“Certainly, help yourself.”
“It’s long distance.”
“That’s fine.”
So she was here to make a long-distance phone call. This explanation satisfied him just a little. A call to Liu Hong?
She put on the sun visor, stood up and, moving swiftly over to the desk, scooped up the receiver. After pressing the buttons with some care, she stood waiting, biting her lower lip, face a blank. No one was answering. Aki swallowed hard and waited. She moved the receiver away from her mouth, covered the mouthpiece with her hand, and said, “It’s really hard for us to call long distance. But—”
Just then the other person came on the line.
“Nainai! It’s me, Xingxing.”
So it wasn’t Liu Hong. With lowered voice, sounding out of breath, she began to talk to her far-off grandmother.
“I’m so glad I got through. Sorry, I wanted to come home, but I couldn’t. Yes, yes, I’m fine. So public security did come. Nainai, do you remember my father’s cricket box? That’s right, the one I gave you before I came to Shanghai. Yes, that’s it. Then it’s safe. Great! The hollow in the walnut tree? I remember. You hid it there, good. But I want you to do something else for me now. Take out everything inside, the notebook and the letters, and burn them right away. Yes, all of them. Right away. Be sure now.”
Li Xing abruptly broke off and transferred the receiver from her right hand to her left, holding it now to the other ear. At the same time, she tucked some stray wisps of hair behind her ear.
“Nainai, goodbye. Be careful. No, I’m all right. Don’t worry…”
Gently, as if setting a block of tofu in water, she laid the receiver back in its cradle. Aki was leaning against the wall by the window. She went back to the sofa and curled up gracefully, then asked if she could have a glass of water.
Aki took a bottle of Perrier out of the refrigerator, poured some into a glass, and handed it over. Slowly, she drank half of it down in one breath.
“That was my grandmother. She’s all I have now. It was a relief to talk to her.”
“Won’t they be listening in?” He meant this half jokingly, but she nodded calmly and gave a serious reply.
“I know, but even if they are, I think it’s all right. She’s a very courageous woman. Before they can get there, even now, she’ll be setting fire to the cricket box.”
“Miss Li…” said Aki, haltingly.
“Xingxing. Please, call me Xingxing.”
“Xingxing…”
“That’s right. That’s what I call myself. ‘Good for you, Xingxing,’ or, ‘No, no, Xingxing.’ My nainai calls me that, and so did my parents.”
And Liu Hong, he thought, but didn’t say it aloud.
Leaving the wall by the window, he crossed the room with his arms still folded. She followed him casually with her eyes. As she did this, for the first time she was able to take a good look around.
“What a huge place. And the bedroom is separate. May I take a peek?”
“Be my guest.”
She opened the bedroom door and peered in cautiously without going inside.
“Lovely. You’re staying here alone? The yaodong we live in has four rooms, but this is bigger. Ten people could live here easily. Goodness, what big beds!”
She quickly withdrew, gently closing the door behind her. Aki stood next to the sofa, looking at her. She cast her eyes down.
“A yaodong?” he said. “I’d like to see one of those sometime. I know – we can pretend this is one.”
“Lovely. A cave in the sky.”
Diffidently, thinking in a corner of his brain, This isn’t what I really want to ask at all, he said, “Did you ever hear of anyone Japanese out there?”
“Anyone Japanese… you mean, your father?”
“Yes, somewhere on the Loess Plateau.”
Li Xing bent her head slightly, thinking. “The plateau is enormous. We used to live in Beijing, but at the time of the Cultural Revolution my parents were forced to move. My father was sent to Yangquan, my mother to Longzhong – on the east and west sides of the plateau. The distance between them was 1,300 kilometres. But how did your father—”
“Never mind, it’s all right. The information’s unreliable. Let’s see, the distance between you and me right now is what, five metres? One two-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth of the distance that separated your parents.”
“You did that awfully fast!”
“Mental calculation is my specialty,” he said, shortening the distance by a meter. “Now it’s one three-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousandth.”
“Don’t shorten it any more, please. I have to be going. But can I ask you just one question?”
From the safe distance of four metres, Aki nodded and smiled at her. Yet he felt as if he stood on the edge of a cliff.
“Are you a Japanese spy?”
His smile stiffened. “Good grief! I wondered what you would ask. Sorry, the answer’s no.”
“I’m not joking. I heard you worked for a Japanese intelligence agency.”
“Who told you such a crazy thing?”
“I got it from one of the most reliable sources in the country. After all, you’re not here on business, and you’ve chosen to come over alone at a particularly tricky time. You must be here to probe something or other. You said yourself you’ve been conducting some sort of investigation…”
“I see. Public security told you.”
“I thought if you were a Japanese spy, I could trust you. That’s why I—”
“How so?”
“My enemy’s enemy is my friend. That’s what they say.”
“It’s not that simple. Miss Li, I’m afraid you—”
“Xingxing.”
“Then, Xingxing. You’re making a mistake. There are no spies in Japan.”
“Why not? They’re everywhere here.”
“Japan has no army.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. And it’s Japan’s policy not to have state secrets. Even if we do, we like to think that we don’t. So in principle, there’s no need for us to probe the secrets of other countries. You could say I’ve come from the country with the least secrets in the world to the country with the most.”
“Having secrets gives you an advantage.”
“So does getting hold of other people’s. It takes more energy to maintain a secret than it does to let it go. What about in our case?”
“What about it?” Her expression didn’t flicker. A pause. “I see. Well, too bad you’re not a spy. Your father was one. And I’m playing the part of one.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
Aki put down the cup in his hand without looking at it and, trying to seem casual, said, “I’ve got one question – no, two – for you, if you don’t mind.”
She smelt so good. Where did it come from? Was it the clothes next to her skin? He was on the point of remembering something, but the fragment of memory vanished.
“Yesterday and today, where were you?”
“Public security. Yesterday morning I tried to board a plane for Taiyuan, so I could go home to get the cricket box. I got as far as the boarding gate at Shanghai Airport before they caught me.”
“Did they give you a hard time?”
She shook her head, moving slowly along the wall. As he followed her progress, her shadow on the wall revealed plainly that she wasn’t a man. He would dearly have liked to uncover the soft, very feminine body beneath the borrowed clothes.
“Is the box really so important? Then call her back. I’ll make some coffee. Not instant, either.”
“I can’t drink coffee. Keeps me from sleeping. You shouldn’t bother. But I will tell you about it.”
She sat down again on the sofa. Seeing her settle back against the cushion, legs tucked up neatly on one side, Aki thought that yes, a sofa was something only a woman should ever sit on.
“The box contained my diary and letters. It belonged to my father. His only hobb
y was qiudou, or ‘autumn fighting.’ Do you know what that is?”
He shook his head.
“Cricket fighting. It used to be all the rage, and people would bet money on it. My father was a scholar, so he raised crickets to listen to them sing, mostly, and only entered them in fights every now and then. There are lots of props involved. Mostly tickling implements, things that are used to get the crickets to sing or fight. The handles are made out of ivory or bone or reed, with mouse or jackrabbit whiskers attached, or the soft throat hairs of Kashmir goats. Isn’t it strange – tickling implements? He kept a whole set of them in his precious cricket box. The box is made of rosewood. After he died, I used it as a letter box.”
Just before leaving for Shanghai to audition for Moving Shadows, she’d gone back on a rare visit to Yangquan and entrusted the box to her grandmother. It contained letters from Liu Hong and copies of her letters to him, as well as her diary. After the audition, whatever the outcome, she’d intended to go back there to retrieve it. Fortunately, she passed the audition and was chosen for the lead role. Then, just as she was making plans for a triumphant return home, the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. Immediately, severe restrictions were placed on travel, leaving her stuck in Shanghai. But Shanghai Film Studio’s involvement in the local democracy movement at least gave her access to information not reported in the newspapers or on TV.
In May, the steering committee of the students, workers, and intellectuals gathered in Tiananmen Square had drawn up a membership list of the organization.
On the night of 3rd June, after martial law troops had opened fire, one person bravely returned to the headquarters tent in the square to burn and destroy that list. It was Liu Hong. That list was what Mango was after, more than anything. Ever since the uprising, Mango’s greatest fear was that various democratization groups would unite in a national organization. The Party and the government issued nationwide orders to round up all suspected of having the slightest connection with them, to search their homes, and to confiscate any such lists. The hunt was already underway in Shanghai, and some people at the film studio had been detained and subjected to house searches.
Liu Hong’s letters to Li Xing were basically silly love letters, with occasional unguarded references to comrades’ names or the existence of an underground movement. Open criticism of Mango was scattered throughout. “What they’ve done over the past forty years is as bad as Hitler and Stalin, if not worse.” That sort of thing.
Mango was bound to search the dormitory of her old song and dance troupe, as well as her old home in Yangquan. Her grandmother knew nothing about it. How to get word to her?
Use of the one telephone in the studios from which long-distance calls could be made was strictly limited, and kept under constant surveillance, while any mail she sent would inevitably be intercepted at the local post office. Her only hope was to beat them to Yangquan. Frantic, hoping somehow to board the local plane, she had gone to Shanghai Airport.
Li Xing told him all this in beautiful Mandarin, but her Japanese was almost as good, he knew. “Where’d you learn your Japanese?” he asked.
“At home.”
“You learnt to speak Japanese at home?”
“Yes. My mother wasn’t a native Japanese like Zheng Pinru’s mother, but she was born and raised there. She died, though.”
Her hand was on the doorknob. Aki cut her off.
“You mustn’t go out first, alone.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll call you a cab. The same one as before. I’ll do it now, so please wait.”
“No, I’ll walk. It’s safer. Chinese women are great walkers. The sun visor would stand out, though, so may I leave it here?”
“Of course. But no walking. It’s an hour and a half from here to the studio. I’d worry.”
Quickly, Aki rang Chen on his pager. There was an immediate response, and although the driver seemed a bit out of sorts, he agreed to be at the hotel in fifteen minutes.
Her hand still on the doorknob as she turned to look at him, Li Xing was back in character as a young man.
“Xingxing, your sunglasses.”
She’d forgotten them. Flustered, unable to remember what she’d done with them, she searched all her pockets with no luck. When this happens it’s best to look somewhere farther away, Aki told her. He walked over to the desk, promptly found them by the telephone, and brought them back for her.
“Xingxing, one word of advice. Your disguise is perfect, but I think you should use it only at night.”
She gave him a quizzical look over the rims of her sunglasses.
“In the daytime, I’m afraid you couldn’t fool anyone. Your skin is too good. It stands out at a distance more than any makeup – beautiful bare skin.”
“Thank you.”
They went down to the lobby without incident. As she was getting into the cab, for a second she made as if to lean lightly against his shoulder.
A half hour later, Chen phoned to report that he had delivered the passenger safely to the film studios. A bit unusual to see a young Japanese guy staying in that neighbourhood, he added, apropos of nothing.
8
What if I fall in love? He awoke with this thought on his mind. He got out of bed and leant out the window, where in the park across the river he could see a group of people doing their tai chi exercises. He was unable to take his eyes off the intricate, ever-changing, elegant motions. However Communism and bureaucracy might impinge on the national consciousness, the people of this country possessed something you could only call a different kind of freedom, an untrammelled spirit all their own. You could see it in their painting and calligraphy, too.
He spent a pleasant while at the window, his sleepiness wearing off. Then he headed to the studio in Chen’s car. The unexpected news that his father had been tried as a Chinese traitor and escaped severe punishment only by steadily repeating the words Wang le had come as a shock. Xie Han knew other things about his father, too. More revelations would be forthcoming. One intriguing question was the unfinished screenplay: what shape would it take in tracing the arc of his father’s life? Zheng Pinru was doomed to execution, but what would be the end of Han Langen?
Yet his main interest, the real reason he was on his way there, lay elsewhere: Would Li Xing show up at work today?
Chen was again the Chen of three days ago – irritable, preoccupied. Aki fell in with his mood.
At the studio there was no sign of the director, and rehearsals were proceeding under his deputy’s guidance. Li Xing was there. Yet she neither greeted Aki nor looked his way. Following instructions in a memo left by Xie Han, she was being made to practice acting with her eyes alone. “There are no scenes of high emotion,” Xie Han had written. “For a female spy, only the eyes count.”
Yu Ming walked around commenting out loud to no one in particular that since her return, Xingxing was prettier than ever – had she been with her boyfriend?
Yes, she was with me, he would have liked to say out loud.
Even when she had a break, Li Xing stood laughing and talking with other cast and crew members, continuing to ignore his presence. He could only console himself with the unlikely explanation that this might be an extension of “acting with the eyes.” To top it all off, while he was having a word with the actor playing his father, she left the studio.
Aki almost wondered if her coming to his hotel in disguise the night before might have been a figment of his imagination – the way she materialized so suddenly out of nowhere, just like the time she showed up outside his taxi.
Rehearsals soon got underway again, and Li Xing reappeared. Aki stood watching with a thoughtful air, taking everything in.
Her style of acting was by no means professional. Yet, she had a quality unmatched by any actress in Japan. Beyond any question of talent or skill, all Chinese actresses, not only Li Xing, gave performances invigorated by a determination to relive their lives differently through cinema. It took guts to do what they d
id. He looked on in fascination.
He hung around for two hours. Then Yu Ming reported that although the director had planned to come in today, that was looking less and less likely. So Aki gave up and left.
For a while Chen drove east on Hengshan Road. Around where it merged with Huaihai Road, he began frequently checking his rear-view mirror.
“Something wrong?”
“That black Peugeot behind us – the kind they make in Guangzhou, they’re always breaking down. It’s following us. The number plate is public security.”
Aki turned to look through the rear window. A slanting ray of light on the windshield of the Peugeot obstructed his view of the driver.
“I don’t know – you think so?”
Chen nodded with conviction. Aki felt his mouth go dry. They entered the long tunnel of plane trees.
“What do I do?” asked Chen.
“Try to shake it. That way we’ll know for sure.”
Aki was only half serious, and he didn’t think the man had that much nerve, but suddenly Chen gave the wheel a sharp tug left and they plunged into a side road. Lining it were the dark brick walls of the former French Concession.
“The car is still there.”
Aki turned to see the black Peugeot coming up directly behind them. Then, clunk, it hit them. Chen honked his horn and stopped the car. The Peugeot slipped past on one side and sped off with a squeal of tires. In the front passenger seat was the man who’d been in the bar of the Metropole Hotel.
Chen got out, went around to the back, and bent down, running a finger along the place where they’d been hit. He reported little or no damage. Collisions like this were a commonplace of life in Shanghai, he said, usually resolved with a brief row and the exchange of a few bills. This time the other driver was clearly in the wrong. Chen could only cluck his tongue in protest.
The collision meant that the level of surveillance had been ratcheted up a few notches. What Li Xing had said suddenly seemed more plausible. But him, a Japanese spy? It was crazy. His protest was like Chen’s, but done silently.
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