Chapter Nine
In the End, It Is the Meaning of Samsara (3)
She was thinking about what lay beneath those words, and the more she thought about it, the more she smiled. Not outwardly, but inwardly. Warmth spread over her calves, and sunlight fell just below her knees. It was as though she, too, were melting in the sun.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” He slipped back into his half-serious, half-teasing manner. “Feeling disappointed that you’re missing out on a gift?”
Naturally, he meant the meeting gift she would have received as his younger sister if he had a girlfriend.
“Yes, terribly disappointed,” Zhaozhao said with feigned regret. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be the only one keeping me company. Girls have more to talk about with other girls, after all.”
“I’m sorry you have to put up with that,” he said, playing along with her and expressing his own regret. “Having only me for company.”
They fell silent at the same time. Neither spoke, and neither hung up. The silence did not make things awkward. Instead, as the seconds ticked by, it melted into an indescribable atmosphere that made them reluctant to end the call.
Even though they could see each other downstairs as soon as they hung up.
Zhaozhao had thought he was taking her to see the sights of Macau. It was only after getting into his car that she learned they were going to visit a greenhouse. When they arrived, the car turned into a secluded European-style courtyard. Shen Ce led her around the back and into a glass greenhouse.
The moment Zhaozhao stepped inside, she sensed that this greenhouse must have some connection to the one on the top floor of the little house in Hong Kong.
The greenhouse was arranged like a maze, divided into several sections. Enormous ceramic pots stood on the ground, while mandrakes hung down in clusters, forming natural walls. She tilted her head back and saw strands of leaves dangling from the suspended flowerpots like green chains. She immediately asked, “What are these called?”
“Burro’s tail.”
“You have these in your greenhouse, too. I recognize the asparagus fern, the narcissus, and the peonies, but I don’t know this one.”
“Is that so?” he asked with a smile. “You’ve been to the greenhouse in the little house?”
Zhaozhao murmured an affirmative, feeling a little guilty under his amused gaze.
What was wrong with having visited the greenhouse?
Before she could think any further, she spotted a woman’s back ahead of her. The woman wore a simple long dress, its color almost identical to the blooming mandrakes beside her. She was tending to a crown of thorns when she heard them talking and turned around. Seeing Shen Ce, she smiled. “So you finally decided to come see me.”
The woman was even more surprised to see Zhaozhao standing beside Shen Ce than she was to see him at all. She gave Zhaozhao several more looks, then turned to Shen Ce in astonishment. Her eyes seemed to be asking, Where did this girl come from? How can she be so beautiful?
The woman’s silent approval put Shen Ce in an even better mood. He introduced them. “This is Zhaozhao. This is my mother.”
Zhaozhao stared at him in disbelief.
Of all the things she had imagined, she had never expected him to bring her to meet his mother, Uncle Shen’s ex-wife.
Fortunately, Shen Ce’s mother did not care in the slightest about his father’s remarriage. Instead, she was much more interested in the girl her son had brought to see her for the first time. After asking Zhaozhao about her life and studies, she asked pointedly, “Did you like that pair of dice?”
Zhaozhao paused. “I did.”
Shen Ce’s mother smiled. “Those dice were given to him by his maternal grandfather. My father had only one daughter, and I have only one son. In the future…”
“We came to choose flowers today,” Shen Ce interrupted from where he had been sitting silently. “The greenhouse needs some new ones.”
He could tell Zhaozhao liked that greenhouse. She had mentioned it when she was drunk, and she had mentioned it again when she was sober.
“I’ll help you choose some later and have them sent across the sea.” Shen Ce’s mother could also see that he was doing this for his new little sister.
Zhaozhao sensed that Shen Ce had something he wanted to discuss with his mother, so she took the initiative and went off to play with the pair of white cats wandering mischievously around the greenhouse.
He watched her retreating figure, gazing at it intently for a while. When he finally turned back, he saw a lotus slowly unfurling in a glass teapot. The dried bud was being coaxed open by the water, and as it blossomed, it regained its color.
“This flower tea…”
“I’ll send you some, too.” His mother mercilessly exposed his intentions. He still wanted to give something to this new little sister. “Before she leaves.”
Shen Ce smiled and looked at her again.
A white canopy covered half the greenhouse. Some flowers preferred the shade and could not be left in direct sunlight. Zhaozhao sat in that cool patch with a cat in her arms, her legs crossed beneath the hem of her short skirt.
He seemed to see her as she had been in the past.
The young girl had leaned against a low table, resting her chin on his leg. Beneath her skirt, her bare feet had never deigned to wear socks. Her pale ankles brushed against the floorboards, and wherever he looked, there was white. The courtyard’s lush greenery enveloped the sound of cicadas, their cries stirring up a restlessness that gnawed at him. The teacup in his hand had long been empty, yet he did not move. He did not want to move.
She had questioned him while resting on his leg. Ge, you really have a woman on the north bank of the Yangtze? Have you really fallen under her spell, lost your mind? Ge, she’s from enemy territory. How do you know she isn’t a spy? Ge, you want a woman… And then came one elaborate argument after another. He listened contentedly, far more contentedly than he listened to the cicadas.
He did not know who had spread the rumor so convincingly, but it had one advantage: he could hear her jealousy unfold, one sentence after another. And because it still was not enough, he deliberately led her to the wrong conclusion.
“Now the north bank belongs to me, too. You shouldn’t call her a woman from an enemy country anymore.”
Her face immediately went pale. Anger flared in her eyes. Once she had finished being angry, she left. He had calculated that she would return in less than the time it took half an incense stick to burn. Zhaozhao could not bear to be apart from him. They rarely got to see each other, and she could not stand to be separated from him for even a moment.
This time, though, he supposed he had angered her badly. He waited a full incense stick before she returned, carrying a shaving blade and a warm, damp towel.
The blade pressed against his cheek. Afraid of cutting him, she handled it carefully. Her almond-shaped eyes held nothing but him, nothing in the world but him.
“Ge… Just think about it. A woman from an enemy country. How could you dare let her do this for you? Aren’t you afraid?”
A young girl’s heart could twist and turn a thousand different ways, but no matter how it turned, it always led back to him.
And her lips, opening and closing as she spoke beneath his ear, had touched him long ago. He had simply pretended not to notice.
His Zhaozhao.
…
“Before I turned three,” Shen Ce said, looking at his mother, “what happened?”
Shen Ce’s mother had also been admiring the beauty playing with the cats in one corner of the greenhouse. The question caught her so off guard that she froze for a long moment.
“Before you were three, your father was always by your side. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know very much.”
For a moment, as she met her son’s eyes, she was still afraid. Afraid of seeing again the look in his eyes on that night when he was three.
That year, her son had neither asked nor answered questions, neither listened nor spoken. She held him in her arms and cried every day. Then, one night, she finally received a glance from him. It was as if he found her annoying, as if he were annoyed by a strange woman holding him and crying.
She dared not admit it, but that look had frightened her to the brink of collapse. In the end, she left Shen Ce’s father alone in Jiangnan to care for their only son.
Whenever she recalled it afterward, she was convinced that the gaze belonged to a man who had witnessed life and death, seen countless killings, and steeped himself in a sea of violence. For such a shadow to dwell in the eyes of a three-year-old child, how terrifying it was.
She had been barely in her twenties then, with little experience of life’s rises and falls. She had been utterly incapable of facing a gaze like that.
Even now, well past forty, recalling it still sent a chill creeping over her.
“Is that so?” Shen Ce looked again at the lotus in the teapot.
“Your father said… that the great monk told him you had suffered greatly, endured pains that ordinary people couldn’t bear, and that was why you couldn’t hold on. You were too young back then.”
He did not answer.
“What if you were to return to the past…” His mother wanted to say the words die a horrible death, but she could not bring herself to say them. She swallowed the rest of the sentence, unable to imagine how cruel it would be to experience the pain of dying all over again. “You might not believe any of this. It sounds so absurd and ridiculous… Even I feel foolish saying it aloud.”
She would rather believe it was a hallucination, some kind of chronic mental affliction.
Because Shen Ce’s mother had not been by his side much when he was young, she had always felt guilty toward him. And since he was her only son, that guilt, combined with the bond of blood, made her treasure him above all else. She could not bear to let him suffer the torments of his childhood again.
She asked softly, “Has something been upsetting you? Stay away from it. Stay away from anything that brings back the memories.”
Why should he stay away? How could he possibly avoid it?
He had just lifted one corner of the veil, and all he desperately wanted now was to see what lay beneath it.
“I came because I want you to help me make a will.”
“A will? How old are you? Your father and I are both still alive. What do you need a will for?”
Why?
He was afraid of dying young. He could not feel at ease.
He could not bear the thought of leaving her alone in this place, with no one to rely on. He did not trust human nature, nor did he believe her parents would ever treat her wholeheartedly, without any selfish motives, no matter the circumstances. No one could do that except him.
The conversation between them was interrupted by a cry of pain from Zhaozhao.
Shaking her hand, Zhaozhao tried to negotiate with the larger of the two white cats, smiling as she spoke. “Scratch a little more gently, okay?”
Noticing that the two people in the distance had stopped talking, she gave Shen Ce and his mother an apologetic smile. “Please, carry on. I’m just playing with them.”
Shen Ce left his mother and went over to her, crouching down beside her. The two cats had not been frightened away by Zhaozhao’s cry. Instead, the moment they saw Shen Ce, their fur stood on end. One darted into the corner of a wicker chair, the other behind a flowerpot. Both pairs of blue-yellow eyes stared fixedly at him, spying on him from two different angles.
Shen Ce reached for her hand to check whether the cat had scratched her, but she pulled away.
His mother was right over there…
If he truly wanted to catch her, there was nothing that could escape him, including her. He had managed to catch her effortlessly last night even with his hands behind his back, so how could she possibly evade him now? Zhaozhao had nowhere to dodge. Her hand ended up in his.
“Your mother takes such good care of her flowers,” she said, forcing herself to appear composed and changing the subject. “What’s that one called?”
“Hibiscus.”
“What a lovely name.” For some inexplicable reason, Zhaozhao liked it.
He looked at her.
She explained, “It has that word sang in it. It sounds lovely when you say it.”
The cats passed behind her. They were afraid of him, but they liked her very much.
In the end, the two cats finally worked up the courage to approach her. Their fondness outweighed their fear, and they settled down beside her feet, though neither dared let the tip of its tail brush against Shen Ce.
“Does it?” he asked after a long pause.
“Mm. Say it,” she said, pronouncing sang with a light sound formed at the tip of the tongue. Then she smiled and asked him, “It sounds lovely, doesn’t it?”
He gazed at her. “I’d rather hear you call me gege.”
“…”
“Changed your mind? Don’t want to call me that anymore?”
Under his gaze, her face grew hot. Her thoughts turned this way and that, going around in circles. “You can’t expect me to call you that just because you tell me to. What do I get out of it?”
“What do you get?” He smiled. “The benefit is that I’ll never find you a sister-in-law for the rest of my life.”
Zhaozhao’s face had already been burning, but that remark struck her squarely. For a long moment, she could not say a word. She picked up one of the cats and walked away.
She was genuinely angry.
And she stayed angry all the way back to the Shen family’s parking garage, without saying a single word.
The parking garage here was enormous, almost half the size of an underground car park.
Shen Ce did not turn off the engine. A thin stream of cold air blew against her arm, leaving her chilled.
Zhaozhao unfastened her seat belt and heard him ask, “Getting out already?”
She still ignored him, freeing herself from the restraint on her own. A soft click came from Shen Ce’s side, too, as his seat belt retracted into its slot. It was a very quiet sound, but there was no one else in the underground garage. The silence was so complete that the noise seemed ten times louder.
Zhaozhao thought he was getting out as well, but instead he reached over and placed his hand on her shoulder.
“I took you out to take care of some business. Only now do I have time to sit with you for a while.” His tone had suddenly become sincere.
After saying that, he asked again, “We hardly ever get to be alone together. Do you really want to go upstairs?”
As if they did not see each other every day, she retorted inwardly.
One second passed, then another. Zhaozhao grew puzzled when he did not say anything. She glanced at him, only to find that he had caught her looking. As if responding to her gaze, he leaned toward her.
“Softening up?”
“No.” He had cornered her into speaking.
His upper body blocked the entire view outside the window.
At first, Zhaozhao ignored him. But with the warmth radiating from his hand on her shoulder, she gradually grew uneasy. He had not moved at all. His hand was still resting on her shoulder. She did not even know when her own hand had ended up against his chest. She pushed him away.
“Ge, stop fooling around.”
An engine started somewhere in the parking garage.
Someone was coming.
Her soul nearly left her body. She closed her eyes and listened to her own heartbeat. Blood rushed to her face, turning it scarlet, while the pounding made her eardrums tremble. Headlights swept past. Even with her eyes closed, she could see the light.
The car gradually drove away, restoring the quiet.
As though she had survived a calamity, she slowly raised her eyelids. The light washed away the darkness.
Shen Ce seemed to have been waiting for her. Only when she opened her eyes did he move closer. Zhaozhao shrank back, but the seat was behind her head, leaving her nowhere to go. This attempt to evade him was almost entirely futile.
She had never been this close to a man before. Her whole body had gone numb, and in this dangerous place, where they could be seen at any moment, the nervous excitement was all the more intense.
“Ge…” She was genuinely panicking now. Her heartbeat was so violent that the scene before her eyes seemed to sway.
He stopped.
“You don’t want me to?”
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