Can Xue - The Last Lover

When these sentences appeared in Vincent’s mind, his whole body felt a little feverish. Energy filled his gaunt and exhausted body. His footsteps gradually became steady. He was no longer nauseated by the false landscape extending in every direction.

Beside the forest an old man collected firewood, catching dry branches with a long hook. After Vincent walked past him, he shouted a sentence in the local language at Vincent’s back. Vincent suddenly understood that he was shouting, “Taking a boat or a plane?” Vincent returned to the old man, but his eyes were lowered as he tied his wood into a bundle with a vine, as if nothing had happened. The old man’s big-boned, able hands looked familiar. Vincent felt a few things inside him swiftly die, but at once a few other things grew.

The old man shouldered his load of firewood and walked into the depths of the woods. Vincent stepped forward along the road heading in the opposite direction.

Maria came to Lisa’s house for the first time. She cautiously looked all around. Lisa didn’t ask her to sit in the spacious living room. Instead, she invited Maria to go upstairs into the bedroom she shared with Vincent. Maria saw that their bedroom was much more spartan than her own. Aside from a wooden bed there were no furnishings. The walls were bare, without a single picture. It was out of keeping in such a high-class residence. The windows were the strangest part. There were two of them, both very small and set high up, making it difficult for light to enter the room.

“I designed our bedroom myself. What do you think of it?”

“Oh!”

“At night we should shut ourselves up in a prison cell, that was my thought initially. Vincent approved of the idea. Since I didn’t come here alone — I brought a large crowd with me. Their maneuvers usually take place in the corner where you’re standing. I prefer to have the long march unfold in a closed-off space.”

Lisa was walking back and forth across the room as she spoke, both hands constantly pushing out from her chest, as if she were pushing something away, but these things kept rushing toward her, and would not let her push them away. Maria saw what seemed to be thin smoke rising in the room.

“And Vincent? Where does Vincent go at night?” Maria asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he sits on the windowsill. The windowsill is so high, it’s a good spot for watching the battles.”

“How are things between you now?”

“You mean since he left? Ha, he comes here every day. He is always among the army troops. So long as I’m patient a while I can see him there. Last night he also had me meet a new friend of his, a retired lumberman. He’s an old soldier, an expert at breaking through enemy lines.”

Someone knocked on the door. Lisa said it was her driver. She lowered her voice and told Maria she could not let the driver know Vincent had left, otherwise she might be seduced by him. Maria asked her how she managed it. Lisa said that provided the spectacle of the long march continued, the young man could not enter the room.

Sure enough, the driver knocked quietly from the outside but did not shout or push the door open.

Maria couldn’t help wanting to laugh.

“He looks down on himself terribly.” Lisa evaluated him. “He wasn’t like this before. Before he was unruly, and he didn’t take notice of me at all. But once Vincent left, this big house became an empty city of desire. Listen, there are two men, the other is the cook, A Bing. The cook is already half-mad because his homesickness torments him. These two poor orphans, I want to take them into my arms!”

At Vincent and Lisa’s home in the center of the city, Maria saw with panic the desolate and fallow inner world of the married couple. It was a residence progressively neglected and forgotten by its owners. She circled the property in Lisa’s company. Although Lisa presented the home to Maria with enthusiastic words, reviewing the romance of former days, in every installation and every corner Maria saw unsalvageable, dead things. It all belonged to the past, to the wreckage of passion. The untended garden, regressed back to nature; the swimming pool emptied of water; the wooden pavilion with its paint peeling; the large house with rooms that had been locked for years were in Maria’s eyes products of a period of impulses. And now these things were all hidden, disappearing into the darkest depths of their hearts.

The cook A Bing was cleaning birds’ nests out of the enormous swimming pool. Why did the birds build nests there? It was a complete mess. A Bing’s movements seemed full of hatred. Maria saw fragments of birds’ eggs spread on the ground.

“A Bing! A Bing!” Lisa’s voice revealed her pain.

A Bing was dazed for a moment, then he threw down the broom and climbed out. He stood in front of Lisa, rolling his eyes with a scoundrel’s smile on his face. Maria was angered.

“At night this swimming pool is busy as hell,” he said.

“A Bing, you aren’t a young man any more. How can you still enjoy acting so willfully? Since you live here, you must get your life in order. If you have so much hatred in your heart, how can you arrange your life properly?”

“My life is arranged properly,” A Bing interrupted Lisa impatiently. “Each person has a different ambition. You have missed me every time. I’m in the long march army, too.”

Lisa was in a predicament. She silently lowered her head, pulling Maria away.

Maria and Lisa sat in the roomy kitchen eating the tasty potato pastries A Bing had made. Lisa said A Bing was a priceless treasure. She also said that if he didn’t have those impulses of hatred, who could say he wasn’t a man “who would do great things”? Maria answered, smiling, that perhaps the cook didn’t want to do great things. He saw through all earthly things.

“Just like Vincent?” Lisa asked in a mischievous voice.

“No, Vincent will never see through things. He travels everywhere and looks and looks. This has no end.”

The two women laughed aloud. They hadn’t laughed so freely in a long time. A Bing walked over gloomily to take their plates, intentionally making the cups clatter.

“He often loses his temper at me. In this house, it seems he is the master,” Lisa said. “Look, he’s going, he doesn’t want to speak with us.”

Maria watched the cook go down the steps into the yard. He was shaped like a black bear. He appeared to be breathing angrily, but why?

“Maria, I want to make an experiment. Can we dream together in that bed tonight? To see if we can communicate with each other in our dreams? Then we can search for Joe and Vincent together.”

Yet after the lights were out the house became a large graveyard. All the graves were earthen mounds piled up with soil. Lisa sat on one of the mounds hugging her knees with both arms. Maria stood at her side. There was no moon or stars in the sky. Someone was carrying a lantern toward them from a place off in the distance. He walked and stopped, walked and stopped again, beams from the lamp shining on the grass on top of the earthen mounds. Maria turned around and saw another man carrying a lantern. He was also searching for something between the graves. She looked again and saw yet another one, just catching up from the road in that direction, who also held a lantern. And behind him was a fourth.

“It’s busy in the graveyard,” Maria said.

When she spoke the first man had already reached her. He raised his lantern up high, giving Maria a very strange feeling. Lisa pulled Maria down to sit with her, quietly saying, “He is making a signal. You haven’t realized yet? A regiment is coming. In a little while this will be the military camp. This spot where I’m sitting is actually Vincent’s grave.”