When Red is Black - [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 03]

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “She, too, suffered terribly Half her hair was shaved off down to the scalp—in a special style called the Yin-Yang haircut, designed for class enemies—a cruel play on the coincidence of their family names. She did not even bother to wear a hat, as if proud of the price she had had to pay for her passion.

  “What’s worse, she was not allowed to see Yang. After a day’s work, she could only wander, alone, around the hut in which he was kept, hoping to catch a glimpse of his silhouette against the window. She kept repeating the lines he had taught her, ‘What a starry night this, / but not that night, long ago, lost. / For whom do I find myself standing here, / against the wind and the frost / deep in the night?’

  “Not long afterward, Yang fell sick again. Because of his lack of cooperation with the school authorities, they made it hard for him to get proper treatment. The barefoot doctor believed that a silver acupuncture needle could cure any illness, because Chairman Mao said that traditional Chinese medicine could perform miracles. Yin was denied the right to visit him until the very last day of his life, when everybody could see that he was beyond hope. It was a cold day, and his hands in hers were even colder. All his roommates left the room, making one excuse or another, leaving the two of them together. Holding her hand, he remained conscious to the end, even though he was no longer able to speak. He died in his dorm room, in her arms. As a poem Yang had translated says: ‘If only your body, cold as ice, as snow, / could be brought back life / by the warmth of mine. . . .’

  “Two years later, the Cultural Revolution came to an end. The cadre school dissolved. She went back to her college. Because of the English she had learned from him, she was assigned to teach English.

  “As for Yang, it was officially declared that he had died a natural death. He had not been executed or beaten to death like some intellectuals, so there was no need to look into the specific circumstances of his last days. So many had died during those years. No one bothered. Nothing was done about him in the first few years after the Cultural Revolution.

  “In the early eighties, the Party authorities issued a document entitled ‘Correction of the Anti-Rightist movement in the Fifties,’ in which having labeled such a large number of intellectuals as Rightists was acknowledged as a mistake, although ‘at the time, there might have been a few of them who harbored malicious intentions against the government.’ Anyway, the survivors were no longer Rightists, and they shot off firecrackers in celebration. There was a movie about such a Rightist who had been lucky enough to find his love during his Rightist years, and survived miraculously, of course, to make new contributions to the construction of socialism.

  “Not so Yang. In a belated memorial service for him, Yang was posthumously de-Rightisted and called ‘Comrade Yang’ once again. A few of his colleagues attended the service. Some of them were actually summoned to it because the school authorities were worried that people might have already forgotten about him. At the memorial service, Yang’s death was declared a ‘sad and serious loss to modern Chinese literature.’ The event was reported in the local newspaper.

  “There was a small incident not covered in the report though. Qiao Ming, one of the former cadre school leaders, also came to the service. Yin angrily spat in his face. People separated them in a hurry. ‘The past is past,’ people said to her, and to Qiao too.

  “Life went on as usual. She remained single and edited a poetry manuscript left by him. A collection of his poems was then published by Shanghai Literature Publishing House. But it was not until after the publication of Death of a Chinese Professor that anyone began to talk about Yang again. Or, to be exact, about the romantic affair between Yin and Yang.

  “That’s the gist of the story,” Peiqin said at the end of her narrative. “What I have told you is also based on information I obtained from the library, from reviews, or from people’s reminiscences. “

  “Isn’t there anything else?”

  “Well, there have been various responses to the book.”

  “Tell me about those responses.”

  “Some believed that this must be a true story of their love affair. A few even blamed her for his death. But for their affair, Yang would not have ruffled the feathers of the authorities and suffered persecution. He might have survived.” Peiqin shifted to a new position, nestling against Yu’s shoulder. “Some discredited the story totally. For one thing, a cadre school was no place for romantic love. The dorm rooms were so cramped. They would not have been able to find any place to meet, even if they had the desire and the energy. Not to mention the political atmosphere. The officials of the cadre school would have been too vigilant.”

  “So what do you think of the book?”

  “When I read it for the first time, I had mixed feelings about it. I liked some parts, but not others. And to tell the truth, I used to be such a fan of Yang’s work, so I was more or less disappointed.”

  “Really! You have not told me about that.”

  “I read most of his poetry in the early seventies, and it was not that safe, you know, to discuss such writing.”

  “But I still don’t see why you were disappointed. It’s her book, not his.”

  “Well, don’t laugh at me, but I thought he deserved someone better, and my first reading could have been affected by my bias.”

  “You mean someone better than the woman in the picture on the back cover of the book—a withered, middle-aged, bespectacled woman?” Yu asked.

  “Not exactly. It could also have been a better book,” Peiqin said. “I did not like the overly detailed introduction about Red Guard organizations. It’s almost irrelevant. And then some of the descriptions of the affair put me off.”

  “What was wrong with them?”

  “Some parts were really touching but some were a bit too melodramatic. It was almost like a teenage infatuation. It’s hard to imagine that a scholar of his age and caliber would have been so naive.”

  “Well, in those years, people clung to anything,” he said. “They would grasp at any straw to preserve some semblance of humanity. This might have been true for her—and for him too.”

  “That might be so,” she agreed. “Perhaps I was too much of a fan of his writing. This time, after having gone into their backgrounds, and having read the book more closely for a second time, I realize that she must have really cared for him. Too strong an emotion might have not been good for her writing. She was such a pitiable woman.”

  “I think so, too,” he said, reaching for a pack of cigarettes on the nightstand.

  “Please don’t,” she said, turning to look at the alarm clock on the nightstand. “We have talked such a long time about others.”

  Under the quilt, he felt her toes touching his shin. It was just like in their Yunnan years, with the brook gurgling behind their hut.

  He saw the message in her eyes and removed the pillow propped against the headboard. It was one of those rare nights of privacy on which they did not have to try to hold their breath, or to make as little sound and movement as possible, as they clasped each other tightly.

  Afterwards, he still held her hand, peacefully, for a long while.

  To his surprise, Peiqin started snoring a little, though ever so lightly. It happened sometimes when she was overtired. She must have stayed up late reading for the last few nights. For his sake.

  After all these years, he still found Peiqin full of surprises.

  He sometimes wondered whether she should have lived a different life. Pretty, talented, she might not have crossed his path but for the Cultural Revolution, to which Yu actually had a reason to be grateful. So many years after the national disaster, she was still with him, even joining him now in an investigation.

  Despite all his disappointments, Yu considered himself a lucky guy. But all of a sudden, he also felt disturbed. It was not just about Yin and Yang; it was something more vague, yet personal. He realized that there was no telling whether another Cultural Revolution might befall China.

  In the moment
before he went to sleep, strange ideas came crowding into his mind. Fortunately, Peiqin is not a writer—that was one of his half-formed thoughts as he finally fell asleep that night.

  * * * *

  Chapter 9

  C

  hief Inspector Chen woke up with an unpleasant thought, as annoying as the shrill ringing of the alarm o’clock on the night-stand. He was going to give in, although he was still too disoriented to tell what he was conceding.

  He got up, rubbing his eyes. It still appeared gray outside the window.

  It was not his case, he told himself one more time. Yu had been doing all that could be done. Any interference by him would not make a difference, not at this stage. His priority must be the translation of the New World proposal sitting on his desk.

  Gu had not pressed him for the translation the way Party Secretary Li had urged him to head the investigation, at least not as directly, although it occurred to him that White Cloud might have been assigned to him not just as a helper but also as a subtle reminder that he was to concentrate on the translation.

  Still, Chen felt that he had to do something with respect to the investigation. There were a number of reasons for him to do so. He ought to pitch in for the sake of Yang, if for nothing else, a writer whose career had been tragically cut short, and whose works Chen should have read earlier.

  In his middle school years, Chen had read Martin Eden, a novel translated by Yang, and knew Yang was one of the best-regarded translators of English fiction, but then Chen started studying English and reading books in their original language. When he himself started writing poetry, Chen did not read any of Yang’s poems—they were not easily available at that time. By the time Yang’s poetry collection came out, Chen was already busy as an emerging Party cadre, too busy to do as much reading as he wanted.

  In fact, his own writing career had now reached a critical stage, Chen knew. There were too many books waiting to be read. In the middle of one homicide investigation after another, however, he did not know how he could ever manage to keep up.

  He felt an affinity to Yang, a poet as well as a translator. But for the dramatic reversal of politics, what had happened to Yang could have happened to Chen.

  Chen did not know that Yang had translated from Chinese into English, an attempt Chen had never made before, except for a few fragmented lines for a friend from the United States. He started to brew a pot of coffee, a Brazilian brand, a gift from her, that faraway friend.

  He took out Yang’s poetry translation manuscripts that Yu had given him. Instead of studying the computer printout, he focused on the handwritten manuscript. The two were practically identical. In his research for a paper he had written years earlier about The Waste Land, he had learned that a handwritten manuscript might be a useful entree into the mind of a creative writer.

  A general impression he had gotten of Yang’s manuscript was that he had made a conscientious effort to make the text readable to contemporary English readers, but what caught Chen’s attention were some abbreviated notes left in the margins.

  “Chapter 3,” “C 11,” “C 8 or C26,” “C 12 if not C 15,” “For the conclusion.”

  Apparently, these references had meaning for Yang alone.

  Perhaps they indicated the books consulted for the purpose of the translation, Chen speculated. Classical Chinese poems could be open to endless interpretations. As a renowned scholar, Yang might have done a lot of research before settling upon one particular rendition.

  But that did not make much sense. For that purpose, Yang should have jotted down page numbers, not chapters. It would have been much easier for him to check his citations afterward.

  The collection included a number of poems Chen recognized immediately, even in English, but a few of them offered no clue as to what the original might have been. It was possible that Yang had selected these poems from earlier or less-known collections. That might be an explanation for the abbreviated references. But then, why all the “Cs” instead of editors’ names?

  The lack of an introduction or conclusion gave Chen a different idea. He, too, had written conclusions for different projects, in which he sometimes quoted a line or two. Yang might have been in the process of writing a conclusion for his poetry translation, but had died without having finished it.

  In spite of his failure to see any relevance to the murder case, Chen did not put the manuscript down. He could see why Yin had cherished the manuscript. It contained wonderful love poems, as Yin had said in the Afterword, which also evoked the most memorable days of their lives. In the cadre school, they would have pored over those poems together, in English and in Chinese, holding hands. On such a night, they might have felt as if the poem of Su Dongpo had been written for them, and that they themselves were united forever through its lines:

  The night watchman struck the third watch.

  Golden waves of the moonlight fading,

  a jade handle of the Dipper lowering,

  we calculate with our fingers

  when the west wind will come,

  unaware of time flowing away like a river in the dark.

  The Afterword was written in a clever way. Yin did not try to say too much, but merely presented the scenes in which she and Yang had read and discussed those poems at the cadre school. She ended, however, with a scene in which she stood alone, reading a poem written by Li Yu, which had once been recited to her by Yang, deep in the night:

  When will the endless cycle

  of the spring flower and the autumn moon

  come to an end?

  How much remembrance of things past

  does a heart know?

  Last night, in the attic revisited

  by the eastern wind,

  it was unbearable to look

  toward home in the fair moonlight.

  The carved rails and the marble steps must remain

  unchanged, but not her beauty.

  How much sorrow do I have?

  It is like the spring flood of a long river flowing east!

  The manuscript had enormous sentimental value. Chen touched it gently. No wonder Yin had kept it in a bank safety deposit box.

  Now he stood up and moved to the window, looking out at the street waking under his gaze. Across the road, he saw a Young Pioneer hurrying out the door, tying his red scarf with one hand, holding a fried rice cake in the other, a heavy satchel on his back—it appeared, for a fleeting moment, as if he was Chen himself, hurrying to school, thirty years ago. The chief inspector collected himself and turned back to the desk littered with dictionaries and papers.

  Now he had something else for White Cloud to do in the Shanghai Library. Some of the poems translated by Yang might have appeared in English study journals, although Chen was not sure when that might have occurred—perhaps before the Anti-Rightist movement in the mid-fifties. If so, some annotation there might throw light on the mysterious abbreviations in the manuscript. They might not turn out to be important or relevant, but he was curious. In addition, the library must have some catalogs from Chinese and foreign publishers. He could try to contact some of them, to see whether they might be interested in publishing the collection. There was no hurry, but it gave him comfort to think that he was attempting to do something for the dead.

  In that way, Chen could also keep White Cloud busy, and away from his room. Then he felt he would be able to settle down to working on his translation. And he did just that, productively, for a couple of hours, before she arrived for the day. The laptop helped.

  When sunlight came streaming through the window, and White Cloud entered the room, carrying a paper bag of fried mini-buns, he had already finished several pages. He explained her new assignment: To find poems in magazines translated by Yang, and to identify publishers that might be interested in publishing a collection of such poems. Also, he had an elusive feeling this might uncover something else, even though he did not know what. It was a long shot. He himself would probably not go to the library on the basis
of that sort of hunch, but having White Cloud available made it possible.

  “I have to assist Detective Yu, as you know, anyway I can,” Chen explained to her, “but I do not have time to do so and to work on the translation for Mr. Gu too. So you are really helping a lot.”

  “A little secretary is supposed to do whatever her boss wants her to,” she said with a sly smile. “Anything. You don’t have to explain. Mr. Gu has emphasized it many times. But what about your lunch?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “It may take you several hours. Take your time at the library.”

  Surprisingly, he received no phone calls that morning. The translation progressed smoothly. A sparrow twittered outside his window in the cold wind despite the barrenness of the twigs. He forgot about his lunch, for he was transported back into the glitter and glamour of the city in the thirties. Like visitors to the New World would someday be, he was “drunk with money, dazzled with gold.”