Elsewhere, p.8
Elsewhere, page 8
In the taxi to Madeleine’s poetry salon, Olivia and I sat in the back seats. She asked me what kind of fiction I wrote.
Mainly about small towns in China, I said. The unspeakable natures of their residents. Gossiping, bickering, pilfering and fornication. Basically, a bunch of faithless people indulging in petty crimes.
Olivia thought for a few seconds. Petty crimes, she repeated. Would you see the lack of faith in China as a regrettable consequence of the Cultural Revolution?
H was texting intensely in the passenger seat. Outside the window, the rain drizzled, the city soaked in darkness.
I tend not to politicise my writing, I said.
Olivia raised her eyebrows slightly. All writing is political, she said. To narrate is to make choices, to cut out the insubstantial and to inaugurate order. Essentially, those who are written onto the page and therefore dominate the narrative hold the power. Wouldn’t you agree?
Hey! H turned back from the front. Do you fancy meeting someone while you’re here?
I stared at him.
I have a friend who’s an illustrious novelist, H said. I was telling him about your event tomorrow and he said he’d come over. Jacob. Jacob is nice, isn’t he?
Olivia chuckled, as if hearing a joke. Yes, Jacob’s terrific.
——
Madeleine’s apartment was palatial, filled with guests in monochrome clothing. Two blond waiters cruised from room to room, carrying trays of drinks. H had been caught in a conversation as soon as we entered the sitting room. Olivia and I stood in front of a wooden mask and drank our gin and tonics. The mask was erected on a plinth and bore no distinctive gender or racial traits. It seemed expensive.
How do you feel about H’s proposal? Une aventure? Olivia asked, studying the mask.
I could sense a hard lump distending insidiously in my left breast and regretted leaving the pump at the hotel.
I suppose he was not entirely presumptuous, by trying to set me up with someone who’s not my husband, I said. The other day I was pushing the baby in the park at about 7 a.m. He wouldn’t stop crying so I had to take him out of the house even though it was freezing. I saw a piece of rusted bolt by the road, abandoned in the grass. Then I was seized, just in that moment, by this savage craving to get laid.
Olivia looked at me. Wow, she said.
A young woman in a slick bob approached us, holding a notepad and a pen. Hello, ladies, I hope you’re enjoying the evening, she said.
Thank you, I said. Can I get a sandwich, please?
The woman seemed baffled.
I think Cara’s here to ask us what we’re going to read, Olivia said. Hi, Cara, how’s it going?
What? I said.
I’m well, thank you. What poems would you like to read later? The young woman gripped the pen, its nib suspended precariously above the pad.
Shall we read together? Olivia said, saving me from the predicament. How about … Maybe we could read an Audre Lorde, ‘Who Said It Was Simple’.
Excellent choice. Cara nodded and wrote on the pad. And any preference for the background music?
Jacob laughed so hard he began to cough. He asked me what music we ended up picking.
I can’t tell you. It’s just embarrassing, I said.
We walked to my hotel, the searing wind blowing in my face. Jacob had suggested a taxi but I had said, Well, if it’s only ten minutes away.
Now time was being slackened by the frosty air. We passed a brightly lit subway entrance and strolled along the wide, foreboding street. On both sides, the concrete buildings stood in the wind, like petrified giants.
So, you’re going to Israel?
I am, Jacob said. My second time already. Then I’ll be in Buenos Aires in May for a three-week residency. Early June, going from there to Bogotá for a literary festival and then to New York City to visit a few friends. August in Budapest and Warsaw.
You’re busy.
I’m in a phased exile, said Jacob. I’m not particularly liked here, just in case you hadn’t noticed. The liberal minds of the literary circle aren’t open to having a conservative man among them. It’s pure ostracism. Anyway, what can an old bachelor do besides drift from one hotel to another? Fine lines, like thistledown, emerged around his eyes when he smiled.
At least sometimes they put you up in good hotels.
That’s true, Jacob agreed. Earlier this year, when I went to Macau, I was installed in the most extravagant hotel and taken to Michelin star restaurants. They even gave me free tokens for the casino.
I was there too, I said, checking his profile and his long black coat. Two years ago. Do you know Susie Tse?
Of course I know Susie. She is the sweetest. Jacob gently placed his hand on my shoulder, guiding me to make a turn.
We walked along a small road lined with tall and bare-branched trees, exchanging fond memories of our mutual friend. We realised we’d both been at a festival in Sydney but three years apart. Klara, who had taken care of me in Budapest in 2016, was inviting Jacob to go this year. And in 2015, we were both in Frankfurt. A few times Jacob repeated: What a small world.
He then asked me why I had lived such a life, to be a writer for foreigners instead of for my own countrymen and now dwelling in England. Are you also in some kind of exile? What problems did you have in your country? Did you write censored books? Were you persecuted by your government?
I laughed. Not everything is political. I had some personal issues and made certain choices.
Nothing is personal after modernity. Jacob held my shoulder again. We’re all fractions lost in the public machine.
I checked my phone. The hotel was two minutes’ walk away from the blue dot that was my projected being. It was nearly midnight. Well, in thirty minutes, I need to pump my milk. Is that personal or public?
Jacob smiled innocuously. The travail of women, he said. But there’s lots of hardship in being a man too.
Like what?
The novelist sighed, halting. For instance, our doomed compulsion to penetrate.
I had not slept since arriving in Stockholm, while the city itself never seemed to be fully awake. The sky would remain hazy for a few brief hours before returning to darkness, in which our exhausted bodies would be hidden, without leaving a trace. Fortunately, since childbirth, I had been used to long, insomniac nights.
After closing the door and kicking off my shoes, I stood alone in my immaculate hotel room, strangely free of the infant’s crying, and a formidable fear crushed me like the arrival of a god. Immediately, I regretted my decision not to invite Jacob in and checked my phone for messages.
H had emailed, notifying me about an interview I would be doing tomorrow. He admitted that it was rather a last-minute request. But he thought I could use some company at lunch since he wouldn’t be available until 3 p.m. – at which point, he and Olivia would meet me in the hotel lobby and accompany me to the airport. He also congratulated me on the success of the event. It was an absolute delight, he wrote, to see three beautiful and talented women participating in an inspiring and scintillating conversation.
It was hard for me to read H’s comment without hearing a note of sarcasm. I could not recall what I had muttered during the event. I had read the opening paragraph of an old story of mine while engaging my core to prevent myself from falling off the murderous stool. I’d also watched my fellow panellists talking, mainly Olivia, since she and I were sitting in symmetrical positions while Anna was two steps back in the middle. Olivia had been wearing bright scarlet lipstick, the contour of her lips beguiling and sensuous as she spoke.
I took care of my breasts, showered and walked downstairs to the guest lounge to make myself a double espresso. The lounge was empty, saturated with a sharp smell of bleach. I sat down on a sofa with my coffee and texted my husband.
In spite of the late hour, he called me back right away. He said he had just given the baby a bottle and rocked him back to sleep and he was now wide awake.
Me too, I said. I haven’t slept since I got here.
You’ll be home tomorrow. Then you can rest, he said.
I laughed. How’s the baby?
He’s good. He only woke up twice last night.
I miss him so much, I said. And I miss you.
We miss you too, he said. How did the event go?
Disastrously. I totally bombed, exhibiting no intelligence whatsoever. I have truly lost it, you know, the ability to write or to even perform like a writer. I’m simply disgusting. All I think about is feeding cues, clogged ducts, latch, nappies, pee, poop, solid poop, loose poop, and more poop.
It’ll get better, my husband said.
You don’t know that. I bottoms-upped my coffee.
I do, he insisted.
There is a curious phenomenon that the more ignorant a man is, the more confident he feels, Olivia commented after the male poet finally finished his lengthy lecture on poetry and the screen-reading era during which Olivia and I each downed two gin and tonics.
Doesn’t it also apply to women, I said. After all, ignorance is an indiscriminate human condition.
You’re right. But women are rarely confident, don’t you think? We are more critical of ourselves because we’re taught to be considerate of others.
I hailed the waiter who was passing by and asked for two more drinks. I need to sit down, I said.
Madeleine’s sitting room was fully occupied. H and a few other guests had formed a tight circle, blocking the doorway to the balcony. Olivia and I went to the dining room, settled in the upholstered leather chairs and sipped our third or fourth G&Ts. I told her I would rather not gaze through the lens of gender but see the world as an autonomous individual. Imagine that this cocktail is my fiction, and I, as the writer, am just the thing that contains it. I tapped my glass. All I hope to be is transparent and clean so that the liquid inside will not be obscured or contaminated. In this way, it can be delivered to its drinker as originally devised by its maker. I lifted and finished my gin and tonic.
Olivia winced. I hope you’re not talking about God.
Ah no, I said. Remember I’m Chinese, hence an atheist. But I do believe, in order to write, one needs to be humble and even fearful of a certain higher power.
I agree with you, Olivia said, on the idea of higher power. The branches shatter before they bear. We are all deeply manipulated, in each culture, language and society. The more marginalised we are from the centre, the less we are allowed to talk, write and think as ourselves. Even you would like to consider yourself an unbiased individual but you are perpetually negotiating with the coercions of collective identities. You’re always seen, by others and by yourself, as a woman, a foreigner, an outsider, therefore the subordinate, the inferior and the inauthentic … She stopped, frowning, and pointed at my chest. What’s going on with your top?
I had completely forgotten about my breasts and now they had erupted. The milk had soaked through my bra and was permeating my blouse with vigorous force. Oh shit, I said, grabbing a napkin from the table.
Olivia laughed and swiftly downed her drink. Let’s get you back to the hotel.
She held my arm and ushered me to the hallway. From the sitting room, the chorus of chattering and debating resounded. We dug out our coats from myriad carcasses of outer garments.
Shall we tell your boyfriend we’re going? I asked.
What for? she said. We’re all autonomous individuals.
H walked into the lobby in a black parka jacket. He glanced around before meeting my eyes. His face, despite being veiled by a thin smog of fatigue, was irrefutably handsome. He smiled at me, walked over and sat down in the armchair opposite the coffee table.
How was the interview? he said.
I didn’t need to ask him to know that Olivia was not coming. I ended up receiving a tour, I said.
H examined me. You look somewhat different.
I’m just wiped out, I said. Having talked about myself at length.
H disagreed. He said as far as he was concerned, I always seemed enchantingly inexhaustible, more of a river rather than a pond. After all, he had recognised, since the first time we had met, that I was one of those lucky writers who would be reinvigorated by speaking in front of an audience. He asked if he could be candid with me. After receiving my consent, he disclosed that for a long time, he had considered me as someone who was better at performing being a writer than actually writing.
He paused, replying to a message on his phone, and continued to say that I had inspired him so much, in the early days of our friendship, with both my public talks and our private exchanges on literature and writing. He then admitted that he had gone through a lot of trouble to order one of my books online, hoping to gain a deeper insight into the world of literature. However, he had been disappointed.
I was profoundly traumatised, H said. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t like your book because, honestly, at that point, I thought I had fallen in love with you. He stopped, clasping his hands, and looked at me like a petitioner in a courtroom, waiting for a verdict.
I considered his words. Then the receptionist called to me from the desk. Ms Zhou, your taxi to the airport is here.
I stood up and thanked them. H took my suitcase and walked out with me. To get to the street, we needed to cross a cobblestone courtyard in which an old laurel tree stood. Its branches spread exuberantly against the taupe walls of the hotel and the flake-white sky. How does it feel to be an evergreen tree in the deep winter? I said, watching my exhalations condensing into murky clouds.
What a blessing to be impervious, said H.
I’m drowning, with the amount of coffee I’ve taken, I told him. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
He took one and gave it an affirming squeeze. You’ll survive, he said.
Later, sitting in the back seat of the taxi beside H, who was immersed in his phone, I was reminded, by our brief bodily contact, of a perfunctory kiss between us in the summer of 2008 and, while my nose had been pressed tightly against his face, a tenuous yet distinct scent that emanated from him. The smell was neither pleasant nor repellent, and I had never detected it since.
It was completely dark outside. The taxi shot along the gloomy highway, lit up occasionally by the oncoming vehicles returning to the city. In the sky above us, small red lights glinted as planes passed like albatrosses. I asked H if he planned to send me more emails.
He looked up from his phone. I don’t know, he said. Things are going well between me and Olivia. But to say I’ll never love another woman or that she’ll never love another man seems obtuse, even hubristic. Who am I to assert, at this point, that our sexuality should be fully taken custody of by a contract of confinement and potentially to be absorbed in the solemn function of reproduction? He glanced at me the way a professor might take notice of his pupil during a lecture and, as if just remembering him, he said: Oh, speaking of which, how’s Liam?
Without waiting for my response, H carried on expressing, enthusiastically, his admiration for my husband’s work. He said the first time he had truly enjoyed my novel was when reading my husband’s translation of it. Although he was not certain whether it was because Liam had triumphed in domesticating my impetuous style, or because, in English – his adopted language – his own perception had become untrustworthy. Nonetheless, H said, I often regard your relationship with Liam as a model one, a perfect union that will extend both your genes and fame.
I folded my hands together to stop them from shivering and thought of my husband and the baby. I thought I’d better pump my breasts before boarding the aeroplane. I thought I’d better find a clean and quiet bathroom cubicle and extract my milk with the machine. Then I would pour it down the toilet and flush it away. Yet, by the time I reached Heathrow, my once-emptied breasts would be replenished with milk, like a forever-flowing river.
When the interview had finished, the young man from the website had asked me if I wanted to go see the lake. He brought it up rather casually, while turning off the recording device and putting his notebook and pen back into his satchel, but the question felt momentous.
I knocked back my second coffee before asking him whether the lake was another inexplicable signifier, like the Swedish word he had left on the back of my hand.
He looked up from his bag. No. He smiled. I meant literally hu, as in we are on an island and surrounded by lakes.
I didn’t know this.
You have to see it to believe it, the young man said, standing up from the sofa. His face was gaunt and pale, no different from when I last saw him at the bookstore, except the dark circles under his eyes had grown even more dire.
We walked out of the café together and descended the sloping, narrow street. The buildings on both sides were tall, creating a sense of oppression. It was midday and there were a number of pedestrians on the street. When I looked at them looking at us, I wondered what speculations they were making about the relationship between me and my companion. The young man had been quiet for a while. In fact, everybody passed by in incredible silence. A man carried groceries, a woman held her phone against her ear and a young couple pushed a black buggy. There was no sound of chatting or whispering nor the slightest shuffling of soles, as if we were all actors in a mime show. I could not be certain if there was an infant in the pushchair.
The young man gestured to turn into a small alleyway between two large buildings and we walked on in single file until the edifices vanished. I stood facing an opening of wild land. Tall, shrivelled grass swarmed up around us, and a muddy path wound towards the rugged rising mound in the distance.
Is this the right way to go? I asked, breaking the long-sustained silence, my lips stinging in the cold air.
It’s a shortcut, he said.
I glanced at my interviewer who was much taller than me. His jawline was sharp and bony, reminding me of a crowbar. I thought of my husband, holding and cooing at the baby, as he read online the news that a Chinese woman writer had been murdered in Stockholm, her body bagged and buried in the weeds.
