The Library, Second Visit
He went to the library on the next Saturday.
He did not pretend to himself that he was going for a document. He had documents enough at the office, and he had — as of two days ago — been granted access to the cadre reading room on the third floor of the Municipal Government building, where most of what he needed for his current work could be found without crossing the city.
He was going because he was going.
He left the boarding house at one in the afternoon. He took the long way again, along the river. The November air was cold but bright; the gingko leaves along the embankment were almost all down, and the bare branches of the willows hung above the water in long pale fingers. A man was fishing from the far bank with a long bamboo pole. Two old women were walking together on the path with their hands behind their backs, talking about — Lin caught a fragment as they passed — a daughter-in-law who had said something at last week's family dinner that one of them was clearly still composing a response to.
He smiled, slightly, as he walked past them.
He arrived at the library at one-forty.
He climbed to the third floor.
He went to the periodical room.
She was at the desk.
She looked up as he came in. The small slow change of her face — from the calm of reading to the alertness of recognition — was, he had decided to admit to himself somewhere on the river path, the thing he had walked thirty minutes for.
"Mr. Lin."
"Miss Su."
A small pause.
"You returned the document," she said. "Last week. Tuesday. I noticed."
"Yes. I had finished with it."
"Did the analysis go well?"
"It went well."
"Good."
She did not say anything more. She did not need to. He understood that the silence, in a library, was not absence; the silence was its own form of conversation, and if one learned to use it correctly, one could say a great deal in it.
He stood at the desk for a moment.
"Miss Su," he said.
"Yes."
"I would like to find something else, today. But it is not — not exactly a document."
She set down the small pen she had been holding. She tilted her head, very slightly. There was no smile on her face, but her eyes had gone fractionally warmer.
"Tell me what you would like to find."
"I would like to find — anything by Du Fu. The middle period, between 759 and 765, when he was wandering. A volume with good annotations. I had a copy at university and I have not been able to find one in Qingyuan. I have looked in two bookshops."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Why the middle period?"
"It is the period of the wandering poems. After he left the capital. When he was an old man on the road, with no position, no patron, only his family and his small bowl of rice and the road in front of him. When he wrote about a sparrow on a branch with the same care he had once written about emperors."
"Yes."
"I have been thinking about those poems lately."
"Why?"
He looked at her.
"Because I have been in Qingyuan for two months, Miss Su, and most of what I read these days is policy briefs, and policy briefs are written in the prose of men who believe they know what is important. I would like, today, to read a poem written by a man who had stopped believing that, and was therefore for the first time in his life able to see things clearly."
She held his eyes.
After a moment she stood. She came around the desk.
"Come."
She led him not to the periodical room but down a different short corridor, into a smaller reading room on the same floor that he had not seen before. The room was narrow, with three reading tables, one window looking out onto the back courtyard, and two walls of bookshelves. The shelves held — he saw as soon as he was inside — no policy documents. They held literature. Poetry. Philosophy. Old editions of *Records of the Grand Historian.* A run of *Dream of the Red Chamber* in three different annotated editions. A small wooden case of thread-bound books that, by their look, were perhaps a hundred years old and had been donated to the library by some private collection.
"This room," she said quietly, "is the literature reference room. Almost no one comes here. Most of our patrons come for current periodicals and the historical documents in the back stack."
"Mm."
She walked along the second shelf. She crouched. She drew out a single volume — a thin hardcover with a faded cloth binding the color of dried persimmon.
She straightened. She held it out to him.
"Du Fu," she said. "Annotated edition by Qiu Zhao'ao. Originally published in 1693. This is a 1979 reprint, but the annotations are the original ones. It is, in the opinion of my father, the best edition. He would not let me take the family copy when I came to Qingyuan. So I bought one for myself, six years ago, and donated my old one to this library."
He took the book.
He opened it.
The pages had been read. There were, in pencil, in a small careful hand, the kind of marginal notes a young woman might have made — six years ago, when she had been seventeen — beside some of the poems. The notes were brief, mostly translations of difficult characters into more colloquial ones. There was, beside the second poem of the Qinzhou period, a short pencil comment in the margin: *春望第四句 — 与父讨论, 不同意.* *Spring View, fourth line — discussed with father, did not agree.*
He looked up.
Su Wanyin was watching him read the marginal notes. Her face had gone, very slightly, the color of the persimmon binding.
"Forgive me," she said. "I should have erased those before I donated it. It was — careless."
"No."
"I will erase them now. If you would give me the book back."
"No."
She paused.
"No?" she said, more carefully.
"Miss Su. I cannot read this book without the annotations. The annotations are the reason I asked for an annotated edition. If your annotations are also in it, that does not make it worse. It makes it better."
She looked at him.
"Mr. Lin," she said quietly.
"Yes."
"You are a very polite man."
"I am trying to be," he said.
She held his gaze for a moment longer. Then she turned, walked to one of the reading tables — the one nearest the window — pulled out a chair, and gestured.
"Sit. Read. You can stay as long as you like. The library closes at five-thirty."
"Thank you."
She returned to the shelf. She put one book back that had been out of place. She walked to the door. She paused there.
"Mr. Lin."
"Yes."
"Which line, in *Spring View,* did I disagree with my father about? When I was seventeen?"
He looked down at the page. He read the fourth line.
*感时花溅泪。*
*Stirred by the times, the flowers shed tears.*
He looked up.
"I would guess," he said, "that your father read it as the speaker projecting his sorrow onto the flowers — that the flowers seem to weep because the speaker himself is weeping. The standard reading."
"Yes."
"And you would have argued, at seventeen, that it could also be read the other way. That the flowers themselves, in a time of war and ruin, *do* in fact weep — that nature itself participates in the suffering, and the speaker is only acknowledging what the flowers know. A more — a more animist reading, less psychological."
She did not speak.
"And your father," he said, "would have told you that this was a sentimental reading, suitable for a young woman, but that the standard reading was the correct one for a serious student of poetry."
A small pause.
"And you would have said nothing further at the time. But you wrote *did not agree* in the margin, in pencil, that night, when he was not looking."
She was silent for a long moment. Her hand was resting, very lightly, on the door frame.
"Mr. Lin. How did you know?"
"I did not know," he said. "I guessed."
"From what?"
"From the way you read the line."
"How did I read the line?"
"You read it," he said carefully, "as someone who had memorized the flowers, but had also memorized the disagreement. Both of them at the same time."
There was a silence. The light from the window had moved a few inches across the floor while they had been speaking. Somewhere down the corridor, a phone was ringing in the front office, and no one was answering it.
She nodded, once.
"Read your poems, Mr. Lin."
"I will."
She went out.
He sat at the table. He opened the book.
He read for two and a half hours, slowly, carefully, taking no notes. He read the poems of the Qinzhou period — Du Fu in 759, fleeing west with his family, broke and stripped of his minor official position, sleeping in temple courtyards and writing on whatever paper he could find. He read the Tonggu poems of the same period, the small reflective ones written in a small mountain village where the poet had stayed for a single autumn. He read, slowly, the poems of the Chengdu years that followed, when Du Fu had built a thatched cottage by a river and had — finally, briefly, in his old age — known something almost like peace.
He read the poem *The South Wind Rises.* He read the poem *Visiting the Daoist Hermit on Tianzhu Mountain.* He read the poem *Drinking with My Old Friend Hu* and noticed, in the margin, a small pencil mark beside a single line: *白发垂双肩 — translated as 'white hair fell to both my shoulders' but could be 'white hair lies on both my shoulders' — closer to original sense.* He smiled, very slightly, at the small marginal correction made by a girl of seventeen.
At a quarter to five, he closed the book.
He sat for a moment in the cold western light.
He understood — not as a piece of information he could have written in a notebook, but as a quieter thing, deeper and harder to articulate — that he had not, in any of the eight weeks since he had stepped off the train in Qingyuan, been entirely *himself* until the past two and a half hours.
Not in his small office. Not at the banquet. Not at the noodle lunch with Zhang Xiaodong. Not even, fully, in the boarding house when he wrote his characters on newsprint at night, because the characters too were a kind of preparation. The boy who had stood across the street from the Municipal Government building on his first morning had not been quite Lin Zhaoxu. He had been Lin Zhaoxu's *suit* — a careful thing the man had put on in order to walk into the building.
For two and a half hours in the literature reference room, he had taken the suit off.
He stood. He returned the book carefully to the shelf — second row, between the two volumes that flanked it. He smoothed the table where he had been sitting. He pushed the chair in.
He went out into the corridor.
He did not pass through the periodical room on his way out. He took the back staircase down. He did not, this time, allow himself the small rationalization that this was a coincidence. He took the back staircase because if he passed through the periodical room he would speak to her again, and he understood — because the boy in the ironed blue shirt who had stood across the street had taught him this, by surviving five weeks, by writing the new map, by feeding three pieces of harmless information to Zhang Xiaodong — that there were certain conversations that should not be had two in a row.
The first conversation had told her, more than he had intended, who he was.
The second conversation, if he had it now, would tell her — because he was tired and content and would not be careful enough — too much about what he was beginning to feel.
He took the back staircase.
He walked out into the courtyard.
The gingko leaves on the steps had been swept that morning into a small neat pile by the gate. The pile had not yet been collected. He walked past it.
He walked the long way home along the river.
The water was very still. It was not yet dusk; the sun was just beginning to drop toward the western buildings. There was no wind. The fisherman from earlier had gone. The two old women had also gone.
He thought about the line.
He thought about a flower weeping.
He thought, halfway home, that he had not, in two months, written his sister. He took out his phone as he walked. He composed a short message.
*Xiao Wan. I read poetry today. I had forgotten how. I will write more soon. Don't tell Ma. — Gege.*
He sent it.
He kept walking.
Halfway across the bridge, his phone vibrated.
*Gege! Of course I won't tell Ma. I will tell her you have a girlfriend now. She will be much more excited. Don't deny it. I can read between the lines. — Wan.*
He stood on the bridge for a long moment, looking at the message.
He did not write back.
He smiled. It was a small smile, alone on the bridge, at no one in particular. The water moved slowly beneath him. The light in the west was just beginning to turn gold.
He put the phone away.
He walked home.
---