The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [9]
Sit down, he says, drink some tea. With you in a minute.
Her first name is unpronounceable to him: the nearest he can get is jir, no matter how hard he tries. So he calls her Xiao Ma, with a rising tone: Little Horse. His private joke. She is a full head taller than he is; when she comes near he feels himself speaking to her shoulder. Long hair, unbraided, that moves the air around her when she turns. Blue eyes, so she says. A smell of lavender enters the shop with her and lingers for hours after she leaves.
Her skirt rustles as she crosses in front of the doorway.
I’m sorry I’m late.
Yes. I watch the clock for you.
She giggles, like a girl, and he hears the pages of the newspaper crackling as she opens it.
He doesn’t remember how long she’s been coming to the shop, having lost the habit of counting months and days. Since the previous summer, perhaps. Twice a week she sits in a chair to the side of the room, reading aloud to him while he gives massages and touches pressure points. The old women are respectfully silent, uncomprehending; even when she reads from the Chinese newspapers, her Beijing accent is impossible for them to follow. He prefers the gaps and slurs of her English, her flat, nasal way of making even familiar words strange. The name of her home place is a ka la hou ma, Oklahoma; he savors the sound, like the taste of a strange fruit.
He has forgotten how she found him, whether it was through Community Chest or Services for the Blind, but it hardly matters. Nor does he care what she chooses to read: about China, anything happening in China—a fire in an oil refinery in Liaoning, a chess competition won by twins in Wuhan. She is a little bit obsessed, he thinks, even for a yanjiu sheng, a graduate student. But the important thing is that she comes like clockwork, like a wake-up call.
Today it is an article about village elections in Shandong province, long and full of difficult English words. He waits, half-listening, for a gap—a page turning, a sip of water—and changes the subject.
How your research is going?
Almost finished, she says. Soon I begin writing the first chapter.
I think you work too hard. Take rest before writing.
She closes the newspaper; the breeze fans his face.
I’ve had all the time in the world.
American, he thinks; you hear it in the way her voice squeaks, as if a demon were trying to leap out. Impatient. Get on with it, Americans always say. She lived three years in Chengdu, teaching English at a shoe factory, and it didn’t change her a bit.
So what do you think, Mr. Chen? Will the village system work?
He smiles; this is the way she always is. You ask the wrong person, he says. How can I know about these things?
I follow the old saying: Lao tou duo jing yan. The old have more experience.
He laughs. Old or young doesn’t matter. Politics I not understand. You ask anyone and get better answer.
Mr. Chen, she says, you know you are a remarkable person.
I am not special, he says. Hong Kong blind people library only have English books, English records. So I learn English. There are many old ones like me. Before library hire Chinese people make recordings.
But you’re the only one I know, she says. To me you are special. So I ask your opinion.
He frowns, bunching his eyebrows together. Sometimes he doesn’t know what she’s getting at. Drink more tea, he says. This is special kind from Yunnan. Good for digestion.
The newspaper rustles again. Let’s see what else is going on, she says. A long moment passes; he asks Mrs. Sze to lie on her side, and puts a fresh towel over her shoulder and neck. Under the cloth her skin stretches like a loose-fitting shirt.
The shop door slams; a rough old woman’s voice calls out to Lao Jiang in a thick Hangzhou dialect. Outside in the street, a lorry’s brakes squeal, and ten horns sound at once: as if someone has smashed both fists down on a keyboard.
All day long his father paces up and down the walkway outside their compartment, or stands at an open window, smoking cigarette after cigarette. From someone he has bought