Jasmine

by Noboru Tsujihara

  The hands of the wall clock pointed to the time she was supposed to get in the car. He shivered and looked around. Time to clear out. He picked up the phone, called JAL, and reserved a seat on the evening flight to Narita. The planes were all flying virtually empty, so getting a seat was no problem. Then he started to pack. Reminders of her were everywhere. The sun visor. The borrowed suit, which she had ironed and hung on a hanger. He dialled Xie Han’s number, but the operator only snapped, “Bu zai.” Not here. He’d have to leave without keeping his promise to host a return dinner.

  The telephone rang. It was Yang Jun, the cameraman. He’d been released.

  “Heard you’re going back to Japan. I wanted to talk to you about that hair restorer. What would you be willing to pay for the marketing rights?”

  Without a knock, the door opened. Li Xing reappeared.

  “Would it be all right if I came over now? I have some samples I can bring with me. I’d really like you to—”

  Li Xing slowly set down her suitcase as if back from a trip somewhere, and let out a long breath.

  “Mr Yang, the boom in Chinese hair-growing products in my country is dying down. I don’t think it’ll work.” Aki stared into Li Xing’s eyes as he spoke. “They say if you really found a cure for baldness, you’d win a Nobel Prize. Not only that, it’s next to impossible to get an import permit from the Ministry of Health and Welfare.” Mustn’t blather. She was standing with her back to the door.

  “How about smuggling some in, then?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll sell you the list of ingredients. How about manufacturing it yourself in Japan?”

  Gently Aki put down the phone, and went over to Li Xing.

  “I’m back,” she said.

  “Hey, there.”

  “Is that okay?” She sat down on the sofa. It made the old familiar sound. “I decided to stay in China.”

  Her smile was resolute. In front of her and a little off to one side, maintaining a respectable distance, Aki stood with a stupid look on his face.

  “He didn’t come. I gave your money to the messenger.”

  I broke it off with Liu Hong. This unspoken message showed clearly on her face, but Aki, unsure, said only, “You like it here.”

  “No, that’s not it. If I went away—”

  There was nothing handy around him, but as if looking for something to lean on, he turned fully towards Li Xing and tried to read her face straight on.

  “—I wouldn’t be able to see you again.”

  “But I was going to leave the country tonight.”

  “That’s okay. I’m happy just to see you here like this.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Run away.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone. If I can make it to the yaodong, I’ll manage.”

  “But can you get there?” All I do is ask questions.

  “They gave me a message from Liu Hong. A way to reach him if anything happens.”

  “He must have guessed you wouldn’t come.”

  She nodded and got up from the sofa. “You, I can feel, Liu Hong, I can only remember. When you have to force yourself to remember someone, it’s no good.” She took his hand, let it go with a sigh, and sat down again. With a strange expression of relief, or fear – one couldn’t tell – she said quietly in a strangled voice, “Liu Hong, Liu Hong.” But it was Aki she was calling out to as she tumbled down the slope. He was listening carefully, and he heard it.

  Looking out the window, he saw that out on the ledge two sparrows were chasing each other in the sunlight. One of them would chase the other into a corner, then they’d both turn around and dart off in the opposite direction. They did this again and again. As he watched, he came to a decision. It was settled in the most natural way possible: he would never leave Li Xing.

  They would go together to the Loess Plateau. Across the whole continent, there were untold numbers of political prisoners in hiding, tens of thousands of them, all fugitives from the law. No reason why he and she couldn’t do that, too. And maybe somewhere in that area was his father.

  “What was the message?”

  “Go to the cricket seller in the street market on Jixiang Road. When you find him, say ‘Jasmine.’ That’s the password. Liu Hong probably got into Shanghai the same way.”

  “Where’s Jixiang Road?”

  “Near where the writer Lu Xun used to live.”

  “That’s not far from here. Xingxing, let’s hurry. They may come charging in here any time.”

  All she had to do was pick up her suitcase and she was ready. Aki hastily tossed the bare essentials into a travel bag. Watching, she said in surprise, “You don’t have to hurry.”

  “I’m coming, too.”

  Her eyes widened. The decision she’d taken was firm, but where it might lead she didn’t know. As she started to speak, he interrupted: “Damn it. Forgot to pack my pyjamas.” He opened up his bag again and tried to stuff the things inside, to no avail.

  “That’s right, even when you sleep on the sofa you wear them, don’t you?”

  “Can’t sleep without them. And they have to be the kind that button to the neck.”

  She shrugged and giggled. He managed to squeeze the pyjamas in. The leather flask and the sun visor would have to go.

  Like any two travellers about to check out, they stood in the doorway and surveyed the room a last time. It was full of things left behind. Too bad. The phone was ringing.

  They slipped quickly across the passage outside, and started down the emergency staircase.

  “This makes it twice I’ve done this in less than an hour.”

  They emerged onto Changzhi Road and walked north for a bit before catching a taxi. The smaller Shanghai taxis were all red Charades. He told the driver to take them to Lu Xun’s old residence.

  They’d been lucky. That morning, Ma Zuqi had succeeded in tapping the phone call from Liu Hong’s messenger. After Li Xing got into a red Charade with the money, she was followed – until at the corner of Kunshan Road, just when a big trolley was blocking her pursuers’ view, she slipped out of the cab and hurried back in the opposite direction on the sidewalk. They missed this manoeuvre and kept on following the Charade.

  Since it hadn’t occurred to Ma Zuqi that she might return to Broadway Mansions, the building and its environs were left temporarily unguarded. Aki and Li Xing were able to take advantage of this lapse to arrive safely at the outdoor market on Jixiang Road.

  The lane was crowded on both sides with free-market street stalls. They found the cricket seller right away. Inside little cages hanging from a pole over a handcart were insects in full cry. A middle-aged man and woman were seated, fanning themselves on stools between the shafts.

  Li Xing went up to them and quietly said the password. The man immediately got up, stepped outside the shafts, and signalled with his eyes for them to follow.

  He took them to a house in a bleak section of the old lilong north of Lu Xun Park, and told them to wait there until nightfall. Then he asked for a credit card. Having left almost everything else behind, Aki refused to hand it over – but seeing the man’s reaction, which clearly implied the deal was off, he reluctantly held it out. The Visa gold card was stuck unceremoniously in the breast pocket of the man’s sweaty shirt.

  The room they were in had once been used as a kitchen, and in the corner was a damp pile of pulverized charcoal. They sat down on wooden stools, propped their elbows on the edge of a rickety table, and looked at each other in the lingering twilight. On top of their anxiety was the stifling heat. There was nothing to say.

  “There’s a cricket singing somewhere,” said Aki, although he wasn’t entirely certain whether he’d picked up the sound or not.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Really? I must have gotten that chirping sound on the brain.”

  They fell silent again. Now and then they exchanged a glance. He noticed something odd: whatever way they looked
at each other, his eyes and hers never seemed to align perfectly.

  At some point Li Xing laughed out loud, as if to lighten the air in this room where darkness was slow to fall.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  The vicinity grew noisier. Having been warned not to go outside, Aki crossed to the edge of the window and peered out. Fat women sat on stone steps in doorways, their legs stretched out heavily on the stone pavement. Charcoal briquettes flared, and over the fires, metal ladles and cooking pots made an angry racket, as if quarrelling. Men home from work slammed on their brakes and hopped off their bicycles, making the kickstand squeak as they shouted out teasing remarks to children who came running.

  At almost the same moment, Aki and Li Xing were seized by the same thought: Where are we now? It was like being a kid again. As if they could run outside and find old playmates waiting for them, all the same height as long ago.

  Li Xing stood up with a small yawn. The moment seemed to stretch and stagnate. Then all at once darkness fell, locking them in fast.

  “Why does it get dark suddenly like that? It’s the middle of summer,” said Aki.

  She knelt down on the floor in front of him and leaned forward on both arms. She hadn’t anticipated this, his coming along. It would have been safer if he’d gone straight home, even though she’d wanted to stay with him for as long as she could.

  “You’re the first truly gentle person I’ve ever known,” she told him. “I can hardly believe a Japanese man could be like this. But you’ve done enough. You really must… go back.” She forced the words out.

  He felt a spurt of anger. “But I’ve made up my mind! There’s no turning back.” It was partly because he saw himself being forced to do things whose outcome was beyond his control. Once I handed over the credit card I was sunk, he wanted to say, but it would have sounded too mean.

  “No, you can still go. You mustn’t come with me. I left Liu Hong and chose you. And I chose China, not another country. I’ve no regrets. That’s why I’m here with you now… Let’s say goodbye here.”

  “Xingxing, listen. What you’re saying is full of contradictions. You chose this country and me; I chose this country and you. Why say goodbye?”

  “I love you, really I do. But it’s impossible, isn’t it? – this romance we’re having. I can’t explain. You just mustn’t come. Are you going to do the same thing your father did?”

  For a second he flinched, and in his mind’s eye he saw the Loess Plateau open up behind her. He tried to embrace her but she moved away, and the vision vanished. Her shoulders shook. She was crying.

  When the cricket seller reappeared, he told them to get ready; they were going to take a boat. Aki stood up first.

  They left the lane and walked along a narrow creek, its tar-black water shining. The fog tasted like cold copper coins. Far away, a tiny lantern described a circle; it was apparently a signal. “That’s it,” murmured the cricket seller, and quickened his pace.

  They went down a steep, narrow, U-shaped flight of stone steps towards the water. The lantern on the boat’s gunwale below lit up the way before them.

  The boat was a solid-looking scow with an awning. The man with the lantern urged them to jump on board. Light entered the water like a snake. Li Xing hesitated, and turned to face Aki with an angry gesture. He gave her a determined look; privately, he was thinking, Okay, here’s where I get cut off from the world of comfort. Goodbye to Tokyo and Kobe and that scenery I love in the northern foothills of Chokaizan. Strangely, he felt no regret. Inwardly, he apologized to Sato: there’d be no memorial service this year.

  He took Li Xing’s hand, squeezed it hard, and together they jumped aboard the scow. Li Xing said nothing more. In the bow was a woman with a pole in her hand. In the stern, holding the oars, was the lantern man; the cricket seller had silently departed.

  Aki and Li Xing slipped under the awning. As the woman pushed the end of her pole against the stone steps and manoeuvred the scow away from the bank, they seemed to rise up in the water, and without delay the man began straining hard at the oars. The boat took off down the narrow, twisting creek. Where it might be headed, they weren’t told.

  Shortly afterwards, the semi-diesel engine in the stern kicked in, and with a loud knocking sound, the boat picked up speed. They had entered Suzhou Creek. Aki tucked up the edge of the awning, poked his head out, and took a look around. One after another, sampans and junks cast off from the little docks lining both banks, crowding into the waterway. Only some fifty meters wide, the creek was so thronged with boats going up and down that it seemed a miracle they didn’t bump against each other. Those going back upstream were headed towards Suzhou and Wuxi, those going downstream, towards the Huangpu River and on to the Yangtze. The water smelt foul. Added to it were the chemical odours from factories along both riverbanks. The boat with Aki and Li Xing aboard was moving upstream.

  14

  China is a land of rivers. The shortness of the Chinese coast is in inverse proportion to the width and depth of the interior. With the Yellow River, the Yangtze, the Pearl River, and other such vast waterways as axes, a transportation and information network of large canals and creeks arose during the Sui dynasty, linking Beijing in the north with Hangzhou in the south. The network expanded in all directions, becoming ever more exhaustive in reach as it was perfected through the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties. For travellers heading north, the southern point of departure in any period of history was Hangzhou.

  At one time, a traveller could undertake a three- or four-thousand-kilometre journey south to Guangdong and west to Jiujiang or Chengdu – all in one boat. But in the twentieth century, the advent of steamers increased the popularity of ocean transport, and the further advent of railroads and automobiles increased the popularity of land transport, so that the canal system declined in status.

  Vessels plying the canals were of two types, those active in daylight and those active at night. The Green Gang, a secret organization that controlled the black market in prewar Shanghai, operated boats and oversaw boatmen using separate troops for day and night. The night vessels carried contraband such as privately grown rice and opium.

  The great canals gradually fell into disuse, but in the region of the Yangtze Delta, canals remain an important means of transportation to this day. East of Lake Taihu, in the Taihu Plain, creeks branch out like capillaries, with rowboats, sailing vessels, and motorboats moving constantly to and fro.

  In earliest times, the land of the Yangtze Delta, including the Taihu Plain, was unmanageably soft and swampy. From around the Qin dynasty (221 BC–206 BC), as creeks were opened and land drained, the area was transformed into fertile farmland. The creeks and rivulets still function primarily as a means of drainage and irrigation, beyond their role in transportation.

  At waterway intersections and harbours, and at river crossings, vessels, people, and goods would gather, forming population centres and markets; then, as commerce and manual labour flourished, towns came into being. Of the twenty-three riverside towns in the Taihu Plain, the largest is Suzhou. Even now, one can travel by water to Shanghai or Nanjing from any of these towns without ever setting foot on land.

  Such towns also afforded convenient hiding places for the Green Gang. The connecting waterways are woven together in a complex and subtle network. Public security officials found it impossible to patrol the creeks at night.

  15

  The fog appeared again. The man sat in the stern, adjusting the engine or plying the oars, and the woman in the bow wielded the pole, using it to push back sampans that seemed about to bump into them and occasionally plunging it straight down to the riverbed to measure the depth of the water. The bowl of the pipe she was smoking glowed red. The smell from it drifted in under the awning, faint yet distinct.

  “Opium,” whispered Li Xing.

  Leaving behind the outskirts of Shanghai and parting with Suzhou Creek, the boat entered a small tributary. They were su
rrounded by fields of tall hemp. Aki tried asking the man in the stern where they were going, but got no reply. Was it all right to trust him? They had no choice, said Li Xing. Eventually the boat came out onto a broad area like a lake, the swirling fog deepening. The awning was rolled up a third of the way. A wind came up. All around the boat in the pitch darkness, little waves were whipped into small surges. Typhoon coming, said the woman in the bow.

  They headed back into a creek that bent like a crank, intersecting with other channels again and again. Hemp and alder branches from the banks on either side pressed in around them with a loud scratching noise.

  “We’re lost,” the man shouted hoarsely to the woman, in a tone of frustration. “Which way is Zhouzhuang?”

  “So that’s where we’re going,” murmured Li Xing.

  Aki repeated the name inquiringly, but she shook her head. She was from northern China. The geography and place names of the Yangtze Delta were largely foreign to her.

  All at once, from overhead came the angry shouts of several men. A voice called out “Who are you?” and a floodlight came on, the beam rapidly crisscrossing the boat. People were running about on the bank. The boat was ordered to stop.

  Out in a field, the orange rooftop light of a patrol car was spinning around and around. The boatman in the stern called back: “What’s going on?”

  “A political criminal from Beijing is on the loose in the area. We’re searching all boats.”

  “We’ve got a woman in labour on board here. We’re on our way to the maternity hospital in Wujiang, but I lost my bearings in the fog. I could sure use some help, officer. Where are we?”

  The boat normally carried hemp that had been soaked in water, beaten, and dried. Under the awning were bundles of the stuff. Li Xing quickly reached out and grabbed a handful, then rolled it up and stuffed it under her clothes. A uniformed officer leapt on board, making the boat roll heavily to one side. The light from a dimmed flashlight swept across Li Xing’s belly where she lay stretched out. Aki held her hand, playing the concerned husband. For a moment it seemed to him as though she really was carrying new life, that the light on her belly came from inside her.