INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (11 page)

Thankful of the excuse to end the conversation with the Sergeant, I follow Private Xu down the short white corridor. I stop when we enter the next room. Then I fall to my knees, and clasp my hands together. Then tears roll from my eyes.

As far as my eyes can see, bottles of wine set behind glass in white-glowing cabinets. Fine Chinese reds from Xinjiang and Ningxia, and there, bold Sicilian vintages and fine French Bordeaux, and a little further along, rows of crisp Australian whites and complex, alluring New Zealand Pinot Gris. And more. So much more. A lifetime of more.

The Private stands next to me, hands on hips. Her voice is filled with her ironic smile. “I guess I’d weep too, if I found my personal nirvana.”

I nod, feigning agreement, as tears trickle down my face. I weep not because I have found it: I weep because I have to leave it behind.

***

I spend the afternoon drinking a fine Ningxia cabernet and reading a slim volume of ancient poetry. I am content.

As the evening arrives, the Sergeant tells me they have found a store of food that will last for years, and the cook is preparing an extravagant meal to celebrate our first evening in the memory shelter. The Sergeant and I seat ourselves at a large white table we have decided is for communal meals. Soon Private Xu saunters in, cigarette dangling from her mouth, and Corporal Zhong follows, sitting down with a large can of Laotian beer in his hand. A peace has settled on the small unit now – contentment even.

The Sergeant says: “Tell us another memory of Wu Mountain.”

I don’t have the energy to lie after the long walk and the excitement, so I tell the truth: “I won’t talk about Wu Mountain tonight. Tonight I will honour the discovery of the memory shelter with a poem by our greatest poet, Du Fu. If there’s one poet you need to remember, it is him.” They all reach for their memory cards.

I breathe in deeply. “This is a poem for those who have left for war, and those who wait for them at home.”

In a quiet, clear voice, I remember every line to them:

“I have this feeling

You won’t come back from frontier duties

But autumn is here

And I get out the laundry stone

Soon you’ll feel the cold

The way I feel our separation

I clean your winter clothes

Whether I want to or not

Send them off to where you’re stationed

Near the Great Wall

A woman uses all her strength

Beating the laundry with a club

Maybe if you listen hard

You’ll hear it way out there.”

They remain silent after I finish. Unmoving, watching me but not watching, eyes distant.

The Private sits with her finger poised over her gold-glowing card. “I can’t write what that is. I can’t describe that.”

I smile. “I know.” Then I lie: “Don’t worry, I’ll tell it again in a week.”

We eat a fine meal of Dongpo pork, soy eggs, pickled vegetables, Baozi, wontons, and hot and sour soup. There is wine and – for the first time since I join them – there is laughter. The cook sits and eats with us and his son, a smear of chocolate above his eyebrow, watches me with eyes wide as I speak. I am sated by the meal and made expansive by the wine, I tell them truth and lies about the war and where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, and they hang on every word.

But the day has been long and taken its toll. They drift away to bed – comfortable, warm bunks for more than fifty have been found down one of the corridors – and soon all that remains is me and the Private, she with a packet of Double Happiness brand cigarettes, me with an Australian Pinot Noir. Such a shame, what happened to Australia – they really did make such magnificent wine.

I watch her in silence. She watches me. I drink my wine, she lights a cigarette and burns through it.

Finally she says: “Why do you want to go east, Omissioner?”

“Why do you wish to stop me?”

She shrugs. “Habit. I don’t like being told what to do.” She lights another cigarette, touching the tip of the last to the fresh one. “Plus I think you’re lying. I think everything that comes out of your mouth is a lie.”

I eye her uniform. “If you don’t like taking orders, why did you join the army?”

She blows a cloud of smoke upwards. “How the fuck should I know?”

It’s a good question. I sigh.

Maybe it’s the wine, maybe it’s the hope that there are some good devils in her, maybe it’s the fact I have no allies and I’m desperate. But whatever it is, I do something foolish, I tell the truth: “My wife and two sons are there.”

Xu leans forward, slender forearms on the edge of the table, cigarette trailing a slow line of smoke to the ceiling. “And the Sergeant would never let you go there for that reason.”

I raise my eyebrows in the sign for ‘obviously’, refill the wine in my glass, and pour a fresh one for her.

“It’s worse than you think, Omissioner.”

I’m unhappy, and don’t manage to keep it out of my voice. “Why is that, Private?”

She frowns. “If we’re going to drink together, we can drop the formalities. My name is Xiaofan.”

I pass her the cup, then indicate for her to continue.

She leans back in her chair, sipping her wine on the way back. “I returned from guard duty one night, close to dawn. Freezing, barely able to see two feet away with the mist. This is maybe a month ago. Maybe a year, I’m not sure. Anyway, when I got back to camp I saw Sergeant Hu looking at her memory card. Everyone else was asleep, and she was crying. I was shocked. She’s like a bronze statue, our Sergeant. I was with her once when she was shot four times in the legs, lying in the mud in her blood and filth. I start panicking and she says to me calmly ‘pass me a med-kit Private, and then return fire on that position’. No pain on her face, no anger – like she was asking me to pass her the soya sauce.”

We both smile at this.

She continues: “But there she was, crying. She’d put the card on the ground next to her and buried her face in her hands. I snuck around behind her. I shouldn’t have done it. But we walk through this world like zombies, not knowing where we’re going, or what we’re feeling, or why we’re feeling it. Dead inside or trying to be dead inside. So if someone feels something, especially the Sergeant, well I want to know why. So I looked at the card. It said one thing: ‘father is east’. That’s all.”

After a long pause, she continues: “Hu was leading us east, into the depths of an entire continent, based on one line in a memory card. I respected her after that Omissioner, more than that, I—” She breaks off her voice and her gaze, unwilling to finish the thought.

We sit in silence after that, mutually agreed. I finish the bottle then start another, watching the cloud of smoke circle the girl’s head.

Xiaofan says something.

“What?”

“I said I’m sorry.” There’s no ironic smile in her voice.

I shrug and sip my wine. “Like the Sergeant said: it was a long shot, Xiaofan.”

She nods, and the regret in her eyes is real.

It’s a long shot, but I don’t care. I’m still going back to my family. And now I have an ally.

***

“I saw something on patrol earlier. Let me show you.”

The Private stands near me, hands on hips. She has a way of leaning one hip to the side and resting the palm of her hand on the curve that an old man like me finds quite distracting. I’m sipping a blunt but satisfying Chilean red and reading poetry again.

I keep my eyes away from her hips. “Is it worth it?”

“It’s worth it.”

I sigh. “Let me bring my bag.”

Thirty minutes later we are sitting on flat, almost-dry stones at the top of a steep ridge. The mist is less pervasive today, affording us the view of a serene, dark watered lake, the edges of which are firm with white ice. In the distance the dark, jutting shapes of hills, fingers of hills, pushing themselves up into the mist or the clouds or whatever lies above us. The silence here is perfect, and draws me in.

Xiaofan snaps her lighter shut, drawing my attention to her. She drags long on the cigarette, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “Better pour the wine then, old turtle.”

I wince at the name she gives me, but she is young and doesn’t know its colloquial meaning. I draw two bamboo cups and a bottle of wine from my travel bag, filling us each a cup.

She drinks deep on the wine. When she speaks, her voice is far away.

“This mist follows me everywhere. Not just out here, but in my mind as well. I can’t think straight, I can’t feel straight, I can’t grasp anything with my thoughts. Sometimes I think this is all a dream. I worry that if I don’t wake up soon I will become this dream and my reality will fade away.” She looks at me. “Am I going crazy?”

I shake my head and then tell the truth: “This is a dream, dreamed by our country. It sleeps deeply now, and we are fated to walk through its slumber. Through its half-remembered places, through the longings of its history, through the world it abandoned to despair.”

She sighs with frustration. “Oh Du.”

“What?”

“Don’t ever switch careers to counsellor.”

“Were you seeking reassurance?”

“No. No, I guess not. Maybe just not the one person in this world more melancholy than I.”

I smile a sad smile. “Drink your wine,” I say, “so we can have another.”

We’re finishing our first bottle when she says: “You didn’t ask about what I was going to show you.”

“I assumed you’d get around to it.”

She nods down the slope. “Look – down there, at the edge of the lake.”

I follow her gaze, past the dark, frost-scarred trees and thin tendrils of mist. There, there it is. A boat, small and silver, tied to a stump at the edge of the lake.

I nod, slowly. My salvation: a small, lone boat, tied up.

My eyes are still on the boat as I speak. “How dear are memories, Xiaofan? It’s like asking someone how important is the heart beating in their chest. I don’t just hold the memories of others; I hold their identities, their sense of self and place and time. They, in turn, hold to me as tightly as if I were part of their soul. You’d think in a world without a past, the man with memory would be king. But no, in that world, he who remembers is a slave.”

“Have you run away from many groups like ours?” she asks, quietly.

“Three.”

She sips her wine, her bottom lip glistening as she takes the cup away from her mouth. “Zhong will kill you, if you try to escape. He’s that way inclined.”

“I know.” I drink deeply, watching the mist that rolls over the waters.

We’re silent for a while until I bump her with my shoulder. “Unless he has sex: that will temper his temper.”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“No?” I raise an eyebrow. “He is the last man on earth for you, and for the Sergeant.”

“Man? No. She’s not that way inclined.”

It takes me a few seconds. “Oh.”

She blows out a cloud of smoke and cold-misted breath. “Yes: ‘oh’.”

“And I take it you’re not that way inclined towards the Sergeant?”

“No.”

I shake my head. “A perfect circle of instability.”

I reach for the bottle and fill my glass. Xiaofan lets me fill hers as well. This makes me happy. I am a man used to drinking alone, but it is heartening to find a kindred spirit, even for just one evening. All souls need communion, even the old and bitter ones. Those, most of all.

I sigh with contentment. The evening comes and the cold of the stone is starting to freeze the bones in my arse, but the wine and company warms my chest. “And you’re not interested in Zhong either, I take it.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’d have a better chance, Du Gongbu.”

I smile, feeling the warmth now in my cheeks, as well. I’m an old man, but still, old men have egos too.

“Even if I was,” she continues, “I’m married.”

“So you’re trying to get home as well?”

“No.”

“No?”

Her eyes shine. “I—” The muscles in her jaw tighten and she sighs through her nose, closing her eyes. Like something unwanted has passed over her vision.

I understand her reaction. It’s one I’ve seen a hundred times. “You don’t remember where home is.”

She shakes her head, jaw still tight. Afraid perhaps speaking will cause the emotion to flow out. Her lips quiver, cyanotic with the cold.

I reach out – with some hesitancy – and put my hand on her shoulder. I whisper: “Do you remember him?”

She shakes her head, clears her throat. When she speaks, her voice is thick: “I lost my memory card. I only found a replacement for it a few months ago. All I have now are snatches of images of him: standing in the kitchen, bamboo steamer in his hand, or next to me in bed, asleep. I have this one memory of him, casually walking around the lounge room whistling this silly tune, while I lie on the sofa reading. Suddenly he pretends to trip over and he falls on me, making me lose the page I am on, kissing me all over my face. I remember him doing that a few times, actually.”