Can Xue - The Last Lover

“Joe, Joe. .” she said.

Many years ago, she and Joe had climbed up from the dry riverbed. Over so many years, she had never thought she might return like this, in person, to old dreams. Maybe now she and her son truly were walking into Joe’s all-encompassing story. He wasn’t on the riverbank; he was inside her body. On such a day redbud flowers grew from her son’s body. The year she became pregnant, she’d often seen Chinese redbuds.

Joe was on the embankment. He saw the mother and son in the riverbed, one standing, one squatting. Then they started to walk, groping like blind men, as if neither could see the other. Joe took two breaths of the limpid air. Then he saw a white-haired Eastern woman appear on the opposite shore. The woman’s clothing was also white and looked a bit like a kimono, a bit like the short dresses of ancient China. She leaned on a willow tree, observing mother and son in the riverbed. Joe stared without shifting his eyes from the aged, beautiful woman, in a daze because he had never seen such a fine older woman. He felt his soul spirited away from his body. Someone clapped his shoulder. To his surprise, it was the shopkeeper from the bookstore.

“The person over on that side isn’t real.” The bookstore owner knit his brow, spitting out the sentence as if it hurt him.

“I had also sensed this. What a pity. Where is she from?”

“She is my former wife.”

Joe looked in surprise at the ugly bookstore owner, and had nothing to say. He couldn’t bear Joe’s gaze. He hunched his back, broken down. Joe recollected an image of him sitting proudly at the bookshop entrance on a high stool, and suddenly understood the pain in his heart. In the riverbed mother and son, one before and one behind, climbed up to the bank. They hadn’t seen Joe. Maria’s legs were slightly lame. Seen from behind, her posture was still like a young girl’s.

“Why isn’t she a real person?” Joe asked the bookstore owner, his voice revealing his tender thoughts.

“Because whichever way you go, you still can’t reach her. If you don’t believe me, you can try it.”

“I would like to make an attempt.”

After Maria and Daniel climbed onto the bank, the woman opposite turned around, her back to Joe and the bookstore owner. Joe thought the woman’s figure resembled the immortals in an Eastern myth. Was the East the place he should go? The shopkeeper walked down the riverbank, hunched over. He said he couldn’t bear it any longer. He seemed to cry as he walked.

Joe went down to the riverbed, wanting to cross over to the other bank. As he walked he distrusted his progress, because the bookstore keeper had just spoken of how no one would be able to reach “her” face. Joe climbed the bank anxiously. He saw the woman slowly turning around. Her clothing was a dazzling white. The woman wore glasses. Joe had not imagined that she might wear glasses.

“Are you off work today?” she asked amiably.

“I never expected. . I thought how much. . Today I didn’t want to go to work. Do you live near here? It’s so nice here!”

“Yes, I live here. I’ve observed you, too. Someone is urging you to leave this city, isn’t that right?”

Joe did not answer. He understood why the bookstore owner was crying. Above them, the heavens became like crystal. He wanted to ask the woman whether she knew Kim.

“Do you mean the man who has a pastureland, who lives halfway up a mountain? Of course I know him, there aren’t many people who don’t know him. He is not a real person. Have you sensed that?”

Her dazzling glance watched Joe. His blood bubbled.

“Your former husband said that you weren’t a real person either. Why?” He drummed up his courage to ask.

“Some people are an unsolvable mystery to other people. If he lives with that sort of person, he will gradually disappear. Have I answered your question? If you go to Ito’s bookstore late at night, you will hear him wrestling inside and the books falling from the shelves.”

“Who is he wrestling with?”

“Who? I think it’s a ghost. He has exceptional eyesight.”

The owner of the bookshop was named Ito. Joe had never noticed this before. So he was Japanese? His wife, this woman before him, was Japanese? They came here from the distant East to start a business, then they separated? Human hearts are frightful. There was something he wanted to ask her, but he couldn’t think of it. She seemed already to know what he wanted to ask, and moreover to be weary of answering it. She said someone was calling her, she must go at once, then she hurriedly left. “We won’t meet again.” This was the last thing she said.

Joe made up his mind to go to Ito’s bookshop in the depths of the night. What relation did this strange divorced couple have to those young Japanese women wearing kimonos in his story? The woman he’d just seen, wearing white. . it seemed that he had seen her somewhere before.

Joe looked up and down the pattern of a new tapestry Maria had woven. His head felt dizzy. There seemed to be no design at all, only changing layers of faint color. Perhaps even the changing of the colors was only in his imagination, and there was no pattern on the surface of the tapestry. His eyes began to hurt looking at it; even his temples hurt. He thought of turning aside his gaze but a magnetic force seemed to draw him into the tapestry. “Let me go, Maria,” he begged in his heart.

“Joe, what are you wasting your thoughts on?”

Maria appeared in the doorway. A few wasps wheeled around her head, looking dangerous. The wasps made Joe’s memory vivid and bright.

“You’ve come from seeing Kim, Maria?”

“As good as seeing him. I met the driver. Ah, that grassland! Did I weave it well? This time I began anew. It’s a new beginning. Listen, Joe. It’s so quiet. I mean the walls are quiet. After you leave, Daniel and I will miss you.”

And so Maria expected him to leave, too? Joe thought of the bookstore owner’s former wife, how years ago she and her husband had undertaken the journey here. The bookstore in the evening dusk and the riverbank during the bright day formed a contrast, so that Joe spontaneously felt the longing between the separated couple. But what kind of longing did Joe have for that woman? Maria was disappearing. Now she wove tapestries that gave him headaches, that left Joe’s line of thought suspended in midair. Joe circled the room, discovering the walls hung with quite a few similar tapestries, only with colors that were even more shadowy, in layers even more difficult to tell apart. When he fixed his eyes on a tapestry with deep gray tones, Maria spoke again, from behind him:

“Joe, what are you wasting your thoughts on?”

Joe uneasily turned to face her, saying to Maria that he grew more and more stupid. He heard the household’s two cats howling from the tops of the walls, and unexpectedly he glimpsed the pattern revealed in the tapestry. It was a hatchet. What hatred did Maria hold in the depths of her heart?

He heard Maria talking to someone, but there was no one in the room. She stood with her back to him, behind the loom, her voice low and hoarse. She was using a language that Joe didn’t understand.

Joe quietly left the workroom and went into the garden. There were a large number of wasps flying around it. Where had they come from? Was a wasps’ nest nearby? Daniel had also come out to the garden. A large group of wasps wound around him. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt, but he didn’t mind the poisonous wasps. Joe thought of Daniel’s girlfriend, the Vietnamese girl with a body as light as a swallow’s, and felt that these two were truly a match made in heaven. Perhaps one day Daniel would go back with her to live in Vietnam. In that green country full of rainwater, Daniel would feel like he was returning home.