by Qiu Xiaolong
‘Your reserved books are still here,’ she said with an engaging dimple. ‘I’ll have my colleagues bring up the new ones as quickly as possible.’
It was said that the library would soon develop an open-shelf system, but no one could tell when. As it was, it took a lot of time for the books to be found by the staff members in accordance with the request and sent up from the lower level. Ling really helped speed this process up.
That day she was wearing a pink short-sleeved blouse and a white skirt, holding out the pile of his reserved books in her bare arms. She was like a peach blossom blazing out of a white paper fan – an inexplicably enchanting image he recalled from a Ming dynasty play. He began conceiving some lines in the back of his mind when the noisy arrival of several teenage readers interrupted his reveries.
According to the library rules, it required a special card to check out any foreign language books; otherwise he had to read them in-house. The Cultural Revolution having ended not too long ago, the government authorities still saw English books as informed with subversive Western ideologies, and exercised control as a matter of course.
For the English Department at Beijing Foreign Language University, there was only one library card for staff members, and that with a limit of three books. As a third-year student, he knew better than to approach his teachers for the use of the card, but for his paper on T.S. Eliot, he found in the university only one collection of Eliot criticism, which had been published almost thirty years earlier.
As the one and only solution, he had to visit the Beijing Library as often as possible, to read there as long as possible, and to make bunches of cards with reference notes on them for his thesis. It was the last summer vacation of his college years, and he chose to stay in Beijing. Though homesick, he could hardly succeed in concentrating, he knew, in that steamer-like attic room in Shanghai.
And he believed he was making some progress, thanks to the contributing ambience of the profoundly peaceful, ancient library. Putting down the cards, he caught his thoughts wandering to the origins of the library, of which there were differing accounts. It was most likely a complex of numerous imperial halls attached to the Forbidden City, where the emperors discussed various issues with official scholars. After 1949, it was renamed the Beijing Library, and the People’s Daily used the change as another opportunity to rave about the new socialist society, in which ordinary people could spend their days reading and studying in the erstwhile imperial complex. Its location was truly excellent, adjacent to North Sea Park with the White Pagoda visible through the vista of green foliage, and across the White Stone Bridge, close to the Central South Sea Complex, the present-day residential complex for the top Party leaders.
It was not ideal, however, as a library. The wooden lattice windows, refitted with tinted glass like in the old days, admitted little natural light. So along the vast desks each reader was equipped with a green-shaded lamp. But he actually liked that, feeling a subtle effect of the once imperial surrounding him. Some of the dust-covered shelves could have been leftovers from the old days too, instilling the tradition as well as the history in an invisible way.
‘Another long day in the library?’ Ling came back to him, asking the question rhetorically. ‘It’s a bit later for you this morning.’
‘Something wrong with the bike tire. It took quite a while for me to find a repairer around the Xisi area.’
Usually he arrived at opening time and stayed till closing, she knew that. He had to make the best of his time there. Retrieving a butterfly bookmark from a reserved copy, he added half-jokingly, ‘Thanks to your help, now I can read while waiting for the arrival of the new books. But it’s just like in a classical poem, “A beauty’s favor really weighs you down.”’
‘Come on, Chen Cao. You don’t have to put on your poet cap for me.’
Since when had he got used to talking to her like that? Perhaps it was just a pleasant prelude to a long day of reading in peace and quiet – surely not like those scenes in Eliot’s ‘Prelude’, with a lonely horse steaming and stamping in the lighting of the lamp, or an ancient woman gathering twigs in the vacant lots …
Three or four weeks earlier, he recalled, sitting alone at the desk, it was to her that he had handed his first request slip in the library. An attractive girl in her early or mid-twenties, she looked up at him with a ray of sunshine suddenly squeezing in through the tinted windows. She asked him a couple of routine questions over the counter, her large, clear eyes reminiscent of the high, cloudless autumn sky over Beijing.
The next day, when he was waiting at the counter, digging out a copy of Poetry from his satchel, she said, eyeing his college badge on the breast pocket, ‘You’re from Beijing Foreign Language University? Not too many books in its library. I know, I studied there too.’
So she had noticed him. Possibly because of the odd mixture of his reading list: poetry, philosophy and mysteries, the last of which he needed simply to refresh his mind in the midst of the difficult paper.
‘Then you know what? There’s only one book about T.S. Eliot in the university library, a collection of New Criticist essays, which was published so many years ago.’
‘Wow,’ she said, her fine features animated with a cute, exaggerated arching of her eyebrows, ‘you are writing your paper on T.S. Eliot. On The Waste Land?’
He nodded, not without a touch of excitement. It was unusual to have someone talking to him about Eliot. And she was an alumna as well. Presumably a worker-peasant-soldier college student during the years of the Cultural Revolution. Those days, students had been selected in accordance to Mao’s class theory. It was beyond his wildest dreams at the time, dogged with the shadow of his black family background.
‘Since you practically come here every day,’ she said, ‘you can leave your books on hold at closing time. They will be kept here overnight. Then you won’t have to wait for them again the next morning.’
‘That’s a great idea!’
That did indeed save him a lot of time. Normally, it took at least half an hour for the books to come up on a small lift from the lower level, a sort of basement, where the royal households allegedly used to keep large ice blocks for summer use, as he had read in a martial art novel.
‘But I may not be able to come every day, so the reserved books—’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll tell my colleagues about it,’ she said, putting a cardboard ‘reserved’ label on top of the books. ‘No one will touch them for a couple of days. You are special.’
Special’s the special way people says it. On a moment of impulse, he produced out of his satchel a newly published magazine, and opened it to the page with his poem printed on it. ‘It’s a copy I bought on the way to the library. By the way, my name is Chen Cao.’
She read the poem, and then another time, more closely. ‘I like it very much. My name is Ling.’
It was perhaps just an exchange of polite words between a helpful librarian and a grateful reader.
That evening, however, he pushed his bike out of the parking lot to see her standing with hers under the ancient arch of the library gate. He pulled out abreast with her, as if by chance.
With her taking the lead, the two of them rode through a maze of quaint hutong lanes, past those old sihe quadrangle houses with white walls and black tiles. A stray tabby cat, startled by his bike bell spilling into the tranquil corner, jumped out in front of them. The two of them exchanged pleasant words, making turns through the gathering dusk till an intersection at Xisi, where she parked her bike to change for the subway. He stood there, watching her move down the subway stair to a landing, above which a mural showed an Urge girl carrying grapes in her bare arms, walking up with the bangle on her ankle shining, in infinitely light steps, like grateful smile in summer breath.
Now this morning, like other mornings, he was enjoying a moment of reverie before he started reading under a green-shaded lamp. Sitting at a seat not far from the counter, he could look up sideways for th
e arrival of the requested books – and at her too, occasionally, as it had been too much of a temptation for him.
She had been nice to him, going out of her way to help him, but he knew little about her.
Among the reserved books, one was an annotated collection of Eliot’s early poems. It was a difficult period for the poet, who insisted on writing and working hard instead of opting for an easy life with a well-paid job through the connections of his family, or through those of his wife Vivienne.
But what fascinated Chen was the tension between Eliot’s impersonal theory and personal writing. Vivienne’s neurotic worries about ‘Prufrock’ being his swan song drove him to a nervous breakdown, which precipitated, paradoxically, his writing The Waste Land. The long poem included the fragmented scenes of her bored monologue, as well as bleak allusions to his sexual frustration. Taking a deep breath, Chen started to make cards for his paper. Those contradictions in the poet might provide him an unexplored perspective.
Soon he lost himself in the lines which stretched on like a tedious investigation, in spite of his effort at sorting through the suspicious clues. At one stage of the earlier drafts of The Waste Land, he was surprised to find Eliot had actually played with an alternative working title: ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’.
But he found himself looking up again, feeling slightly disappointed at failing to see her there. He caught himself thinking about a mermaid singing, dancing, coming through the waves in ever-changing colors, white and black, wreathing herself with seaweed …
Surely these Eliotic lines made his mind digress again, and he shook himself out of the trance.
In a year, after completing his paper on Eliot at the end of his college studies, where would he possibly find himself?
His mother, all alone in Shanghai, wanted him to go back there after graduation. She needed his support after his father passed away toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, though she had not said so explicitly to him. But it was not up to her, or to him, to choose. Under the policy of state-assignment for college graduates, he had to take a job wherever the government assigned him. If he said no, he would be politically stigmatized, and remain jobless for years.
Perhaps he would have to consider himself lucky for obtaining a job like Ling’s, with which he would at least be able to read to his heart’s content. But then he hastened to tell himself that he was here because of his paper, not because of anything, or anybody else.
Again, he managed to pull his thoughts back to the books, wondering whether it would be feasible to translate some of Eliot’s poems into Chinese as an appendix of his paper.
The next time he put down the poetry collection, it was past twelve. Lunch then presented a problem. Reaching into the satchel, he touched the cold steamed bun that was as hard as a rock, practically unchewable, from the school canteen the day before. It was arguably not too much of a disaster for the summer time, but he did not have any appetite for it.
There were some inexpensive snack eateries he liked in Beijing, but few in the area around the library. Nothing except for a Cool Korean Noodles sporting a long hose of cold water in front to cool the noodles. The chilly noodles did not agree, however, with his stomach. As for the tourist-frequented restaurants nearby, they were way beyond his budget. Fangshan, for instance, was a high-end restaurant which used to serve the Qing royal family exclusively in the North Sea Park.
He walked out to seat himself on the stone steps of the ancient courtyard outside the library, with the Qing dynasty bronze cranes and turtle still staring out along the ancient verandah. Before reaching his hand into the satchel again, he gazed up at the tilted eaves decked with yellow dragon tiles, woven with constantly changing white clouds.
All of a sudden, he was aware of Ling standing behind him, holding in her hands two enamel bowls.
‘Lunch time,’ she said.
‘Oh, I almost forgot. But there’s nothing really good nearby, you know.’
‘I know, but we have a staff canteen here. It serves deep-fried croaker today.’
‘That’s fantastic.’ It sounded incredible to him. Croaker was served only during the national holidays at the college canteen.
‘Then you just follow me.’
‘How?’
‘We’re allowed to take in our visiting relatives.’
She appeared to be in earnest, raising the two enamel bowls in her hands. It was an offer too good for him to decline.
He followed her to the back of the courtyard, moving across another winding ancient corridor to the staff canteen, in front of which an apple tree was blossoming like a transparent dream.
Immediately, he became aware of people’s curious glances at the two of them. Some of her colleagues knew the man walking beside her was nothing but a reader.
She ordered a portion of deep-fried croaker for him, and of Shanghai-style pork ribs for herself. The fish tasted more delicious than he remembered. With his portion gone in less than three or four minutes, he felt embarrassed as she put pieces of the sweet and sour ribs into his bowl.
‘I cannot have too much meat,’ she said by way of explanation before she rose to fetch a bowl of tomato and egg drop soup for him.
It might not be true. She had an athletic figure with long and shapely legs. A colleague of hers sidled up to their table in the corner, as if anxious to discuss with her some library issues, but ended up saying only two or three irrelevant words, studying him across the table most of the time. He kept eating in silence, his head hung low over the bowl.
At the end of the lunch, Ling, walking out by his side, said, ‘You want to take a short lunch break?’
In Beijing, people were used to taking naps in the middle of the day. In the library, he too took an occasional nap with his head resting on the desk. For the moment, after a generous portion of the deep-fried fish plus the ribs, he didn’t feel like going back so quickly to Eliot’s poems.
‘That would be nice. But—’
‘You may take a break at my office.’
So she had an office for herself. Apparently she was not just an ordinary librarian working at the counter. That accounted for her not being there all the time. But a short break in her office?
‘Beijing Library has some exchanges with other libraries in the world,’ she said, seeing the question in his eyes. ‘Still, with not too much work in the foreign liaison office, I do not have to stay in it all the time.’
This job of hers was even better than he had imagined. She came to the counter merely to help.
‘Alternatively, how about a visit to the rare book section?’ she said, aware of his hesitation.
He had heard of the rare book section, which was said to be open only for ‘distinguished visitors’, which he was not.
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll take you there.’ She seemed so confident of her capability or privilege, leading him to the office at the end of a long corridor. ‘But I have to stay with you in the room. It’s the library rule.’
So they arrived at a large room at the end of the corridor.
In spite of a note on the door saying that it was closed for restoration, she took out a key and opened the door to the spacious room with glass cabinets lined along the walls, containing books in exquisite blue cloth cases. Almost like a special museum exhibition from the Ming and Qing dynasties, except that he could take the books into his own hands for a closer look, as she explained to him. A thin layer of fine dust under those cabinets seemed to speak about the long, forgotten history.
‘Sorry, I have to write a fax,’ she said, seating herself in a folding chair in the corner, ‘to an Australian library. You can look around for yourself.’
Instead of those valuable thread-bound books in blue cloth boxes, he found himself drawn toward a silk scroll unfolded under a glass counter. The time-yellowed paper of the scroll testified to its age. The scroll presented a tiny figure pushing out the bamboo hut door to the high mountains, and to a large blank space covering about hal
f the size of the painting. He tried to make out the elusive meaning of those lines in the cursory style above the mountains, but with limited success.
Taking out his pen and card, he started scribbling the characters, stroke by stroke, as if lost in the vision that the mountains alone might be able to understand against the surrounding blankness.
The moment the painting / of a man opening the door / in the mountains, and of the door / opening the man into the painting …
How long he lost himself studying the scroll, he didn’t know. When he looked up, she must have been done with the fax sheets quite a while ago.
The room seemed to be suddenly hot. She had kicked off her sandals and put on her earphones, listening to a Walkman on her lap, looking relaxed. He felt a violent wonder at her bare feet beating a Bolero on the ancient floor. She looked up, smiling, as if taking his intensity over the scroll like the silver fish escaping the sleepy eyes from the inscrutable lines, before she said she was going to send out the fax from her own office.
It was time for them to leave, he understood.
Afterward, she did not reappear behind the counter in the reading room. It might be just as well. A beauty’s favor, he reflected with a touch of self-irony, might not be that easy to pay back. Already more than enough favor for him in one single day.
But like in a proverb, it takes coincidences to make a story. Later that afternoon, the electricity suddenly went out in the library, and the readers had to return the books and leave in a rush. Ling hurried over to the counter to help.
He carried the pile of books back to her and said, ‘If only I could carry them back to the campus.’
‘I understand. But what if there’s also an electricity outage on the campus? It’s citywide, I’ve just heard.’
‘Well …’ In that case, he might not be able to do anything back at school. ‘You’re leaving at five or five thirty?’
‘Five. Why?’