The Language of Solitude

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  * * *

  Da Long, where are you? What are you doing? I can hear you moving around in the kitchen; I can’t make out what you’re doing from those sounds. You’re not clattering pots and pans. You’re not washing dishes. You’ve been gone so long and you know how I don’t do well without you. I never have. Come to me. Sit on the bed again. Tell me what you’re doing. Tell me something. Read to me. I need to hear your voice. I need you.

  * * *

  He returned to check on Min Fang every now and then, gave her water, and held her hands, which seemed colder than usual. For a moment he was overcome by doubt: Was he allowed to do what he was doing? Was he allowed to raise himself to a position of mastery over life and death? He could not ask his children for advice or his wife for her agreement. Was he allowed to decide for her? For himself, he had no doubt. He was free, at least in this respect. Da Long bent over his wife and kissed her forehead, her mouth, and her neck. He pushed her gently to one side and lay next to her. He took the book from the nightstand, turned to hexagram thirty-three, and read:

  “ ‘Dun—The Retreat. The circumstances are such that the enemy forces, helped by the times, are prevailing. In this case, to retreat is the right thing, and it is through withdrawal that success is gained. Success consists of conducting a retreat in the right way. Withdrawal is not to be confused with flight. Retreat is a sign of strength. Do not waste the right moment so long as you are in full possession of your strength and wits.’ ”

  * * *

  Only now do I realize what you have in mind. Are you sure? Have you thought through everything? It’s not in your power to go back on this. I wish you would let me go alone. You are too young. You are in good health.

  * * *

  Twilight had fallen outside. Da Long got up, went outside, sat on the steps, and lit a cigarette. It was a mild and pleasant evening; there was no lovelier month than May. Not as hot and humid as the summer, but no longer as cold as the winter, when he felt more and more pain in his bones every year. A bird cheeped on the shed roof over the roar of the highway in the background. He heard a freight train pass in the distance.

  Was there an alternative? Of course, he thought, there was always an alternative, but it was not one that he wanted to choose. He was tired, incredibly tired. When the water has flowed out of the bottom of the lake . . .

  When the bird fell silent, Da Long got up and tidied the house. He mopped the floor, took the laundry off the line, and piled it up carefully. He picked up the cigarette butts and swept the courtyard thoroughly. It should not look like they had left the house in a rush, even though that would have been impossible anyway, with Min Fang’s condition. They were not fleeing. They were retreating, and if a retreat was conducted in the right way, it was a sign of strength. That was what the I Ching said. That was what Da Long thought.

  He looked in the closet for the white nightgown that Yin-Yin had brought back for her mother after a trip to Beijing a few years ago. The long sleeves were decorated with frills, and there was a ribbon and beautiful mother-of-pearl embroidery on the front. Min Fang had laughed, embarrassed, when she unpacked it, and said that she was too old for it, but Yin-Yin had contradicted her with vigor. And then Min Fang had indeed worn it, so often and for so long that she finally put it away in the closet because the material was getting thin and she was worried that she was wearing it out from wearing it and washing it too many times. He sniffed it, hoping to find a trace of her scent on it, but it smelled only of laundry detergent and the closet. How big it seemed now on her emaciated body. It was difficult for him to pull it over her stiff arms and legs. In the end, he used the scissors to widen the neckline at the back. He combed her thin gray hair and fastened it with a hair tie. Min Fang had liked to wear her hair that way. He wiped her face; he had cut her finger- and toenails only a few days earlier. The person of superior character retreats in a spirit of goodwill and withdraws cheerfully.

  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 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, of brown corduroy, which Min Fang had patched the elbows of so often.

  Da Long carried his wife into the kitchen, laid 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 I Ching 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 sealed at the bottom.

  He turned the music down until it could no longer be heard. Min Fang had always hated it when he 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 that 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. Thanks to 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. How wary we are of wandering. Hand in hand.

  Is this perhaps death?

  XX

  * * *

  Xiao Hu gazed at his parents, or, to be precise, at what remained of them: two handfuls of grayish-black ashes in plain dark-brown 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, fine cloud 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 possibly 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 be at peace only in a single container. He put the urn on a she
lf next to the television, put down an offering of an orange, his mother’s favorite fruit, for each of them, lit a few incense 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 nor 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 Leibovitz had called, Xiao Hu had driven to Yiwu immediately. Before they called the police, he and Paul had searched the house together, but they had not found anything. Only the I Ching 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 death as in life.

  “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.”

  Xiao Hu had read these lines in the dimness of his parents’ house, but 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 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 death? 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. The entire morning. When he saw Paul Leibovitz’s number light up on his cell phone screen, he had barely dared to answer the call. The hoarse voice. “Xiao Hu, I’m sorry . . .” Silence. Seconds that seemed endlessly long and hard, in which he sensed disaster before it was spoken.

  He had gotten 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 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 first cited stomach trouble, 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 street—car horns, traffic, bicycle bells, voices—which seemed to be coming from another reality. He heard cell phones, noises at the door to the apartment, whispers, and calls, and did not know if he was imagining it all. He dreamed peculiar things: about talking fish, flying cats who ate only 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 felt only 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 to address them if he felt the need to.

  Xiao Hu felt strangely vulnerable. He was not sure if it 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 once thought things like this happened only 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 gotten 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 would be 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 people who had petitioned the government directly in despair were held, supposedly for days, weeks, or months. 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 occu
r 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, a thought 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 be achieved only via the Internet. Paul Leibovitz 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 emails on the subject. No Internet searches from his computer. He would get rid of his laptop, 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 Internet 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 were lucky. That could 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 Yin-Yin had lived in 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 I Ching, 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.”