Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

JUNE 11

I could barely eat for the first week. Yong frantically wracked her brains each day to cook me meals or take me to different restaurants. She watched attentively as I ate, or peered at me out of the corner of her eye while she was eating to check if I was getting something down or if I liked anything. She laughed and said, “I don’t care if I go broke to get you to eat.” She wasn’t someone who expressed her concern for me directly, and sometimes would even say the opposite of what she meant. Since meeting her five years ago, I haven’t recalled her once saying “I love you.” Most of the memories I accumulated of her are of unemotional words she’d said, or even worse, of words so cold that we eventually screamed at each other. With her, the old adage of judging a person by their actions and not by their words is especially true. This is something that took me a really long time to grasp.

It was very painful for me to eat. Sometimes as soon as I swallowed a mouthful of food I’d vomit it all back up again. Yong noticed and stayed calm, but I could see in her eyes a flash of genuine worry overcoming indifference, of reason overcoming emotion (the expression in her eyes I’ve always appreciated). I could sense her determination to keep me alive, and that she would do whatever it took to save my physical body, to help it to eat again, sleep again, so it could survive…. I had been depressed for so long, I couldn’t remember when my depression started. Over the last year it had developed more specific symptoms like anorexia and insomnia, turning my life bit by bit into a shell, sucking my life dry of blood and flesh, like two sentries of the angel of death sent to follow me all year until I reached the point of no return and they could steal me away.

I’ll never forget that evening we sat in the second story of a café and I told her I had come to see her in Tokyo because she was the only one who could understand the deepest parts of me and that these parts were intimately connected to her. In my time of deepest suffering I trusted her alone, knowing she could understand. I wanted to spend the last moments of my life with her. I wanted to see just her because she alone could give me the desire and the courage to live. I could only imagine living for her because only her existence truly needed me, needed my existence to live. I wanted to live for her and be confident and courageous for her. I wanted to live to take care of her…. Her eyes flashed as she watched me closely. Through the windows the sky had gone from nightfall to pitch-dark.

When we left the café hand in hand, it was drizzling. The narrow streets were dotted with little shops closing for the night. The outside air was warm.

We ducked into a cozy sushi restaurant, where we saw many people sitting on barstools around an oval-shaped sushi counter behind which a chef in a white cap and uniform smiled as he prepared the fish. His technique was so quick and precise, it was as if all the different kinds of sushi flying onto the conveyor belt were doing a dance for the customers. The front of the restaurant was rectangular. A line of people were waiting, facing the chef, and Yong and I squeezed into line with them. Everyone seemed confined by a sadness within the prison of their bodies, as waiters called out orders, hurrying around the bustling space that seemed hermetically sealed…. I sat down, my hands folded together over my knees, not daring to turn and glance at Yong next to me, not daring to move, afraid that this feeling of joy I couldn’t breathe in quick enough might dissipate. I was like a bashful bride or a shy groom, my head in a cloud of face powder….

I want to kiss you , I said softly.

Okay.

But I can’t.

After we were seated she carefully chose some dishes I might like and keep down. Every plate had two pieces of sushi on it. She would eat one first before removing any wasabi from the other one, then placed her chopsticks down to watch me and keep me company as I chewed, swallowed, and began to digest the sushi she had given me before she turned again to choose more food.

In the three years we’d been apart, a period when a pair of heartless yet loving people were kept apart by time and space, she had actually grown into a mature adult, quietly transformed into a grown-up capable of bearing the weight of another’s life. She dispensed with words, or at least communicated in a language free of the emotional burden of words, while showing genuine concern for me; and when I was close to breaking down, she did everything she could to lift my problematic life and make me feel loved.

There will often still be joy and beauty , I murmured to myself.

Shoulder to shoulder we stepped slightly drunk into the dim light of the night and headed for the bus stop that would point the way home.

The three weeks I was in Tokyo happened to coincide with the ephemeral cherry-blossom season.

Yong thought it would be unhealthy for me to spend all day at home and often took me out for a walk at dusk, or for a bike ride to the trolley station in the afternoon, and then to run some errands and ride home singing merrily in the rain. A few days before the cherry blossoms bloomed, we searched for signs of life on the branches, and once the buds had opened, she instructed me in the way to observe the blossoms as they burst forth each day…. I remember riding our bicycles around many bessou villas and country roads, as well as down many dilapidated alleyways before riding along a pencil-straight, desolate highway to a small village outside the city. A riotous energy rushed through the town akin to the streets, crowds, vendors, vehicles, and atmosphere of the Tokyo metropolis area…. During these journeys, we were two friends who had known each other for a long time and had loved each other and separated and then reunited, our old bicycles on this trajectory of life in this season of blossoming…. What kind of risks were we taking and what were we chasing? Two people so far from home, far from our loved ones, each of us having gone to live in a foreign country, reuniting on a foreign-beyond-foreign highway, pedaling on our rusted bicycles, one of us on the verge of death — what was this exile, roaming, and homecoming we were enacting?

It was a kind of journey with her — in Taiwan, in Paris, in Tokyo — that I could not see clearly. For more than five years it had presented itself to me as broken fragments of spine and limb, always hazy suffering and sorrow without end or pause, without restraint or silence, and endless separation, a journey into an endless vacuum from which even our mutual tears and cries had been extracted….

Do fated connections exist between people? Does someone in the remotest corner of the world have a fated connection with me that I must pursue? I’ve been asking myself these questions for eight years.

A friend once casually told me that life is just a big pile of coincidences, and that if I insist on believing in the fatedness of connections it’s merely my own fantasy. If I still believe my life has an absolute value or meaning then I’m an anachronism, old-fashioned. I still believe in fate, but hasn’t fate often smashed me to bits? Smashed me to bits toward annihilation, each collapse worse than the last? Yong, am I but a boldly excessive gambler?

On the way home, we walked one to the left of a bicycle and one to the right of a bicycle along a stretch of desolate highway, the fiery red sunset shining over the distant orchards and farms and farther beyond, a clear matchless immensity, the delicate beauty of her face illuminated, and I said that in this life all I desire is to walk with her in this evening light and I’d be okay.

I didn’t want her to see me off to the airport; I didn’t want to face the spectacle of saying goodbye to her again. I stumbled my way through Shinjuku on my own to take the express train to the airport. (If there is ever another earthquake in Tokyo and identities are lost, I will not claim my own name during reconstruction. I won’t speak until you lead me out from the crowd, for you will recognize me in my silence.) Her voice echoed in my ears; I saw her face through the train windows as it lurched forward and my tears streamed down. This time the sound of uncontrollable sobs and more tears….