placed seventh among the thousands of exam candidates, his family thinks surely he’ll come back. “Since Baoyu was fated to pass, he’s bound to turn up.” “Now that Master Baoyu has passed we’re certain to find him.” “You know the proverb—a successful candidate’s fame spreads throughout the land.”
Only his sister says quietly, “People shouldn’t have anything unique about them. We thought it was good he was born with jade in his mouth, but such mysteries can’t be understood. Maybe we never knew him at all.”
On the page I’m now translating the narrator says “Honorable Readers, certain things are predestined and cannot be helped.” He doesn’t say this in a mournful way. I suspect you would be more skeptical.
Meanwhile, the Emperor restores the family’s fortune. Their confiscated property’s returned, they’re reappointed to their official posts.
I hold your remaining letters—the stack so thin, not even a stack now, hardly more than a frail layer of skin. This frightens me.
In Shen Fu’s “Six Chapters of a Floating Life,” he explains that near is far and far is near. The landscape must create this illusion. “Thus do you suggest something which is not there,” he says of placing low balustrades along the top of a wall to suggest the presence of a nonexistent roof garden. And “Thus do you conceal what is there,” he says of a garden’s bamboo trees and few rocks set just so to block the further view. The unreal lives in the real, and the real in the unreal.
As your voice lives in mine and mine in yours. As your sister’s red laughter moves through me, though I don’t know if she’s your sister or if her clothes still smell of sun. I don’t know if you’re even alive—
Aosta, J, Feb 7
My Friend,
and cannot XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and cannot and
—the burns
I don’t know how or why she died what caused her death XXX sodium hydnocarpate soft infiltration so many years and we went on and on the two of us just living XXXX discomforts yes fevers lesions sleeplessness yes but why did she die what happened and why do I grow weaker? Infected burns on my right thigh but how did I get them how long have I had them I don’t know XXXXXXXXX bone pain nerve pain XX elbows and knees tender when they bendyXXX peripheral nerves swelling under skin glycerine borax gold salts excision of histology of I still wonder about the Chinese gardens Qi Biaojia wrote, “where it is level I introduce a little unevenness, where it is too diffuse I tighten it. It is like being a good doctor” XXXX and what is a “landscape window” it is said Li Liweng had one installed in his Mustard Seed Garden but I don’t understand I don’t know what it is XXXXXX I remember her white sleeves divided into diamonds by the trellis
She wrote in her notebook “He works in the garden but he must see it’s enclosed, doesn’t he care that it’s enclosed?”
“but even in the most closed system might some freedoms still exist?”
Wrote, “irreducible core”
Wrote, “Very tired today. I don’t want to watch him weeding. I don’t want to see him bending down among those tall red flowers.”
Clerval pushes his translation work to the far side of the table, sits for a long time with the pages of his friend’s still-unread letters. Doesn’t pick them up. Sometimes he rubs them lightly with his fingers.
Soon there’ll be no more letters left unread. I learned to live within that kind of quiet, I know about such things. Then Claire came to me, and Clerval, though never you. Or was it I who went to them? I couldn’t touch them or be touched, couldn’t speak to them or listen to them speak. Even so, a kind of tenderness began. Something within the harshness broke and opened.
Clerval eats his noodles, drinks his tea. Washes his pot, his cup, his bowl. Sits down again and reads about gardens, takes notes on gardens, as if he could send his notes to his friend.
NOTES ON GARDENS
Ji Cheng in his “Yuan Ye” (17th c) The Craft of Gardens, writes that a garden “should make your thoughts travel beyond the confines of this world of dust” (my friend, has your garden done this for you? I picture you planting, weeding, bending)
∼ ∼ ∼
there are no fixed rules for garden design, only the essential principle that such a place must touch one’s deepest being
∼ ∼ ∼
a gateway functions as a surmountable barrier (imagine, my friend, something surmountable, after