The Last Lover

16. LISA AND MARIA’S LONG MARCH

Maria came to Lisa’s house for the first time. She cautiously looked all around. Lisa didn’t ask her to sit in the spacious living room. Instead, she invited Maria to go upstairs into the bedroom she shared with Vincent. Maria saw that their bedroom was much more spartan than her own. Aside from a wooden bed there were no furnishings. The walls were bare, without a single picture. It was out of keeping in such a high-class residence. The windows were the strangest part. There were two of them, both very small and set high up, making it difficult for light to enter the room.

“I designed our bedroom myself. What do you think of it?”

“Oh!”

“At night we should shut ourselves up in a prison cell, that was my thought initially. Vincent approved of the idea. Since I didn’t come here alone — I brought a large crowd with me. Their maneuvers usually take place in the corner where you’re standing. I prefer to have the long march unfold in a closed-off space.”

Lisa was walking back and forth across the room as she spoke, both hands constantly pushing out from her chest, as if she were pushing something away, but these things kept rushing toward her, and would not let her push them away. Maria saw what seemed to be thin smoke rising in the room.

“And Vincent? Where does Vincent go at night?” Maria asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he sits on the windowsill. The windowsill is so high, it’s a good spot for watching the battles.”

“How are things between you now?”

“You mean since he left? Ha, he comes here every day. He is always among the army troops. So long as I’m patient a while I can see him there. Last night he also had me meet a new friend of his, a retired lumberman. He’s an old soldier, an expert at breaking through enemy lines.”

Someone knocked on the door. Lisa said it was her driver. She lowered her voice and told Maria she could not let the driver know Vincent had left, otherwise she might be seduced by him. Maria asked her how she managed it. Lisa said that provided the spectacle of the long march continued, the young man could not enter the room.

Sure enough, the driver knocked quietly from the outside but did not shout or push the door open.

Maria couldn’t help wanting to laugh.

“He looks down on himself terribly.” Lisa evaluated him. “He wasn’t like this before. Before he was unruly, and he didn’t take notice of me at all. But once Vincent left, this big house became an empty city of desire. Listen, there are two men, the other is the cook, A Bing. The cook is already half-mad because his homesickness torments him. These two poor orphans, I want to take them into my arms!”

At Vincent and Lisa’s home in the center of the city, Maria saw with panic the desolate and fallow inner world of the married couple. It was a residence progressively neglected and forgotten by its owners. She circled the property in Lisa’s company. Although Lisa presented the home to Maria with enthusiastic words, reviewing the romance of former days, in every installation and every corner Maria saw unsalvageable, dead things. It all belonged to the past, to the wreckage of passion. The untended garden, regressed back to nature; the swimming pool emptied of water; the wooden pavilion with its paint peeling; the large house with rooms that had been locked for years were in Maria’s eyes products of a period of impulses. And now these things were all hidden, disappearing into the darkest depths of their hearts.

The cook A Bing was cleaning birds’ nests out of the enormous swimming pool. Why did the birds build nests there? It was a complete mess. A Bing’s movements seemed full of hatred. Maria saw fragments of birds’ eggs spread on the ground.

“A Bing! A Bing!” Lisa’s voice revealed her pain.

A Bing was dazed for a moment, then he threw down the broom and climbed out. He stood in front of Lisa, rolling his eyes with a scoundrel’s smile on his face. Maria was angered.

“At night this swimming pool is busy as hell,” he said.

“A Bing, you aren’t a young man any more. How can you still enjoy acting so willfully? Since you live here, you must get your life in order. If you have so much hatred in your heart, how can you arrange your life properly?”

“My life is arranged properly,” A Bing interrupted Lisa impatiently. “Each person has a different ambition. You have missed me every time. I’m in the long march army, too.”

Lisa was in a predicament. She silently lowered her head, pulling Maria away.

Maria and Lisa sat in the roomy kitchen eating the tasty potato pastries A Bing had made. Lisa said A Bing was a priceless treasure. She also said that if he didn’t have those impulses of hatred, who could say he wasn’t a man “who would do great things”? Maria answered, smiling, that perhaps the cook didn’t want to do great things. He saw through all earthly things.

“Just like Vincent?” Lisa asked in a mischievous voice.

“No, Vincent will never see through things. He travels everywhere and looks and looks. This has no end.”

The two women laughed aloud. They hadn’t laughed so freely in a long time. A Bing walked over gloomily to take their plates, intentionally making the cups clatter.

“He often loses his temper at me. In this house, it seems he is the master,” Lisa said. “Look, he’s going, he doesn’t want to speak with us.”

Maria watched the cook go down the steps into the yard. He was shaped like a black bear. He appeared to be breathing angrily, but why?

“Maria, I want to make an experiment. Can we dream together in that bed tonight? To see if we can communicate with each other in our dreams? Then we can search for Joe and Vincent together.”

Yet after the lights were out the house became a large graveyard. All the graves were earthen mounds piled up with soil. Lisa sat on one of the mounds hugging her knees with both arms. Maria stood at her side. There was no moon or stars in the sky. Someone was carrying a lantern toward them from a place off in the distance. He walked and stopped, walked and stopped again, beams from the lamp shining on the grass on top of the earthen mounds. Maria turned around and saw another man carrying a lantern. He was also searching for something between the graves. She looked again and saw yet another one, just catching up from the road in that direction, who also held a lantern. And behind him was a fourth.

“It’s busy in the graveyard,” Maria said.

When she spoke the first man had already reached her. He raised his lantern up high, giving Maria a very strange feeling. Lisa pulled Maria down to sit with her, quietly saying, “He is making a signal. You haven’t realized yet? A regiment is coming. In a little while this will be the military camp. This spot where I’m sitting is actually Vincent’s grave.”

“Vincent is inside this mound?”

“Not yet, he is still roaming outside. I sit on top of the grave and my heart is at peace.”

Maria raised her head and saw that there were already eight or nine lanterns in their vicinity. The faces all looked familiar. She recognized one of them as a neighbor from her own street. More time passed, and she saw Daniel and Zhenya arriving.

“There’s Maria!” Zhenya said happily to Daniel. “I see the members of your family can hold in their emotions particularly well! Your mother looks positively sedate sitting there.”

Maria couldn’t see Daniel’s face clearly. His body was like a long, thin twig.

“Daniel!” Maria shouted, her heart aching.

Wind blew through the graveyard. Daniel’s voice sounded as if he were inside an urn. She couldn’t hear what he was really saying. Maria saw that her son was shaking his head as hard as he could.

“Daniel, what do you want to say to me?” Maria was disheartened.

“He’s talking about his father.” Zhenya answered for him. “He’s always saying that even I’m affected by him, nearly falling in love with your Joe.”

Maria reached out to embrace Daniel’s long, thin waist, but she was shocked because her son’s back bulged out in a protuberance.

“What is this?” her voice shook.

“It’s Joe,” Zhenya said. “Your son now carries his father everywhere on his back. See, isn’t Daniel much sturdier? He is a grown man.”

Maria took off her son’s shirt, touching his deformed back. Several mad ideas occurred to her. Lisa comforted her, saying, “It’s a good thing, you see, your son’s outstanding.” Daniel grumbled another sentence.

“He says his father is speaking inside him, so we can’t hear him clearly,” Zhenya interpreted again.

Maria relaxed her hand and Daniel immediately hid behind Zhenya’s back. This left Maria almost disconsolate.

Quite a few people had already gathered in the graveyard. Maria smelled a faint odor of horses and even of gunpowder. The people holding lanterns appeared to be going to a temple fair. How could they exude such smells? Zhenya and Daniel vanished into the dark. Lisa said she was going into the army to find someone. She had Maria take her place on the grave mound to avoid missing anything. She walked away as she was speaking.

Now Maria sat alone by herself on the mound. Some small animal pushed underneath her foot. Oh, it was her African cat! The brown striped one. In the dim light she discovered that the cat’s claws were dripping. It was injured, with its right front paw almost cut off. It was unable to transmit electricity. Maria grew extremely anxious. She wanted to bring the cat back home to treat its wound, but she could not break her promise to Lisa. She waited helplessly for Lisa to appear. People were rushing around the graveyard; everywhere there were points of light. Another of Maria’s neighbors passed her, carrying a lantern. Maria called out to the old woman to stop:

“Karen, can you help me find Lisa? It’s urgent.”

“Ha, it’s Joe’s wife here.” Karen’s elderly face smiled. “How can you have time to sit here? It’s urgent for all of us, it’s life and death. We come to the last opportunity, the time is now!”

She raised the lantern to size up Maria’s face. Maria felt the old woman’s eyes like a hawk’s on her. She cowered in fear. And even though it was injured the cat struggled out of her arms. Maria was annoyed and gave the cat a slap. The cat didn’t move after that.

“Just give it up,” Karen’s mouth shriveled. “Who can find anyone on a night like this?”

The old woman walked far away, her back hunched. Maria saw seven or eight women curiously surrounding her to get a look. Probably her speaking with Karen had drawn them over.

“This is Joe’s wife? Oh my!”

“Poor Joe, gone and not returning.”

“He’s not stupid. He can figure things out for himself, that usurer.”

“He is a real pangolin!”

The women, heads close together, mouths to ears, dispersed again like a swarm of wasps.

A premonition grew in Maria’s heart. She felt that something had happened to Joe. What was it? Perhaps he would return home soon? Did he have a grave here too? Just at this moment, Lisa returned. She carried a yellow lantern on a pole. Far away there were joyful shouts:

“Maria! Maria, dear! Joe’s come back! Listen, listen!”

Lisa’s head and Maria’s were close together. They listened carefully. All the neighboring people were surely saying “Joe, Joe, Joe. .” Casting her eyes into the distance, Maria saw them squatting one by one on the grave mounds, placing their lanterns on the tombstones. The graveyard seemed vast and limitless. Lisa said that each one squatted on the grave of his or her “beloved.”

“I want to go back home, my cat is hurt,” Maria said.

Maria passed through the grave mounds hugging the cat. She still heard people saying “Joe, Joe, Joe. .” Warmth sprang from the desolate depths of her heart. She smelled a faint odor of tobacco and the rusty smell from the cables of the iron bridge.

“The forms of the long march are many and varied,” Lisa said, sitting in Maria’s flower garden.

Maria saw that Lisa’s spirits were roused, and she thought of the events of the night. She was distracted.

“Daniel! Daniel! Don’t trample your father’s books!” she stood and shouted.

Daniel’s voice carried down the stairs, muffled. His throat seemed to be squeezed by something. The study windows quivered. Maria sat back down in her chair, disappointed, and continued talking with Lisa about Daniel’s days at middle school. As they spoke a three-legged African cat jumped onto her knee. “Is this happiness or suffering? Is this happiness or suffering?. .” she repeated. The cat trembled nervously on her knee.

“There was a yellow butterfly,” she finally recalled. “At noon, Daniel came back from school. All around it was very quiet. But why did Joe return home at that time? I was staring at a yellow butterfly, my mind brimming with good fortune. Joe opened his mouth wide and called to me, but he couldn’t make a sound. He pointed to the blood running down on Daniel’s forehead. He looked crazed. The yellow butterfly spun in circles and stopped on the top of the stove. See, Lisa, having a son is such a troublesome business.”

While she was speaking, another cat, the yellow-and-white one, came over. Lisa felt her calf tingle, like an electric shock.

“So could the long march take place here?” Maria asked, hesitating.

“Of course. Daniel has already begun.”

That night Maria went to the study because she couldn’t sleep. Although she hadn’t turned on the light, she could see that Joe’s bookcases had turned into a dark forest of books. The books had grown large, one book set next to another vertically on the floor, the pages of the books opening and closing. She couldn’t feel the wall of the room, and so she didn’t know where the light was. Her voice was a little ghastly as she shouted: “Joe? Are you there?” Then she stopped shouting. She felt that Joe was nearby, sitting behind a book, beside a little stream. He had taken off his shoes and stretched his bare feet into the black water. Maria thought, Joe would not leave her again. How good. In the house built on the foundations made by her ancestors, she, Daniel, and Joe, this family, were starting their own long march. They were going to bring back to life those long-ago stories. This would be a fine thing! But she feared her husband’s body was forever disappearing from their home. Daniel, because he couldn’t find his father, was losing his way. It was Daniel who had pushed down all the bookcases. Was he also sitting behind a book now?

“Mother, I’m here.”

“Daniel, what do you think of this?”

“I’m truly happy, Mother. Soon we will reach the end of the bridge. Do you hear the roaring of the river?”

Maria couldn’t see Daniel, but she knew he was nearby. This mutual searching and pursuing in the nighttime sent a warm current through Maria’s heart. After so many years, she experienced for the first time the way blood kept relatives together. Maria touched the enormous book pages with a shaking finger. She touched one after another of the letters protruding from the pages, and those letters jumped slightly, giving off electricity. Suddenly she comprehended the book’s meaning. The book told of an ancient, deserted beach. Someone climbed onto the bank from the sea. Sea birds cried ominously in the air. “That man is Joe,” Maria spoke quietly. Then her finger touched the word “Joe.” “Joe, is it you?” she asked.

“Of course it’s Father. Why don’t you believe it?” Daniel spoke in the dark. “Touch it again, everything is inside that book.”

Next Maria touched the description having to do with her African cats. The book didn’t tell of her cats in the present, but rather of long ago when they were still in Africa. They had just been born then, and were two little kittens. The sun of the African continent irritated their eyes so they could not open them. But why did the light-brown cat have only three legs? It had lost its leg later, in the graveyard.

“It always had only three legs. You just hadn’t noticed,” Daniel spoke again.

“Daniel, can’t you come over here?”

“I can’t, Mother.”

Maria touched the surface of another book. This book had an illustration of small snakes. Her hand kept touching them, and the snakes began to slither. Maria feared the desire inside her body and circled around behind the book, her back to its spine. She thought, over several decades of uninterrupted reading, her Joe had created this forest. And he hadn’t removed her from it. Once she entered, she blended into this place. In the su su rustling sound made by the pages, a world of writing appeared in her mind. She realized that for many years everything she’d woven was this writing. So familiar, so pleasing — was this happiness? She began to walk from one book to another. Dry leaves made noise under her feet; her feet touched a few small stones; she even heard the song of a nightingale. It was inside the pages of the largest book, singing and then pausing.

“Mother, you should speak with Father. In the square his ears are listening carefully. That ear hung on a tree is flapping ceaselessly with thirst.”

“Joe, your story has come back.”

“Wonderful, Mama, Father hears and is contented.”

“Daniel, if a man expends a lifetime of energy changing himself into a forest of stories, then does this man still belong to us?”

“He doesn’t belong to us, but is with us every day.”

“Thank you, son.”

“But Mother, you don’t belong to me and Father either. I saw you walking in the woods, your silhouette so long and thin, so unreal, your entire body full of electricity.”

There was a dim light in the forest of books, but when Maria looked up she couldn’t see the sky. Was there even a sky? There were grass, stones, a path, and she heard water flowing from a spring. But the air was filled with the fine smell of old books. This was Joe’s story. This story belonged to her, forever. Maria’s heart was full of gratitude. She pricked her ears, awaiting the nightingale’s singing again. She waited till it sang, but it wasn’t one call, it was many, many calls. One rising as another fell.

Lisa did not go home after she left Maria’s rose garden. She turned into a narrow street and stood at the door of Joyner’s flower shop. Someone waved her into the shop, but it was dark and she couldn’t see who it was. Once her eyes adjusted she finally saw Joyner. However, this wasn’t the same Joyner as before. Except that her face gave Lisa a slight feeling of familiarity, she’d changed completely — she’d become a fat middle-aged woman. The main difference was in how her movements were hampered. She strained and sat down in a wicker chair, placing herself among the tulips. The darkness of her surroundings made her face look even more pallid.

“Did you come to see Vincent?” Joyner asked sternly.

“Yes, I’m looking for him.”

Lisa felt dizzy, because it was suddenly dark inside the room. She couldn’t see anything.

“These are tulips from the Netherlands. On your right are yellow roses, and also violets. Did you come to see Vincent?” she asked again, her tone even more severe.

“Yes. Vincent. . Could he be here?”

“Step over my body, and you will be able to see him. You need to step boldly, raise your foot!”

Numerous giant lightbulbs, as bright as snow, suddenly turned on. They shone in Lisa’s eyes and she still could not see. She felt that she had been placed in a square, perhaps a competition arena. No matter what direction she went in, she didn’t bump into anything. Should she go on? As she was thinking this, she had already raised her foot.

“Vincent, I want to speak to you!” Lisa shouted, so excited her face grew pink.

An ocean of light spread in all directions. Her voice reverberated for a long time. She still couldn’t see. She was moving ahead, but she couldn’t even see her own feet. She suddenly thought, Maybe this was a snowcapped mountain? Long ago, Vincent had said to her that letting the light of a snowy mountain become the light inside one’s eyes would surely be fascinating. Lisa wanted to speak to him now about her own feeling of “blindness.” Joyner had not deceived her. Vincent was nearby. In the midst of the light she saw his inner heart. This light was a cold light, but her eyes were suited to it.

“Vincent, I want to speak with you!” she shouted again.

She felt profoundly that Vincent had transformed into this light. At this very moment he was touching her neck, her eyes. She recalled the events that had just happened. Wasn’t she in the flower shop not far from the office, where she’d met the black woman, Joyner, and then come here? Lisa didn’t like flowers, and she didn’t plant flowers, so why had she gone to the flower shop?

“That kind of story is concealed in every corner of the world.”

In her mind this line of words appeared distinctly.

At the end of the ocean of light a shadow appeared. It looked like a crowd of people, or of beasts. Lisa sensed a bugle sounding in the darkness of her abdomen. Her feet stumbled on something and she almost fell over, but she didn’t fall. She spread her arms like a giant bird trying to keep its balance, then, staggering, flapped ahead. The more anxious she grew, the more slowly she advanced. But she made out that the distant shadow of the army was growing stronger, and it was expanding by degrees in her direction. She even saw the corner of a red flag, guns, and litters, and gunpowder smoke slowly rising into the air. A memory of her childhood revived in an instant. On the solemn grounds of a large mansion, she and her mother were summoning their courage to attack a mud frog. Her mother pounced into the pond and climbed back out, drenched. She made Lisa listen to the violent, sudden sound of drumbeats. They were army drums. Thereby their home became much darker.