1980s - Chapter 9

Previous | Table Of Contents | Next 

Three measured knocks, the rhythm of rooms that learn to open.

Zhao Rui slid the latch. The door eased inward to reveal not the inspector with clean shoes, but a different man altogether—shorter, wool cap, clerk’s smile. He carried a leather folder and the weary confidence of someone sent to fetch things others were afraid to touch.

“Comrade Zhao,” he said, stepping just far enough to smell the lamp. “Good morning. The district requests your photographs related to the irrigation project. For archival reproduction.”

Behind Zhao Rui, Li Ming had already taken one step into the room’s plain light; the two cups on the shelf were spaced wider than habit. The mirror, even from here, reflected nothing but a man and a wall and a lamp that had not burned long enough to soften the glass.

Zhao Rui kept the envelope between his fingers where the man could see it, its mouth still unsealed, the cheap paper creased. “We’ve prepared a set.”

“Excellent,” the clerk said. His eyes never lifted above the level of the folder. He could have been collecting signatures or socks. This was an errand body, trained to pass messages without understanding their temperature.

Li Ming handed over the decoys: the newspaper clipping; a pump-side image where Zhao Rui existed as a sleeve and a shadow; a blurred frame of the cooperative children. The clerk glanced, ticked a small box in his head, and slid them into the folder with a whisper of paper.

“And this?” Zhao Rui lifted the anonymous envelope. “It was under our door at dawn.”

The clerk blinked, the first true surprise to touch his face. He reached for the envelope, then stopped, unsure if his hand was meant to take it or only witness it. “I only carry what I’m told,” he said carefully. “I was told to bring what you bring and to tell you the office expects you at nine.”

“What office?” Li Ming asked.

“The district records.” He swallowed. “Room 203.”

The number sat between them like a small stone placed in the middle of a path. The clerk bobbed a polite half-bow, backed out with the door’s own patience, and left.

Silence folded itself neatly around the room.

Li Ming closed the door and leaned his forehead against the wood for a count of three. “Room 203,” he repeated, as if saying it aloud could change the shape of the door’s frame.

Zhao Rui turned the envelope over again. The anonymous print inside stared back: courtyard at noon, two silhouettes stitched together by the seam of light. The message on the reverse was not a threat, only an instruction that presumed obedience.

“He’s telling us he can get close,” Li Ming said, straightening. “Close enough to print what we hid.”

“Or he’s telling us he knows someone who can,” Zhao Rui answered. “Either way, this isn’t about art.”

“It’s about leverage.”

“It’s about compliance,” Zhao Rui said, and slid the envelope into his coat. “Let’s go see what price he thinks we’ll pay.”

They climbed the stairs at eight fifty-eight, faces set to weekday. The hallway smelled of paste and old ink; files lined the walls like thin bricks. Room 203’s door stood half open. Inside, the clean-shoes inspector sat at a desk, jacket off, sleeves square, pen ready. On the credenza behind him, a tray held tea grown cold while no one remembered to care.

“Comrades,” he said, pleasant as a good hotel in bad weather. “Thank you for coming promptly. Please sit.”

They did not. Li Ming nodded at the folder on the desk. “Our contribution to the archive is inside.”

The inspector tapped it once, a pianist feeling the weight of a key. “I appreciate your civic spirit.” His gaze flicked to the edge of the tray, where a single photograph lay—their photograph, the illicit print with cheap blacks and hurried whites.

Zhao Rui kept his own gaze strictly on the inspector’s face. “You went to some trouble to deliver that.”

“Trouble?” The man smiled. “We all serve the collective. Some of us serve by walking quietly.”

“And some by opening door latches without knocking,” Li Ming said mildly.

The smile did not move. “I prefer speaking to acting,” the inspector said, stealing the scarf-woman’s line without the grace that made it not a threat. “Room 203 is for speaking.”

“Then speak,” Zhao Rui said. His hands were loose at his sides; only a muscle in his jaw took notes.

The inspector folded his own hands over the folder. “The province will run a year-end feature on innovation. A panel suggests awards. Awards lead to transfers, resources, travel. The photograph”—he touched the cheap print with a finger that did not quite smudge—“is an example of… complication. I dislike complications in stories that ought to be simple.”

“And your role?” Li Ming asked.

“To make them simple.” He held their eyes one by one, the way a teacher does when he wants to be sure the lesson sits. “Help me keep the story of your work neat, and the story of your… companionship will remain the business of your walls.”

The word companionship settled like dust. It wasn’t knife-sharp, but it carried the memory of metal.

Zhao Rui let one beat pass. Then he asked, very evenly, “And if we don’t help you?”

The inspector’s eyes wandered to the tray, to the cold tea, to the window where winter light wrote angles on the sill. “I would regret the inconvenience. I am a practical man. I prefer not to waste ink or make mothers travel.”

Li Ming’s breath hitched so softly only the desk could have heard it.

Zhao Rui stepped a fraction closer to the desk, close enough for the inspector to smell iron—factory, not threat. “We have already helped,” he said. “Water climbs the hill. The youth clapped. The paper named two men who built. If the province wants a neat story, it has one.”

The inspector smiled, pleased to be contradicted without losing his posture. “Neater,” he said. “A single face photographs better than two.”

He looked at Li Ming. “The plant wants to nominate you alone. Comrade Li, first name on the citation, photograph with the director, a train north to present at a conference. The other name remains on the page as ‘support.’ That way the archive has no… confusion.”

The offer lay on the desk like a bolt slid into place: clean, precise, humiliating. It was a demotion masquerading as protection.

Li Ming’s answer came without choreography. “No.”

The inspector tipped his head. “No?”

“We built it together,” Li Ming said. He did not raise his voice; he made it narrow, the way orders travel farther when they are tight. “If the plaque has one name, it will have neither.”

Zhao Rui could feel the danger shift footing in the room, looking for a new angle. Refusal had its own scent, and bureaucracy disliked the taste.

The inspector sighed, as if disappointed by men who failed a test he’d expected them to pass. “You are young,” he said, though neither of them was, not in the ways that mattered. “Idealism is handsome on paper. It bleeds badly on concrete.”

He slid the cheap print toward them with one finger. “Room 203 will always prefer speaking to acting. But rooms have neighbors.”

He stood, the universal gesture that means this meeting is ending and the conversation is not. “You have till tomorrow to reconsider. Bring a letter from the plant recommending Comrade Li by name. Or, if you prefer… bring the negatives.”

“Negatives of what?” Zhao Rui asked, as if he didn’t know.

“Anything that might complicate the province’s appetite for heroism.”

He didn’t say your mirror. He didn’t need to. He had learned to talk around the doorframes of other people’s lives.

They left without shaking hands.

Outside, the hallway felt colder than the room, as if the building itself eavesdropped and did not approve. The stairwell window threw a crooked patch of light onto the landing. Li Ming stood in it and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, hard, once—resetting himself like a man killing a cough.

“He’ll go to the plant,” he said.

“He’ll go to anyone who writes letters,” Zhao Rui said.

“Director Wang may agree,” Li Ming said. “Promotions are numbers and neatness. He likes both.”

Zhao Rui’s mouth tilted without humor. “The scarf woman said she prefers quiet districts. Quiet needs useful men more than it needs pretty stories. We go to her first.”

They did. Her office was a square with a window that made even cheap paper look warm. She listened without interrupting, her scarf a defiant ribbon in a room that had learned to muffle color.

“The inspector is not wrong,” she said finally, which was not the same as saying he was right. “The province likes one face on a poster.”

“Then pick one we draw ourselves,” Zhao Rui said. “Give the photo to the plant with the pump and the cooperative. No ‘hero engineer’ at all—only ‘collective achievement.’ He gets a neat story, you get quiet, we keep the truth.”

She tapped the table thoughtfully, a drum smaller than worry. “And the other… truth?”

“Stays where it lives,” Li Ming said. “In work. In rooms that you don’t have to police if the street stays calm.”

The scarf woman looked at them for a long moment, weighing variables not printed on any form. Then she nodded once, decision as crisp as a stamp. “I can reroute the province’s appetite. But he will not like being denied a face.” Her smile was all teeth and no malice. “He will try to find another one.”

“We’ll give him a machine,” Zhao Rui said. “Machines photograph better.”

She laughed, short and sincere. “Write me a note I can wave,” she said. “Three sentences. Collective innovation, rural benefit, replicable model. No names.”

Li Ming wrote them. She initialed the corner and slid the paper into a folder with a dozen other papers that kept the district from tripping over itself before lunch.

“Go,” she said. “Work. Be ordinary. If he comes to your door again, make him drink bad tea for thirty minutes while you explain valves.”

They left lighter and not. A plan is relief and a wager at the same time.

Back at the plant, Director Wang was not interested in politics when a gasket hissed on the test bench. Both men leaned into the comfort of bolts and seals until the hiss became a purr. Ordinary is a strategy that smells like oil.

Mid-afternoon, a telegram arrived addressed to Li Ming. The runner who brought it loved his job too much to hide his curiosity. “From Hubei,” he sang, as if distance itself were a lyric.

Li Ming read it twice and swallowed hard. He passed it to Zhao Rui without comment.

Mother ill. Come if can. Harvest late, doctor scarce. — Aunt.

The words rearranged the day. They rearranged the week. They rearranged plans without asking permission.

“We go tonight,” Zhao Rui said.

Li Ming nodded once. “He’ll think we’re running.”

“He’ll think we’re sons,” Zhao Rui said. “Even men with ledgers understand that story.”

“And the room with the mirrors?”

“We seal it once more,” Zhao Rui said. “And we leave something behind that makes noise if touched.”

They worked until dusk: tucked the fragile gallery deeper into silver and wood; slid a thread of rice paste along the frame’s seam and dusted it with ash so any finger would print a skyline when it pried; placed the decoy negatives in a box that looked like treasure and contained nothing but the cooperative’s thank-you letter and a blurred photograph of frogs.

Li Ming wrote one more note—five words—to the scarf woman: Mother ill. Hubei tonight. Back soon. He left it on her desk with a weight that was not a paperweight but would be seen as one.

At the station, the same platform that had once held a departure carried them toward a return. The provincial paper lay on a bench, folded to the page with their names. A boy traced the pump with a finger as if it could pull water from newsprint into his mother’s bag.

“Do you think he’ll try the door while we’re gone?” Li Ming asked, eyes on the darkline of tracks.

“Yes,” Zhao Rui said. “And I think he’ll prefer speaking to acting if the district keeps him busy.”

Li Ming’s hand brushed his—accidental in the way that time teaches accidents. “When we get there…”

“We will fix what can be fixed,” Zhao Rui said. “And be there for what can’t.”

The train shouldered into the station with a sigh. They boarded, sat, breathed, said nothing for a while. Outside the window, the city let go.

Hubei’s evening smelled of wet earth and firewood. Madam Li’s courtyard was smaller than the way she wrote from it—two trees, one low eave, a bench that had remembered a thousand conversations. She was thinner than before, breath short, eyes sharp as ever.

“You took your time,” she scolded, which is a dialect for you came.

They sat her down with broth; they fixed the dripping roof; they mended a fence; they fetched the doctor who knew more about patience than medicine and enough about both to matter. Zhao Rui moved through the house with the efficiency of a man who had rebuilt rooms out of rubble. Li Ming did the talking his mother needed to hear—about pumps and fields and youth clapping for neat diagrams.

At night, under mosquito net and frog choir, Madam Li caught Zhao Rui’s sleeve as he passed her door. “You will keep him,” she said, a command disguised as a plea. “You will keep him from spending himself on every stranger’s broken thing.”

“I will try,” Zhao Rui said. “I will fail sometimes. Then I will try again.”

She let go. “Good,” she said. “There is a leak in the kitchen pipe. Fix that first.”

He did. He fixed small leaks until the big one—the one under her ribs—decided on its own schedule.

They stayed three days. On the third, she slept longer and deeper, and the doctor’s face allowed itself not to guard the mouth. “She’s not worse,” he said, which is country for she may be better. Li Ming exhaled for the first time since the telegram.

They would leave in the morning.

The telegram that found them at dawn reversed relief like a glove turned inside out.

Return soon. District requests presence. Plant notified. — Scarf.

No details. No temperature. Only the rhythm of summons.

They boarded a noon train. The fields rolled by without comment. Zhao Rui’s hand made a fist against his thigh and unfisted on a schedule the rails kept for him.

At the city station, the platform smelled of coal and a conversation already started without them.

The scarf woman was waiting, scarf bright enough to be a flag. Her expression was not fear; it was a math problem with too many equals signs.

“He tried your door,” she said without preamble as they stepped out of the flow. “Found it… instructive. He complained to the secretary about ‘obstruction.’ The secretary dislikes it when men under him improvise.”

“Did he take anything?” Zhao Rui asked.

“No,” she said. “He took offense. You left a mark.” She smiled despite herself. “Ash on his cuff. He tried to brush it off in the hallway and looked like a chimney surrendered.”

Li Ming’s mouth did a small, victorious thing. “And now?”

“Now he wants to escalate. He delivered a memo to the plant requesting ‘clarification on living arrangements and association patterns for archival accuracy.’ He cc’d me. He cc’d the province.” She lifted a folded paper. “I accidentally spilled tea on it.”

“And the secretary?” Zhao Rui asked.

“Prefers quiet districts,” she said. “He has invited the inspector to a different city for a week to ‘study propaganda efficiency.’ He leaves tonight. But he will be back.”

“And Room 203?”

“Closed for a week,” she said, as if boards had been nailed over the number. “Your window is temporary and real. Use it.”

“What do we use it for?” Li Ming asked.

She looked between them, then at the station hall where people were finding each other with gestures that made place out of noise. “For whatever you cannot do when a man with clean shoes is counting your steps,” she said. “Register your pump design nationally under ‘collective model’ so no one can assign a single face. Move your bed before someone decides to count the cups on your shelf. Seal what needs sealing. And—”

She hesitated, the only time they’d ever seen her unsure which word to choose.

“And what?” Zhao Rui prompted, gentler than the hallway.

“And if there are photographs that would burn you,” she said quietly, “choose whether life is keeping them or keeping each other. Fire is sometimes a lock.”

They stood with the choice hovering like a heat you don’t feel until your skin comments.

“Thank you,” Li Ming said, and his voice made of those words something like a vow.

“Work,” she said, reclaiming her brightness. “Be ordinary. Be visible where it saves you and invisible where it wastes you. I can move paper; I cannot move men at doors if you open them.”

She left with a nod that felt like a hand on each of their shoulders.

The room had been entered and left. Not ransacked—inspected. The mirror’s seam wore a faint bruise of ash that matched the cuff they’d been told about. The decoy box sat split, frog photograph on top like a joke they almost admired. Nothing else had moved. Everything else had moved by a thread’s width no eye would have confessed to seeing.

Zhao Rui locked the door behind them and threw the bolt for the first time in a year.

Li Ming went to the mirror and touched the wood beside it, not the glass. “We could take them out,” he said. “We could put them in the stove and watch ourselves unexist.”

Zhao Rui opened the drawer where he kept the thin envelope of real negatives—three frames only: the radio open like a book, Li Ming’s face turned up mid-explanation; the public group where their not-quite-meeting gazes had learned to pretend to miss; the courtyard at noon, shadows stitched.

He held the envelope and weighed love like paper.

“We built a house out of reflections,” Li Ming had said weeks ago. Houses burn. Some are meant to; some are saved by knowing what to burn.

Zhao Rui slid two negatives back into the drawer and placed the third—noon courtyard—on the table. “Not this one,” he said. “This one is a blueprint. We keep the blueprint.”

Li Ming’s eyes asked the rest.

Zhao Rui fed the other two into the stove’s mouth. The flame took them with the impatience of a thing that knows its job. For a second, Li Ming’s face shone silver and black between the grate and vanished.

They stood without talking as the room wrote a new smell into itself.

When the fire calmed, Zhao Rui returned the last negative to its envelope and then to the small pocket sewn into the hem of the curtain, the place no one touches unless they live there.

He exhaled. “Now if they take the mirror, they won’t take us all.”

Li Ming pressed a palm flat to the wall, eyes closed. “It hurts less than I thought,” he said, surprised and a little ashamed of the relief.

“It hurts late,” Zhao Rui said. “We will feel it when we shave and see less.”

Li Ming laughed once, raw and brief. “We’ll learn a new face.”

They looked at each other—not with triumph, not with defeat, but with the tired recognition of men who had refused a bargain and paid a different price.

“Tomorrow,” Zhao Rui said, “we file the national model. Collective. No names big enough to paste.”

“And tonight?”

“Tonight we move the bed,” Zhao Rui said, one corner of his mouth obeying gravity at last. “And then we practice explaining valves for thirty minutes without stopping.”

“For when he comes back,” Li Ming said.

“For when anyone does.”

He reached for the chalk, the fisherman’s moon sign, fingers hesitating over the frame’s edge. He did not draw it. Not now but later belongs to corners; tonight, the middle of the room needed courage, not codes.

They worked until the lamp told them to stop.

By dusk, word curled in the streets: the inspector had boarded a night train carrying a suitcase that looked heavier than his knowledge. The district exhaled. The scarf woman sent a boy with three words on a scrap: Window open. Work. The boy waited until Zhao Rui gave him a sweet and then asked, “Are you in the paper again?”

“Only the small part,” Zhao Rui said, and the boy ran away satisfied that adults were inscrutable in ways that would someday be useful.

They ate congee that tasted better than hunger and sat at the table with the window open so the river could remind them how to be plural.

Li Ming took out the provincial paper, the crisp one that had started this current. He placed it flat and smoothed it with both hands. “You once said if we vanish you want us to exist somewhere.”

“I did.”

“What if we exist in other people?” He tapped the pump, the farmers, the channel’s bright arc. “In water and fields. In a village where my mother now keeps a pot warmed by irrigation she didn’t have last year.”

Zhao Rui thought about villages and rooms and the stove’s mouth. “Then we already do.”

He folded the paper with cleaner lines than the envelope had given them and tucked it under the tin again. This time he scratched three words lightly into the lid with a nail, so faint only habit would read them: Here we are.

He looked up. Li Ming’s gaze held that same narrow light he wore when something finally turned the way it should.

“Tomorrow,” Zhao Rui said.

“Tomorrow,” Li Ming answered.

The window sent in a breath that smelled like iron cooling and river distance.

And in the corridor, perhaps on a different floor, a pair of shoes paused—worn, not clean—and then moved on, as if the building had decided for one night to let good doors keep their own latches.

Outside, a late train announced itself with a long, hollow note. Neither man rose to look. The sound drew a line through the dark, steady and straight, and the chapter held on that line—soft, uncertain, humming—as if testing how much weight a story can bear when it refuses to break.

Previous | Table Of Contents | Next