Can Xue - The Last Lover

Daniel saw that as Nick spoke he was staring fixedly at one spot, so he turned around to look. What he saw almost made him vomit. The cook was standing inside the tent. He had sliced his stomach open and was pulling out his intestines.

“Don’t be afraid.” Nick pushed his wheelchair nearer, saying quietly, “We can take this opportunity to go examine the garden.”

“I want to leave,” Daniel said weakly.

“Good-bye then. Thank you for helping me arrange the garden.”

Daniel was passing absentmindedly through the large white building, which was so still that even the crows and sparrows were quiet, when he bumped into two men in uniform. They grabbed his shoulders and shook him sternly, saying, “Wake up! Wake up, you!” Daniel told them that of course he was awake, but they didn’t believe him. They said people who came here were never able to wake up. They asked Daniel where the family was hiding. He said they might be in the basement. The two men left him and ran downstairs.

He was leaving through the main entrance when Nick caught up to him again. Nick wanted him to promise never to speak of the place where his grandfather was hidden. He also said that if Daniel told, it would be the death of them. “Inside here is a paradise on earth,” he explained.

Daniel returned to Zhenya’s with his empty stomach rumbling. Zhenya gave him a large bowl of borscht and some veal. Daniel ate until his forehead sweated. His mind was greatly eased.

“Nick is a murderer,” Zhenya said. “He kidnapped his grandfather, along with the manservant, and threw them in a dry well. Every day he throws some food down into it. He suffers from insomnia because his conscience is troubled.”

“How do you know this?”

“Is there anything on earth I don’t know? But this Nick, he isn’t a bad person. He did it to save his grandfather’s soul. Those two old men don’t plan to ever come out from the well.”

As Daniel helped Zhenya unload the fruit baskets from the car, he saw his father walking by, swaying as he walked. He carried a leather suitcase and appeared to be drunk. Daniel had never seen his father like this before. He remembered his mother saying that his father was on a business trip, so why would he still be loafing around here? Worried his father would recognize him, Daniel quickly turned his back and went into the building. Inside he stood at the window facing onto the street and saw his father place the suitcase on the ground, sit down on it, and read a book.

Zhenya quietly entered. She wanted to speak with Daniel about his father.

“Your whole family is very interesting, very difficult to fathom. So when your mother proposed that you stay at my house, I agreed right away. Buoyant people, like your family, are the kind I like to deal with the most.”

Her heavy body pressed down on the sofa like a rock, so that the shape altered.

“Your mother’s spirit is so light, she’s truly happy! You’ve asked about my fiancé. Look at me, I’m so fat, so heavy, how could I go to him? If I was like your parents, who can make themselves invisible at any time, I would have returned to his side long ago. Look, your father isn’t sitting on his suitcase, he’s rising into the air. That’s how focused he is!”

“My father is reading an Eastern detective story,” Daniel mumbled.

“Of course, he’s a great man.”

Daniel noticed his father’s hair was a mess, his clothing disarrayed. The strangest thing was that he was wearing a pair of garish leather shoes, the kind with pointed toes and a decorative pattern. Was this man actually his father?

“I like buoyant men the best.” Zhenya’s eyes suddenly shone lewdly.

As her voice fell Daniel turned to look at his father, but didn’t see him.

“He never stays in one place,” Zhenya said with admiration. “No one can be sure where he is.”

The whole following afternoon Zhenya was tormented by a fearsome worry. She said that she had caught “gigantism,” that the flesh of her body was expanding until she couldn’t possibly survive it. “Daniel, Daniel, I’m going to die!” she hollered, flailing on the sofa. In her despair she refused to handle any of the business, so the troubled Daniel ran in and out, both selling fruit and comforting her.

When the sky was dark she finally calmed down. Staring into Daniel’s eyes, in a daze, she asked, “Daniel, tell me the truth, am I completely hopeless?”

“How could that be? Zhenya, you are a beautiful woman. You’re a little fat, but that doesn’t affect your charm at all. You are the kind of — let me think a bit — right, you are the kind of person who can be in two places at the same time, like my parents.” Daniel thought he’d said a clever thing.

“Really? Really?” Zhenya grew happier. “You’re a good boy! Ha, I will let you meet my fiancé. I can’t say for sure what day he will come with the business inspection group! Now I have a plan. I intend to make the sensation of my body disappear. Do you think I can manage it?”

“You certainly can.” Daniel spoke in earnest.

Even so, that night Daniel, sitting before the window, saw a peculiar thing. His bedroom was on the second floor. He looked down and saw a man and a woman kissing under the streetlamp. At first he didn’t notice, but then he thought the man looked familiar. He discovered that as a matter of fact the man was sitting in a wheelchair. It could only be Nick, Nick wearing a white sports shirt and looking like a vigorous young man with extremely well-developed muscles. The woman turned around, and her immense body was illuminated by the streetlamp. To his surprise, it was Zhenya. Daniel felt happy for her because she had a new love. Before, when he thought about her strange, possibly nonexistent fiancé, Daniel had felt uncomfortable. He believed that this man was merely an illusion depending on a few threads of information to preserve it. Although this was interesting, Zhenya had no need to renounce all life’s pleasures because of him. But Daniel couldn’t understand Zhenya’s display downstairs, when he saw her sit on the stone steps and cry bitterly. Once she started crying, Nick, as though evading a contagion, fled, his wheelchair rocking.

Daniel ran downstairs to Zhenya’s side.

“Daniel, I can’t go on living!”

“What’s the matter?”

“You must have seen what I just looked like. Aren’t I like a pig? I’m so fat!”

“I looked down from upstairs. What I saw was a beautiful woman and a prince kissing.” Daniel stroked her fleshy back and reassured her.

“I want to die!” she said loudly.

“Wait a bit, Zhenya. Wait, and you’ll change your mind.” Daniel raised his voice, too. “Once you see how he looks flying around in his tent, you’ll love him even more!”

“He is a half-bodied devil.”

Zhenya stood, with effort shifting her body. The two of them went inside and shut the shop door. Daniel smelled the thick stench of rotten fruit. The smell was more concentrated than at any other time. It was suffocating. Zhenya had not returned to her bedroom, but sat dully among the fruit baskets. Daniel thought she must be remembering something. He couldn’t stand the smell, so he went upstairs.

Zhenya sat there the entire night, crying every so often. Daniel slept in his bedroom, hearing her crying and complaining, mingled, it seemed, with Nick’s voice. Daniel didn’t believe that Nick had really come to the shop. Rather, Zhenya was imitating Nick’s voice. In this way she demonstrated that she surely loved him. But why had Nick run away?

“Is Nick here?” Daniel asked a red-eyed Zhenya in the morning.

“No. Everything you heard was him speaking from inside my body.”

She had squashed a basket of apples, ruining it. The juice ran all over. Zhenya really was too heavy. Daniel wondered if she truly planned to die. Her disgust toward her body had reached the point of wanting to wipe it out altogether. Was a person like this still able to love someone else? Was her love genuine? Daniel suddenly understood: Zhenya simply wouldn’t die. She had come here from remote Siberia, and had all but put down roots. Thus, she was unable to seek death; she would always live like this. In the dark storeroom with its rotten fruit smell, she made despairing moans. No one could have imagined her love to be so deep. Perhaps her lover was a Siberian with a beard, a man as shrewd as a thief. Perhaps it was Nick, who had no legs but could fly in the air. After all, it wasn’t important who it was. The important thing was that antennae could stretch out from inside of this despairing body. .