Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4567 | Page 351

“What gave me away?”
She remained silent, pressing her lips into a smile.
“I’d like to show you my favourite place here,” she said again, and it was an order, not an
invitation.
So I buttoned up my overcoat and followed her down the endless stairs, my heavy feet after her
light ones.
*
She led me to a tree of cuckoos lamenting mournfully by a lake.
“How beautiful,” I murmured. The presence of the moon and water called for quietude; and yet, a
boatman was chanting afar as the cuckoos tolled their knell, their songs joyful, tuneless, and
disconnected through the night...
She blew out a soft strand of smoke. Only the yellow tip of the flame lit the darkness, like a
burning chiaroscuro.
1931, Year Xin Wei.
It marked the beginning of a little whirlwind that never made its way into the history books. She
took me to the local markets with her sun-coloured parasol in hand, where the streets were filled with
sweetmeats, lute music, and the fragrance of florida-water. Somebody urged her to buy handkerchiefs
folded into rhododendrons; and someone else lifted a wicker of snow-pears that glistened as if carved
from jade to our eyes. The crowd cried in radiant malice as two tomcats fought on the hot earth, each
of their fast, taut steps like a barbarian’s dance. A pigtailed child was peddling caged doves by the ring,
looking diffident.
“Who do you think will win?” she asked under her breath. Her palms were curved as if in prayer.
She was cupping the folded handkerchief.
“It’s just a matter of time,” I whispered, and she smiled wryly. Her heels sang on the rough
cobblestones like copper coins as we walked away. A woman in a silk kimono glided past us, a comb in
her long hair, and a certain sangfroid in her dark eyes.
*
Under the archive’s lamplight we read of demise, within the embossed scrolls about courtesans
who drowned in satins, and their emperors who drowned in wine. They eyed us impassively from
within their paper prisons. There were also odes to flowers and elegies to fowls, to which she pointed –
“Ah, a cuckoo bird!”
And it was a cuckoo bird indeed, which was brought to life in the barest of strokes. A waterfall
plunged behind it, alongside a few lines of ineluctable prose.
“It’s crying,” I whispered in her ear, almost afraid the bird might hear and take flight.
“Yes.” She ran a finger across its eloquent eyes. “They are said to weep blood in trying times.”
Very gently, she folded the scroll shut and tied it up with its faded chrome ribbon, ending a
narrative that had been woven across millennia.
*