The Last Lover

7. YOUNG DANIEL

“All along you thought we were Vietnamese. Actually, we are from the ancient country Z, where our palaces have red walls and green tiles, and white hares run all over the gardens. There may be an emperor wearing a long satin robe of sapphire blue, but no one has seen him. My home is several thousand li from the capital city. I can’t say exactly how far, because none of us has ever been to the capital.”

The girl told Daniel these things in an arrogant tone. She said her name was “Amei,” but she also said that all the girls of Country Z were named Amei. This was rather convenient. Once you heard the name you would know where they came from.

Amei stood naked among the flowering shrubs, her smooth body glistening under the flickering sunlight. Only the triangle between her legs was a shiny black. She greedily stretched out her long, thin arms, as if she wanted to fly away.

“Amei! Amei!” Daniel rushed in alarm to put on his clothes, tugging at one of her arms.

He stooped to pick up her skirt and give it to her, but she hit him, knocking him to the ground.

She stood with her arms akimbo, squinting at the sky. Daniel, however, thought she was like a hydrogen balloon rising upward. And so he embraced her body in his arms.

“I saw a camel carrying our village on its back. Wherever the camel stopped, we landed there and put down roots. Daniel, have you ever ridden a camel before?”

“No, I haven’t. My dear, I love you,” Daniel murmured, kissing the hollow at the nape of the girl’s neck.

“I love you, too, Daniel. But I must fly away soon. Your country has no camels, and you cannot look out on the landscape from high places. I can’t stay here without moving. Look, your mother is coming.”

Daniel released her, and turning toward the house he saw Maria walking down the stairs. When he turned back around, Amei was already gone. A white thread ran across the crystalline sky. Daniel was terribly annoyed. He wondered, staring at the ground, where her clothes had gone.

Maria did not come over. She returned inside, where she was working. Daniel didn’t want his mother to see him looking like this, so he quietly slipped out of the yard.

Daniel returned to the house of the Russian woman, Zhenya. Zhenya was Maria’s friend, a fat, fiery-hearted widow. She let Daniel live on the second floor of her home in a small room with a window facing the sea. Zhenya sold fruit to make a living, and her house was her storefront. Daniel also helped her at this trade. His own business began with Zhenya’s customers, because among the people living nearby every house had its own garden, and all needed care. Zhenya said she was forty, but Daniel believed she was at least fifty-three.

Zhenya sat in the shadow of the fruit baskets, sunk in thought.

“Zhenya, do you have a fiancé?” Daniel asked her.

“Oh, yes. He’s in Siberia. We haven’t seen each other for twenty years. He doesn’t even have a telephone there, so we pass information through business groups as they come and go. Young man, why do you ask about this?”

“How do you two address the question of sex?” Daniel’s face reddened, but fortunately the light in the room was dim, and Zhenya did not raise her head to look at him.

“That is a secret between the two of us, one we can’t tell other people.”

“Do you still intend to get married?”

“Of course! Otherwise what am I doing all this hard work for? He hasn’t come to see me once, and I have never once been to see him. See how we toil!”

“Do you plan to make money and then go to Siberia?”

“That is impossible!” She stood in surprise, looking at Daniel. “How can you speak of money? A little business like this can’t make money. He was very clear on this point. .”

Daniel lowered his head in concern. He felt as if he were living inside an unsolved mystery. Zhenya was like a bread oven, hot from head to toe, and her days were so difficult! Even so, what in essence distinguished those two from people like Amei and himself, who were so near, meeting daily? Like his father, such an able, a talented man. . He thought this and then stopped, because he respected his father too much. At present Daniel had five customers. He planned to expand to ten customers, so he would be much too busy. He liked working in the gardens and he knew that the garden of every house held its own secrets. And if you didn’t go there to work, you would never know these secrets. This was the kind of thing Daniel had observed since he was young, and so, in the end, he chose the profession of gardening. In his own home, it was only his father who didn’t understand this secret. His thoughts lay in other places.

Today when he was selling fruit, Daniel had recruited another customer. It was a disabled man, with a handsome face and a golden beard on that face. He lived in the middle part of the street in a white house. The family was wealthy. His wheelchair stopped in front of the shop. He was only looking around, not buying any fruit, as if he were waiting for Daniel to come out and speak with him. Daniel went over, and they quickly struck up a conversation.

This young man, Nick, appeared to have a violent temper. He spoke incoherently, one hand waving back and forth as though he were having an argument with someone. It cost Daniel great effort to understand that, in fact, Nick was an insomniac. He stayed out in his family’s garden all night long. But the layout of the garden drove him mad. He’d made up his mind to ask someone to help him disrupt it. For a long time, he had dreamed of a stretch of uncultivated land and the full wheel of the moon slowly rising there. He hoped Daniel could help him realize this dream.

The impression Daniel had of Nick’s house was of a white building which could be seen from the street. It was a long, four-story building, taking up almost a quarter of the block. Because the white edifice beyond the iron fence was so close to the street, and so immense, Daniel had never thought of there being a garden behind it. As to the garden, he had in fact heard Maria speak of it. But he had never seen it with his own eyes. Maria had told him that Nick’s family were old residents of the area. The family business was large, its foundations deep. But since the middle of the last century the family had been in decline. She didn’t know why. Its members had dispersed, and now at the house there remained only Nick, who was disabled, an old grandfather, a cook, and an old servant who had something wrong with his eyes. The building contained more than a hundred rooms. It was a long walk from the east end to the west end. A city census taker once went to their house, a young man, who passed back and forth through the building. He said that he’d looked into all the rooms and was positive no one from the household was there. Where were they actually living?

Daniel accompanied Nick through his family’s house and reached an enormous brown transparent tent. He had never in his life seen such a large tent, like a small square inside. Moreover, the tent was constructed of a material he had never seen before: it was neither cloth nor plastic, but was almost like a transparent animal membrane. Yet he couldn’t think of what animal had this kind of membrane. There was an orange hot air balloon in the center of the tent. Stepping closer to look, he saw pots of nearly dead orchids in the basket under the balloon.

“This is my family’s garden.” As soon as Nick spoke, a weng weng buzzing sounded from every direction.

Daniel turned back and discovered Nick’s wheelchair floating in the air and, further, that the head of the man sitting in the wheelchair hung down, that his handsome face was grayish, and the corners of his mouth drooped in an unsightly way. It seemed he had taken ill.

“Nick!” Daniel called out anxiously, and was soon frightened by the noise he raised. All around was a sound like the constant breaking of glass windows, and the hot air balloon began gradually to shift.

Daniel wanted to retreat from this unsettling place, but at the entrance where they had come in he saw a fiend, a man in his prime, who stood holding a large hatchet.

“Where should I work?” he mustered up the courage to ask. At once he felt a pain in his eardrums, as if they’d been punctured.

Nick’s wheelchair moved in a circle through the air inside the tent. As it rose higher and higher, his voice carried down from overhead: “Start with the mud under your feet. It’s grown over with Euphrates poplar.”

Daniel climbed into the hot air balloon. The balloon leapt into the air, and before long it rushed out through a gap in the tent. It didn’t rise very high, however, always traveling along at five or six meters up, and never leaving Nick’s residence. Daniel saw the enormous tent bulging and shrinking like a frog’s belly, and heard Nick shouting from inside. Under the blue sky, Nick’s household did seem a bit unusual. Daniel had always believed his own to be the strangest house, and had never imagined this kind of situation. He forgot his original reason for coming.

Someone suddenly began speaking from a partition underneath the basket of the hot air balloon. Daniel leaned on the seam to look underneath, and saw two people on the level below the basket. They were very old men, with wrinkles like rock fissures on their faces. One was sleeping, the other wrapped in his thoughts.

“Hello,” Daniel said, knocking on the partition. “Are you the owners of this house? Can you tell me where your garden is? I need to get to work! I can’t fly back and forth in the air all day!”

Despite this long string of words, the old man, as he woke, only watched him guardedly and shrank back. He seemed to be trying to make his body appear as small as possible.

“Please, tell me, are you the owner?” Daniel roared.

The old man stood up, trembling and rustling, and with effort spat out the words:

“No need to shout. . danger. . cliff. .”

The basket collided violently with something. Daniel’s vision went dark. He got up and sat on a wooden chair. The hot air balloon still wheeled in the sky over the house. Daniel suddenly understood that this family spent the better part of their time in the hanging basket. This is why the city census taker had been unable to find them.

So why had Nick employed him to take care of the garden? Up till now he hadn’t seen even the shadow of a garden. Aside from the large building, their residence consisted of only the enormous tent in the back and this unused space outside the tent. Perhaps the tent really was Nick’s family’s garden, and all the objects in it were things Daniel couldn’t see. He couldn’t see them because he was not as perceptive as Nick. Before Daniel’s eyes appeared the image of Nick’s wheelchair hovering inside the tent at around midnight. This was the anxious insomnia of which Nick had spoken. Now Daniel discovered a marvel: the bowls of orchids unexpectedly burst into full bloom. He counted twelve flowers, and also a few buds ready to blossom. Looking at them, Daniel couldn’t help thinking, Did Nick intend him to care for the flowers in midair? Daniel did not like the feeling of suspension. He also could not think of how his work would progress in that kind of environment, where he couldn’t even sit stably. As for the two old men under the partition, could they really believe that the hot air balloon was safer than the inside of the house?

Someone below was shouting. It was Nick, who’d reached the open space, waving his arms for Daniel to come down.

“Jump down, jump quickly! The balloon will explode!” His face was white.

Daniel heard a buzz, weng, in his head. He climbed over the side of the basket, closed his eyes, and toppled down.

Everything was fine. He fell on the mud, without any injuries. The earth of the open plot was soft.

“You’ve crushed a whole patch of violets!” Nick said.

Daniel discovered a knife wound on Nick’s face. It was still bleeding. He let out a cry.

“It’s nothing,” Nick said. “It’s from wrestling with the cook. This sort of thing is unavoidable. I wanted you to come down because the hot air balloon isn’t able to bear too much weight. But it doesn’t descend when you want it to, either, so you’re forced to jump out. It’s the same for me: entering the tent is easy, leaving the tent is hard. I have to fight with the cook. He’s cut my wheelchair to pieces. You may find it strange: why do I want to have a garden inside the tent? It’s to treat insomnia! I push the wheelchair along, traveling back and forth in midair, the nerves of my cranium get a rest, and the long, long night passes. There are several trees that have grown too tall and block my path, but that’s no problem. Every time I encounter an obstacle, I become more agile. But I’m not satisfied with the grass and flowers of the garden below — always the same varieties, and all clear from a glance. I want transformation. You can help me, right? Daniel, I tell you, in the garden just a moment ago, I thought I would never wake up again. That way I wouldn’t have insomnia. But I’m still unresigned; I cried out.”

Daniel saw that as Nick spoke he was staring fixedly at one spot, so he turned around to look. What he saw almost made him vomit. The cook was standing inside the tent. He had sliced his stomach open and was pulling out his intestines.

“Don’t be afraid.” Nick pushed his wheelchair nearer, saying quietly, “We can take this opportunity to go examine the garden.”

“I want to leave,” Daniel said weakly.

“Good-bye then. Thank you for helping me arrange the garden.”

Daniel was passing absentmindedly through the large white building, which was so still that even the crows and sparrows were quiet, when he bumped into two men in uniform. They grabbed his shoulders and shook him sternly, saying, “Wake up! Wake up, you!” Daniel told them that of course he was awake, but they didn’t believe him. They said people who came here were never able to wake up. They asked Daniel where the family was hiding. He said they might be in the basement. The two men left him and ran downstairs.

He was leaving through the main entrance when Nick caught up to him again. Nick wanted him to promise never to speak of the place where his grandfather was hidden. He also said that if Daniel told, it would be the death of them. “Inside here is a paradise on earth,” he explained.

Daniel returned to Zhenya’s with his empty stomach rumbling. Zhenya gave him a large bowl of borscht and some veal. Daniel ate until his forehead sweated. His mind was greatly eased.

“Nick is a murderer,” Zhenya said. “He kidnapped his grandfather, along with the manservant, and threw them in a dry well. Every day he throws some food down into it. He suffers from insomnia because his conscience is troubled.”

“How do you know this?”

“Is there anything on earth I don’t know? But this Nick, he isn’t a bad person. He did it to save his grandfather’s soul. Those two old men don’t plan to ever come out from the well.”

As Daniel helped Zhenya unload the fruit baskets from the car, he saw his father walking by, swaying as he walked. He carried a leather suitcase and appeared to be drunk. Daniel had never seen his father like this before. He remembered his mother saying that his father was on a business trip, so why would he still be loafing around here? Worried his father would recognize him, Daniel quickly turned his back and went into the building. Inside he stood at the window facing onto the street and saw his father place the suitcase on the ground, sit down on it, and read a book.

Zhenya quietly entered. She wanted to speak with Daniel about his father.

“Your whole family is very interesting, very difficult to fathom. So when your mother proposed that you stay at my house, I agreed right away. Buoyant people, like your family, are the kind I like to deal with the most.”

Her heavy body pressed down on the sofa like a rock, so that the shape altered.

“Your mother’s spirit is so light, she’s truly happy! You’ve asked about my fiancé. Look at me, I’m so fat, so heavy, how could I go to him? If I was like your parents, who can make themselves invisible at any time, I would have returned to his side long ago. Look, your father isn’t sitting on his suitcase, he’s rising into the air. That’s how focused he is!”

“My father is reading an Eastern detective story,” Daniel mumbled.

“Of course, he’s a great man.”

Daniel noticed his father’s hair was a mess, his clothing disarrayed. The strangest thing was that he was wearing a pair of garish leather shoes, the kind with pointed toes and a decorative pattern. Was this man actually his father?

“I like buoyant men the best.” Zhenya’s eyes suddenly shone lewdly.

As her voice fell Daniel turned to look at his father, but didn’t see him.

“He never stays in one place,” Zhenya said with admiration. “No one can be sure where he is.”

The whole following afternoon Zhenya was tormented by a fearsome worry. She said that she had caught “gigantism,” that the flesh of her body was expanding until she couldn’t possibly survive it. “Daniel, Daniel, I’m going to die!” she hollered, flailing on the sofa. In her despair she refused to handle any of the business, so the troubled Daniel ran in and out, both selling fruit and comforting her.

When the sky was dark she finally calmed down. Staring into Daniel’s eyes, in a daze, she asked, “Daniel, tell me the truth, am I completely hopeless?”

“How could that be? Zhenya, you are a beautiful woman. You’re a little fat, but that doesn’t affect your charm at all. You are the kind of — let me think a bit — right, you are the kind of person who can be in two places at the same time, like my parents.” Daniel thought he’d said a clever thing.

“Really? Really?” Zhenya grew happier. “You’re a good boy! Ha, I will let you meet my fiancé. I can’t say for sure what day he will come with the business inspection group! Now I have a plan. I intend to make the sensation of my body disappear. Do you think I can manage it?”

“You certainly can.” Daniel spoke in earnest.

Even so, that night Daniel, sitting before the window, saw a peculiar thing. His bedroom was on the second floor. He looked down and saw a man and a woman kissing under the streetlamp. At first he didn’t notice, but then he thought the man looked familiar. He discovered that as a matter of fact the man was sitting in a wheelchair. It could only be Nick, Nick wearing a white sports shirt and looking like a vigorous young man with extremely well-developed muscles. The woman turned around, and her immense body was illuminated by the streetlamp. To his surprise, it was Zhenya. Daniel felt happy for her because she had a new love. Before, when he thought about her strange, possibly nonexistent fiancé, Daniel had felt uncomfortable. He believed that this man was merely an illusion depending on a few threads of information to preserve it. Although this was interesting, Zhenya had no need to renounce all life’s pleasures because of him. But Daniel couldn’t understand Zhenya’s display downstairs, when he saw her sit on the stone steps and cry bitterly. Once she started crying, Nick, as though evading a contagion, fled, his wheelchair rocking.

Daniel ran downstairs to Zhenya’s side.

“Daniel, I can’t go on living!”

“What’s the matter?”

“You must have seen what I just looked like. Aren’t I like a pig? I’m so fat!”

“I looked down from upstairs. What I saw was a beautiful woman and a prince kissing.” Daniel stroked her fleshy back and reassured her.

“I want to die!” she said loudly.

“Wait a bit, Zhenya. Wait, and you’ll change your mind.” Daniel raised his voice, too. “Once you see how he looks flying around in his tent, you’ll love him even more!”

“He is a half-bodied devil.”

Zhenya stood, with effort shifting her body. The two of them went inside and shut the shop door. Daniel smelled the thick stench of rotten fruit. The smell was more concentrated than at any other time. It was suffocating. Zhenya had not returned to her bedroom, but sat dully among the fruit baskets. Daniel thought she must be remembering something. He couldn’t stand the smell, so he went upstairs.

Zhenya sat there the entire night, crying every so often. Daniel slept in his bedroom, hearing her crying and complaining, mingled, it seemed, with Nick’s voice. Daniel didn’t believe that Nick had really come to the shop. Rather, Zhenya was imitating Nick’s voice. In this way she demonstrated that she surely loved him. But why had Nick run away?

“Is Nick here?” Daniel asked a red-eyed Zhenya in the morning.

“No. Everything you heard was him speaking from inside my body.”

She had squashed a basket of apples, ruining it. The juice ran all over. Zhenya really was too heavy. Daniel wondered if she truly planned to die. Her disgust toward her body had reached the point of wanting to wipe it out altogether. Was a person like this still able to love someone else? Was her love genuine? Daniel suddenly understood: Zhenya simply wouldn’t die. She had come here from remote Siberia, and had all but put down roots. Thus, she was unable to seek death; she would always live like this. In the dark storeroom with its rotten fruit smell, she made despairing moans. No one could have imagined her love to be so deep. Perhaps her lover was a Siberian with a beard, a man as shrewd as a thief. Perhaps it was Nick, who had no legs but could fly in the air. After all, it wasn’t important who it was. The important thing was that antennae could stretch out from inside of this despairing body. .

Daniel raised his head, and saw Amei standing in the doorway.

“Amei, Amei!” he called out in confusion.

“Here, where you are, is like heaven, Daniel.” Amei made a lovely smile.

She caught sight of Zhenya, and her eyes immediately grew bright and shining. She walked timidly up to her and mumbled, “I’ve come here with Daniel, Auntie.” Her voice carried a weeping note.

Zhenya glanced at her with an expressionless face.

Amei grew even more ashamed. She went out, her head lowered and her face turning red.

Zhenya, who had not slept all night, suddenly grew lively. She directed Daniel, and the two of them hustled, lifting the large basket of squashed apples and throwing them away. Afterward she rolled up her sleeves and went to make breakfast in the kitchen.

“This is living,” Daniel sighed. In his heart he recalled Amei with concern. He didn’t understand why a person like Amei would be ashamed to meet Zhenya. Thinking of Amei among the rosebushes, how abandoned she was, he still couldn’t keep his heart from pounding with infatuation. Then he remembered his father. His mother probably thought, like Zhenya, that the farther away he went the better.

Daniel returned to his own home and saw his mother, as usual at this time of day, drinking tea in the garden. She beckoned Daniel to join her. The sky was overcast, and the two cats were again wailing beside the well.

“Your temper has grown steadier at Zhenya’s house.” Maria’s face betrayed a smile.

“Father is walking back and forth out on the street. How is that possible?”

Maria snickered, pu chi, saying: “He said he was leaving on a business trip. If someone is too consumed with stories, he no longer has any sense of reality. Don’t you agree?”

Daniel glanced at his mother, thinking that her eyes looked bright and shining.

He went upstairs to his father’s study. As he sat down in the old-fashioned armchair, looking around at the bookshelves that filled the room, it occurred to him that his father had just been there. On the open page of an old book spread out on the table was a drawing of a cat, and beside the cat were the words Turkish cat. He examined it with care for a long time, but even then he couldn’t tell what the characteristics of a Turkish cat were. This cat and the cats of his city were alike in every particular. When he was small, Daniel had sometimes snuck into this library for a look around. He didn’t read books himself, but he had always been familiar with the smell of books. From the time he was six he had known that his silent father lived inside a completely different world. And although his father’s world fascinated him, he had never thought of connecting with him through reading. In fact, Daniel thought he and his father were already in communication, only his father didn’t think so. For example, he saw the cat on the page, saw the words Turkish cat, and felt that he already knew the book’s meaning and was faintly agitated by it. To quiet his agitation, he moved the book a little aside. But at this movement, he felt in the right hand that lifted the book a numbness and weakness that rushed straight toward his heart. He had always believed that his father, absorbed by his many bookcases, must surely have a great and powerful mind. Daniel himself was thin, weak, and easily agitated. When he encountered a problem he was often unable to extricate himself. His worship of his father was thus natural.

Daniel took the books down from the shelves one by one and leafed through them, then restored them one by one. He was once again captivated by the smell issuing from the books. It was an extremely familiar smell, but also complex and hard to describe. It was like ice flowers on the windows on a snowy morning, or an old well with the moss of many years beside it. But what it was most like was the illustration in the book on the table — that Turkish cat. While he was absorbed in concentration, leafing through the book, someone slipped into the library and hid behind a bookcase. It was Amei. From her hiding place, Amei couldn’t help sighing. She’d felt for a long time that it would be hard for a boy like Daniel to survive. His appearance now confirmed her view.

“Who’s sighing over there?” Daniel asked. He couldn’t see Amei.

He was suddenly upset. He replaced the book and went to find his mother.

But his mother was gone. It was Zhenya sitting at the table in the garden. She welcomed him over, smooth-browed and smiling.

“Every time I come to your house, I forget that I’m fat. I’m almost as light as a swallow now.”

Daniel sat down across from the balcony of his father’s library, staring at it in a daze. Amei’s silhouette flashed for a moment on the balcony. His spirit was still immersed in the atmosphere of the books.

“Zhenya, tell me where my father really is.”

“He and Maria are together. Those two can’t be apart for a moment. Has Daniel thought of leaving home?”

“I’ve already decided to be a gardener here. So how could I leave?”

“Oh, that’s no obstacle.”

Zhenya hugged an African cat on her air cushion of a stomach. The cat tamely licked her stomach where her clothing parted.

“Daniel, I want to tell you about your mother,” Zhenya said, watching the red dragonflies fly back and forth. “Maria is a remarkable woman. You can’t find another woman like her nowadays. Think about how the small town she used to live in has been gone for so many years. Almost no one from it is left, but without changing her original plans she still speaks with them. In this city, who of us can build a house on a foundation passed down from our ancestors? I’m afraid there is only Maria. One night, my Siberian fiancé had entrusted someone with a letter for me, and the letter said he was tired of waiting. It said that since he couldn’t touch my body, it was the same as not having a fiancée, so he planned to go roaming. After reading his letter, I wept and came crying to your mother. You were still at boarding school then. Your house was blazing with lights. Your father was on a business trip. I thought your mother was in the bedroom, but I looked all over and couldn’t find her. But as I searched, the sorrow of my heart eased. I sat in your kitchen eating meat pies and my mind became entirely calm. Then I heard someone speaking in a low voice. I followed the voice and finally found it in the laundry room in the basement. Your mother was sleeping in the large tub, with dirty clothes piled around her. Her mouth moved continuously, calling out, in a quiet voice, a name unfamiliar to my ears. Every time she called out, a strange, hoarse voice sounded from the wall opposite her. I couldn’t hear clearly what it said.

“‘Zhenya, dear, do you love your fiancé?’ She suddenly turned her head and looked earnestly into my eyes.

“I stood there, my brain completely numb, then I felt my heart surging. I piled up words: ‘Maria, Maria, I love you! You cannot abandon me.’

“You see, Daniel, your mother and I are such kindred minds. Your mother told me later that on the night your father went away on a business trip, she was having ‘true communication’ with him through those ancestors. When your mother and I sat among the rosebushes drinking coffee, my body floated in the air. That really is a rare happiness! She sang ‘The Small Village Bakery’ for me. Every time I heard it I shed tears. The two cats ran back and forth, giving off electric sparks. If it wasn’t for the sound of cars outside, we would have forgotten where we were. Daniel, I’m telling you this so you will know that your mother is a woman entrenched in older times. The origin of her family is complicated, which makes her proud but also makes her suffer. Yet she gave birth to you on this foundation. It’s so strange!”

Zhenya’s speech had just ended when Daniel again saw Amei. She went out quietly through the main gate. Daniel shouted to her. She did not answer.

“Life is so fine! Red dragonflies, girls!” Zhenya said.

That day the two of them returned to the shop arm in arm. On the road, Daniel smelled the icy wind blowing from Siberia, bitterly cold, but fresh and new.