In the Dark, page 29
2 April
Dormitory. Night. Clear.
Chen Sisi’s letter arrived even faster than I expected, but now it was here, now I could feel its weight in my hand, I could tell it was no ordinary letter. No doubt its contents included any number of means to dredge up my secret. I kneaded the letter between my fingers for what seemed like forever. I didn’t dare open it. Of course, a letter must be read, only … I needed to prepare myself for what was inside. To give me strength and to reinforce my defences, I took out Chen Erhu’s photo and last words and placed them in front of me. When I finally opened Chen Sisi’s letter I had Chen Erhu and his scrawled missive watching over me.
And so I began to read the letter from my former love. Once I had finished reading, however, I discovered that my concerns had all been for naught. From beginning to end, she didn’t once mention her father’s last words: it was almost as though she knew I was fearful of her raising the issue and so she deliberately did not. I began to suspect that perhaps she was unaware of what was in her father’s letter to me, so I telephoned Chen Sibing to ask. He told me that his father had made him promise not to tell a soul what the letter contained, not even his sister. That was how I was finally able to refuse Ah-bing’s demands. I told him, ‘Your father did this because he knew I wouldn’t be able to resist her interrogation, given our previous relationship, and so he deliberately concealed the situation from her.’
Once Ah-bing had listened to my explanation, he seemed to come to some kind of conclusion. He sighed and said, ‘So that’s how it is.’ Then he hung up. I knew he wouldn’t ask me about the secret again. That was good. Very good.
The only thing I didn’t expect was how long Sisi’s letter was. Over eighteen pages, every page filled out completely, not like a letter at all. Looking at it, seeing the slight changes in handwriting, it was easy to see that she had written it over several days, the final day being the twenty-fifth of March, the same day I received the first phone call from her brother. Its contents read more like a novel than a letter. You could say that the pages were soaked with emotion; the narrative was exciting and very moving.
The Letter: Day One
… A red enclosure, its wall are high, wire netting adorns the top, two large, black iron doors forever closed, the opening is a window that looks very much like a small iron door, armed sentinels march back and forth, they ask for identification from whoever they see. When I was small, I and the other children would steal out of the compound and into the mountain. Standing outside the iron gates, we’d watch as the grown-ups would walk up to the doors and disappear inside. We thought we’d take a look inside the grounds, but none of us were permitted inside and no one told us why. Once I’d grown up, I understood. I knew that my father dealt in secrets, and so what was behind those red walls was also a secret: no ID meant no admittance.
Even to this day we’re still not sure what the actual nature and content of our father’s work was, but considering the amount of respect everyone in the organization accorded him, I believe that the work he did was vital, and no doubt very arduous, very exhausting. When my mother was still alive, she used to nag him to retire early because she could see how the work was draining him of life. As every year passed he looked older and more feeble. I often used to wonder when my father would be able to stop working, when he would be able to leave those red walls behind, to be a normal man and live a normal life. The year after you were transferred, 1984 it would’ve been, that day finally came. He was already sixty-five years old; he should have retired years earlier.
After his retirement, I thought he would be able to live a quiet, relaxing, normal life, to live in ease and comfort – I thought we would be happier than ever before. Perhaps you don’t know, but since my father’s life had revolved around work, he didn’t much care for family life and he didn’t show much concern for us. But our feelings for him were deep and real. We never complained that he spent little of his time with us. In truth, we understood him, supported him, respected him. We believed that his golden years would be filled with happiness because, up until now, he’d known only work. In order to give him something to do after his retirement, we planted a flower garden round the house and began to raise a few birds and fish. Once the holidays came, we took him to see our relatives and also for strolls in the park. At the time, Ah-bing hadn’t yet begun his graduate studies and he didn’t talk much about girls. I just wanted him to keep Father company and not to burden him with his own personal concerns. That’s what he did. The two of them would just chat about trivial things and go for walks together, all very relaxing. Ah-bing was raised by our maternal grandmother. Afterwards he performed his mandatory military service, and then went to university. So you could say that the relationship between father and son was rather cold and distant. Now that they were often together, I worried at first that they would have difficulties talking and getting along with each other, but I soon realized that my worries were groundless. They got along marvellously, much better than I had expected. Afterwards, I thought this might be because they had never had much to do with one another before: they were like two long-lost friends getting re-acquainted with one another. They always seemed to have something to talk about, and they’d talk and talk for hours non-stop. For the first little while after his retirement, everyone was incredibly happy.
But it didn’t last. A month later, perhaps less, Father had grown tired and annoyed with this kind of purposeless life. He had no patience to look at flowers; he couldn’t be bothered to watch his birds; and it seemed as though he and Ah-bing had exhausted all topics of conversation. His temperament changed: he became gruff and unpleasant to be around. Without provocation, he’d let loose a litany of complaints – hurling insults at this, blaming that – it was as if everything in our house exhausted him, tormented him, made him uncomfortable. Now, whatever we said or whatever we did seemed to displease him. Even when we tried to get close to him, he’d become upset and wave his hands, shouting at us to go away. In such a short period of time, life had become a burden to him, something unbearable. He would spend the whole day shut up in his room, reduced to a shadow of his former self as he paced up and down. Needless to say, it made all of us feel terribly worried. I should say that Father never used to be so temperamental, so unpredictable and difficult to please. He never used to make unreasonable demands on anyone, but now he seemed to be a complete stranger. He was pernickety, harsh, peremptory, violent and unreasonable. One day – I don’t know whether someone had said something to him – he suddenly went wild. He went out onto the balcony and tore open the bird cages, releasing them into the air, and then he set about smashing all the flowerpots, one after another. A month before this, he seemed to like his birds and his flowers very much, but now he had turned against them. Father seemed to get bored with his toys like a child, but the problem is that he wasn’t a child. Every day he’d get up incredibly early, but he wouldn’t go anywhere, he wouldn’t do anything, he wouldn’t open his mouth. From morning till night, he’d mope about looking discouraged and dejected. He’d sigh, he’d get angry, he’d stare blankly at nothing. He gave the impression of a man at the end of his tether.
One day, I noticed that he’d spent ages just standing on the balcony, a blank expression on his face. Several times I asked if he’d like to go for a walk, and each time he rudely refused. I asked him what he was thinking – if there was something making him unhappy, or if he needed us to do something for him. He uttered not a sound; he just stood there looking sad – pathetic, really – not moving a muscle, like a wooden puppet without a puppet master. The winter sun slowly worked its way over his body, illuminating his head of grey hair, giving it a shining brilliance. I walked up to the balcony window and looked out. You can easily imagine the look on his face in that moment – it was an expression absolutely familiar to me: his face was taut, deep lines were etched across his forehead, his eyes had a vacant quality about them – unmoving, they seemed to be embedded within sagging eye sockets from which they could, at any moment, come loose and fall silently to the ground. But if you looked attentively at that empty mask, if you looked beyond the spectre of death hanging about it, you could see under the surface the confusion he felt, the restlessness, the sense of expectation for something that would never come, the utter despondency.
Father’s moods made him seem a stranger, and yet he remained familiar. This often made me very unhappy. In the beginning, we thought that the reason he did not wish to go to the old people’s recreation centre was that he didn’t like the atmosphere there, so we asked some of his old comrades-in-arms to come and pay him a visit. But even after these friends arrived, Father remained cold and indifferent; no friendship was rekindled. After a few commonplace remarks and some unwelcoming looks, he managed to get rid of them pretty quickly. It soon became obvious to us that Father was friendless, and that this was mostly his own doing. When he was dying I noticed that the only people who came to pay their final respects were a few senior officials from that red-walled compound and our relatives; no one else. The only person he wanted to see was you; you were perhaps his only friend, if you could call your relationship with him friendship. My father must have got along poorly with the people in his work unit. I wondered how this happened. What was it that made him keep people at a distance? Was it honour? Or character? Was it the work? What made him so solitary, so bad at normal relationships? What was it that left him friendless, can you tell me? Ah, forget it. Perhaps it’s better if you don’t tell me. But let me tell you why he was unable to enjoy his golden years, unable to live out his days happily as other old people do.
One day, even though it was after dark, Father had not come home for dinner. We went out to look for him, scouring the whole area. We finally found him out by those red walls. He was sitting next to the iron gates, alone, the ground around him littered with cigarette butts. According to the guard, he’d spent the afternoon sitting there. He had shown the guard his ID, but knew that he would not be permitted inside, so he had just sat there like that – and yet to look at him, he seemed at ease, peaceful. He just couldn’t let go of his former life behind those red walls! He just couldn’t let go of the work! I knew then why he had been unable to enjoy retirement. His heart had remained within those walls; it had remained with all those mysteries and secrets. Nothing else could steal it away: he was infatuated with the place, with the work. He’d been intoxicated by what went on behind the walls; his heart had become divorced from the world outside the compound. This special work, this oh-so-secretive career, had required him to sever all connections with the real world. It was as though he had been confined within a web of secrecy. Year after year the outside world and its inhabitants grew ever more remote until finally they ceased to exist for him. To make him leave this world of secrets, to suddenly force him out of that red-walled compound – well, what he saw, what he heard, what he felt could only mean nothing to him. It was all so unrelated and alien to him; snippets of a life he had long since abandoned. As a result, everything bored him. It was all so meaningless. It was an ossified form of life, unendurable. You could say this is the attitude of a ‘company man’: for such a person normal life is fragmentary, superfluous, pointless. I remember General Patton once said, ‘There’s only one proper way for a professional soldier to die: the last bullet of the last battle of the war.’ I think my father’s sorrow stemmed from this. He hadn’t been felled by some bullet fired from within those red towering walls. The last bullet never found him.
Oh, Father, why do we call them your golden years! Today, here, describing your last days to your only friend, I can’t help but feel how terrible those days were for you. How difficult it is for me to put this down on paper. Right now I have only written the beginning, but I already feel that I can’t go on, my heart weeps. I want to forget everything, I don’t want to remember it … but I am your daughter. And I think your friend deserves to understand, deserves to know you, the real you. It is only by seeing your end that he can understand the rest of your life. Your last years were so painful …
Day Two
Once he was fed up with tending to his flowers, for nearly two months he simply did nothing but sit upon the sofa, always with a dejected look on his face, his body slumped over, smoking cigarette after cigarette, punctuated only by fits of coughing. At the same time his health began to deteriorate and his blood pressure soared. It went as high as 200/90 when normally it’d stand at around 160/90; it really worried everyone. Then he developed chronic bronchitis: he’d cough and cough, so loud it seemed that the earth shook and the mountains trembled. For certain this was caused by all the heavy smoking he had been doing recently. Father’s love of tobacco had always been quite serious: normally two packs a day wouldn’t be enough, but during his retirement, he smoked even more, lighting one cigarette after another. We tried to tell him he should cut down, to which he replied that he bought his cigarettes with his own money, not ours, and so it was none of our business. Later we heard that he had been repeatedly contacting the work-unit supervisor requesting to be reinstated, to be permitted back inside those red walls. His requests were always denied. I couldn’t help but think all his requests must be becoming an annoyance to the authorities, and I was right. One day, Director Wang came to speak to me. He implored us to think of some way to deal with the situation, to find some way to placate Father so that he’d no longer bother them. I wanted to ask him what he thought we’d been doing. Nothing? We’d already tried everything we could think of; we’d exhausted ourselves trying to make him happy, all to no avail.
Some time later, one day in winter, Father had finished his dinner and, as usual, planted himself down on the sofa with his cigarettes. Bluish-grey smoke soon began to billow out from his mouth and nose like a spirit exiting its mortal shell. The haze blanketed the room with a heavy, suffocating shroud. Everyone became tense and nervous, fearful even, which only provoked Father’s bad temper even more. Ah-bing turned on the TV, hoping to find a programme that would catch his attention. Once the screen flickered on, the image of a go board came into view. Black and white pieces appeared. They seemed to be scattered across a white wall in a disordered manner. A man and a woman seemed to be demonstrating various strategies. To the uninitiated it would have seemed deeply mysterious. Ah-bing, however, was addicted to go and so was drawn to the image on the television screen. I, too, enjoyed the game (mostly because of Ah-bing’s influence), but I thought Father wouldn’t be interested and would yell at him to change the channel. Ah-bing turned round to look at Father. His eyes were narrowed, his face blank; he looked to be overcome with boredom. Ah-bing asked whether or not he wanted to watch this, but Father seemed not to hear him, nor did he answer. When Ah-bing changed the channel, he told Ah-bing to go back to the go game. It seemed as though he hadn’t heard his son’s earlier question. As the go game flickered back on, Father asked Ah-bing what game it was. It was go, he said, and then explained the basic rules. Father listened to the explanation, but made no response. His face remained expressionless. He just sat there, watching the programme until it finished.
On the following day at the same time, Father watched another lecture on go, but this time something was different – his face had a different look to it. He watched the programme intently, concentrating on what was being said; his mind seemed to be going over the intricacies of the game. I asked him if he understood what they were talking about, whereupon he challenged me to a game; this surprised me so much that it took some time for me to respond. Even though I’m a pretty average player, I believed I’d be much better than my father. After all, he didn’t even really seem to understand the game. As we began, Ah-bing came and stood next to Father, prepared to assist him if necessary. In the beginning, he was happy to let Ah-bing give him instructions, but before long he stopped listening to him; he said he wanted to play the game by himself. He was quite slow in making his moves; each one seemed to require an inordinate amount of time and consideration. When he finally shifted a stone, he did so in quite an unorthodox manner. Given his illogical moves, he seemed to be heading for sure defeat, but by the time the game reached the halfway point, both Ah-bing and I were stunned. A moment ago his manoeuvres seemed to lack precision and skill, but now he went on the offensive. In a series of strange and eccentric moves he began to put pressure on me, harassing my stones, forcing me to slow my pace and think more deeply about each and every piece. I soon discovered that it would be difficult for me to regain the initiative. He was advancing with every move and consolidating his position. There seemed to be fewer and fewer avenues open for me to break through the stranglehold he was building. I had no idea what move to make.
