Jasmine

by Noboru Tsujihara

  The taste of her was still on his lips. He put the receiver back and looked around the room in a daze. Seeing the window open, he closed it and drew the curtains. The phone rang again. Li Xing backed off, standing in the shadow of the half-open bedroom door.

  “Wei,” he said brusquely, and waited for someone to speak.

  “Mr Xie, is that you?” said an excited voice in Beijing dialect, using the Chinese pronunciation of his name.

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t give my name, but you know who I am.” He spoke rapidly. “This line’s probably bugged, so do as I say. I’ll call back in thirty seconds.”

  Li Xing again came closer. He looked up at her and nodded. Precisely thirty seconds later, Liu Hong called back.

  “Listen. After this, make sure you always pick up in the middle of the third ring and hang up in fifteen seconds. That way the bug can’t work. I’ll call back in one minute this time. You hang up first.”

  Li Xing sat down on the sofa and crossed her arms and legs. A slipper dangled from her toes, about to fall off. She set it swaying. Watching the slipper out of the corner of his eye, he took off his watch and laid it beside the phone. As instructed, he picked up on the third ring.

  “Is Li Xing there?”

  “Yes. I’ll put her on.”

  “No. I want to talk to you. I’ll be blunt. Get some money ready. Fifty thousand yuan.”

  Aki counted off fifteen seconds and silently hung up. Li Xing was squarely in the centre of his vision. On the other end of the line was Liu Hong. The phone rang again. At the third ring he picked up.

  “Wei. You Japanese still haven’t paid us any reparations. Li Xing is my wife.”

  “Your… wife?”

  “As good as.”

  “Then you’re asking for double reparations. That’s extortion.” The last bit was going too far, he thought, but it was too late. With Liu’s suppressed, self-mocking laughter sounding in his ears, he quickly put the receiver down.

  It would take five calls to complete Liu’s business.

  The Hong Kong-based network that helped political criminals flee China had so far successfully smuggled seven major wanted criminals overseas by way of Hong Kong, but a week ago, a number of their people were arrested in Xi’an and Shenzhen. For the time being, they had been forced to withdraw their operations from the mainland. That was four days ago. Liu had reached Shanghai the day before yesterday; two days earlier and he’d have been in time. As a wanted criminal, he would have trouble heading further south incognito. It was imperative that he leave the country immediately. His only recourse was to rely on the underworld – the snakehead gangs who, naturally, demanded payment up front. Seeing dictatorships and democracies alike as a means of doing business, they alone could ignore the authorities and survive.

  Aki thought of his old driver, Chen Ying. Had he made it safely to Japan, or was he still afloat on the East China Sea? Probably he, too, had paid fifty thousand yuan to a snakehead gang.

  Aki hadn’t yet been able to explain his arrangements with Liu to Li Xing, but she seemed to get the picture anyway – and was visibly upset. Though he held the receiver out to her several times, she refused to take it. Yet midway through the fourth call, from a short distance away she called, “Liu Hong!” The anguish in her voice was plain, and carried across the space that separated them. It registered squarely with Liu. Abruptly his pushiness vanished and his tone changed to one of supplication.

  “None of us have any money. There’s no one to turn to but you. If you can’t help, I’ll go to a friend’s place further south. I can only stay in Shanghai another day and a half.”

  Fifty thousand yuan was, what, about a million and a half yen? The helplessness and uncertainty that Chen and Liu must feel infected him as well. If his money could buy Liu’s freedom, it might serve also as a kind of personal reparation. It was a persuasive thought. He began to work out how to raise the cash.

  He had about 600,000 yen in travellers checks with him. There was a Citibank branch on the first floor of the Peace Hotel. Using his Visa gold card, he could probably take out a loan of US$7,000 to make up the difference.

  “Xingxing, could you come over here,” he called out. “He’s going to phone back one more time. This last time, you should talk to him. Tell him I’ll get him the money. He has to decide when and where the transfer will be made.”

  Li Xing shook her head but moved nearer, as far as the window, sliding her back along the wall. “God, for him to be asking you for money! But please… please, let him have it.”

  The words were wrung out of her. Requests for money can ruin things; they’re like a blast of cold wind. Yet, hers had the opposite effect: it blew the things he loved, and wanted to possess, toward him.

  The phone rang.

  “I won’t talk. Don’t make me.” As she backed away, he could see in her eyes a crisscross pattern of light and shadow from the lace curtain.

  “Fifty thousand yuan. All right.”

  The handover would be tomorrow morning. He would phone later with details.

  “Is Xingxing there?”

  “I’ll put her on.”

  She turned her back to him. Through the narrow gap in the curtains, she stared outside. What was there to see out there, besides the black Peugeot? The figure of Liu Hong?

  “I’m taking her with me,” the voice on the phone said.

  Aki replaced the receiver. “He says he’s taking you with him,” he told Li Xing, her slim figure still facing away from him. His tongue was dry; the words came painfully.

  He had only forty minutes till the bank closed. He grabbed his jacket, made sure his passport and credit card were there, and tore out of the room. Once in the corridor, he forced himself to slow down. The Peace Hotel was on the Bund, a little way past Garden Bridge. He turned left outside his hotel and was approaching the bridge when Ma Zuqi caught up with him and said familiarly, “Where you off to?”

  “The bank. Then I’m going to buy my plane ticket home.”

  They walked abreast across the bridge. The day was overcast and muggy.

  “No word yet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’ll be tonight then, count on it. Believe me, we want this guy. Two others have already gotten away from Shanghai. Remember, Mr Waki, it’s one thing to feel sorry for the fox – but whatever you do, stay out of the way of the hounds.”

  “I will. I’m a foreigner here after all, a guest in your country. But I’ll say this, Mr Ma: I can see you mean business, but you strike me as someone who enjoys the hunt.”

  He felt as if he’d walked down this street before in his dreams, as if all this, now, was itself a bad dream. Let it end, if I’m dreaming, but leave me Li Xing.

  “Watch it,” murmured Ma, grabbing his elbow and pulling him back onto the curb at a corner with no traffic light. A black Crown zoomed past, sounding its horn. The sudden commotion took Aki by surprise, but failed to really wake him up. Only twenty-five minutes left.

  He was now racing against time, and he was in luck. When he left Citibank, there were seven thousand dollars in his pocket. Ma was nowhere to be seen.

  Briskly he retraced his steps across Garden Bridge. Ma was leaning back against the iron railing, smoking a cigarette. Seeing Aki, he casually raised his right hand, cigarette between his fingers, and waved. For a moment, Aki had an urge to blurt out everything. If he did, the nightmare and Li Xing both would be suan le. Done and gone.

  She was standing in the same place by the same window in the same position as when he’d left. For a ballerina, the feat was easy.

  She was playing with a tassel she’d pulled off the curtain. She spotted Aki. A man approached him and crossed the bridge alongside him. Someone from public security, she thought. He must have – no, he couldn’t…

  He came back.

  “I got the money,” he said.

  Li Xing flushed with shame at having doubted him. Angrily, she said, “Don’t you hate the way this country wor
ks?”

  “What way?”

  “Everything you see and hear, everything around you. All of it. Me, Liu Hong with his demand for money, public security always watching us, opium and Hami melons and malantou and mangoes.”

  “I like it all. Why, I even like Mango. Because it represents you, even if it makes you suffer, Xingxing.”

  She let out a tiny sound midway between a sneeze and a laugh.

  They had to seem free and easy for the benefit of eyes watching them. Li Xing and the Japanese guy were sleeping together, the story would go; she was his woman now.

  For dinner, they dressed nicely, went up to the restaurant on the eighteenth floor, and had Cantonese cuisine. They looked and acted like people in love. But they fooled no one. That’s because they were, in fact, in love.

  On returning to the suite, they shut themselves in the bedroom. The only lights were a single bedside lamp and a floor lamp with a green silk shade by the window, both turned low so that their two moving shadows showed hazily on the walls, as if the room were filled with a fine mist. They changed from shoes into cloth slippers and sat on the edge of the big bed. Ever since last night, in bed, they had spoken entirely in Mandarin.

  Li Xing dangled her slipper from her toes. “It’s like we’re on a pier,” she said. “Below us is the water.”

  “The Yangtze?”

  “Yes.”

  She had never seen the sea. With a half-smile playing on her face, she swept up her hair in her left hand and gazed off into space. As though this were a signal, Aki toppled her back on the bed. After a long kiss, hot breaths and saliva mingling as they struggled like two enemies, they undressed. They stared into each other’s eyes while their four hands roamed at random, quick, awkward, and impatient. Eventually a sturdy arm held the linen sheet high and their two naked bodies, slightly damp with sweat, slid underneath.

  For a while they had no chance to look into each other’s eyes. They were intent on following instead the way their fingers and tongues covered every corner of their bodies. Like the viewfinder of a camera touring a battlefield or disaster site, they saw themselves from above. Then, gently yet unmistakably, their moving shadows coalesced.

  The night before, when it was over, Aki had been surprised to realize that he had never fantasized about what it would be like to sleep with a Chinese woman. The discovery puzzled him and pleased him at the same time. That he loved Li Xing simply for herself, without regard to any aspect of her background, he’d been able to confirm not only in his heart, but with his body. If asked, “What was it like to sleep with her?” he would have answered promptly, “It was good,” with no unnecessary commentary. Asked, “Was it all you imagined?” he would simply have nodded. It was against his nature to exaggerate; when he chose to emphasize his words, he usually did so by lowering his voice.

  For Li Xing, the sensations that she’d had last night, and that continued even now to resonate slightly inside her, were a new experience. Her pleasure was mixed with wonder. And yet… she wasn’t confident. Although her ballet-trained body was lithe, strong, and beautiful, she wondered: could he really like such a poor, thin thing?

  As she’d done the night before, once again Li Xing whispered in his ear: “Be careful – please don’t come inside me.”

  The Mandarin for “be careful” was xiaoxin, written with the characters “small” and “heart” – a combination that in Japanese meant “timid.” In the echo of the word as she said it, the subtly different meanings collided, to his delight.

  When the time came to sleep, Aki returned conscientiously to the sofa. As he buttoned his pyjamas to the neck, he asked himself what he was going to do. Was there any way he could spirit her away, take her to her grandfather in Kobe? The effort he might devote to such a scheme hinged on the amount of energy this affair generated. Once it reached a certain heat, he wouldn’t stop, even at the risk of his life. There was something not quite rational in his determination.

  Odd that now, of all times, he should inwardly turn for help to his wife. Perhaps when people are stretched to their limit, it’s not the living to whom they cling for support, he thought, but the dead.

  Certainly the most natural thing to do, and the easiest, would be to let Li Xing leave the country hand in hand with Liu. In any case, there was no avoiding a clash with the Chinese authorities. Would he, Aki, be arrested? Of course he would.

  A thought occurred to him: exactly the same drama might have been played out here in Shanghai fifty years ago. He was thinking of his father, whom Xie had quoted as saying, “The ideal life would be to live in Shanghai embracing a woman, and one’s conscience, with both arms.” What sort of conscience did he mean?

  Aki stretched out on the sofa, wrapped himself in the sheet he had pulled off one of the twin beds, and closed his eyes. Tomorrow – everything would be settled tomorrow, decided one way or the other. Suan le, done, that was the best way. Time to forget it all till then.

  But he couldn’t sleep. He thought of what Xie Han had said. He was dead right. Threats never to forget the past, demands for reparations – this wasn’t dignified. Yet being Japanese, he could never say so. Liu’s remark about the war was more acceptable. Japan’s efforts to make amends were still inadequate. The postwar Japanese were aggressors awakened to a sense of themselves as victims.

  I had nothing to do with the war and it’s not my responsibility, but everywhere you look in Japan today, you find prosperity. Money’s all anyone has. What else forms the mainstay of each Japanese individual? It’s sad. If reparations had to be paid, and someone asked me how, I’d have to say by putting to use the personal wealth of each individual. Xie Han said responsibility is something verified only through actual experience. ODA is certainly a laudable use of Japanese wealth; but since it can’t lead to individual self-awareness, the concept of responsibility never gets through.

  His own money was going to be used to finance a couple’s flight abroad. Responsibility here was getting through to him. For him. This is putting my personal wealth to good use all right, he thought… a thought that was like a bomb strapped to his chest.

  Before he knew it, he was asleep. When he woke up, he could tell he had slept surprisingly well, feeling physically and mentally refreshed. He got up and went into Li Xing’s room. She awoke, pushed back the linen sheets with a sleepy, faraway look, and stretched her arms up over her head. Pale soft hairs in her armpits were lit faintly by the sunshine filtering through the lace curtains.

  “It’s morning.”

  “So it is.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  “My breakfast is you,” he whispered in her ear.

  Aki felt as if until now he’d been walking alone through a Shanghai shrouded in fog, and that suddenly the loneliness and fog had been dispelled, opening up a view of things he’d never seen before.

  On her side, Li Xing had come to a decision – one reached before she’d begged him to give Liu Hong that money. The first night they were together, she’d thought, This man is kind, and good, and wanted nothing more than to make him happy. Last night, after making love, her decision was reaffirmed. But she couldn’t tell Aki about it, because she loved him.

  This was what she had resolved to do: leave Liu Hong; see that Aki got safely back to Japan; and remain alone in China, a fugitive.

  That was only half of her decision, though. What the other half was, not even she herself clearly understood yet.

  The telephone rang. Aki, who’d been dozing beside her, sprang out of bed. The male voice on the phone wasn’t Liu’s; someone else gave him the instructions, perhaps a member of some gang. Thirty minutes from now a taxi would be parked behind the Broadway Mansions Hotel, across from the west service entrance. A red Tianjin Charade. Li Xing was to get in that taxi with the money.

  She came and stood at his elbow, neatly dressed and ready to go. Wanting to curse and swear at someone or something, he gave her a bleak smile and relayed the message. “I’ll go with you downstairs,”
he added.

  “No, I’ll go alone.”

  His mind registered automatically that she’d switched to a formal level of Japanese. “Why alone?”

  “If I’m caught, and it’s just Liu Hong and me, that’ll be the end of it. We’ll be sentenced to fifteen years in a forced labour camp in Chaidamu or Tarim. People don’t usually come out of that alive. I couldn’t bear it if you were caught, too. And besides…”

  “Besides?” His voice choked on the word, and he tasted something bitter at the back of his throat.

  “I’m a Chinese woman. Not weak, like Japanese women.” An impish smile was on her lips.

  He handed her the envelope.

  “No, don’t. I’ve got ten thousand yuan of my own saved up. That’s enough to get by on.”

  “Don’t be stupid! He needs fifty thousand. It’s right here.”

  “He shouldn’t have asked for it. Money is to have fun with. I can’t have you throwing yours away like this.”

  “You’re being unreasonable. Listen, what’s good about money is that you can use it any way you like. I don’t know if Liu Hong meant it that way or not, but if he wants this as a kind of war reparation, that’s okay with me, too. Just think of me as someone from Japan you met in passing, and remember me sometimes.”

  As he said the words, a protest swelled inside him. The hell I am. I’m no such thing.

  “Met in passing? Oh, no, no…” That’s all she could say.

  Aki forced the envelope into her hands. “You’ve only got fifteen minutes. Hurry.”

  He had made sure that by using the emergency staircase, she could go straight out through the service door without entering the lobby. If she cut across the corridor quickly and timed it just right, no one would even know she had gone.

  Li Xing left.

  Aki stood staring vacantly at the door she had opened and closed behind her without looking back. He remembered how she’d shut the door on him in the guesthouse at the film studio. Remembering, he told himself, That’s that.