‘Yes, I’m visualizing you standing here in those long-ago days, the waves lapping against the bank, the wind flapping the pages of the book in your hand, Chen.’

  ‘Who is being sentimental now, Jin?’

  Jin turned toward him, looking deep into his eyes, and accidentally rubbed her flushed cheek against his in the cold wind.

  ‘Let me tell you something I may have mentioned to you, Chen. After my college graduation, my parents begged their connections for help – with or without red envelopes. Eventually, they managed to obtain for me a secretarial position in the city government.

  ‘I joined the office while you were still on leave. Alone, I read through the office documents and paperwork, which had nothing to do with my history major in college. Nor with the reform of the judicial system. It was nothing but piles of Party propaganda about the law and justice in China. I shuddered at the prospect of wasting years and years like that, in spite of other people’s assertions that it was such an enviable job – secure, decent pay, and with a lot of benefits in the gray areas. But it could be just a matter of time, I realized, before I became one of them, sharing the same values in this materialistic age, wallowing in self-satisfaction like the pigs in that sonnet about Animal Farm. Or, like a hollow soul, mind filled with straw, meaningless, muddling along …

  ‘Then I came to find myself working with you. It was an unbelievable stroke of luck. Not because you’re a well-known, middle-ranking Party official, and also a published poet, which is enough for a little secretary’s vanity, but because, working by your side, I began to find the meanings unknown to me before.

  ‘The more so over the past week. It has proven to be really a meaningful, valuable week for me.’

  She did not think she had to say any more.

  Nor did he.

  A white water bird was flying up over the waves, flashing against the dazzling light. The big clock atop the Custom House started striking the Mao-worshipping melody ‘East Is Red,’ which had been changed into a beautiful light tune after the Cultural Revolution, but then changed back into ‘East Is Red’ in the last several years.

  She noticed an outside table under a large unfolded umbrella sporting the logo of Anheuser-Busch, and several green benches around. They were not wet.

  ‘Let’s sit here,’ she exclaimed, ‘On the green benches, though not the same green benches as in your memories.’

  ‘Not exactly the same green benches,’ he said, seating himself with her.

  Then she said with a sudden faraway look in her eyes, ‘I’ve been reading 1984, skipping chapters and chapters, of course, and jumping to the end, in which Julia and Winston finally part, after suffering all these tortures.’

  She took out the cell phone, opened the downloaded Chinese text, and before she started reading for him, she added in a hurry, ‘Sorry, my English is so poor. I’m just paraphrasing.

  ‘In the ending of the novel, Julia doesn’t respond to Winston’s affections, and he spots she has a long scar on her face. She tells him she’s betrayed him – and he responds to admit he betrayed her too. They are full of guilt that they only thought of saving themselves, not the suffering of each other, and once they’ve confessed this, there is nothing else for them to say.’

  ‘It’s a realistically haunting end,’ he said. ‘They’re crushed in the end.’

  The somber sky was lowering. The falling and rising of the sirens in the distance filled the space around the two of them with a black foreboding. A short spell of silence locked them down.

  ‘What are you thinking, Chen?’

  ‘For the moment, about the love and the murder engulfing Zhou and An in the time of Covid, the moment of his holding her hand outside the emergency room, gazing helplessly at her as she left this cruel world, and swearing to avenge her …’

  ‘It’s so heart-breaking,’ she said. ‘The virus is deadly. Zhou and An weren’t victims of the virus, however, but of state surveillance and suppression. Without the insane zero-Covid policy, things could have turned out to be utterly different for the couple, who could have been blissfully carrying their baby in their arms, holding hands, in love, strolling along the Bund like you and me.’

  ‘I think I will try to write something about them, as you suggested that day you came to my apartment.’

  ‘You still remember it, Chen?’

  ‘Of course I remember. And it’s also a promise to Zhou I have to keep. I will first put the tragedy of Zhou and An as a translator’s afterword at the end of The Wuhan File. And then I’ll start writing our book.’

  ‘Oh, you will do that, Chen! You will really do that?’

  ‘Yes. I’m so worried about how things will end up under the CCP’s zero-Covid policy.’

  ‘You’re already thinking of the ending of all that?’

  ‘It’s not sustainable. I mean, what the CCP government has been doing during Covid, what with the ever-deteriorating collateral damage, with the collapsing economy, and with the people’s louder and louder protests. The Beijing government will eventually be forced, all of a sudden, to open up, I think.’

  ‘That will be fantastic, Chen.’

  ‘Not that fantastic, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Any responsible government will start making the necessary arrangements for a transitional period. For instance, to give people as many effective vaccine shots as possible, and that as soon as possible, for the sake of herd immunity.’

  ‘Talking about vaccines, I have just learned that what the Chinese government has kept pushing to the people is the inactivated vaccine. But it’s not that effective, not on a par with the mRNA vaccine developed in the Western countries.’

  ‘Well, it’s more than understandable. It’s about the image of China’s superior socialist system. How can the Beijing government admit that it doesn’t have the same advanced technology?’

  ‘It may be a bit more expensive. I mean, the imported mRNA vaccine.’

  ‘It’s nothing compared with the staggering expense of the zero-Covid policy.’

  ‘That’s true, Chen. To say the least, they should have invested the money in improving hospital conditions, in preventing the virus staging a catastrophic comeback with the mutations. An incredible budget has been poured, however, into the endless, relentless Covid tests. Tests after tests. Believe it or not, they even do the test for the fish swimming in the river.’

  ‘Exactly, an abrupt, unprepared opening-up could lead to a huge disaster. So many years ago, Lu Xun, the only modern Chinese writer I really admire, compared his writing to a most likely futile effort to wake the sleeping people in a ship sinking in the dark. He was disillusioned, pessimistic, but he nonetheless wanted to try. The same can be said of my pathetic attempt to write a book about it.’

  ‘Yes, we will do that together, pathetic or not, my love,’ she said, rising, her eyes glistening. She was ready to throw herself into his arms when another evil black siren cut across the sky.

  Years ago, the Bund had been a favorite resort for young lovers standing there, almost squeezing against one another, she had heard. Or Chen had told her? It appeared now as if in another life.

  ‘You were talking about the ending of 1984,’ he said. ‘Big Brother succeeds in erasing their memories of the idealistic days, of being their true selves. But a book like The Wuhan File or the one I’ll write in your company may be able to keep the memories alive for other people, in other languages. Like Doctor Zhivago, I hope. I really need your help in this endeavor, just as I did in this murder investigation.’

  Another siren swept darkly over the river, stretching out to the horizon. A light broke through the clouds, which appeared to be so mysteriously high.

  ‘I really like a poem titled Sunlight on the Garden by Louis MacNeice, Jin. I used to imagine that the poet murmurs the poem to his wife, who’s leaving him. I’ve done a parody of it for a dear friend. One stanza of it reads like this:

  The sky proves ideal for flying

  Drones, defying the heart-wrenching bells

  Along with every Covid-crying

  Siren and what it spells:

  The surveilled earth tells

  We are dying, China, dying …’

 

 

  Qiu Xiaolong, Love and Murder in the Time of Covid

 

 

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