Lost in Translation Page 0,59

found his proof, Paleolithic proof. But it didn’t help. Man was doomed in the Garden, they told him.

A waste, she thought, staring at the trees waving and whispering by the wall of Building Two.

There was a movement in the trees, near the door to the building: a person, perhaps, or an animal, or just a rippling bush. The motion detached and wove through the plots of hollyhock. Something white glimmered about its upper half—a shirt, maybe, pale and detached in the darkness.

A man. She squinted.

He came toward her. Only when he was almost upon her could she see it was Dr. Lin.

"Shuibu-zhao?" he whispered, Can’t sleep? and squatted beside her. A carp broke the water and slid under again. Dr. Lin folded his arms over his knees.

"How did you know I was here?"

"Meiyou zhidao. " I didn’t.

Then there was quiet for a stretch, in the temporarily unreal night world of the Number One courtyard. They sat so close, their legs were almost touching. She knew he spoke no English at all, so her thoughts, her mind, her senses, slid entirely into Chinese. "Dr. Lin. Do you ever wish you were somebody else?"

"Trouble you to repeat?"

"Do you wish your life had been different?"

He made a chuckle, but it was a hollow sound. "Of course, but I don’t think of it that way. We Chinese can’t think that way. It’s different here. I don’t know if you can understand."

"I think I can," she countered. "I have worked here a long time. I have listened to many people’s tales."

"So you have," he said, looking briefly into her face. Privately he thought: She knows a lot. But whether or not she knew about the insides of a man after the Chaos, the barren soul, the fields sown with salt—he could not tell.

"I know it was bad," she said in a softer voice, respectful, knowing something terrible must have happened with his wife.

He nodded.

She sighed, aware that he saw her as an outsider. They all did, at first. If he got to know her, he would see that she was more Chinese than American. Wasn’t she? Sometimes, when she looked back on the thick, damp air of Houston, she wondered if she had ever really lived there at all, if it had been anything other than a strange dream of before. Not that Dr. Lin would have understood this. Not that she felt ready to say it.

He let a beat of quiet fall before he continued. "Hao chang shijian han xin ru ku, " It’s such a long time we’ve been drinking from the bitter cup. He sighed and rubbed his eyes with his large, hairless hands. "But this is our circumstance. These are our times. And the road behind cannot be changed."

"What of the road ahead?"

He smiled. "What of it?"

"Can you change it?"

He considered silently. His road was made up of everything he was and everything he had endured, so it was deeply paved already. All he had allowed himself to feel and all he had walled off from his feeling. Like his wife, led away one day, one look back, over her shoulder, and then a universe of nothing ever after. Years of nothing. He would, of course, not say such a thing to an outside woman, whom he barely knew, in the middle of the night. Instead he said: "I don’t think the road can change."

"I used to agree with that," she said slowly. "Lately I feel different." She thought of herself in bed earlier that evening, reading The Phenomenon of Man. In fact I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he ... realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised in him... the axis and leading shoot of evolution. She breathed in fully, deeply. He had a spicy, wonderful Chinese smell, Lin Shiyang.

"Perhaps you are right. Eh, Mo Ai-li, I can’t believe I’m talking to you in the middle of the night like this. You’re a strange woman. Are other outside women like you?"

She laughed. "No."

"May I ask, are you married?"

"No," she said, and then added, "not yet."

He looked into her face but she couldn’t read him in the dark.

"You were married," she said boldly.

"Yes."

"Are you still?" Her heart beat faster. Had he put his wife aside, that’s what she wanted to know, had he huaqing jiexian, drawn a clear line between them, as so many Chinese had been coerced into doing in