Cold Sea Stories

Doctor Cheng

ONLY ON THE plane did it dawn on him that the decision to make this journey, taken a good fifteen months ago, was a reckless one. Nothing really drew him to the country where he had spent the first twenty years of his life and which had no positive associations for him. Or at least positive enough to long for and dream about. All right, once, when he was on his way down to Luigi’s diner in the lunch hour and had passed two pretty girls twittering away in his native language, something had shuddered inside him. But it was barely a twitch. No more at any rate than the time when, flicking from channel to channel, he had chanced upon the image of the Pope and a cheering crowd whose singing reminded him, as if through a fog, of a blazing hot day in June and a Corpus Christi procession.

To tell the truth, right from the start – if only there were such a possibility – he would have loved to press the button marked ‘instant rewind’ and then watch the passengers’ stunned expressions. But there was no such button. So he considered another, entirely realistic possibility. Straight after landing he would check the return flights, buy a ticket and if necessary even spend half a day at the airport. Perhaps if they had a hotel near the terminal he would take a room, stretch out on the bed and sleep through the time until departure.

Like a pendulum over the Atlantic, he thought – why on earth not?

But at once he came to his senses. As he was returning to his home country rather half-heartedly and for no real reason, how was he supposed to explain to himself this next, even more rapid return, or rather escape? And what in the end would he be running away from?

A little bit of common sense, he mused, with his eyes closed, never does any harm!

Eventually he decided that everything would proceed just as he had so precisely planned it: a taxi from the airport to the train station, then four hours travelling in a rickety train – an express in name only – and finally a walk by the sea, where he would recognise two lighthouses, a few miles apart: the one at the entrance to the port and the one that cast its light over the roofs of an old health spa. Then he would look for a boarding house for two or three weeks, and live from one day to the next, perhaps taking the opportunity to renew some old acquaintances, but with no obligation and no expectations. His plans went no further than that. He was single and wealthy. He could just as well spend the rest of his life on exotic journeys, or settle in some quiet spot in the south – as far as there were still any quiet spots left on earth.

The lighthouses were the same as years ago, the boarding house was perfectly suitable, and his daily walks along the sandy beach afforded him immense pleasure. He immediately noticed that there were far fewer of the small, yellow fishing boats than in the past. But the number of fish bars and restaurants had increased, stretching along a new promenade. From dawn to dusk, roller-skaters and cyclists went racing along a dedicated path that ran parallel to it. Where coastal meadows run wild had once given shelter to truants and lovers, there was now a city park. The tower in the pine forest, from which the military used to monitor the state border delineated within the waters of the bay, had disappeared. But not everything had yielded to such thorough change. When he alighted from the tram on the main avenue of his old neighbourhood – and he only made his way there after a couple of days – literally two steps beyond a strip of banks and elegant shop fronts, he could tell that although much had changed here, in actual fact almost nothing had changed. He was greeted by crumbling garages, rubbish bins full to overflowing, sickly little gardens and peeling plaster. From gateways, courtyards and toolsheds yawned the same, eternal odour of drunkards’ piss, mothballs, weeds, puddles that never dry up, vegetable soup, fag ends and feline nuptials. On the other hand, there were definitely more cars and dog mess. Instead of sentimental sighs, a few of which he had been expecting in this place, he felt rising disgust. He did not take a single photo, and when he returned to the boarding house by taxi, instead of heading off on his afternoon walk along the sea, he sat down in a bar and drank vodka, while browsing the papers. The politicians annoyed him: a child could have told lies with more charm than these gentlemen, casting aspersions at one another. They were like drunken, sweaty porters, competing to snatch the suitcase of the only passenger at a badly lit, provincial station, long after hours. In hope, he reached for the local supplement, furnished with the heading ‘kultukultu’, but this time too he was disappointed. Everything that over the past thirty years had been devised, consumed, masticated and excreted as art in the city and the country he came from, the entire phantasmagoria of installations, videos with genitals and without, sawing grand pianos in half, smashing violins to smithereens, drinking or excreting urine in full view of the public, in short, all those passé entertainments had been produced here as the revolutionary doings of local geniuses. As, with a stifling sense of weariness, he put the supplement aside, he noticed an announcement on one of the advertising pages: ‘Doctor Cheng has a wide selection of dreams to offer.’ There wouldn’t have been anything unusual about it, if not for the fact that there was no address or even a phone number given in the advertisement. He came to the conclusion that it must be one of those adverts that develop: in a day or a week, let’s say, the reader would find further information in the same spot. A description, for instance, of the hypnotic state in which a patient encountered her dead husband. Or found out the numbers that would win her the jackpot on the lottery.

Next day when he looked through the new edition of the paper he was quite surprised. The announcement had not been repeated, either in a fuller form, or in its previous, useless version. From then on, every day at breakfast he scoured the small ad columns, but to no effect: no one called Cheng ever advertised again. Moreover – and he checked carefully at the reading room in the local library one rainy day – this strange message had not been printed earlier either. In short, it only appeared once, and that was the time he had read it. He felt anxious, as if an invisible hand had opened a door into the past.

He didn’t believe in God. He regarded the idea of the afterlife, and of resurrection, as a fiction as ancient as it was extravagant. And yet, every year since Sophie had died, he had conducted his ritual on the same day in September, and at the same time. He would go to Chinatown, and at the spot where his wife had fallen to the sidewalk he would stop for a few minutes, summoning up the brief moment in which he had seen the last spark of life in her eyes. It was the only form of prayer he was able to muster. When he told his psychoanalyst about it, Dr Esterhagen had defined this act as a spontaneous search for the vagina of eternity. He never went to see the doctor again. Whereas he did read every book and pamphlet he could find on the Book of Changes, which at the time he and Sophie had been on their way to buy at Tung Chung-shu’s famous store. Sixty-four hexagrams, in endless combinations, from which one could interpret the fate of both individuals and entire countries, continents and galaxies, seemed to him a mental delusion. Poetic enough to be called mad. That was no consolation, especially when he remembered the enthusiastic way Sophie used to tell him about it all, and how pleased she was when he suggested they buy the Book not at one of the elegant bookstores in their neighbourhood, but right at the heart of Chinatown. If at the time they had reached Tung Chung-shu’s store, which was barely a block away, would the final expression in her eyes have been any different? The cold look that had stuck in his memory expressed a feeling of utter loneliness, as devoid of complaint as it was of hope. But on the other hand, what value could there be in supposing that if her heart attack had happened after entering the store, she might have died happier? He could sense the absurdity of such speculation, but he couldn’t entirely free himself of it, because always, somewhere at the back of his mind, a sense of guilt stirred in him. As if it was he himself who had chosen the time and the place. He realised he would never free himself of it if he didn’t make some sort of change to his annual ritual, or abandon it. So why shouldn’t he consult the Book? He didn’t actually believe in its merits, and fortune-telling – if one could define the arrangement of a hexagram of scattered sticks in this way – had no greater value than the toss of a coin, in which we leave everything to chance. And so he went ahead and did it. Having no experience, however, he fell into a whirlpool of contradictions, which he failed to interpret. For what on earth did the element of fire mean in conjunction with being forbidden to climb? It wasn’t as if he was planning to go hiking in the mountains during the summer season of forest fires. And on top of all this – a man disappearing into a chasm! What sort of interpretation could this possibly offer for his affairs? It was no different at the second attempt: the element of water was supposed to lessen the severity of hurricanes, yet the death of a bird augured a never-ending, ever greater threat. He did not make a third attempt, which could only have confirmed his worst suppositions: interpreting the hexagrams made no sense at all if you were not a Chinese man from the time of the Ming dynasty. As he put the sticks back in the red lacquer box, he decided he would go there one last time. He would stop at the spot where Sophie had died, and then go into Tung Chung-shu’s store, because he had never actually visited its interior. By the beginning of September one more detail had come into play: he would put his apartment up for sale and, without taking any souvenirs with him, would leave for northern California, or anywhere at all.

What he remembered most was that sense of compression: as if from at least a hundred and twenty television channels a single one had been made. And as if on this single channel a malevolent goblin were running the same tape over and over again: the second plane crashing into the second tower. At once he understood why they kept showing that second one non-stop, less often returning to the first. When the second one crashed, the cameras were already in place: the plane flew in, decelerating, turned a semi-circle, speeded up and finally smashed its beak into the slab of glass, only to come flying out the other side as a jet of fire. The first plane was like a stone hurled accidentally. The second contained the elegance of an agent who, not satisfied with just killing, makes a show of it into the bargain. Between the replays there was live coverage. In bars, in stores, before window displays and at gas stations people were watching what was happening in the very same city, just a short distance away. Tiny figures were jumping downwards. A pillar of smoke was gushing upwards. Finally, this entire inferno slumped like volcanic lava, filling the labyrinth of streets and avenues with heat and dust. Just at that moment he crossed the street to enter Tung Chung-shu’s store, but it turned out that this repository of all kinds of wisdom and ancient knowledge, familiar from guidebooks and esoteric links, in whose display window he had seen the same golden Buddha each year, had closed down. In its place, a tacky painting of a dragon, with the royal letter wang hovering above it for some unknown reason, invited guests to enter an antique store.

He spent a long time wandering a narrow, badly lit labyrinth between dozens of wardrobes, dressers, screens, tables and cabinets, made chaotic by accumulated knick-knacks, until finally he spotted the storekeeper at the far end of all this junk. The old man was wearing a long silk gabardine and his white hair was covered by a little round hat, from under which a tacked-on pigtail spilled onto his shoulders. Reluctantly he turned his gaze from the television screen, where no doubt for the hundredth time that day, the plane full of passengers was on the point of crashing into the second tower.

‘You looking for something?’ he asked, glancing at the screen again. ‘Cheng have everything genuine, genuine porcelain, genuine fan, Canton, Shanghai, nothing fake!’

‘I’m looking for Tung Chung-shu’s store,’ he said. ‘Has it moved? Or closed down?’

Now on the screen he could see a fire truck disappearing into a dark cloud of dust.

‘You not see Tung Chung-shu?’ The old man shook his head. ‘No one see him.’

‘I saw him last year,’ he said, also glancing at the screen, from which a reporter leaning over a blood-stained stretcher was speaking. ‘I was standing just over there, on the other side of the street.’

‘Tung Chung-shu,’ said the old man, sniggering, ‘die long time ago. Very long time ago. Han dynasty.’

He knew nothing about the Han dynasty. The storekeeper, like many old people, was living in his own, insulated eternity, where this particular morning some aeroplanes made into missiles had joined in. He headed for the door, casting half-hearted glances at the imitations of lacquer, silk, or woven paper, made in Taiwan or Indonesia. And just then, on the surface of a small rectangular table, with columns of imprinted gilded Chinese characters in a wavy style running across it, he caught sight of a model of a cottage. He stopped beside it, gazing in disbelief at the intricately reproduced windows, the hip-roof and the small veranda with an architrave and a pergola. There was even the head of a china doll set in the middle window of the upstairs bedroom. All that was missing were the snow and the sledge, on which he could have seen himself. One after another, images released from the storeroom of his memory came passing before him as he picked up the model, gently ran his fingers over the red roof tiles, closed the white shutters and touched the chimney.

Opposite the former German barracks, in a row of officers’ villas built at the turn of the century, this one single house had always aroused his curiosity. It was mysterious. It caught the eye, like a visitor from a faraway land. The adults simply called it the Chinese cottage, though no one knew why some Prussian had come up with such a bizarre idea. In summer the house was fenced off from the street by a hedge. In autumn one could see a garden pond, with golden chestnut leaves floating in it. Yet it was at its loveliest in winter. Now he was remembering that evening, when under the Christmas tree he had found a copy of Mr Inkblot’s Academy and the sledge he had been longing to receive. Outside thick snow was falling. How wonderful! His father had agreed to let him try it out at once. They walked, or rather glided across the city like a pair in harness. His father was the reindeer and he was Father Christmas, come all the way here across the frozen Baltic from Finland. Beyond the last, narrow little street were the woods and the first hill. They slid down it a few times. On the way home he asked his father if they could make a short stop outside the Chinese cottage. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the illuminated windows, the snowy roof that looked like a pagoda and the little girl’s face that appeared for a moment in an upstairs window.

‘Who lives here?’ he asked.

‘Maybe a great Chinese scholar,’ joked his father. ‘You’ll read about him in a book.’

As they set off again, the girl waved goodbye to them.

He put down the model cottage and left the store. The city was living and breathing nothing but the catastrophe, yet as if it were the most important matter in hand, he was trying to remember the name of the Chinese scholar from the book he had found that time beside the sledge beneath the Christmas tree. But in vain. Once he reached home, not without some transport problems, he switched on the television, and as he watched the plane crashing into the second tower, he decided that none of it had any real meaning any more as he couldn’t tell Sophie about it.

By now he had been to a get-together with friends from his class, gone sailing in the bay, made a trip to Kaliningrad by hydrofoil, spent a week by a Kashubian lake, visited his parents several times at the cemetery, given an interview to a local newspaper, had an evening at a business club, and even seen a performance of Hamlet at the town theatre, which he was already trying to forget about before the curtain fell. He had visited his old neighbourhood several times, and the first impressions had subsided under the influence of the ones that followed, which were not as unpleasant. He took a photograph of the Chinese cottage, which had been restored by its new owners, and he took lots of snaps of the tenement house where he used to live with his parents. Just as he had decided at the start, he lived from day to day, without attaching any great significance either to renewed, or entirely new acquaintances. Just occasionally, as he gazed at the sea from his boarding house window, he wondered why he wasn’t leaving.

Towards the end of the summer an important change occurred in his peaceful, maybe by now even boring existence. He bought a flat in a small, new apartment block and had a pleasant time furnishing it. He was rather amused by the fact that he had taken the decision on impulse. The block was situated on the edge of the woods, at the head of a valley, where people used to go mushroom-picking, but now just went for walks. Fifteen minutes by taxi from the boarding house with the same, single suitcase with which he had flown across the Atlantic – that was his entire move. Gradually the rhythm of his day also began to change. He got up early and jogged around the wooded hills for an hour or so. On the way home he bought the newspapers and some bread. After coffee and a read he took a shower and sat down at the computer. He had no need to increase his money, but nevertheless, as in the days when he was earning it, he liked to check the share prices and the fund quotations. Sometimes he sent an e-mail to one of his old partners and brushed off their answers with something like: ‘What the hell are you doing, if you’re not doing anything?’ Then he would walk to the university, where he’d spend a little time in the reading room, or he’d take the tram to the seaside. Equipped with more than a dozen culinary compendia, he cooked his own dinners. If he hadn’t arranged to meet someone at a pub, he would spend all afternoon and evening reading philosophy books, which he bought with the passion of a neophyte. He found Plato, with whom he had come into contact in his student days, just as absorbing as Wittgenstein’s treatise, and he leafed his way through Pascal’s bitter truths with the same attention as the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius. He had no definite aim, and maybe that was why he derived such great pleasure from it.

One night he had a dream about Sophie by the seaside, in which all he did was tell her about what he had been reading. Quite a long time went by before he realised he wasn’t talking to her in English and that she couldn’t understand a thing, but when they shifted into their common language, she disappeared, and at that point he awoke. As he couldn’t get back to sleep, he got up, went into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and with a sweater thrown over his pyjamas, went out onto the balcony. The sun was not yet peeping out above the hill and the crest of the woods, but it was already light. Amid falling trails of mist two roe deer were nibbling the grass in the middle of the valley. He fetched his camera from the living room, adjusted the zoom and released the shutter. The animals raised their snouts and went bounding into the woods. There was a man coming down the path leading from the old oak trees, pulling a two-wheel cart loaded with a hefty package covered in tarpaulin. He could have peeked at him through the zoom lens, but as this man had scared the animals away, he stirred nothing but irritation. Half an hour later, as he was trotting along his usual route, he was sorry he hadn’t done it. The man he had seen from the balcony was now spreading out some large canvas sheets in the middle of the meadow. It looked quite like a hang-glider, or maybe a balloon being unfolded, but it was impossible to check, as he didn’t want to seem like an intruder by stopping and staring in the man’s direction.

After all, there was nothing quite so extraordinary about it.

But that afternoon, when he came back from the seaside, he changed his mind. There at the centre of the meadow stood a capacious oval tent, the kind seen in old-fashioned prints of Turkish military camps. In front of the tent, on a small colourful rug sat a Chinese man. Later, when he discreetly aimed his lens at him from the balcony, the Chinese man distinctly smiled and waved a hand. At that he withdrew inside. Yet he searched the Internet and the newspapers in vain for advertisements or information. Nowhere could he find anything announcing a miracle-worker, a folk performer or an Asian doctor who was going to pitch his tent in a suburban meadow, in a conservation area within a park. That evening, on his way out to the pub, he glanced across at the valley. The tent was standing in its place, but its owner had vanished. There were some children running around, and a dog barking outside the wind-stirred entrance flap. That night, when he came home from the city, the tent stood out like a grey stain against the black backdrop of the woods. But in the morning the meadow was empty again. He made a slight detour from the route of his run to look for traces of it. They were irrefutable: a hole left by the tentpole, an area of grass trampled flat, and some smaller holes made by the tent pegs. ‘But that’s impossible,’ he thought, ‘quite idiotic!’

He thought he ought to leave this place, but at the very thought of a journey he felt utterly despondent. He wrote a diplomatic e-mail to Dr Esterhagen, asking if he would like to take up a conversation on some completely new topics, but the analyst didn’t answer. Luckily, towards the end of November there was heavy snowfall, and a new occupation distracted him. He bought some cross-country skis and, with a map and a thermos of hot tea in his backpack, he set off on long daily outings, identifying the old routes of his suburban hikes among the forest tracks and clearings. He was particularly fond of the places that gave a clear view of the city and the bay. This was just how he wanted to spend the approaching Christmas Eve: a couple of hours on a ski run, come home, have supper, and then head off to Midnight Mass. Besides, it was better than being alone in that apartment, where everything reminded him of Sophie. But then came a sudden thaw, and there was no question of skiing. When he looked out at the meadow that morning, not a single patch of snow was covering the tawny-grey grass. Rain was drizzling out of heavy, low-drifting clouds. But in the very same spot as before, the same tent had been pitched. Calmly, as if he were just off to the corner shop, he put on his hooded jacket and boots and left the house.

‘Is there anyone there?’ he asked, standing outside the loosely laced-up entrance. ‘Should I speak in English?’

‘No, I can speak in any language,’ he heard someone say. ‘Please come into the vestibule.’

Inside an extremely cramped space a small spirit lamp was burning. His host’s face looked unfamiliar, though it may have been the same man he had seen through the lens.

‘So you are Doctor Cheng? Did you place an announcement in the newspaper?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why are you looking for me? What do you want from me? Why are you hounding me?’

‘I want you to believe.’

‘In what? Trading in dreams? Predictions? It’s nonsense.’

‘I do not sell dreams, I merely offer them. Do you remember your hexagram, in which the element of fire warned against climbing?’

‘That still doesn’t prove a thing.’

‘I am tired. I have little time. If you want to try, say yes.’

‘Try what?’

‘A dream is not a daydream. Or a reflection. It is the other side of your shirt.’

‘But what am I supposed to believe in?’

‘In what you will see.’

‘All right. So what do I have to do?’

Doctor Cheng gently moved him half a pace aside and put out the lamp. Suddenly he raised the inner tent flap. It looked just as if inside, beyond an invisible threshold, there was a very different space. He saw a mountain stream, a footbridge, and some distant peaks. If it was an illusion, it was perfect. The stream was thundering over the rocks, and he could feel a fine mist of water spraying his face. Clean air filled his lungs. The doctor gave him a small push forwards, and suddenly he found himself inside the scene that seconds earlier he had been watching. Some people were calling to him from the other side of the footbridge, and soon after he recognised them as his parents. His mother was signalling to him, and his father was smiling, as ever. He crossed to their side of the bridge; they shook hands and chatted. He understood that in a while they would want to move onwards, but without him. They had backpacks and suitable boots, but he didn’t have any. Now he realised how he had got here, but he looked around in vain: neither the meadow outside his new home nor even the tent he had entered were anywhere in sight. His mother and father were already far away; he could see their tiny figures on a rocky path, waving goodbye to him. He bathed his face in cold stream water, and then he caught sight of the inner tent flap closing in front of him.

‘Beautiful,’ he said to Doctor Cheng, ‘but it’s just a trick. I saw them, I touched them, but they aren’t alive. You cannot resurrect them.’

‘If you know something, speak of it. If you do not know, do not speak. That is the principle. And indeed you do not know what they desire.’

The doctor lit the lamp again, and put it out again.

This time he was in Chinatown, in the spot where Sophie had died. But it was she who was leaning over him, not he over her. He could see her tears and her lips rapidly uttering the words of a prayer that he couldn’t hear. An excruciating pain in the region of his sternum was making any kind of movement or response impossible. Finally, once the spasm had abated, in total darkness he felt her hand on his face and heard her whisper – better me, better me than him, me, not him, O God, O God…

‘What is the point of your mission?’ he asked, when he found himself back in the vestibule again. ‘What is it meant to prove?’

‘I really have very little time now. Others are waiting. Sometimes it is better to break free of one’s thoughts and accept reality. If you had come the first time, you would have learned far more. Do not seek me here, or anywhere else. You can only meet me once.’

As he said this, Doctor Cheng drew aside the outer flap of the vestibule and pushed him out of the tent. He must have spent a long time inside it, because the meadow was now in darkness and a lot of snow had fallen. Evidently, on leaving the house, he hadn’t flicked the light switch, because he could see bright light shining in his windows. He walked towards it, with the feeling that everything that had happened really had occurred. Just like that Christmas Eve when he and his father had stopped outside the Chinese cottage. And suddenly he remembered the name from that book: Pai Chi Wo – he kept shouting at the top of his voice, overjoyed, until people on their way to Midnight Mass started anxiously looking round at him. Then he ran fast, not realising that a crack of blinding light, ever brighter, going deep into the earth, was engulfing him.