Can Xue - The Last Lover

“Ida.”

It was Jade. Two more raindrops fell on Ida’s face.

“Ida,” she said again.

“Oh, Jade. How are you feeling today?”

“I feel like I want to find a dark hole and go squat inside it to think things over. There are many dark holes in our bar, you slowly come to realize.”

The young girl’s face couldn’t be seen clearly in the dimness. Her hoarse voice had a weathered tone. Ida remembered her astonishing beauty.

“Do you have a lover?” Ida asked.

“I do. But we meet very seldom, because I can’t go outside. Oh, I haven’t gone outside in over two years. He’s my schoolmate. At nightfall he stands on the street waiting for me to come out, but I don’t want to go. I’d rather get things done around the restaurant. That doesn’t mean I’m not stuck on thinking about him. It’s because I know that once I leave Green Jade disillusion will overwhelm me. I help out Father in the shop, thinking in my heart that someone is outside waiting for me. I almost hear the sound of his pacing, it does me such good. If I want to clear the thoughts in my head, I just find a dark hole to get into.”

Ida reached out a hand, and held the young woman’s ice-cold hand tightly. She felt sorry for Jade.

“And yet my lover became my foe,” Ida said.

“It’s so strange, I can’t think of how that could be.”

“That — that is to become a single body with someone, but also to become enemies with him. Even when I stand here, I can still see the crows on the farm spreading over the sky and covering the earth.”

Jade’s hand on Ida’s large hand gradually grew warm again. Ida’s heart rushed with the desire to kiss her.

“Jade! Ida!” It was the bar’s owner calling.

Ida thought, her mood complicated, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches. She heard a constrained disturbance among the customers. Here and there were the sounds of stifled cries. Even though she made no effort to look, she still saw white mice scurrying madly among the customers. There really were too many of them. A boy came crashing and tumbling over and grabbed hold of her hand, then pounced into her arms, making a slight rustling sound with his trembling. The boy appeared to be younger than twenty. “They’re coming again. How can this be? Oh? How can it?” he said. Ida remembered that she had just seen him talking to an older lady with an elegant manner, his eyes showing a maturity exceeding his years. “They call you Ida, are you really Ida? Damn it, they’re scurrying over here again. You know how to cope with them.”

Ida helped him into a chair, using her body to block the lamplight so he was left in total darkness. She felt as if this boy were her little brother.

“Whose child are you?” she asked him warmly.

He drew both his legs all the way into the chair, and held his knees with his hands.

“If you leave me, I will never get up from this chair. Tonight there’s a rainstorm.”

Although people panicked, no one had fled. They formed a line standing next to the wall now, staring fixedly at the little animals running along the floor. Ida thought that they were in fact enjoying these little animals.

Jade walked over from the distant end of the hall, with a gait that looked like she was drunk. Ida had never seen her like this and couldn’t help feeling curious. The boy took one look at her and tugged nervously at Ida’s hem, saying over and over: “Her! She’s coming! You have to hide me! She’s coming!” He hid his head in his knee. But it was Jade who stopped her steps in the center of the hall, staring blankly at the animal specimens on the wall. A beam of green light seemed to cut off the other half of her face. In the blink of an eye, Ida understood the relationship between these two people.

When the music stopped, the mice were no longer to be seen. The entire hall became as still as death. At some point, people had taken their places. Perhaps it was the bar owner who’d stopped the music. Now, over by the counter, she could no longer see the figures of the owner and the two waiters; there was a patch of dark. Where had they gone to? Ida looked again, and saw that Jade wasn’t there either. After a bit, the room resumed its earlier scene of low whispering. But the whole time, the boy stayed in his chair. He grasped a corner of Ida’s clothing in his hand.

Ida stood there awkwardly. Past events were before her eyes, an acute struggle in her heart.

Mr. Reagan had once poked fun at her: “Everywhere is your domain. Wherever you go, you make that place your home.”

She had retorted: “I want to be free and unrestrained. I imagine drifting like a kite with the string broken off.”

Someone reached out a hand from the dark and dragged her over, pulling her straight to the back door. It was Jade. Ida had realized this from the start.

“Don’t pay attention to him. He’ll bring you with him into an abyss. The boy has no taboos. He’s not used to what our bar is like, his situation is miserable.”

Jade’s pale fingers fearfully twisted her brown hair.

When the mice were no longer making a disturbance and her father and mother went outside, Jade stood beside the ancient furniture covered in thick dust and told Ida of the hopeless love affair. It was Jade herself who’d pursued this Japanese boy. The boy liked to climb mountains. In the early days of their association, Jade had sensed dimly that his weak, brittle exterior was only a kind of disguise, that inside it was some wild thing, a thing that Jade feared from the bottom of her heart. At that time they were as inseparable as a body and its shadow. Finally, one day the boy invited Jade to climb a nearby mountain with him. The mountain wasn’t very high. It was a bald rocky peak. Although Jade made ample preparations, she never imagined that midway up it would begin to rain. They lay prone on a steep, slippery cliff. The rain fell harder and harder. He entreated her not to look down, because “you would be able to see right through me.” This sentence induced in Jade a desire like a reptile ready to strike. The seduction was too great for her. The result was that she fell into a stone cave grown thick with cogon grass and damaged her spine. During the half year Jade spent in the hospital, she felt that all her hopes were dashed, as though she had died. The boy also went missing. When youth at last triumphed over the spirit of death, when her physical strength was little by little recovered, Jade saw what she had seen that day looking down from the mountain. It was a mouse swimming along a current in midair. Jade regained her normal life, and the boy reappeared. She made up her mind to open up a distance between them, and to raise little white mice with her mother. Her mother, it seemed, grew ever more fascinated with raising mice, so within a short time their corridors were full of the little animals. But the boy didn’t want to have a distance opened up between him and Jade. He knew perfectly well that Jade wouldn’t leave the house, but he still went to wait for her every day at the old place. Sometimes, like yesterday, he burst headlong into the bar.

“The most frightening thing is the thing we most want to experience,” Ida spoke with deep sympathy. “Your boy has a tenacious will.”

“I know,” Jade said distractedly. She kept looking toward the stairwell, seeming afraid her mother would appear there without warning.

“What are you afraid of?”

“My mother doesn’t approve of my sentimental side. She thinks I should concentrate all my attention on handling these mice. Of course, she is right.”

Days passed quickly at the bar. Although almost every day had the same substance, Ida still hoped to prolong each one as much as possible. When she had free time, she thought, harboring an infinite longing, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches, but what were things like in the south on that rubber tree plantation? Every day when the business of the bar began at midnight, when the guests came in one after another like shadows, Ida would hallucinate, thinking she was working as before on the rubber tree farm, and that these customers were her co-workers in disguise. Why did the bar owner always put on solemn, abstruse classical music? Could Mr. Reagan already be here, mixed in among the guests? Perhaps it was because of her longing that the days went so quickly, she thought. Escaping her own lover was a good thing. Hadn’t Jade escaped hers? Before, Ida had never known there was a kind of longing like this: longing for the thing or person one absolutely needed to escape. This new form of longing, while unable to bring her fulfillment, could fill out and enrich every day. Look, Jade was even more fulfilled.