Can Xue - The Last Lover

Joe, reading this far, felt duped. Nor could he produce a corresponding image in his mind. Hadn’t the author said he would write exclusively about the personal details of his life? This generalized background was like an old teacher’s worn-out saws. He put down the book, growing distracted. There was a man in this book who wanted to say something to the people of the world, and so he had written the book. The man was much like Kim, the owner of the grasslands in the north whom Joe had met; but he was also entirely different. Yet Kim, his own situation hidden, had indirect exchanges with Joe through all kinds of connections. The result of these exchanges was that Joe sank into oblivion. Joe sighed and picked up the book again. This time he began to read in the middle.

The landscape of swirling snowflakes is a symbol of happiness. One only has to see the atmosphere of ardent collective labor in the ice caves to understand this. What is happiness? Sweating in the freezing winter, at 30 degrees below zero Celsius, is happiness. Each person holds an iron pick in hand, digging stroke on stroke into the walls of a thousand-year-old ice cave. We are extending our own space .

Joe shut his eyes and felt incredibly tired. Someone came into the hallway. Was it Daniel? Did Daniel know his father’s spirit had fallen into a difficult place? Such a sensitive boy! When the web of the story in Joe’s mind was about to reach a state of perfection, someone was sabotaging him, pulling the firewood out from under the pot. In recent days, the space Joe had constructed over a long period of time had been shrinking. His eyesight was also getting weaker. He held in his hand a book that fascinated him, but he simply couldn’t read it; he only had a sense of being excluded from it. Was he already so old?

“Father, I love you.” Daniel stuck his head into the room and then drew back.

Joe heard a cat meowing in the hallway. “A woman who builds up a home like this is admirable.” Joe felt deeply Maria’s intrinsic perfection and beauty. “I love you, too, Daniel,” he said to himself. The loom sounded downstairs. Hadn’t Maria stopped weaving a long time ago?

Daniel finally came in. He stood quite still against the wall, a long thin twig.

“Is something bothering you?”

“I’m happy.”

His response startled Joe. When Daniel was little Joe took him fishing, and when a fish was hooked Joe had asked him what he felt. He said it hurt him. Now he’d become a gardener with a happy life.

“Daniel, why are you still standing there?”

“There are things in this room that I’m afraid of. Father, do you see the bone you hung on the wall, it’s moving. . What kind of bone is it? Is it human?”

Daniel stuck close to the wall. To Joe he looked like he was trying to bore into it.

“Don’t take this to heart, child. Your thoughts are so serious.”

Joe stood up and went to another bookshelf. From this angle he couldn’t see Daniel. The boy made him restless. He sat down, still wanting to reason through his own train of thought. But he couldn’t with Daniel on the opposite side, interfering with him like a magnetic field. Joe heard the sound of pages turning. Was Daniel looking at the book out on the table? Abruptly the study rang with the sound of Daniel reading aloud:

The garden in the air has no flowers, only wild grass. Who would garden in a place like this? No one. But when a gust of wind thins the dense fog, a straw hat appears .

Joe walked out of his hiding place. He saw Daniel holding the book. Joe moved in front of him and took the book from his hands. But somehow he couldn’t find the sentence his son had just read aloud. He asked Daniel where the sentence was. Daniel said it wasn’t in the book, he had just seen it. He’d strained to look and the sentence appeared. This was the kind of book you could see things in, but usually he didn’t read because it was too hard on his eyes. He wished his father would read less of this kind of book.

“Father, you should just be a gardener, too.” His look as he spoke was both simple and experienced.

Joe thought of the days and nights when he was immersed in the world of his books. There was also the story he had woven, a great undertaking soon to be completed. In comparison to Daniel, all of this was insignificant. He sank back into gloom.

“I don’t want to be a happy gardener, son. My destiny is to work at the Rose Clothing Company. My life is under a spell. Maybe someday I will be able to leave. It’s what my boss expects of me. Daniel, are you still afraid of that bone?”

“No, Father. It isn’t moving now, so I can see it’s a cow bone. I have to go. I’m even happier now, because you aren’t opposed to my being a gardener. I haven’t touched any books for years. Are you disappointed?”

“No, Daniel, I admire you.” Joe spoke in sincerity.

The door shut. Joe heard Maria and Daniel talk in the hallway, then go downstairs together. Joe reflected that he had an admirable wife and an admirable son. He paced onto the balcony and saw the figures of mother and son floating out through the garden gate like ghosts. A cat squatted guard on a boulder, watching them go.

Someone was in his study. When Joe returned to his desk and sat down, the man walked out from behind the bookshelf. He walked up behind Joe with slow steps, then returned back behind the bookshelf. Joe heard him, but did not want to turn around to see him.

“Daniel, your father wants to come out of his cocoon. Will you move back in, darling child?”

“No, Mother. This way is better.”

Maria looked at her son as he walked beside her. His long, thin body seemed to be near her side, yet also at a far distance. She thought of the young women who wore kimonos in Joe’s story. It was possible that in Joe’s eyes those girls were embodiments of Daniel. Joe was such a strange man. At the present moment her son was by her side, and yet wasn’t by her side, and surely he was pondering some remote thing. When he came outside, Daniel had said he would bring her to see the garden he’d designed in the air, but they were already outside the city, where there weren’t any gardens. They followed an embankment down into a dry riverbed. Daniel squatted, scooping the river’s silt with his long, thin fingers, letting it run through them. Maria heard a groan from his throat. The fog gradually grew thicker, and after a bit they couldn’t see each other’s faces. Maria’s mind grew confused.

“Daniel, I can’t remember what I did yesterday.”

Daniel’s answer was scattered in the air with a buzzing weng weng . Maria had no means of understanding the disordered words. She breathed with effort. Surely she smelled the fragrance of a rose of Sharon. The blooms were invisible; probably they were running through her son’s fingers. A vision of Daniel wearing a straw hat, sweating under the sun, appeared in Maria’s imagination. She heard him saying two syllables, Fa-ther . But Daniel wasn’t calling his father. It was like a preschooler practicing his letters.

Steps could be heard on the river embankment. Maria stood and the steps stopped.

“Is that Joe?” she shouted.

“Is that Joe. .” The air vibrated, Daniel’s voice echoing hers.

A magpie flew in front of them, toward the embankment.

“Mother, let’s go back to where Father is.”

Daniel stretched out his hands to restrain her. Maria saw that the arms he reached toward her were the branches of a Chinese redbud, with small flowers swaying cheerfully. They climbed together up onto the embankment, but Joe wasn’t there. Maria’s heart flowed with warm currents of happiness, because she heard again the voice of Joe in his youth. She was moved to tears.