But that was years earlier, in Beijing, in his youth. He was confused by the momentary hallucination, with an elusive sense of déjà vu.

  The girl was now walking up to his subdivision gate, talking to the guards, producing a piece of paper like a document; then there was either arguing or discussing before she was permitted in.

  Recognition hit home.

  It was none other than Jin, his secretary at the Office of Judicial System Reform in the Shanghai City Government.

  It’s difficult for a friend to come in the wind and snow.

  Was that a line he himself had written?

  And then another line—

  It’s most difficult to pay back the favor from a beauty.

  But that was not his own line; he was sure about it.

  How could she have come over today – and why? He straightened up his littered desk in a hurry.

  She was knocking at the door, lightly.

  He hastened to open the door. She was standing in the doorway, smiling, carrying a plastic bag in one hand; on her back, a large backpack was speckled with light snow. A streak of sunlight was streaming in from behind her.

  ‘It’s wet on the ground, so my shoes are, too. I’d better change into slippers,’ she said, removing her white sneakers and socks. She picked up a pair of plastic slippers from the shoe rack for herself as if she was returning to her own home, before taking a plastic foam box out of the plastic bag.

  ‘I’ve bought you the last two portions of fried mini buns from the shop at the street corner. Your favorite in the neighborhood. They’re still hot, Director Chen. It’s nothing short of a miracle that the eatery is still open for business today. Most likely, it won’t be tomorrow, though.’

  She was referring to the looming lockdown of the city. More than a dozen of the shops in the neighborhood had already sold out or closed down, with the government’s red sealing labels on their doors.

  ‘Perhaps not in lockdown tomorrow, but you’re right about the fried mini buns, Jin. I appreciate your carrying them over for me. The subdivision guards must have made it difficult, I’m afraid, for you to come in?’

  ‘Most of the subdivisions are accessible only for their residents. But you don’t have to worry about me. A special permit was issued to me by the city government. We have to serve people wholeheartedly under any circumstance, as Chairman Mao said long ago. Our office is an important one in the ongoing reform of China’s judicial system, Director Chen, and I have to report to you regularly.’

  ‘Well said,’ he said, enjoying her sarcastic repartee. He glanced at her still-bulging backpack. It looked like one carried for travel.

  ‘Still, the transportation system presents a huge problem. Half of the subway lines have been shut down. This morning, it took me more than an hour and a half to go to the office, and I had to change trains several times along the way.’

  ‘How about a taxi?’ he asked, then added in a hurry, ‘I believe our office has a budget for emergency expenses.’

  ‘I can take a taxi, but it’s too much expense if I have to do so every day. Your place is not far from the office. So I thought I might as well drop in today. Old Heaven alone knows what will happen tomorrow in this crazy world.’

  ‘The world is going crazy and crazier. “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.”’

  It could have applied to this moment, to this place.

  ‘What a poetic Director! Incidentally, a short poem has resurfaced online of late – in the last few days, to be more exact. It’s whispered among the netizens that Internal Security may have targeted you as one of the possible authors. So I thought I had to come over.’

  She whisked out her phone and showed him the poem in question on the screen.

  ‘Reading Animal Farm’

  Stay still in your sty, stop squeaking!

  Fed more than full, you pigs mill around,

  then dream your big dream – sty-bound –

  of a moment of freedom, peeking

  around the stall. Refrain from any comment

  criticizing the Party for any reason.

  Bathing in the light of his Majesty Napoleon,

  you may wallow to your heart’s content.

  What – a swine pandemic with fever high?

  Even the possible has to be spun

  into the impossible. Search the sty,

  seal and sear the squeaking tongue.

  Who cares about the flood drowning the sky

  afterward? I’m the Emperor, the only one.

  He could not help reading the sonnet closely, and then even more closely for a second time. He recognized it, though there might have been a few words different from what he had remembered.

  It had been composed in the very early days of the Covid crisis, though not by him. He had first encountered the poem in an earlier investigation – in his last days as a chief inspector in the Shanghai Police Bureau, and shortly prior to Jin coming to serve him as a secretary in his new office. It had not been an investigation under his charge, possibly incriminating a netizen in Red Dust Lane, but one in which he had been involved through a weird causality of circumstances. Even at that time, however, the people above had suspected him as the author of the anti-CCP poem, but then the investigation had broken in an unexpected direction and the issue of authorship was dropped.

  ‘Oh, the mini fried buns! You have to eat them hot,’ she said. ‘That’s what you told me before, remember?’

  She was still holding the plastic foam box in her hand. Aware of his hesitation, she picked up a bun for him. In her slender fingers, the tiny bun, with its scallion-and-sesame-covered top and crispy golden bottom, looked even more appealing. Before he could say anything, she stuffed a piece into his mouth.

  ‘Let me feed you. So you can read and think about the poem between bites.’

  He started sipping at the delicious soup inside the bun with an embarrassed smile.

  ‘You also want a bun?’

  ‘Just one, please,’ she said, opening her mouth as he chopsticked one to her, and she sucked at the soup carefully with an air of satisfaction.

  ‘What do you think of the poem, Jin?’

  ‘Its reappearance on the Internet was probably because of the words “swine pandemic” in the poem. The current CCP’s top leader is nicknamed “swine” or “swine head” among netizens. And that, in combination with “pandemic,” was enough to raise the alarm for the Netcops. Not to mention the fact that quarantine concentration camps these days are compared to pigsties. The people who responded by reposting the sonnet or marking it with a like emoji all got into trouble.’

  ‘It speaks through the persona of Napoleon, the pig emperor in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. A very clever choice,’ Chen said. ‘And “afterward” in the last line sounds like an echo of something said by a French emperor, who declared that he did not care about what might happen to the world after his death. It proves to be equally applicable to the current Chinese emperor, so angry netizens protested that he cares about nothing but his own grasp of power, no matter the cost to the people.’

  ‘No wonder the Netcops have been going all out,’ Jin said broodingly. ‘For quite a long while, the name “swine head” has been a sensitive one to them. Not necessarily because of the poem, though.’

  Perhaps that was the real reason for her unannounced visit to him today. They couldn’t have discussed the poem on the phone.

  That was also why netizens forwarded the poem online at this critical juncture, with the lines in cyberspace crashing hard against the realities under the CCP. And little wonder that the Netcops targeted Chen as its potential author. After all, he was a published poet.

  ‘The government is digging three feet into the ground to ferret out the writer of the poem,’ she said, searching his face for a change of expression.

  ‘How could I have anything to do with it, Jin? The poem was written by somebody else. I read it in an earlier investigation – not my investigation – involving someone at Red Dust Lane.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I have to keep a low profile under the present circumstances, Jin. I know better. Besides, it was you that taught me how to use WeChat. I’m still so clumsy with the new tech—’

  She was then moving to his side and producing her cell phone. ‘Look at this list.’

  The list came with the hashtag #YourMotherGoToHell with the web name ‘Blue Worm Killers.’ The list simply grouped a number of public intellectuals who should be ‘removed from this glorious time.’

  The list included the name of Chen Cao.

  That was more than alarming – and puzzling, too. People had known him as a capable inspector, but not as an intellectual. He had published poems that were not that politically correct for the present time. However, few people read poems seriously. It was not such a big deal to the government authorities.

  Certainly not such a big deal as to make those government-backed Internet thugs go out of their way to put him on their murderous list.

  Why?

  Because of the poem she had just shown him? In China, authorship, like everything, is to be determined by the Party authorities.

  ‘We trust the Party, and we trust the people,’ he said sarcastically.

  ‘The Party has brainwashed the people.’

  ‘Confucius says, people can be told about what you want them to do, but not about why they have to do so.’

  ‘May you always be capable of shielding yourself behind these ancient quotes,’ Jin said with no less sarcasm in her voice before perching herself on a small sofa, tucking her bare feet under her, and changing the subject abruptly. ‘I’ve heard that the investigation of your first major case was also related to Red Dust Lane. What a pity the whole neighborhood there is going to be pulled down.’

  He refrained from discussing those past investigations with her. For the moment, the less she knew about his work, past or present, about those people ‘in close contact’ with him, the better for her, and for everybody else.

  A silence fell over the room.

  ‘Let me ask you a different question, Jin,’ Chen said. ‘This morning, I was going to visit the Foreign Language Bookstore on Fuzhou Road. Traffic was terrible, with one ambulance after another near Renji Hospital. So I gave up and returned home. The moment I came back, however, I got a mysterious phone call. It demanded that I take a Covid test. How could that have happened?’

  ‘Oh, it’s the so-called “companionship in space and time”. The most advanced surveillance technology in China. This morning, you must have passed close to someone exhibiting a red Covid code—’

  ‘Hold on, Jin. I’m utterly bamboozled. The “companionship in space and time”? Sounds like a romantic commercial! But what the devil does it mean?’

  ‘You had your cell phone with you this morning, right?’

  ‘Yes, I carried my phone with me.’

  ‘Therefore you must have had a “close contact” in terms of the Covid phone code – you don’t have to actually touch or contact somebody. Let’s say that at a distance of twenty or thirty feet, a phone with a red Covid code will trigger off a yellow code in your phone. That does not mean you’re infected, just that there’s a possibility of getting infected. So you have to take a Covid test as part of the new “zero-Covid” policy. That way, all the possible “close contacts” of Covid patients will be contained.’

  ‘It’s so scary. Then I, too, have to report myself to the quarantine camp?’

  ‘You may not have to worry about that – not yet, Director Chen – because the test will most likely turn out to be negative. If needs be, I can take your guest room tonight and accompany you to the hospital tomorrow.’

  ‘No, you should leave right now,’ he said in haste. ‘I’m not ungrateful for your kind suggestion, but now you, too, are in contact with a close contact!’

  ‘Don’t panic. Let’s go and have your test done. Afterward, I may go directly to the office. It’s close; I don’t have to take the subway. And I can have your direct instructions for our work on the way to the hospital. Each and every call between us may be tapped, you know. The same with email and WeChat.’

  That was true. More often than not, they had to talk in a sort of coded language understandable only to themselves. It was a tacit understanding between the two of them. Anything politically sensitive – or even personally sensitive – had to be left unsaid. It was like a mechanism of self-censorship, like a lot of blank space speaking in silence in a scroll of classical Chinese landscape painting.

  ‘More importantly, I’d love to try your cooking, too,’ she said with a teasing smile, ‘my celebrated gourmet chief inspector.’

  ‘Unfortunately, it is still a no. According to an old Chinese proverb, no matter how capable a chef, he cannot produce a meal without rice. Right now, most of the grocery stores have empty shelves.’

  To her offer, whether teasing or not, he had to say no – with true or false excuses.

  What had happened to them in the Yellow Mountains had happened there and could not happen again here. Perhaps it had been the different altitude, under the cover of the dark, treacherous night, against the legend of a pine tree blossoming into a miraculous pen in the dream …

  It appeared so surreal in retrospect, like the transient vision of the cloud merging into the rain, and of the rain merging into the cloud, as depicted in a celebrated ancient rhapsody by Song Yu in 300 BC.

  Since their return from the Yellow Mountains, they had kept their working relationship as it had been before the trip, as if nothing had happened. He remained on ‘convalescent leave.’ Big Brother is watching you! People above could have suspected there was something between the two of them. He did not want her to lose her job because of it.

  So it was another tacit understanding between the two of them. Both had to take extra precautions. Perhaps only in this way could she continue working by his side, in a position to obtain bits and pieces of inside information for him.

  In the age of mass state surveillance, with all the new technology – both imaginable and unimaginable – an Internet joke was gaining fast circulation: It’s hard for the criminals to murder, and hard for the people to love, too.

  ‘I can help a little, though,’ Jin persisted. ‘It’s not easy for you to go out for grocery shopping. With your high blood sugar, you are more vulnerable to Covid.’

  His blood sugar had recently touched the pre-diabetes level. In fact, it had been the very excuse the Party authorities had used to put him on convalescent leave. He began wondering whether she had rehearsed the persuasion.

  ‘Ours is an omnipresent, omniscient surveillance society,’ he said. ‘With your special permit, you may come and visit me in the name of office work. But anything more than that—’ He changed the topic without finishing the sentence. ‘But you may do one thing for me, I think, if it’s not too inconvenient for you.’

  ‘What is it? Tell me.’

  ‘I’ve just had a phone call with my friend Pang in Wuhan. I don’t think you need me to tell you how terrible things have been there. I would really appreciate it if you could mail some face masks and disposable gloves to him. And cans of luncheon meat, too. Put all of them into one package.’

  ‘No problem, Director Chen,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It must be like the end of the world for the people in Wuhan.’

  He shook his head as if agreeing with her about the horror at the end of the world. Words were too pale, too weak to make any difference.

  ‘But can’t we try to do something more for them?’ She stood up, poured out a cup of hot tea for him, and said, ‘Something for the Wuhan people engulfed in the disastrous lockdown, Director Chen?’

  He could not come up with an instant response.

  Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one has to be silent.

  For once, he found Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement not that agreeable to him.

  In the Yellow Mountains, he had been intensely aware of her youthful passion, which had come close to rekindling his disillusioned idealism. Only, they were no longer in the mountains.

  ‘You may try to write something about Shanghai in the Covid days, Director Chen,’ she suggested.

  ‘No, it’s totally out of the question to have anything written about the Covid disasters, to be published in China. “Negative energy,” you know.’

  ‘Negative energy, indeed. A schoolmate of mine is a high school teacher. She gave her students an assignment of writing something like a book review,’ Jin said with sadness rippling in her large, clear eyes, ‘and one of the students accused her of spreading negative energy because one of the books listed was Doctor Zhivago. As a result, my schoolmate jumped from her balcony.’

  ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ Chen said with an echoing sigh. ‘When I was a child, an old bookseller was put into jail because he had the English version of it on the shelf in his tiny bookstore. History really repeats itself. Now Doctor Zhivago is turning into negative energy again. According to Karl Marx, things that happen for a second time in history are nothing but farce.’

  ‘Yes, Marx said something to the effect that history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But I’m still wondering whether it’s possible to have your writing published abroad, like Doctor Zhivago; you are surely capable of translating it into English yourself—’

  She did not have to say any more. Not between the two of them.

  But the problem was that he did not have such a book available. He stood up abruptly. What about The Wuhan File being written by Pang?

  It was then that another phone call burst in.

  Chen picked up the phone. Another unrecognized number presented itself on the screen. Before pressing the key to accept the call, he heard a car pulling up under the window of his apartment.

  ‘Oh, it’s a Red Flag,’ Jin said, rising, standing on her tiptoes and glancing out of the window.

  The Red Flag had been the most politically honored car in China, being made in China and reserved for the top Party leaders like Mao in the sixties and seventies. Hence, it was the number-one car in Chen’s childhood memories, seen only in the propaganda documentaries of Mao meeting with distinguished foreign visitors in the Central South Sea. In the reform under Deng, the Red Flag had been eclipsed by luxurious Western models. In recent years, however, it had staged a surprising comeback as a symbol of China’s independent achievements, along with the political connotation that it was reserved only for high-ranking Party cadres on official occasions.