by Ge Fei
Still, I agreed without hesitation. You can probably guess the reason why.
He added that no one in the house cooked, so we’d have to go out to eat. He had a place in mind some distance away. I made my way to the bathroom before we left.
As I passed the foot of the staircase, around a basin filled with Asiatic lilies, I heard the sound of a woman coughing upstairs. Whether this was Ding Caichen’s wife, his daughter, or somebody else, I had no idea. Two more coughs followed. When I came out of the bathroom, I couldn’t help glancing up the stairway, then over to Ding Caichen. I considered suggesting that he call down the person upstairs to join us for lunch.
He was changing his footwear by the doorway; he slipped out of his loafers—standard wear for any Beijinger —and grabbed a gray windbreaker from the rack. Then he turned to me and smiled, saying, “I’m sorry, I forgot to mention it before. I’ll wire the remaining two hundred and sixty thousand into your account immediately. No need to worry, I have your account number.”
Hearing this, I felt a little pang of regret. If he had only brought this up a few minutes earlier, there would have been no reason for me to stay for lunch.
•
We arrived at a Hunan restaurant next to the real-estate development office. The pungent smell of old chili oil permeated the air inside. We picked a table and sat down. It was still early, and for the moment we had the place to ourselves. At the service counter, five or six members of the wait staff crowded together, chattering quietly in Hunanese.
After a little while, a chubby waitress sauntered over to our table with a menu under her arm. Ding Caichen accepted the menu from her, flipped through it carelessly, and said, “Let’s have a pot of tea first—Pu’erh tea. And bring me an ashtray, please.”
“There’s no smoking in here,” she abruptly replied.
Ding Caichen looked up; he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and stared at her for a second, as if he didn’t understand what she had just said. Then he gave a short chuckle, and repeated in a low voice, “It’s fine. Just bring me an ashtray.”
“I’m sorry, sir, smoking isn’t allowed in public places, it’s the law. I hope you’ll understand. I’m sorry, if you really feel the need to . . .”
The chubby waitress couldn’t finish her sentence. Ding Caichen had reached into the pocket of his windbreaker to remove a solid black object, which he placed gently on the tabletop.
It was a handgun.
Ding Caichen’s gaunt, ashen face turned savage. “Savage” isn’t exactly the right word, because the darkness that suddenly clouded his face clearly stemmed from an unconcealed, magnified anguish. He looked terrifying; I could plainly see that the frail little man could completely lose it at any moment.
I had never seen a real handgun before. My terror muffled another sentiment—I felt an irresistible urge to reach out and touch the weapon. Truthfully, I could barely believe what was happening, even with the gun lying there right under my nose. By the time I snapped out of my prolonged moment of shock, I noticed the chubby waitress had disappeared.
Everyone had cleared out—the restaurant was now deserted.
A few moments later, a man rushed from the back of the restaurant to our table, where he bowed and apologized, nodding and smiling obsequiously. He looked about fifty and called himself the manager. He referred to Ding Caichen, at least twenty years his junior, as “Uncle Ding” (so they were already acquainted); the chubby waitress, whom he called “that stupid little bitch,” was his niece, a recent migrant from the countryside. The manager kept asking us to move to one of the private rooms. Ding Caichen, however, didn’t say a word, so the manager dropped it. Then he started to plead with Ding Caichen to put “that baby” on the table away—more guests would be arriving, you know, no need for it to be out in the open. Ding Caichen remained silent, as if engulfed by some sort of excruciating agony, and totally ignored the manager’s well-intentioned requests. After a long, awkward pause, the manager could only cover the gun with a yellow cloth napkin.
In a flash, dishes of all kinds materialized on the table, along with two crystal ashtrays and a pack of expensive Nanjing cigarettes.
Yet, strangely, Ding Caichen didn’t smoke a single one throughout the entire course of the meal. He didn’t eat much, and he spoke even less. Of course, the handgun under the napkin made me desperate to leave as soon as possible; when he did speak, I could hardly focus my attention to formulate a response. On the drive home, as I entered the tunnel, I suddenly recalled Ding Caichen asking me if I could come take a look at the sound system if he experienced any problems with it. This is more or less what I could remember saying to him: “Sure, that goes without saying. People in my line of work fetishize the machine to a degree. Normal folks would definitely find us a little weird. You know, you sell off a nice piece of equipment, but you never really let it go. It feels like marrying off your daughter, no exaggeration. You can no longer protect her or care for her, and you secretly hope the new owner will be as good to her as you had been. Even though you know she’s already married, you still can’t resist the impulse to go see her. All audiophiles are like this; others don’t understand it. Thus, if I could have the opportunity to return to your home and see her again, that would be more than I could ask for.”
Ding Caichen gave me an absent-minded thank you, then looked me in the eyes for a long time without saying anything. The expression on his face suggested that he was making multiple calculations simultaneously. Finally, perhaps unable to think of anything else to say, he brought up the subject of money again. He smiled wanly and said, “Don’t worry, I will wire the rest of the money to your account. A man like me doesn’t have many good points, but I do stand by my word. In this world, anything can happen, but that two hundred sixty thousand will be paid to you, down to the last cent.”
•
You can guess the first thing I did when I returned home from Sleeping Dragon Valley that afternoon. I downloaded the horror movie Her Lost Soul and watched it from beginning to end. But really, I only needed to see the first few minutes to figure it out.
I mean, to figure out why Jiang Songping had randomly brought it up the first time he described Ding Caichen.
9. RED DAWN
TWO DAYS passed.
Two weeks passed.
A month passed.
The two hundred and sixty thousand yuan Ding Caichen promised he would wire me never posted to my account. I could feel something was wrong, though I had no way of knowing what. I toughed it out for a few more anxious days, then with shaking fingers dialed his cell number. An unfamiliar voice came on the line. The guy spoke with a thick Sha’anxi accent—definitely couldn’t be Ding Caichen.
“What do you want?” he demanded in greeting. I couldn’t finish explaining my concerns before he completely blew up: “You’re right messed up, huh? You got a fuckin’ death wish, huh?”
Then he hung up.
After that, I tried several times to muster the courage to call back, but I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t figure out what the hell “messed up” referred to, either. I could only bother my old friend Jiang Songping once again.
“What did I tell you, brother? I said you had to be extra careful dealing with the likes of him, and now look what’s happened.” He lowered his voice and continued, “And let me tell you, I’m in as big a mess as you are right now. My goddamn senile mother has gotten it into her head that I should take her to the Maldives. Yeah, anything you fucking want, Ma. Fucking hell. Let me call you back in a bit. . . .”
He never called back.
•
One windy afternoon in December, the bastard Chang Baoguo slouched his way into my apartment, dragging his bad leg behind him. I tried my best to explain my situation to him, but no matter what I said, he just looked at me with suspicion and disappointment, shaking his head and sighing. As if I myself had done something shameful. He demanded that I give him a firm date for moving out, so he wouldn’t lose his patie
nce. A clear enough threat, but to make sure I fully understood he put it in more obvious terms. He claimed he had “done everything he could for me,” and that “a man’s patience was actually very, very, very limited.” A piece of shit like him could be capable of anything.
One definite piece of information I gathered, which he repeated several times amid a steady stream of profanity, was that this problem, without question, could not drag on into the new year. Nothing to be done—he wanted me out before the end of the year. Anger, panic, and desperation caused my head to spin; I took a deep breath and reassured him that December thirty-first would be fine. That left me only three or four days. He forced me to put it in writing.
A copse of birch trees and a transformer station bordered my apartment building. Standing on my bedroom balcony, I watched Chang Baoguo hobble his way to the edge of the trees, and suddenly halt. He lit a cigarette, then waved a hand toward the thickest section of the grove, next to the station shed. A small figure emerged from behind the wall and ran to him. She glanced up in my direction. The two of them clung to each other for support, and soon limped off across the road like a dinghy in rough seas. When they reached the sign for the 356 bus, they stopped and waited.
For the first time in my life, I discovered that my wrinkled old sister was a pretty funny woman indeed.
•
Though I knew it would hardly make a difference, I decided to sell the rest of my hi-fi equipment at significantly discounted prices online, as a one-time clearance sale. I would have sold myself to defray moving costs had anyone asked. I didn’t have to wait long for my first buyer to appear.
Colonel Shen, a military commander, had his heart set on my Red Dawn flat-line speaker cables.
Early one evening, Colonel Shen arrived at my place in a Humvee, cash in hand, ready to pick up his merchandise. He told me he had decided to buy this particular pair of cables because his new wife liked the name: Red Dawn. He said that using them to listen to music made you think of a red sun rising in a fountain of light.
I supposed that when times are tough it can be easy to become a little unhinged. Shit. Colonel Shen had barely walked through the door and for whatever reason I just started to babble on about Ding Caichen, the epic sound system, the missing money. I poured out my heart out to some soldier I had never met before. I knew how undignified it looked, exposing my own weaknesses to a stranger, but for some unfathomable reason, I simply couldn’t control myself, as if a sympathetic God had sent me an angel to hear my misfortune.
Though I described Ding Caichen several times as an intimidating and mysterious figure, I withheld the part about the pistol on the table. Tall and muscular, Colonel Shen possessed an open, trustworthy face. Even the pockmarks on his cheeks made me feel safer. He listened to my entire tale with cool patience, then smiled dismissively and growled, “Aren’t you being a little too sensitive, Mr. Cui? Nothing in your story sounds particularly terrifying to me. For a buyer to delay payment or even refuse it altogether is common enough, whether for financial reasons or something else. It’s no big deal. Worst-case scenario, you can always take him to court. If you can’t reach him by phone, you should drive back out there, find this guy Ding, and ask him what’s going on. That would be better than sitting here, making yourself miserable.”
He must have noticed the timidity in my expression, as he added in a half-joking tone, “Guys like you just love dwelling inside your own head. If you’re really worried something will happen, why don’t I send over a couple of armed soldiers here tomorrow to go with you?”
I thanked him for his generous offer, but declined. Still, his words confirmed a fear that had been slowly growing in my mind: I really had no other choice but to drive back to Sleeping Dragon Valley.
10. LEONHARDT
WHEN I left my apartment that morning, a steady rain fell from a thick, gray sky. I say rain, but it felt more like sleet. The heavy, glittering droplets were piercingly cold, as if they might transform into a flurry of snowflakes in a moment. As my car entered the mountains, the steady rain turned into a downpour, an endless curtain of hammering raindrops that flooded the pavement of the deserted highway.
Beijing usually didn’t have such heavy rains this early in the winter. Those paranoid scholars and professors would have something to say about it. As everyone knows, they’re capable of interpreting any natural disaster, any abnormality in the climate or seasons, as a sign that the world is coming to an end. Every day they’re online claiming this or disputing that, as if they were indubitable experts at how to run the country. They produce opinions like a dysfunctional endocrine system secreting hormones, or like a senseless fog building up layer after layer, or like measles, in hot flashes followed by chills. If you’re stupid enough to take them seriously, you gradually realize that you can’t even figure out what they’re trying to say!
So for instance, you hear them constantly droning on about how the Three Gorges Dam caused the earthquake in Sichuan; how a rapid rise in ocean temperature caused the southeastern tsunami; how various gases trapped beneath the ocean floor would kill ninety percent of the population if they ever broke out to the earth’s surface. The logical conclusion would be to reduce our carbon footprint, and yet if you ask these people to use a little less electricity, or to decrease their driving, it’s as if you’re robbing them at gun-point. They seem incapable of doing anything but complaining. If the number of mosquitoes dropped one summer, they’d say, My God, the world’s gotten so bad even the mosquitoes can’t adapt. And if the mosquito population boomed, they’d say, Shit, it looks like only mosquitoes can thrive in this world. One of my clients regurgitated the most ridiculous theory I had ever heard. His research focused on “joint friction” or something like that. He had just returned from Tubingen; claimed to be a vegetarian. He thought the biggest contributor to global warming wasn’t car exhaust nor industrial pollution, but cow farts. He liked to use the phrase “in point of fact” a lot, I couldn’t say why.
Even if what these so-called experts say sounds reasonable, I still think they’re fabricating a lot of it. More importantly, if what they say turns out to be true, how could it possibly relate to a poor man about to be kicked out of his home by his own sister? If the world’s ending, let it end, I thought. I didn’t have the energy to care about questions of such magnitude.
Only one concrete problem dominated my limited, selfish imagination, namely, how to get the two hundred and sixty thousand yuan Ding Caichen owed me as painlessly as possible so I could move out of my apartment and into that farmer’s courtyard by the end of the year, and in the process salvage what little dignity I had left. I couldn’t endure being humiliated by a piece of shit like Chang Baoguo for the rest of my life.
I parked my car outside of Ding Caichen’s courtyard.
After I turned the ignition off, I could hear the sound of music drifting from inside the house. It seemed to me an unmistakable sign: Ding Caichen was still listening to music and so nothing could be wrong, all would be well. I could tell that full, flawless piano timbre emanated from my Autograph speakers—no doubt about it. I also recognized the recording: Emil Gilels playing Brahms’s second piano concerto, his 1972 performance with Eugen Jochum and the Berlin Philharmonic. Of all the piano concertos ever composed, Brahms’s second has been my favorite by far. I think of it as my Requiem. In my opinion, not even Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto reaches the same heights. So I sat in the car, listening to the third movement, my somber mood brightening up. The northern winds wailing by outside couldn’t dispel the warmth the music brought me. It caused me to forget my predicament, and stirred a long-suppressed pride in my handiwork.
•
That a person should live his entire life without the opportunity to enjoy such beautiful music would be a shame!
•
I walked along the curving, mud-veined stone path as I had before to the north end of the house. I found the red doorbell on the wooden gate and pressed it. The music faded in and
out without stopping—no one answered the door. I gave the bell a lingering, persistent second ring, then a short, perfunctory third. Finally, the door on the east side of the house opened; a woman wearing a floral-patterned jacket and a headscarf came out the door and down the steps, a spring-green umbrella open in her hand.
The silk scarf wrapped around her head covered her face completely, leaving only a narrow slit for her eyes. Her appearance made me think of a conservative Arab woman in a burqa, or a headscarved Chechen terrorist. As she neared and looked me up and down, I admit that my heart skipped a few beats.
From the other side of the gate, I introduced myself and explained my business with Ding Caichen. I remarked with feigned cheerfulness that the music she had been enjoying was being played on a sound system I had designed especially for her home. She paused for a minute before finally opening the wooden gate.
When I took off my shoes inside the front door, I remembered that I hadn’t put on clean socks; my leather shoes were soaked from the rain, and the smell from my feet truly exceeded the descriptive borders of the word “putrid.” Afraid of offending her, I didn’t put on the slippers offered me, but instead grabbed a pair of loafers from the shoe rack above, with the hope of blocking the stench that poured forth in waves from my feet.
But the woman stopped me. She told me to use a pair of slippers by the door.
Drenched, with stinking feet, I decided not to sit down, for fear of staining her furniture.
“Is Ding Caichen out?” I asked her. The woman walked over to the expansive window and turned off the Linn 12. The room suddenly became very quiet.
“He is gone.”
“Oh, then do you know when he’ll be back?” I continued. “Could I possibly wait for him here?”
“He is gone,” she repeated. Though we were now inside, she still hadn’t removed the silk scarf around her head, which intensified my uneasiness.