Can Xue - The Last Lover

Jade’s mother was looking around at the end of the passage. She saw that her daughter’s door was closed, and tiptoed over. Ida watched her place the object she was holding in her hand on the ground. It was a little white mouse.

“Ida, Ida, do you think Jade is happy?” she asked anxiously.

Ida saw the falling dust all over the woman’s clothes, and her hair was a mess, but this could not conceal her innate beauty. That beauty was a bit like the green beauty of a newborn plant, quiet and noiseless, but astonishing. Ida avoided her ardent glance and answered indifferently: “I suppose she is happy. Every day she looks forward to the next, doesn’t she? Her mother is truly daring. Who else is brave enough to raise so many little mice? This really is something like a dream becoming a reality.”

The woman smiled, as if freed from a mass of worries. She reached out a fair hand and stroked the old pieces of furniture. It seemed they were like her infants.

“These were purchased at a secondhand store. Her father is set on believing that the furniture belonged to his former family, and was scattered after the mudslide. But I have two friends who happened to come upstairs to look at them, and they said these were their family’s old things. What do you think, what is this memory then, after all?”

“Memory is the things people think up.” Ida spoke too freely.

The woman looked at Ida with some surprise. She walked past and began to lightly knock on her daughter’s door.

Ida thought it inappropriate to stand there, and went downstairs.

The bar owner was not downstairs. Someone else sat behind the bar counter, a waiter with an almost fierce expression. Ida had never understood why the owner had recruited someone who looked like this to work at the counter.

This waiter, Mark, was fiddling with the worn-out record player. It was playing the same music Ida had listened to every day until it became familiar. But under Mark’s hands the music became, at intermittent moments, strange sounding, and hearing it Ida’s whole body broke out in goose bumps. She swiftly turned to go outside, but tripped over something. Lowering her head she saw that it was the bar owner. He was lying on the ground reading a book. From his appearance he seemed to focus his entire attention on it, and was undisturbed by the outer world. Because the light in the room was dim, Ida could not tell what book it was. Alvin sat up and asked Ida benignly, “Ida, do you still remember what it looked like at the very last moment right before the floodwater swallowed your home?”

“I’ve completely forgotten. It was chaotic then.”

“All those things are written inside this book.” With both hands he hugged the book, which was as thick as a brick, to his chest. “Only it doesn’t say them openly. They are riddles, which I have to guess. That’s what this sort of book is like. I carried several books here from my hometown. When there’s nothing to do I lie on the floor and read. Why do I lie on the floor? For convenience’ sake. I only need to place my ear against the floor and the things described in the book make all sorts of sounds. I call this ‘listening to books.’”

“Could I listen to books?” Ida asked.

“You couldn’t, Jade can’t either, but Jade’s mother can. This kind of thing requires reading experience. And there’s that fellow Mark, he can, too. Look, isn’t he lying on the floor? He’s listening to music. What he hears and what you hear are completely different.”

Ida walked over to the counter and looked behind it. She saw Mark’s body curled up in a ball on the floor. He was crying.

“Mark is our restaurant’s treasure. The customers say his entire body is musical.”

Ida walked out the main door and stood under the Green Jade grape trellis, her whole body bathed in its light.

“Ida!” Jade called from the window of her bedroom, with tears in her voice. One of her hands caught at the clothes at her chest, and her eyes bulged with fear.

“Jade! Jade!” Ida waved toward the second floor. She remembered that Jade’s mother was inside the building.

What was Jade’s mother doing inside? Intimidating her daughter? It seemed the woman was always stealthily forcing her daughter to do something.

Jade’s whole upper body extended from the window, as though she were going to jump from it. Once and then again she rushed toward the outside, but she could not get through. Ida understood that it was her mother pulling her back. Ida wondered, since it was like this, why did the mother continue to force her? Perhaps it was because mother and daughter were naturally too beautiful. Overly beautiful people often prefer an extreme sort of life. Something was thrown from the window. Oh, it was a little mouse!

“Ida, good-bye!” Jade shouted, her voice hoarse from the effort, and then drew back in. Immediately someone closed the window.

Ida looked up at the spot in confusion. Why was Jade saying good-bye?

But Jade had not gone anywhere. When night came, she appeared with her mother again at the bar. Mother and daughter looked serious, even somewhat desolate. But the owner was dressed in formal wear, with a bowtie, and beaming with high spirits. Who would have thought he bent to the ground to listen to books?

In the main hall, from a dim corner, came a voice that made Ida’s heart leap and her flesh twitch. It was Reagan, Reagan was calling her; Ida heard him clearly.

“I’d like a brandy,” said the stranger, who was sitting with a companion.

The world, after all, could have voices as similar as this.

“Miss, please look over to the right.” He spoke again.

Ida saw a mouse on the wall. It squatted, gnawing, on the head of a deer. The sound of its tiny teeth scraping the bone was clear and piercing. Ida stared, the menus in her hand falling to the ground. She thought distinctly that she had seen this sight somewhere before, many years ago, with rain and seawater. It also had something to do with a strange man. But it wasn’t the man in front of her. This man’s voice sounded near to her ear: “Manila, Manila, floodwaters cover the open fields.” She turned, but the two men at the table were no longer to be seen.

Jade came to her side and, leaning toward her, spoke: “Now we both have fallen into a cavern. Such an exciting night. Haven’t you been out to see the sky? Right now the sky is purple and red.”

Jade finished speaking and bent down, picked up the menus and handed them to Ida, then went to wait on guests. Ida observed in her movements as before a kind of bodily longing, just like the snakes in the wild. Where had her guests gone? There really was not the slightest trace left behind. Ida’s heart shrank a little in pain. She thought, once again, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches, and perhaps because of this he sent his voice to cover the whole earth. The earth, after all, held a man this infatuated.

She attended to many guests. They all wore numb expressions, with a look of pretending to listen to the music. There was a woman whose jacket button unexpectedly fell off. She bent down to feel along the ground, filling her whole hand with dust. The man who’d come with her also helped her look. He shone a flashlight underneath the table for a long while, so long it seemed undignified. Now the guests close by all walked over to look, surrounding them in a semicircle. The man started crawling on the ground like a cat. He crawled through the empty spaces between the tables, with people giving way in turns.

“A dropped button amounts to upsetting the whole arrangement.”

A woman wearing a dark-red coat said this in a low voice. Ida observed her excited eyes gleaming.

Ida was not herself. Wanting to avoid these people, she gathered the plates from a table and went into the kitchen. The cook at first was busy in front of the flame. When she heard Ida enter, she stopped the work in hand and turned around to face her. There was a buzzing weng in Ida’s brain. Was this Ali?