Song of Everlasting Sorrow (66 page)

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Authors: Wang Anyi

BOOK: Song of Everlasting Sorrow
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The only one who seemed to be moved by any of this history was Zhang Yonghong. She didn’t believe the story initially, but once she had accepted it she had an endless array of questions for Wang Qiyao. Wang Qiyao, for her part, resisted answering them at first, but once she began to open up, she had an endless series of revelations for Zhang Yonghong to uncover. There were many things that Wang Qiyao thought she had completely forgotten, but as soon as she got started, all of those tiny bits and fragments of detail came together to make a flowing river of memories. The stories she told were those of a woman who had stood in the limelight; but wasn’t that the goal of all those girls on Huaihai Road trying to outdress one another? Wave after wave of fashion that came and went—weren’t they all vying for their moment in the spotlight? Zhang Yonghong, who understood the magnitude of the splendor Wang Qiyao was describing, exclaimed, “I’m so envious!”
Zhang Yonghong introduced Wang Qiyao to all of her boyfriends and invited her to all kinds of parties. These were mostly parties for young people, and, knowing her own place, Wang Qiyao would usually sit off to one side. Nevertheless, her elegance would still add a touch of distinction to the party. Barring the occasional glance, people didn’t pay her any attention, but everyone was aware that there was a “Miss Shanghai” in their presence. On occasion there might even be a few people eagerly awaiting her arrival, not realizing that she had been sitting in the corner all along—she sat there alone until the music stopped and the show was over. Wang Qiyao was always well dressed and elegant; she was never awkward and never got in the way. She was an ornament, a painting on the wall to adorn the living room. The painting was done in somber hues, with a dark yellow base; it had true distinction, and even though the colors were faded, its value had appreciated. Everything else was simply transient flashes of light and shadow.
It was under these circumstances that Old Colour first met Wang Qiyao.
Could that be the
“
Miss Shanghai” everyone was talking about?
he wondered. Just as he was about to walk away, he saw Wang Qiyao look up and scan the room before lowering her head again. The look in her eyes had a hint of panic, but she was not at all looking for sympathy or forgiveness. It was then that Old Colour realized how callous he had been. He thought,
The Miss Shanghai pageant was nearly forty years ago
. His vision grew blurry as he stared at Wang Qiyao, as if his eyes couldn’t focus properly, and through that hazy vision he saw an image of her from more than three decades ago. Gradually the image became clearer, taking on depth and new details. But none of those details looked real; they floated on the surface, piercing Old Colour’s heart. He came face to face with a cruel reality—the corrosive power of time.
At twenty-six years of age, Old Colour should have been too young to care about the passing of time; time had yet to teach him such truths, but that is precisely why he longed for the past—that is the only reason he dared to extol the fruits of time! The passage of time associated with those old jazz records was indeed a good thing; it had smoothed things out until they were strong and fine, rubbing off the superficial layers to reveal the inner grain, like gold emerging when the fire has burned away the dross. But what he saw that day was not an object, like an old jazz record, but a person. He was at a complete loss as to what to say, because the situation had an element of the tragic. He had finally touched the heart of that bygone era, whereas before he had only paced back and forth on its surface. Something halted his steps and Old Colour couldn’t bring himself to walk away. He picked up a glass of wine and leaned up against the door, fixing his gaze on the television. Eventually Wang Qiyao got up from the corner to go to the restroom. As she walked past him, he flashed her a smile. She immediately accepted his smile, responding with a look of gratitude before smiling back at him. When she came back, he asked her if he could get her a drink. She pointed to the corner and said that she already had a cup of tea, so there was no need. He asked her to dance. She hesitated for a moment . . . and accepted.
Disco music was blaring in the living room, but they danced the four-step at half speed. With all manner of wild movements swirling around them, only they were stationary, like a lone island in a rushing torrent. She apologized, suggesting that he go back to disco dancing rather than waste his time with her. But he insisted that he was having a good time. He put his hand on her waist and could feel the slight pulsations of her body. It was a strategy of nonmovement in response to the myriad changes taking place around her, of finding her own rhythm, no matter what the tempo of her surroundings might be, a rhythm that could carry her through time. Moved by this, he remained lost in silence until she suddenly complimented his dance skills; they were now doing a traditional Latin number. When the tune changed, someone else invited Wang Qiyao to dance. During the next number, they each danced with their respective partners but their eyes occasionally met, whereupon they exchanged a knowing smile, lit up with the joy of this chance meeting. The party took place on the evening of National Day and fireworks were being set off from one of the balconies. A single rocket shot up into the darkness and slowly unfurled its fiery petals in the night sky before breaking up into a stream of falling stars, which vanished slowly, leaving a faint white shadow in the sky. It was some time before the last of the light was absorbed into the blackness.
After that evening Wang Qiyao ran into Old Colour at a few other parties and they gradually got to know each other better. One time Old Colour told Wang Qiyao that he suspected he was the reincarnation of someone who had lived four decades earlier. This person had probably died a violent death in his youth, but because he hadn’t properly finished out his previous life, was now left with a strange attachment to the past. Wang Qiyao asked him if he had any proof of this. He replied that his proof was based on his endless longing for the Shanghai of the forties, a world that otherwise had nothing to do with him. Sometimes, walking down the street, he would slip into a daze that seemed to transport him back to the past. The women would all be wearing
cheongsams
and dresses, the men had donned Western-style suits and hats, the trolley bell would ring out, and girls crying “Gardenias for sale!” sounded like orioles, while the apprentice at the silk shop made crisp noises with his scissors as they cut through pieces of fabric. Amid these sights and sounds he would slip into the past, becoming a person of that bygone era, someone who parted his hair in the middle, carried a leather briefcase, and supported his virtuous wife and family by working at a Western firm. Wang Qiyao laughed at this.
“Virtuous wife? Tell me, just how is she virtuous?”
He ignored her and continued on with his story. He said that in his vision he had taken the trolley to work as usual when a gun fight broke out inside the trolley car. A spy from Wang Jingwei’s puppet government was trying to assassinate a man from the Chongqing faction. They chased each other around the car and in the end he was shot by a stray bullet and died there on the trolley.
“You got all that from a TV show!” Wang Qiyao challenged him.
Still disregarding her comments, he continued, “I was unjustly killed and my soul refused to accept what happened. That’s why even though I seem to be here, my heart is in the past. And look at the way I always make friends with people much older than me, and when I first meet them I always have a feeling of déjà vu.”
At that moment the music came back on and the two of them went back out onto the dance floor. Halfway through the number, Wang Qiyao suddenly smiled and said, “Actually, it’s funny how
I
lived through that era and, much as I want to, I can’t go back. But here you are, able to go back whenever you want!”
Her words moved him, but he didn’t know quite how to respond.
“Even if it is a dream,” Wang Qiyao continued, “It’s
my
dream! You don’t get to have those dreams and make them seem so real!”
With that, the two of them broke out in laughter. Before they left for the evening, Old Colour invited Wang Qiyao out to dinner the next evening. Seeing him play the role of the gentleman, Wang Qiyao thought him ridiculous, but she was also touched. “Why don’t I be the host? But not at a restaurant. Why don’t you come over to my place for a simple dinner? Anyway, you decide.”
The next evening Old Colour arrived nice and early for dinner at Wang Qiyao’s apartment. He sat on the sofa and watched Wang Qiyao as she trimmed the bad ends off the bean sprouts. Wang Qiyao had also invited Zhang Yonghong and her new boyfriend, whom everyone called Long Legs; they arrived just before dinner was supposed to start. By then the dishes were already on the table and Old Colour was putting out the plates and chopsticks as if he was one of the hosts. Because Wang Qiyao was a whole generation older than her guests, she felt no need to stand on ceremony and put out all of the cold and hot dishes together, leaving only a pot of soup simmering on the gas stove. Zhang Yonghong and her boyfriend had seen Old Colour around, but didn’t really know him well enough to connect a name with his face. They couldn’t help feeling a little awkward, and the conversation didn’t get off the ground until Wang Qiyao smoothed things over. Since they were eating, the subject at hand naturally turned to food. Wang Qiyao mentioned a few dishes that they had never heard of, such as Indonesian coconut milk chicken. Since they were no longer able to buy coconut milk, she said, she couldn’t make that dish. Another one was Cantonese-style barbecued pork, which she couldn’t make because some of the ingredients were also unavailable. Then there were French goose liver pate and Vietnamese fish sauce . . . the list went on.
“That’s what dinners were like forty years ago,” Wang Qiyao explained, “a veritable United Nations conference. You could get food from any country! Shanghai back then was a little universe of its own. It was a window onto the rest of the world. But what could be seen outside the window was not half as important as what happened inside. What you saw outside was mere scenery; what happened inside was the foundation of everyday life. Forty years ago nobody ever flaunted this foundation, no posters or advertisements were needed. Every grain of rice and every piece of vegetable was accounted for. Today people carelessly grab things by the handful, and everything tastes like cafeteria food cooked in vats. Did you know that, forty years ago, when you ordered noodles, they would make them one bowl at a time?”
Old Colour could tell that Wang Qiyao’s words were meant for him. She wanted to show him what life was really like forty years ago—to remind him how little he really knew. He knew that he was being mocked, but he didn’t feel insulted; he actually welcomed that type of criticism, because it gave him entrée into real knowledge. He also got a taste of how astute she was. That was a quality from four decades ago: it was about silently putting up with wrongs rather than fighting for a better position, because in her world there was no place for displays of strength or cries of emotion. There was more consideration for others and less calculation for oneself. It was about understanding, something that was missing from the prevailing astuteness that has taken root forty years later.
After that night Old Colour started to come by quite often. On one occasion, when Zhang Yonghong was asking Wang Qiyao’s advice about making a coat, he sat beside them, listening. Although he understood little about dressmaking, what she said seemed to contain some more abstract truths that could be applied to all kinds of things. He realized that he had been completely ignorant before; those old jazz records he listened to were intended as an accompaniment or background music; the real melody and action lay elsewhere. The saxophone might snatch at your attention with its dazzling displays of virtuosity, but the real star of the show always maintained its composure. Simple and unadorned—it was the common heart with which one lives the everyday. He gazed out the window at the neighbor’s closed window across the way and wondered what lay concealed. Perhaps romantic stories were being played out. He walked slowly around the room; with each step he heard the sound of floorboards creaking and knew that here too were stories. There was so much indeed that he neither knew nor understood. In fact, the romance of forty years ago had lain right under his eyes, scattered in every corner.
Old Colour was an extremely quick-witted young man, and it took only a little effort for him to comprehend what the world had been like back then. Nothing authentic could slip past his eye, and nothing fake could fool him. He could almost smell the air from back then, carrying the scents of Rêve de Paris perfume and gardenias. The former belonged to the elite while the latter captured the banal tastes of the commoner, but even those gardenias had been romantic in their own way, each one carefully planted and cared for. And while that French perfume strove to rise above the rest, it still had its feet firmly planted on the ground. They represented the romance of the everyday world, which was quite enduring; even after its shell was cracked, the kernel remained.
“Whenever I come over to your place,” Old Colour commented, “I really get the feeling that I have gone back in time.”
“If you go back in time,” Wang Qiyao mocked him, “I’m afraid there isn’t that far you can go! Your mother’s belly?”
“No,” he explained, “I’m talking about going back to a previous life.”
Afraid that he was about to carry on again about his previous life, Wang Qiyao quickly waved her hand for him to stop.
“I know all about your former life as a gentleman working at a foreign firm and married to a virtuous wife!” she snorted.

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