A Flower’s Shade (8 page)

Ever since Huaifu had appeared, it was as though she had acquired a personal houseboy. She could take him with her on any of her wanderings through the great Estate, and sometimes even took him along when she went outside. For many years, Miss Yu had led a reclusive life in the Estate. Her father had never allowed her to go out. Although by that time, modern education had already become popular, her father had been old-fashioned on the point of her upbringing. On the pretext of her addiction to opium, he had engaged private tutors. Miss Yu was welcome to get up to whatever mischief she liked on the Estate, but she was not allowed out.

"Huaifu, let's go outside for a walk sometime." Miss Yu whispered impulsively one day.

I
n the bright sunshine of the secondary school's sports track, Miss Yu tried clumsily to learn to ride the bicycle. Xiaoyun stood at no great distance, making lazy gestures, obviously reluctant to teach her. When she had first asked him to go out with her, his reluctance had been evident. First he had put on airs and wouldn't commit himself one way or the other. Then he refused, until Suqin interceded and he reluctantly agreed. Because he wouldn't hold the bike steady, Miss Yu had swallowed her anger and asked Huaifu to do it. Huaifu had obediently obliged, clumsily steadying the bike and exhausting himself in the process. Miss Yu had almost fallen off more than once, and Huaifu was breaking his back to help her, but he was getting precious little thanks for his efforts.

Xiaoyun looked on coolly from the side, still wearing his highly peculiar dark glasses, and from time to time revealing a barely perceptible sarcastic smile. Since he had run into her in the corridor a few days earlier, he had been waiting for this day. Although he had left the Zhen Estate ten years before, he remembered her headstrong temperament. He knew that his bicycle, which was the talk of the whole little town, would be certain to draw Miss Yu's attention once she had come upon it. Miss Yu had grown up in a closed environment, and so when new objects appeared, she exhibited a particularly intense curiosity.

The students were in class. Their clear voices, chanting their lessons, could be heard. Huaifu was drenched in sweat. Every time Miss Yu climbed on the bike she would lose her balance and start wildly pedaling. Nervous, she would blush a deep red. Biting her lip, she tried time and again.

A youthful hand flashed before Xiaoyun's eye. Bygone years rushed at him, and Xiaoyun was drawn helplessly into his memories of the past. He saw a rather girlish hand, swiftly and very skillfully forming the opium pill. He saw that same hand taking an exquisite snuff-bottle and shaking out some white, powdery stuff. Then he saw how the powdery stuff was kneaded into the opium pill.

With a crash, Miss Yu had finally and heavily fallen. Pouting, she got up, clapped her hands, and abandoned her effort to learn.

Deep in thought, Xiaoyun watched her approach.

Livid, she said, "I asked you to teach me to ride a bike, but you refuse to help me at all?"

"I didn't refuse to help."

"Didn't you?" Miss Yu snorted.

Xiaoyun still seemed not to have emerged from his reverie. "In order to learn to ride a bike, you have to fall off," he said, absent-minded and vague.

Miss Yu, "I fell off, and you just looked pleased."

"Why should I be pleased?" Xiaoyun said, smiling coolly, "You're the one who wanted to learn. You went to find me and made me come out here. If you fall, you can't blame me."

"I give up!"

Xiaoyun watched Miss Yu with indifference. The illusion reemerged, the powdery stuff being poured from the snuff-bottle, a steady stream of it coming out. "What's so wonderful about this stupid bike? I give up!" He heard Miss Yu, but it did not affect him. Whatever Miss Yu said, it had lost all importance to him. He wanted to escape from this incessant illusion, and return as quickly as possible to reality. But the more he wanted to do this, the more he was bound by the temptation of the illusion.

As he walked back home with the bicycle, accompanied by Miss Yu and Huaifu, Xiaoyun still couldn't rid himself of this illusion. He seemed dejected, and capricious Miss Yu thinking this odd, asked, "Hey, why are you so out of it?" She looked at him carelessly, not knowing what was on his mind. Xiaoyun smiled at Miss Yu apologetically, a smile which appeared to her even stranger and more incomprehensible. "What's with you?" Miss Yu had forgotten all about the unpleasantness of the bike-riding lesson, and now she couldn't suppress a laugh.

Miss Yu seldom left the Estate, and now followed Xiaoyun and Huaifu like a child. Leaving the school's sports grounds, they headed towards the town, the county seat. The school was on the edge of town, while the Zhen Estate was located inside it. In order to get home, they had to cross a field. Miss Yu really knew far too little about the outside world. When Old Master Zhen had been alive, everything outside of the Estate had been forbidden territory. For many years, she had been hidden in the Estate, a girl waiting for people to come blow opium for her, and her only distraction was the calligraphy she practiced by copying classical inscriptions. Now that Old Master Zhen had died, the gates to the outside world were wide open for Miss Yu. But instead she had become helpless, like someone who had suddenly come into money and doesn't know how to make use of it.

Practically everything one could see outside was fresh and new to Miss Yu, and she was looking right and left, brimming with curiosity. Two dogs scuffling in a field, a herding boy drowsing on the back of an ox, and not for away, a classically Yangtze-River style bridge, with sailboats in the distance gliding closer. Xiaoyun pushed his clattering bicycle along. Miss Yu wanted to speak to Xiaoyun, wanted to ask him about the outside world. But Xiaoyun wouldn't snap out of it, and didn't really seem ever be paying attention. On the bridge, they encountered a girl who looked like she was probably a student. Evidently, she and Xiaoyun knew each other well, for, catching sight of one another, they stopped on the bridge and began a very friendly conversation.

Miss Yu was standing right beside them, and had assumed that he would introduce her. But he entirely ignored her presence, and continued to banter with the girl student. There was an obvious contrast between the affection he showed towards the girl and the coolness he exhibited to Miss Yu. The girl student obviously knew they were walking together, and nodded at her smilingly, which had to pass for a greeting. With something like a smile, Miss Yu looked at the girl. Then her expression changed to one of uncontrollable displeasure. She gestured at Huaifu to keep walking, and once they were off the bridge she waited for Xiaoyun, nursing her wrath.

Xiaoyun and the female student kept on bantering. It seemed like he was bent on angering Miss Yu. The girl said, "Last time, when you spoke at our school—that was wonderful, really. After you left we all kept discussing the matter." Xiaoyun said, "Not at all. I almost drove your headmaster round the bend, didn't I? He was coughing the whole time. I knew he didn't want me to go on, but I kept talking anyway, just to watch him squirm."

Miss Yu could contain herself no longer, and shouted at Xiaoyun, "Hey, are you done yet?"

Xiaoyun looked down on her from his position on the bridge with an expression of displeasure at the interruption.

"Are you coming or not?" Miss Yu said commandingly.

"You needn't wait for me." Xiaoyun said casually, and then continued speaking to the girl.

"You—" Miss Yu's eyes were ablaze.

But Xiaoyun was engrossed in his conversation, and had completely forgotten about Miss Yu's existence. In exasperation, Miss Yu wanted to fly into a rage at him, but in the presence of this young and beautiful girl student, Miss Yu felt for the first time rather ashamed of herself. She suddenly remembered that she was only an old-fashioned girl who didn't know the ways of the world, an old spinster who hadn't even read any of the new books. She knew that all these people in the new mold would certainly look down on those in the old. Miss Yu suddenly felt terribly sad, feeling that she had no understood the key reason for Xiaoyun's indifference to her. In the Zhen Estate, she was a tyrant who could do whatever she liked. But once she passed its gates, she was nothing at all.

"Huaifu, we won't wait for him, he's no big deal, let him fart around if he wants to." In humiliation, she clenched her teeth and pinched Huaifu's arm so hard that he grimaced.

T
wo days after the death of Old Master Zhen, Xiaoyun had returned to the Zhen Estate on the sly. He had never thought that he would return to this decaying mansion, but he had taken the bull by the horns and come back to the haunts of his youth. Ten years earlier, when he had resolved to leave this place behind, he had been only just sixteen years old. In the past ten years, he had studied in various locations, taken odd jobs in bookstores, taught elementary school, had even wasted a few months at one of the newspaper offices in the provincial capital. His haughty personality and his incompatibility with life in the real world had caused his stay everywhere to be short. Wherever he went, he fought with people, and had even been beaten black and blue on more than one occasion.

From the moment he set foot in the Zhen Estate, Xiaoyun was gripped by profound regret. He knew he shouldn't have returned, that he shouldn't once again make himself a burden to his sister Suqin. The confused atmosphere of the Estate during the period of mourning had diluted his memories of the past. Ten years had passed, and now it seemed as though everything had become strange. People seemed to have forgotten who he was. Everyone was busy with their own affairs, and even Suqin seemed preoccupied with her own thoughts, and never had time to exchange a few words with him in private.

Besides returning to the Zhen Estate to eat and sleep, Xiaoyun whiled away most of his time in the world outside. He called on the so-called "new people" in the little town, seeking to befriend them, but soon left off, finding that from the looks of it, the "new people" in that little town were at least as irritating as the old conservatives. A madam in one of the brothels had once explained the difference between the old-fashioned and the new people in this unique way: they both liked to visit the girls, but the old-fashioned ones liked to come at dusk and spend the night at the brothel, while the new people liked to come openly and in broad daylight to sleep with the girls they fancied.

The nifty new gimmicks that Xiaoyun had brought to the new town soon lost their swank and charm. The first time he had put on his dark glasses and ridden his bike through the streets, a pack of children had followed him around like mad.

Because he had returned from the provincial capital, the little town's middle school principal, who had the reputation of never rejecting the new currents of thought, had paid a courteous visit to Suqin, asking her please to convince Xiaoyun to give a talk at the school. The principal was a laughable old curio, his head chock full of pedantic old ideas, but he liked to flaunt his penchant for the new, to show his enlightenment.

The result was that the predominant reaction to Xiaoyun's talk had been pure astonishment, with the exception of a few school radicals who made the occasional approving comment. In the several hours of his talk, Xiaoyun had pulled out all the stops, blustering of violent revolution, of the popular anarchist movement. While condemning the warlords, he himself seemed to have the unparalleled arrogance of a warlord, with millions at his command. His speech was incoherent, and not to put too fine a point on it, it was little more than a collection of popular slogans strung together. The excessive fierceness of this speech, if it were known, might incur the displeasure of the local authorities. The somewhat frightened headmaster had been forced to this pretense of a cough, attempting time and again to interrupt Xiaoyun's speech.

His talk had pleased some of the girls, and when he had to interrupt his speech, several of the girl students had erupted in loud applause. After the talk, the headmaster had stared on as the girls had flocked around Xiaoyun like so many birds. They had surrounded him with a chatter of childish questions. Xiaoyun had suddenly become something like a wise mentor, and he continued exultantly to talk without any thought of the consequences, going on until he lost his voice. In truth, he hadn't really mastered the vocabulary, nor were the radical opinions he gave out necessarily his own. He was only trying to use criticism to inflict the greatest blow he knew how on the entirety of reality. But people were soon to discover that what he kept deep in his heart was a profound reserve of hatred.

H
uaifu lay on his back and vaporized the opium while Miss Yu lay on her stomach resting, waited for him to blow the smoke for her. Zha Liangzhong rushed into the room. He was an impressive-looking man, dressed in a Western-style suit, his hair neatly parted and shiny. He appeared to be a frequent guest, for he came into the room without the slightest inhibition, and looked at Miss Yu, lying on the opium bed and preparing to breathe in the fumes. It looked to him as though she was not in the best of spirits.

Miss Yu was furious about the indifference shown towards her by Xiaoyun. This had been the first time she had left the Estate since Old Master Zhen's death, and she had gone out in marvelous spirits, only to return her heart full of bile. Xiaoyun's behavior had been so pernicious; every time she thought of the awful way he had treated to her, rage overcame her. She regretted having left the Estate, since if they hadn't been outside, he might not have dared to act so arrogantly. Evidently, Miss Yu was poorly adapted to the outside world. And if they had not gone out, they would not have run into that young female student. The affectionate way that girl had spoken to Xiaoyun had stung Miss Yu. Her youth and simplicity had filled Miss Yu with envy.

Huaifu, noticing that someone had come in, stopped what he was doing. Miss Yu opened her eyes and was a little surprised to see Zha Liangzhong. Then, she sulkily closed her eyes again. This was the second time Liangzhong had visited since the death of Old Master Zhen. His purpose was completely transparent: to curry favor with Miss Yu. It could be seen that he was an accomplished flatterer.