species of flowering plants you’re seeing, what names they have for them, what uses they might be put to, medicinal or ornamental. I wonder what kind of house you live in and what you do with your days.
From my window I can see a long white chain, its links soft and unbroken. Tomorrow should bring a little rain, which will be good for the garden.
I think of you with fondness.
Your Friend,
Clerval sits at his desk barely moving, head lowered, mouth closed, his friend’s letter beside him. What would I see in his eyes if I could see them? When his hands begin to stir, he gently folds his friend’s letter, turns his face to the window, wipes his forehead, starts to write:
When I first began translating these pages, it didn’t occur to me so many characters would suffer from the cold. After all, there are many luxurious flowers in the garden, such a sense of what is tended. Yet the Lady Dowager’s servant brings her a hand-stove as she sits in her black sedan chair sheltered by a black umbrella, or reclines on her kang. Daiyu writes, “Snow covers the broom of the monk up on the hill,” and coughs ceaselessly, can’t stand the slightest chill. Each day she drinks a tonic of bird’s nest boiled in gruel. It’s made from the purest snow-water from Moon Crescent Nunnery; she can’t tolerate anything else, and she never eats cold things. “‘There,’ Xueyan said with a laugh, ‘that will carry away her illness,’ and with a pair of small silver Western scissors clipped the cord tied to the reel. The kite drifted away until soon it seemed no bigger than an egg, then dwindled to a speck like a black star…” But Daiyu doesn’t get well. The narrator comments, “The longing to be close ends in estrangement.” Snow falls and falls. They move through rooms called Pear Fragrance, Happy Red Court, Bamboo Lodge, but all the while something shivers deep inside them. All the while the Great Waste Mountain that Baoyu fell from as a stone casts its shadow near them. “The jade hairpin is broken, the red candle cold,” is the answer to one riddle.
on Beggar’s Bridge the crowds of poor standing, sitting, crawling, holding out their hands as I pass, my hands in my pockets, my white hands–
Father, what would you think of all I see?
WORKING NOTES FOR DRC:
—the name Zhen Shiyin is a homophone for “true facts concealed”
—the name Jia Hua is a homophone for “false talk” (Cao Xueqin is very fond of such names)
—there’s a practice in which rich families pay poor families’ sons to be priests or monks in their stead in order to ward off evil
—the following lines that Daiyu recites are from “The Western Chamber”:
What a riot of brilliant purple and tender crimson Among the ruined wells and crumbling walls
So many books inside this book. I wonder what my friend in Aosta would think—
Aosta, May 31
My Friend,
When you were here and we sat face to face for those few hours, you asked me to speak, of my illness and its history but I refused. But yesterday I wrote to you about my hands, and today as I sit down to write I’m thinking about the lepers of Gloskar.
The island was desolate. “Small and lonely,” many called it, and in November 1651, it was chosen as the hospital site for the lepers of Aland. About sixteen were taken by boat to their new home: two cabins alongside a cattle byre and bakehouse. The wardens house stood some distance away.
The winters were very harsh and the cabins very quickly began to fall apart. There was no money to fix them. Cattle walked on snowdrifts high as roofs, and trampled the roofs of sheds to pieces. About a third of the patients died every year, most between November and April, and every year new patients arrived. Each year they petitioned Aland’s sheriff for firewood but were refused. Instead, they uprooted the island’s juniper bushes, used them until the land was bare. One day some set out in search of wood on other islands but their boat became trapped by ice floes and capsized. Somehow they managed to get back home and in milder months used the boat to ferry their cattle to pasture on outlying islands. They’d tend the cows each morning and night, then return to the island with fresh milk, the one thing they could manage for themselves.
(As I write this, I think of the way