by Andy Cox
Almost enough, anyway.
“The west was a long shot,” grunts the cook.
The Corporal squares his shoulders. “Where the Sergeant says we go, we go.”
“The cook is right. West was always a long shot,” says the Sergeant, and the mumbling from the others ceases. It is hard to tell in the firelight, but her eyes seem to gleam.
The Private has been watching me throughout. “What the Omissioner’s story tells us is this,” she says, “the journey east is too long. If we head that way we live as the turtle does, on a journey that never ends.”
“Um,” I say, “I’m not sure—”
“South – it means we must go south,” continues the Private, “like I keep saying. We can’t survive the creeping winter. We must head towards a warmer climate.”
I want to interrupt and tell her she’s wrong, but it’s too late. The conversation heads where I don’t want it to go and in so doing, veers away from my home. The Private looks at me while the others speak, eyes twinkling. I was right; she has the devils in her. I grit my teeth. I should just have had the turtle tell them to go east: kept it simple. But no, I tried to end the story with a flourish. Old fool. So they speak of their new plans with each other over the fire while I look into my empty wine cup. I am attached to these people now – to leave this remnant unit would be called desertion. And the iron-faced Sergeant woman was the sort to shoot deserters.
My wife and sons never felt further away.
I am awoken the next morning, the large face of the cook smiling over me as he shakes my shoulder. I grumble at him for doing so, groan at the cold in my bones, and curse both as I sit myself up. He puts a warm cup of tea in one hand and rice porridge in the other, and leaves me to my grumbling, still smiling. The mists have not relented with the early morning, they press in on the small clearing, drawing a veil across the darkened forest beyond. The others have already packed their bags and are chatting to each other quietly.
The warm breakfast is a pleasure I have not had for many weeks, and I relish it. When I give the bowl back to the cook, his face reddens as he opens his mouth and then closes it again.
“Is there something you want to ask me, cook?”
“This dish,” he holds up the bowl, “what’s the name of it again?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Congee?”
He beams and bows deeply. “Yes, that’s it – congee. Thank you Omissioner.”
The cook seems worse than average. Maybe that’s why they just call him cook. He’s probably forgotten his own name.
We walk most of the morning and afternoon, with a brief break for lunch. I slow them down, but not too much. In this world you can either march all day, or you can die, and I’ve been marching as long as I can remember. I still complain, of course. I am old, so it is my right. About the cold, my sore hip, the lack of wine. The others pay due respect to my office by not telling me to be silent; Corporal Zhong just glowers twenty shades of loathing at me. The mist is always with us, whether thirty feet away or three, pressing down on the earth and our moods. Eventually its oppressive omnipresence is enough to stop even my old-man complaints, and we are left with silence bar the scuffing of feet and a thin wind that rattles the bamboo.
We are setting up camp in the dark trees that evening when the Sergeant emerges from the mist, red-faced from running. “Omissioner,” she puffs, “I’ve found something. You need to see this.”
I’m already sitting down near the fire and not planning on leaving it anytime soon. “What is it?”
Her eyes harden. “Now.”
The Corporal stands. “You heard the Sergeant – now.”
The orders in stereo only harden my desire to stay where I am, but I’ve decided the Sergeant scares me. So I grumble and complain, but get to my feet anyway. After a twisting walk down a fading stone path we come to a large, grey door covered in moss and moisture. Water has worn down the markings on the stone, but despite its age, despite the decay, the symbol engraved on the door is plain to see. It matches the symbol on my Memento of Office – the 智.
“This is something important, isn’t it?” asks the Sergeant. The others have gathered behind her now, curious. Even the cook is here, his son staring up at the huge door from behind his father’s apron.
I rake back the grey hair from my eyes and step over to a short stone pillar that stands next to the door. My heart thumps in my chest and suddenly my throat is dry. This can’t be what I think it is. Not after all this time. The top of the pillar is angled at forty-five degrees towards me, made of a dark metal that time has made little impact on. It is completely blank, just a flat, black panel with enough shine still in it that I can see my reflection: an old man with deceptively quiet eyes and a thin white beard growing from his chin.
I pull the Memento from my shirt and pass it over the touchplate. Nothing happens.
For several long seconds, anyway, while the others look on in silence. Then something does happen, the touchplate glows a soft golden hue and satisfying clunk-clunks, metallic and deep, echo from inside the door. With a hiss of compressed air and a gasp from someone behind me, it opens.
I move to enter, but the Sergeant pushes me to one side, signalling Zhong and Xu to go first. Zhong leads, machine gun to his shoulder, while the Private pulls the pistol from her hip and shadows him down steep stone stairs. We follow. The stairs end at another door, this one cleansteel and chrome. My Memento opens this door as the last, and we follow Zhong and Xu through.
We enter another world.
The space is brightly lit, a smooth oval space with moulded furniture in harsh whites and soft reds, the walls lined with books and viewing screens and paintings of worlds long forgotten. The lines are crisp here, real, when I reach out and touch a cushion the sensation of the soft leather against my fingertips is sensual and startling. The space is large and interspersed among the moulded chairs are plinths, perhaps twenty, an object on each. One near me has old coins with square holes in the middle, the next, a calligraphy pen and scroll with ancient script; the one after that a bronze cauldron with intricate patterning on the side – western Zhou period, I’m sure; lacquered black wood platform shoes on another, a horn shaped jade cup on the next, pure and curled and gleaming.
It’s like waking up from a long dream. Senses long blurred are now sharp, vague thoughts now linear and clear.
“What is this, Omissioner?” asks the Sergeant, now at my shoulder. She speaks in the whisper of her awe.
I tell the truth, readily: “A memory shelter. I heard of these, secreted away as minds faded and wars began. I thought it a myth, passed from general to general, Omissioner to Omissioner.” I nod towards the shelves and the screens. “Here is our collective consciousness, the fibres of our civilization. These books and manuscripts and artefacts embody us, and in those screens there on the walls you’ll find a hundred million recordings and facts and virtual archaeologies.”
Her hand touches my elbow, her fingertips sparking as they alight on the cloth of my robe. I start and turn to her. She bows deeply. The Corporal and the cook and even his son do the same. The passivity of shock and wonder now settled on their faces.
The Sergeant’s eyes are wide, glistening. “You have saved us, Omissioner. We owe you our lives.” She turns and indicates walls. “And you have given us purpose. To protect this, to learn it, to preserve it will be the duty of our lifetimes. And yours will be to teach it all.”
I’m wondering how to respond to this rather lengthy proposed timeframe when the Private appears at the mouth of one of three corridors that lead from the room. “Omissioner – you must see this.”
Thankful of the excuse to end the conversation with the Sergeant, I follow Private Xu down the short white corridor. I stop when we enter the next room. Then I fall to my knees, and clasp my hands together. Then tears roll from my eyes.
As far as my eyes can see, bottles of wine set behind glass in white-glowing cabinets. Fine Chinese reds from Xinjiang and Ningxia, a
nd there, bold Sicilian vintages and fine French Bordeaux, and a little further along, rows of crisp Australian whites and complex, alluring New Zealand Pinot Gris. And more. So much more. A lifetime of more.
The Private stands next to me, hands on hips. Her voice is filled with her ironic smile. “I guess I’d weep too, if I found my personal nirvana.”
I nod, feigning agreement, as tears trickle down my face. I weep not because I have found it: I weep because I have to leave it behind.
***
I spend the afternoon drinking a fine Ningxia cabernet and reading a slim volume of ancient poetry. I am content.
As the evening arrives, the Sergeant tells me they have found a store of food that will last for years, and the cook is preparing an extravagant meal to celebrate our first evening in the memory shelter. The Sergeant and I seat ourselves at a large white table we have decided is for communal meals. Soon Private Xu saunters in, cigarette dangling from her mouth, and Corporal Zhong follows, sitting down with a large can of Laotian beer in his hand. A peace has settled on the small unit now – contentment even.
The Sergeant says: “Tell us another memory of Wu Mountain.”
I don’t have the energy to lie after the long walk and the excitement, so I tell the truth: “I won’t talk about Wu Mountain tonight. Tonight I will honour the discovery of the memory shelter with a poem by our greatest poet, Du Fu. If there’s one poet you need to remember, it is him.” They all reach for their memory cards.
I breathe in deeply. “This is a poem for those who have left for war, and those who wait for them at home.”
In a quiet, clear voice, I remember every line to them:
“I have this feeling
You won’t come back from frontier duties
But autumn is here
And I get out the laundry stone
Soon you’ll feel the cold
The way I feel our separation
I clean your winter clothes
Whether I want to or not
Send them off to where you’re stationed
Near the Great Wall
A woman uses all her strength
Beating the laundry with a club
Maybe if you listen hard
You’ll hear it way out there.”
They remain silent after I finish. Unmoving, watching me but not watching, eyes distant.
The Private sits with her finger poised over her gold-glowing card. “I can’t write what that is. I can’t describe that.”
I smile. “I know.” Then I lie: “Don’t worry, I’ll tell it again in a week.”
We eat a fine meal of Dongpo pork, soy eggs, pickled vegetables, Baozi, wontons, and hot and sour soup. There is wine and – for the first time since I join them – there is laughter. The cook sits and eats with us and his son, a smear of chocolate above his eyebrow, watches me with eyes wide as I speak. I am sated by the meal and made expansive by the wine, I tell them truth and lies about the war and where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, and they hang on every word.
But the day has been long and taken its toll. They drift away to bed – comfortable, warm bunks for more than fifty have been found down one of the corridors – and soon all that remains is me and the Private, she with a packet of Double Happiness brand cigarettes, me with an Australian Pinot Noir. Such a shame, what happened to Australia – they really did make such magnificent wine.
I watch her in silence. She watches me. I drink my wine, she lights a cigarette and burns through it.
Finally she says: “Why do you want to go east, Omissioner?”
“Why do you wish to stop me?”
She shrugs. “Habit. I don’t like being told what to do.” She lights another cigarette, touching the tip of the last to the fresh one. “Plus I think you’re lying. I think everything that comes out of your mouth is a lie.”
I eye her uniform. “If you don’t like taking orders, why did you join the army?”
She blows a cloud of smoke upwards. “How the fuck should I know?”
It’s a good question. I sigh.
Maybe it’s the wine, maybe it’s the hope that there are some good devils in her, maybe it’s the fact I have no allies and I’m desperate. But whatever it is, I do something foolish, I tell the truth: “My wife and two sons are there.”
Xu leans forward, slender forearms on the edge of the table, cigarette trailing a slow line of smoke to the ceiling. “And the Sergeant would never let you go there for that reason.”
I raise my eyebrows in the sign for ‘obviously’, refill the wine in my glass, and pour a fresh one for her.
“It’s worse than you think, Omissioner.”
I’m unhappy, and don’t manage to keep it out of my voice. “Why is that, Private?”
She frowns. “If we’re going to drink together, we can drop the formalities. My name is Xiaofan.”
I pass her the cup, then indicate for her to continue.
She leans back in her chair, sipping her wine on the way back. “I returned from guard duty one night, close to dawn. Freezing, barely able to see two feet away with the mist. This is maybe a month ago. Maybe a year, I’m not sure. Anyway, when I got back to camp I saw Sergeant Hu looking at her memory card. Everyone else was asleep, and she was crying. I was shocked. She’s like a bronze statue, our Sergeant. I was with her once when she was shot four times in the legs, lying in the mud in her blood and filth. I start panicking and she says to me calmly ‘pass me a med-kit Private, and then return fire on that position’. No pain on her face, no anger – like she was asking me to pass her the soya sauce.”
We both smile at this.
She continues: “But there she was, crying. She’d put the card on the ground next to her and buried her face in her hands. I snuck around behind her. I shouldn’t have done it. But we walk through this world like zombies, not knowing where we’re going, or what we’re feeling, or why we’re feeling it. Dead inside or trying to be dead inside. So if someone feels something, especially the Sergeant, well I want to know why. So I looked at the card. It said one thing: ‘father is east’. That’s all.”
After a long pause, she continues: “Hu was leading us east, into the depths of an entire continent, based on one line in a memory card. I respected her after that Omissioner, more than that, I—” She breaks off her voice and her gaze, unwilling to finish the thought.
We sit in silence after that, mutually agreed. I finish the bottle then start another, watching the cloud of smoke circle the girl’s head.
Xiaofan says something.
“What?”
“I said I’m sorry.” There’s no ironic smile in her voice.
I shrug and sip my wine. “Like the Sergeant said: it was a long shot, Xiaofan.”
She nods, and the regret in her eyes is real.
It’s a long shot, but I don’t care. I’m still going back to my family. And now I have an ally.
***
“I saw something on patrol earlier. Let me show you.”
The Private stands near me, hands on hips. She has a way of leaning one hip to the side and resting the palm of her hand on the curve that an old man like me finds quite distracting. I’m sipping a blunt but satisfying Chilean red and reading poetry again.
I keep my eyes away from her hips. “Is it worth it?”
“It’s worth it.”
I sigh. “Let me bring my bag.”
Thirty minutes later we are sitting on flat, almost-dry stones at the top of a steep ridge. The mist is less pervasive today, affording us the view of a serene, dark watered lake, the edges of which are firm with white ice. In the distance the dark, jutting shapes of hills, fingers of hills, pushing themselves up into the mist or the clouds or whatever lies above us. The silence here is perfect, and draws me in.
Xiaofan snaps her lighter shut, drawing my attention to her. She drags long on the cigarette, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “Better pour the wine then, old turtle.”
I wince at the name she gives me, bu
t she is young and doesn’t know its colloquial meaning. I draw two bamboo cups and a bottle of wine from my travel bag, filling us each a cup.
She drinks deep on the wine. When she speaks, her voice is far away.
“This mist follows me everywhere. Not just out here, but in my mind as well. I can’t think straight, I can’t feel straight, I can’t grasp anything with my thoughts. Sometimes I think this is all a dream. I worry that if I don’t wake up soon I will become this dream and my reality will fade away.” She looks at me. “Am I going crazy?”
I shake my head and then tell the truth: “This is a dream, dreamed by our country. It sleeps deeply now, and we are fated to walk through its slumber. Through its half-remembered places, through the longings of its history, through the world it abandoned to despair.”
She sighs with frustration. “Oh Du.”
“What?”
“Don’t ever switch careers to counsellor.”
“Were you seeking reassurance?”
“No. No, I guess not. Maybe just not the one person in this world more melancholy than I.”
I smile a sad smile. “Drink your wine,” I say, “so we can have another.”
We’re finishing our first bottle when she says: “You didn’t ask about what I was going to show you.”
“I assumed you’d get around to it.”
She nods down the slope. “Look – down there, at the edge of the lake.”
I follow her gaze, past the dark, frost-scarred trees and thin tendrils of mist. There, there it is. A boat, small and silver, tied to a stump at the edge of the lake.
I nod, slowly. My salvation: a small, lone boat, tied up.
My eyes are still on the boat as I speak. “How dear are memories, Xiaofan? It’s like asking someone how important is the heart beating in their chest. I don’t just hold the memories of others; I hold their identities, their sense of self and place and time. They, in turn, hold to me as tightly as if I were part of their soul. You’d think in a world without a past, the man with memory would be king. But no, in that world, he who remembers is a slave.”