been subdued. An odd peace reigned within him, one that he had only felt in rare moments before. The pain and the grief were stronger than he would have thought possible. Given that he had been estranged from his father and had already wrapped his head around his mother’s demise, they had barely exchanged a word for months. Perhaps it was the finality of it that had taken him unawares. The things not said, the questions not asked. All things that he had neglected in the past few years, thinking that there was still time enough to address them if he felt the need to.

  Xiao Hu felt strangely vulnerable. He was not sure if this was due to the death of his parents or to the arrest of his sister. Soon three weeks would have passed and he still did not know what had happened to her. Vanished without a trace. Xiao Hu had thought things like this only happened to poor farmers in remote provinces who did not know how to defend themselves, but never to the sister of a middle-ranking Party cadre in Shanghai. Three weeks without any contact from her – they’d never let that much time lapse without some kind of communication. He had made telephone calls and invited Party comrades out to dinner, had used all his contacts, had even spoken to his boss, who knew people in the ministry of justice in Beijing. His boss had promised to look into it; two days later, he had simply said that he had got nowhere. No explanations, no apologies. Xiao Hu had tried to reach the Party secretary who had questioned him and set him the ultimatum. No luck. After the death of his parents he had been convinced for a few days that it was just a matter of hours until he saw his sister again. Whoever was keeping her under arrest would surely relent after such a loss.

  The power of the darkness.

  Xiao Hu knew the rumors about secret prisons in which desperate people in despair who had petitioned the government directly were held. Farmers whose land had been seized without any compensation or for far too little in payment. Migrant workers who were cheated of their wages by factory owners. Women whose husbands had been abused by the police. Citizens who had no hope of achieving their rights through legal recourse. They traveled to the provincial capitals or straight to Beijing to appeal for justice at the office that had been specially built for such cases. This was a tradition that had its origins in the Ming dynasty, when subjects had made the dangerous journey to the capital to plead for help from the imperial authorities against corrupt officials. The Communist Party had incorporated this right in the constitution after the Revolution, but Xiao Hu knew that it existed mainly on paper. Anyone who tried to exercise it had to reckon with harassment or worse. Nevertheless, he had not wanted to believe the rumors about the secret prisons.

  Every day that passed without him hearing anything from Yin-Yin made him feel more and more uncertain.

  It was his fear for his sister, his feeling that he had to do something for her, mixed with a growing rage over the injustice that was being done to her, that led to him formulating a plan during those few days when he was lost to himself. It did not come overnight. It did not occur to him from one hour to the other, but slowly, almost imperceptibly. He had been sitting in a café in Changle Lu when the idea occurred to him, one so outrageous that he thought it actually might work.

  He wanted to continue what his sister had begun. If the death of his parents was not sufficient cause to set her free, if his contacts made no difference, then only public pressure would do the trick, and in China that could only be achieved via the Internet. Paul had sent him Yin-Yin’s piece by mail from Hong Kong. He wanted to add to it and publish it on the Internet again, but do it more cleverly, without leaving any traces. No e-mails on the subject. No Internet searches from his computer. He would get rid of his laptop afterward so that if they searched his apartment no one could seize it and find the deleted information on his hard drive. He would make a list of more than three dozen websites, Internet forums, chat rooms and blogs, and post the piece on them under an assumed name and address. He knew what key words and expressions the cybersecurity police looked out for; he would avoid using them and hope to slip past the authorities that way. For a couple of hours at least, perhaps even a few days if he was lucky. That should be enough time, he thought, for it to spread widely enough, to reach a critical mass that would make it difficult for the official censor to intervene.

  Yet he hesitated. He distracted himself in cafés with magazines and at home with the television, and found himself developing the plan on long walks. He stood in the darkness in front of the building where Yin-Yin had lived and stared up at her unlit window. He held conversations in his head with his mother, who reminded him of his responsibility as an older brother. He was seized by a restlessness that made it more and more impossible for him to sit quietly in his apartment. He paced back and forth between his kitchen and his living room, read random pages of The Book of Changes and discovered, much to his surprise, more and more sentences that piqued his interest: “The persistence of the lonely person places high demands.” He turned to another page. “Getting used to what is dangerous can easily lead to it entering one’s own nature. One knows it and gets used to evil. Thus does one lose the right path and disaster is the natural consequence.”

  Xiao Hu shook his head. He had not gotten used to evil. He had not even been aware of it.

  “If you are truthful, you have success in your heart and what you do will succeed.”

  Truthfulness in the heart. One of those antiquated phrases that had made him not take the book seriously before. Now it sounded almost like an echo to him. Truthful. What did he have to do now to be truthful? What was important to him if he forgot about everything around him, if he did not let himself be distracted, if he peeled away layer after layer from himself like an onion and went right to his innermost nature? Yin-Yin. Little sister. Big brother.

  “A clear path like this always leads to good.”That was the last sentence that his father had left him.

  Xiao Hu read the hexagram on RETREAT over and over again; the more he read it and the more intently he engaged with it, the more he understood the advice that his father had found within it, which now applied to him too. He had to withdraw. From everything that he had learned in Party training. From colleagues and friends. From his desire to be transferred to Beijing. “The inner act of detachment is a clear-cut fact. Thus does one have the freedom to leave.”

  He realized that a retreat was not the same as the end. A retreat had many faces; it could merely be a detour on the march forward. Properly used, withdrawals were not capitulations, but weapons. ““When one sees the way ahead so clearly, free from all doubt, a cheerful mood sets in . . .”

  The situation was unambiguous.

  Xiao Hu thought about who he could meet that evening. He picked up his iPhone and scrolled through the five hundred-plus contacts in it. He knew countless acquaintances, colleagues, and friends from the Party whom he could get in touch with now to chat about cars, women, property, and stocks and shares. None of them was a friend he could ask for advice about his plans, someone who would encourage him. Maybe Zhou. Yes, he was the one he had spent a lot of time with him after buyi
ng two apartments from his wife last year. Since his parents had died two weeks ago they had only spoken once, briefly; every time Xiao Hu called Zhou was at the hospital, playing golf or out at dinner, and promised to ring back.

  “Hey, Xiao Hu. Sorry I haven’t called. Been too busy.”

  He felt uncomfortable hearing the embarrassment in his friend’s voice. “I know. No worries. Am I disturbing you?”

  “No. What’s up?”

  “Nothing in particular. I wanted to ask if you guys were free this evening?”

  Zhou hesitated before replying. “Hmm. This evening is no good.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Not good either. Maybe next week.”

  “Okay. When?”

  “I . . . I don’t know what my shifts are yet. Best if I call you at the beginning of the week.”

  Xiao Hu hated poor excuses. “Zhou, is everything all right?”

  “Of course? Why shouldn’t it be? Why are you asking?”

  “Just asking.”

  It was as if he had an infectious disease. He wondered if he was on some kind of list of people to be avoided. Did Zhou know something? The doctor was also a member of the Communist Party, though a passive one, but perhaps he had heard news about him from within the Party by chance through a patient or a relative that Da Long himself was not aware of yet. Or had he simply sensed that his friend’s fate was wending its way toward something undesirable and was therefore keeping his distance? Did he think that the double suicide was not the end of Xiao Hu’s problems but only the beginning?