At the airport he got in a taxi. He remembered his old driver Chen Ying. Every time he got off a plane or boat in China, Chen had been conspicuously standing around with a happy-go-lucky grin, his hands in his pockets. He’d never heard anything further from Chen. What had become of him? Were he and his Anli living happily ever after somewhere in Japan?
The taxi drove into the downtown area. Aki was riveted by the scenes outside his window. The city was being overturned. Everywhere he looked, another old neighbourhood lay dismantled, reduced to piles of rubble; those few that remained were under attack from great iron wrecking balls flung around by cranes. There were huge clouds of dust, with laths and girders sticking out of them, hanging perilously in the air.
The traffic was appalling. Aki got tired of looking out the window, and went through the city centre with his eyes shut. “Dao le.” We’re there. At this comment from the driver, he reopened his eyes. There stood the Broadway Mansions Hotel, unchanged, an eagle with its wings half folded. The familiar sight was reassuring.
He was booked into a standard twin on the fourteenth floor, one with a view of Suzhou Creek, as he’d requested. It pleased him above all that the room was directly below the suite where he’d spent several days with Li Xing and nearly a week under house arrest. The coincidence struck him as a lucky omen.
Aki opened the curtains. It was a clear day, but where the sun was he couldn’t tell for sure. Red-tinged light shone through the choking haze to fill his room. December had been unusually cold here, with occasional snow flurries, he’d heard, but today the air was warm. Underneath the surface reflections from its banks, Suzhou Creek wound along, black as tar. Flat-bottomed barges laden with coal entered on it one after another from the Huangpu, passing under Garden Bridge and heading back upstream. On to Suzhou, Wuxi, and Kunshan. Yes, and Zhouzhuang too, he thought. On ropes stretched over the piles of coal, colourful laundry fluttered in the wind like a signal.
The view had changed considerably. The row of pretentious, neoclassical European-style buildings was the same, but just behind them, steel-frame skyscrapers now jutted into the air.
Along the riverside promenade was a strip of three-story concrete shops extending all the way to Pier 16, so unless you climbed to the rooftops, the surface of the Huangpu remained hidden from view.
Across the river, a queer-looking tower was under construction, shaped like a hairpin, a good five hundred metres high. All kinds of sixty-story buildings were springing up around it. Just a few years ago this had been agricultural land – nothing but some piers, a factory or two, and a scattering of workers’ housing. Now it was being transformed into a financial centre, to amass the wealth of the world.
The city was pulsing and humming with activity, kicking up a pall of dust as it reinvented itself – and hidden somewhere in all this ferment was Li Xing, here to board the ship for Kobe. The thought made him restless. Wearing a sweater and a leather jacket, he hurried out into the street with three places in mind to revisit. Straight off, he went to Shanghai Film Studio, where the sole familiar face belonged to Yu Ming. When he asked her about Xie Han’s house, she shook her head and said it had been torn down. His wife had died long ago, and Yu had no idea what had happened to his ashes.
He then went to the bar in the basement of the Metropole Hotel. The long counter was unchanged, but it had been converted into a karaoke bar. No sign of Wang. The market where the cricket seller had been was nearby. He began to drift in that direction, but soon thought better of it. If he allowed himself to revisit the corner in the alleyway where the man had taken them… then the road by the creek… the stone steps leading down to the barge… he might give in and go all the way back to the river town where he had lost Li Xing. What he was committed to now was facing forward, not backward, in the belief that time’s natural unfolding of events would bring him to Li Yan, as apparently she was now called.
For dinner, he went to the hotel restaurant on the eighteenth floor – and to his surprise was turned away. Unaccompanied guests could not be served, he was told, so he withdrew without objecting. Going out to eat was too much trouble. He went down to the coffee shop in the lobby and ordered two kinds of sandwiches to go, picked up a bottle of red wine at the kiosk, and went back to his room.
The gaudy lighting of the buildings on the Bund made them look more than ever like a theatrical backdrop. Aki closed the curtains, munched his sandwiches, drank his wine. He made short work of the meal. There was still plenty of wine, but it seemed no amount of alcohol would get him drunk tonight, so he left off.
Anxiety reared its ugly head. Was Li Yan really Li Xing? After going underground, Li Xing must have resurfaced under a different name and resumed her life – and somehow or other become acquainted with Zhang Liang.
As Zhang had said, it was only a short hop by plane to Kansai International Airport, and yet his wife insisted on travelling by boat. Moreover, since she lived in Beijing it would be natural for her to sail from nearby Tianjin, but instead she was going out of her way to take the Xin Jian Zhen from Shanghai. Tomorrow I’ll see her, he almost yelled. His eyes travelled around the room, looked up at the ceiling. Up there was our room.
Sitting back in the chair, he drank one more glass of wine. He opened his book of Arabic poetry, and quietly read aloud a couplet:
The watchmen know that Hafiz is in love.
Even King Solomon’s councillors know.
The following morning, after a morning mist mixed with the dust from construction sites had cleared, the air tingled with a resinous smell that stung the tongue and nostrils. Aki checked out and tried to hail a taxi in front of the hotel, but was turned down by driver after driver, all of whom said his destination was too close. Giving up, he set off for the pier on foot. Fortunately, he had only one small bag to carry.
He turned left at the foot of Garden Bridge and walked along the Huangpu, arriving at the boarding area in twenty minutes. A lively crowd of young girls spilt out into the street. Dragging large suitcases and great big carryalls of heavy plastic with wide stripes of red and blue, they thronged into the smallish waiting room, which was poorly lit and stuffy. On his voyage from Kobe five years ago, there’d been barely fifty passengers in all, but he guessed there were a good three hundred now.
Aki got in line and waited for the processing for leaving the country. His eyes roamed about like a searchlight. Li Yan was here, somewhere in the crowd; the thought drove him to distraction.
The line began to move. Still no sign of her. Aki was duly processed and left the building, walking the two hundred metres to the ship. Everything was happening in just the reverse order from five years ago. The Xin Jian Zhen was anchored with her bow upstream. Both fore and aft, two thick hawsers stretched down from the side of the ship to wind around mushroom-shaped bollards on the pier. Aki came to a stop by one of them.
He walked briskly up the gangplank. At the purser’s desk, he entered his name and passport number in the register for A Deck, where there were eight first-class cabins and one VIP cabin. The first-class cabins were twin rooms, the VIP cabin a suite. A consul’s wife travelling alone would probably be in one of the first-class cabins, he thought. He cast a quick glance over the other names in the register, but hers wasn’t there. No hurry. This was a ship, not a creek or an alley where she might slip away.
He was handed his key; it was just like checking into a hotel. The purser’s desk was on C Deck, so to reach A Deck he climbed the spiral stairs in the central stairwell. His cabin was A5. Five years back it had been A4, directly across the way. He put down his bag and had a quick look at the bed and sink before going back out. After checking the vicinity of the stairs, he went out on deck near the gangplank.
He looked down at the pier. The group of girls was now camped out below, awaiting the signal to board. Their suitcases and carryalls were piled one on top of the other on a pallet covered in netting. The luggage was hoisted up on a hook suspended from a crane. The girls climbed noisily aboard.
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A large, shiny black car approached. Was Li Yan inside? Aki followed the vehicle’s progress intently. It drew alongside the gangplank, and the driver opened the passenger door. A man holding a black bag, the captain perhaps, got out.
All around the ship, buzzers were sounding.
“Qi mao!” Weigh anchor. The order boomed from the loudspeaker. The hawsers were detached from the bollards. The winch in the bow began to groan, hauling in the chain from the water. The dripping anchor rose into sight. The gangplank was drawn back from the side of the ship.
As the steamer had dropped anchor facing upstream, it would have to swing left in a wide U-turn as it pulled away from shore and re-entered the river channel. Still no sign of Li Yan. Aki left the railing and returned to his cabin. Was she on board? Or had she had a sudden change of heart, switched to a plane ticket after all? This seemed possible. He hadn’t checked out every passenger, but still…
Aki stopped a passing crew member and verified that the first-class cabins were all occupied. If Li Yan was indeed on board, she must be in one of the curtained cabins. The range of possibilities was limited. Plenty of time. He sat down heavily on a bench on the portside sundeck, crossed his legs, and watched the continent recede. This would probably be his last view of it. Farewell, Babylon, he muttered under his breath.
From the riverbank came the sound of things being hammered or dropped, the clang of steel plates, the hum of engines. Smells, too. Scorched oil, rotten fruit, coal-fire smoke. The rank smell of the continent. Why did it stir him so?
A large crane on the wharf lifted an enormous steel plate and rotated it in the air. Eventually, the crane swayed to a standstill and a voice rang out: “Okay, xiexie!” Aki murmured his own thanks, to Xie Han and Shanghai.
A voice by his ear said, “You’re Japanese, aren’t you?” The next thing he knew, a plump, middle-aged woman was settling down beside him. Aki nodded.
“Me too,” she said. “Been living in Shanghai three years now. I’m on my way back to Osaka to get my teeth fixed. No use going to a Chinese dentist. They’re expensive and no good.” As she laughed, she covered her mouth with her hand to hide her front teeth.
“Pretty extravagant, isn’t it, taking a boat trip to go to the dentist?”
“You think so? Actually, this is the cheapest way to go. Round trip plane fare runs to 150,000 yen, but this way I only spend 20,000. The difference pays for the dental work and the hotel, both. It’s cheap and relaxing besides. I always take a second-class Japanese-style cabin.”
“They have those?”
“Oh, yes. Three, no, less; rather large. The Chinese passengers aren’t interested, so you can really stretch out and get comfy. See how crowded the boat is today? I’ve got a large cabin all to myself!”
“You say you’ve been living in Shanghai for three years? Why did you move there, if you don’t mind my asking?”
The woman smiled back at him in a friendly way. “Unusual, isn’t it? It’s because my husband is Shanghainese. We had a Chinese restaurant in Sakai City, but he was getting on and we didn’t have any kids, and he really wanted to go back. The Communists are more broad-minded now, he said, and the cost of living there is cheaper – so next thing you know, there we were.”
“And what do you think now, after three years over there?”
“It was the right move. It’s a fun place to live. And the city hall back home in Japan sends our pension over like clockwork. We don’t lack for anything – it’s just the dentists that are no good. So once every three months, I take a ride on this boat. I do enjoy it, I have to say.”
Up ahead, sticking out of the waves was a small white lighthouse, marking the confluence of the Huangpu and the Yangtze. A damp, chill wind blew. The Chinese girls were out on deck taking a stroll, practicing Japanese phrases as they passed by arm-in-arm: “Hello, my name is Cho.” “Hello, my name is Kyo.” “That is the sea. This is a mountain. That is a fish. Pleased to meet you.”
“Those girls are from Jiangsu Province,” said the woman. “They’re going to visit a spinning factory in Okayama. That’s the official story, anyway. Actually they’re going to be working there and sending money home. For three years they make 55,000 yen a month, of which the company sends 10,000 straight back to their parents. Some of them manage to scrimp and save quite a lot, but others run away.” She stood up. “Goodness, it’s getting chilly out here. You can tell we’re on the Yangtze, all right. I think I’ll go below.”
“See you later, then,” Aki said. “Still plenty of time before we get to Kobe.”
As he stood up to see her off, he sensed some movement behind him and, turning, noticed that two men in A3 had just opened the curtain and were standing looking out at the water, talking. That was the cabin diagonally across from his. Now he knew the occupants of cabins A8, A6, and A3. Four to go.
Suddenly the wind picked up, and the cold drove him back inside.
He lay stretched out on the sofa, head on one armrest and feet on the other, attempting to pick up the change in the boat’s swaying as it left the mouth of the river and entered the sea. He listened intently to the sound of the engine. While waiting, he dozed off. The dinner bell roused him. It felt as if he’d slept barely a quarter of an hour, yet outside the porthole the sky was dark. Presumably, the ship’s eastward progress shortened the hours of daylight. They were now out on the East China Sea.
He went down to the dining room and sat right at the back, by a window, remaining till the last possible minute. Li Yan did not appear.
Although the rolling was minimal, he gradually succumbed to seasickness. Neither the degree nor the quality of the boat’s motion seemed very different from when they were on the Huangpu or the Yangtze, but once seasickness got hold of you, it tightened its grip and wouldn’t let go. Like a fish, the boat made subtle adjustments in the transition from fresh water to salt. Each alteration had its effect and the effects were cumulative, his discomfort mounting steadily. “The purser is now distributing seasickness pills,” came the announcement. Aki got up and went out.
In front of the purser’s desk, the Jiangsu girls had formed a long line, waiting for their pills. Some were in tears.
He was handed a packet of white tablets and told to take them three times daily, before meals. He stuck the medicine in his pocket and went for a stroll around A Deck. The lights of every cabin were on, but he could see no sign of any occupants behind the curtains. He walked aft from the bow with a strange sense of speed, as if sprinting. His queasiness got worse. He returned to the cabin, took two tablets, and fell flat on his back on the bed. Overhead the fluorescent lighting was mercilessly bright. Still, little by little the nausea subsided.
Aki got ready for bed. “Tomorrow, it’ll all happen tomorrow,” he muttered as he buttoned his pyjamas to the neck and climbed into bed.
Sleep did not come easily. Things that Li Xing had said to him came back vividly, along with her gestures and expression. The words were all in Mandarin.
Have you any idea what I was really doing, all morning long? Guess. Eyes filled with mischief shone like dew on a leaf. Being in love. With you.
Despite everything, sleepiness finally came. Right now, Xingxing and I are in the same boat, floating over the same water, he thought, yawning. Tomorrow… tomorrow is the day…
He dreamt a stupid dream – “It’s got no point at all,” he said out loud. And woke up. It was morning. He’d slept soundly all night long. Soon came the tinkling of the bell in the corridor announcing breakfast. He had no appetite, but he swallowed two of the tablets he’d been told to take on an empty stomach and went down to the dining room.
Here and there on the floor of the forward lobby lay the Jiangsu girls, wrapped in blankets. Their faces had a uniformly greenish cast, their expressions full of distress, eyes closed. Poor kids. Not only the sea and the boat trip were new to them, but also this awful helplessness.
After a light breakfast of toast and coffee, he walked around looking for a c
rewman, intending to ask about Li Yan, and ended up out on the sundeck. The sun was not yet fully up, but its presence could be felt along the eastern horizon. No sign of an island anywhere. The search for a crewman took him around the entire circumference of the deck. He was stopped by the woman who was on her way to Osaka to have her teeth fixed.
“You’ve been doing a lot of walking since yesterday, haven’t you?” she commented. “Keep circling around the boat the way you do, you’ll end up like the tigers in Little Black Sambo, a big pool of melted butter!”
“I need the exercise.”
“I have to say,” she sighed, “by day two of this trip, it starts to feel like you’ve been on the boat forever. You know what I mean?”
“Um, now that you mention it,” he answered, not focusing on what he was saying, his eyes scouring the vicinity.
“You’re in first class, aren’t you? All by your lonesome?”
He nodded.
“Fancy,” she said mildly. “Some people know how to live, I guess.”
She had a point; the first-class cabins were all twin accommodations, and occupying one alone was indeed extravagant. As this woman’s whole motive for being on the ship was economy, he must have seemed a terrible spendthrift.
“There’s another first-class passenger travelling solo, too, you know,” she added. He perked up at this news, encouraging her to go on, and she jerked her right thumb over her shoulder at the window just behind them. “When I caught sight of her, I thought at first she might be your wife.”
“You saw her?”
“Just the one time. At the purser’s desk.”
“Just one time,” he repeated. The woman nodded. Aki looked away, far across the sea where flying fish leapt from the waves.
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