Qiu Xiaolong - A Case of Two Cities

A more likely scenario would be that his phone discussions with Yu had been overheard. After the first few times, they had largely given up their weather terminology. A necessary yet disastrous decision. He had gambled on Yu’s home line not being tapped. In one of their discussions, he had mentioned Little Tiger in the context of the Xing…

But then these thoughts began depressing him. There would be time enough for him to think, once back in China, about whatever he was going to do or not do, as a cop.

He rose and took a local newspaper from a rack. The waitress came to him again. He had another glass of wine. Reading rather absentmindedly, he noticed three or four grammatical mistakes in one short article. He recalled what American writers had said of his English writing.

You can be a good writer here.

Perhaps he would be able to launch a new career here. The long-faded dream of his college years, of writing whatever he wanted to, and of not worrying about politics and corruption. It wouldn’t be a choice, he told himself, made out of any materialistic consideration. It might not be too late-with a wonderful friend staying in the background.

These thoughts had barely come crowding into his mind when he started to drive them out. Even in the confusion of a fleeting moment, he knew he had moved too far from the cherished vision of his college years. Like a green light he had read about long ago, already beyond his reach there and then. Or perhaps like Tian, who, with his booming business in L.A., like it or not, had found a new self with a young wife and a million-dollar mansion. Chen, too, had come to find himself more and more, ironic as it might appear, through those fatal investigations.

Besides, what about the people who stood by him all the way?

Looking out, he tried to refocus his thoughts on her, which seemed to be the only thing that could possibly cheer him up. With so many gloomy things surrounding him, with the memory of a poet musing at such an evening, with something like a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of the subconscious, however, even those self-indulgent fantasies took on a self-debunking color…

He suddenly felt an impulse he had not experienced for a long time. Turning to a blank page in his notebook, he started scribbling-to his surprise, in English, in a quite different strain, almost like a parody.

He took a gulp of his wine, as if smashed with a bizarre combination of rhythm and rhyme-in a language not really his own, and with those lines coming out of nowhere. It appeared doubtful whether they would make their way into a poem, or into anything readable. But he’d better put them down, he knew, while the inexplicable urge still clutched him.

He was shocked by the lines rising out of the unlikely moment. In his college years, he had read about surrealist poets writing automatically, as in a trance. He wondered how such a similar experience befell him. Perhaps he could think of a number of explanations, but he was not in an analytical mood.

Because he would never be able, he knew, to squeeze the moment into a ball, to start it rolling toward where he would like to go. Not just about what he described in those lines, but more symbolically, like Eliot. No, he was not what he had imagined himself to be-not even in those lines. It was just a moment, and then it was gone.

And it was not a long moment.

He saw a black car pull up in front of her building. A man emerged from the driver’s side and opened the passenger door. She stepped out in that black dress with spaghetti straps.

The man did not go in with her, but they hugged outside the door, his hands lingering on her bare shoulders.

A long, passionate hug.

He kissed her on the cheek before moving back into the car. A shining black Jaguar. She stood on the doorstep, watching, waving her hand, until the car rolled out of sight in the growing dusk.

Chen kept watching, spellbound, like sitting in the movies.

She had been busy with the Chinese delegation for days. It was an afternoon when she had a few hours for herself. So of course she had taken care of her personal things.

It was unrealistic to imagine that a young, spirited woman like her would lead a colorless life like his. There should be a man-or men-in her life. Too absurd of him to imagine her shutting herself in after their meeting in Shanghai, as in a Tang dynasty poem- with the fallen petals in the yard, collected too much to open the door.