“What kind of disaster?”

“It’s impossible to explain in a few words.”

“Then it’s best not to try. Haven’t you ever slept with a woman you loved or liked and not made love?”

You think about it and say, “Yes.”

“That was the right thing to do.”

“How was it the right thing to do?”

“You must have respected her, respected her feelings!”

“Not necessarily. If you like a woman and don’t touch her—that is, when you are sleeping in the same bed—it’s very difficult.” For you, anyway.

“You’re quite honest,” she says.

You thank her.

“No need, there’s no proof yet, let’s see.”

“It’s the truth, it actually happened. Afterward I regretted not having touched her but I was no longer able to find her.”

“In other words, you respected her.”

“No, it was also because of fear,” you say.

“Fear of what? Fear that she would report you?”

You say it was not that former wife of yours, it was another woman. She would not have reported you. She was the one who had taken the initiative and, of course, you wanted to, but you were too afraid.

“Why?”

“I was afraid of being discovered by the neighbors. Those were terrifying times in China, I don’t want to talk about those old happenings.”

“Talk about them, you will feel better after you talk about them.”

She seems to understand something of the human mind.

“But just don’t talk about women.” You think she’s acting like a nun.

“Why not talk about women? Whether it’s a man or a woman, they’re human in the first instance and it’s not only a sexual relationship. You and I should be the same.”

You don’t know what you should talk about with her. In any case, you can’t immediately get into bed, so you try studying the well-ordered strokes in the set of color woodcut prints in gilded frames on the wall.

She removes the clasp in her hair, and her hair tumbles down. While taking off her clothes, she says her father went back to Germany afterward. Italy was poor, and it was easier to make money in Germany.

You don’t ask about her mother, you remain carefully silent and try not to look at her. You think it’s impossible to relive the beautiful dream of yesterday.

She takes a robe into the bathroom, leaving the door open, and, running the water, goes on to say, “After my mother died, I went to Germany to study Chinese; the Chinese programs in Germany are quite good.”

“Why did you study Chinese?” you ask.

She says she wanted to distance herself from Germany. When a new fascism reared its head, they would again report her. She was referring to the neighbors in her street, the cultivated ladies and gentlemen she had to acknowledge with an insipid hello when they met outside. If she came upon them on weekends, while they were polishing their cars—their cars were as shiny as leather shoes—she’d have to stop to say a few words to them. But some day, as happened in Serbia not long ago, they or their children would betray, expel, gang-rape, and murder Jews.

“Fascism wasn’t only in Germany, you never really lived in China. Fascism was no worse than the Cultural Revolution,” you say coldly.

“But it wasn’t the same. Fascism was genocide, it was simply because one had Jewish blood in one’s body. It was different from ideologies and political beliefs, it didn’t need theories.” She raises her voice to argue.

“Your theories are dog shit! You don’t understand China at all and you haven’t experienced the Red Terror. It was an infectious disease that made people go mad!” You suddenly lose your temper.

She says nothing, and, wearing a loose gown and holding the bra she has taken off, she emerges from the bathroom, shrugs her shoulders at you, and sits on the bed, head bowed. With eye makeup and lipstick removed, her face is pale but it has a more feminine softness.

“Sorry, sexual repression,” you explain with a bitter smile. “You go to sleep.” You light a cigarette.

She stands up, walks over to you, presses you against her soft breasts, fondles your head, and says quietly, “You can sleep next to me but I don’t have any lust, I just want to talk with you.”

She needs to search for historical memories, and you need to forget them.

She needs to burden herself with the sufferings of the Jews and the racial humiliation of the Turks, but you need to receive from her body a confirmation that you are living at this instant.

She says, right now she has no feelings.

9

Late at night, after the criticism meeting at the workplace had ended, he went back to his room. Old Tan, who shared the room with him, had been locked up for interrogation in the meeting room of the workplace building, and would not be returning. He locked the room, lifted a corner of the curtain to see that all the lights were out in the neighboring homes of the courtyard, closed the curtain and carefully checked that there were no gaps. He then opened the coal stove, put a bucket next to it, and began to burn his manuscripts: a pile of diaries, and notes in several dozens of books of all sizes that he had kept since his university days. The belly of the stove was very small, and he had to pull apart a few pages at a time, then wait for the scorched paper to burn thoroughly and become white ash, before shoveling it into the bucket. The ash was ground to a paste: not the smallest fragment of unburned paper must remain.

An old photograph taken with his parents fell out of a diary. His father was wearing a suit and tie, and his mother was wearing a qipao. When his mother was alive and took out the clothes from the chest to air them, he had seen this silk qipao with orange-yellow flowers on an ink-blue background. In this faded photograph his parents were leaning against one another and smiling, and in between them was a skinny child with thin arms whose eyes were round with bewilderment as if he thought a bird would fly out of the box camera. Without hesitating, he stuffed the photograph into the fire. With a dull crackle, the edges began to burn. His parents had started curling up by the time he thought to retrieve it, but it was already too late, and he watched the photograph curl and then flatten out. His parents’ image had turned into black-and-white ash, and the skinny child in the middle had started to go yellow. …

The way his parents were dressed, they would have counted as capitalists or managerial employees of a foreign firm. He had obliterated whatever he possibly could, done everything he could to cut off his past, wipe out his memories. Even recalling those times was a heavy burden.

Before he burned the manuscripts and diaries, he had witnessed a crowd of Red Guards beat an old woman to death in broad daylight. He was riding his bicycle near the soccer grounds of bustling Xidan around midday during the lunch break, so there were lots of people out on the main street. Ten or so teenagers, fifteen- or sixteen-year-old middle-school students—a few girls among them—wearing old army uniforms and red armbands with black writing on them, were using leather army belts to beat up an old woman who was sprawled on the ground. The old woman had a wooden placard with the words REACTIONARY LANDOWNER’S WIFE tied with wire around her neck. She could no longer move but was still wailing. People passing by all kept a certain distance and watched in silence. Not one person stepped forward to stop them. A civilian policeman wearing a blue hat and swinging his white gloves walked past and seemed to look with unseeing eyes. A girl in the group, who had her short hair tied into two little bunches and looked quite elegant in glasses with a light-colored frame, also started wielding her belt. The brass buckle struck a mass of disheveled gray hair with a thud, and the old woman’s hands went up to clutch her head as she collapsed onto the ground. Blood oozed between her fingers, but she could no longer make a sound.