The following week, I resigned and moved to the little inn I had taken over before the New Year in City X. My mother had already put it in good order. My father had torn down the low brick wall the former owner had built around the courtyard and replaced it with two rows of fencing made from Russian Scots pine. Pink wild roses climbed all over the rails, glittering in the sun.
I had thought that by twenty-seven I had lost all sensitivity to beauty and art. Yet in that instant, I unexpectedly remembered the fairy tales I had read as a child—the little house deep in the forest.
Ren Fei getting married and my resignation had no real connection. I had been planning the inn for three years. Asking after him was probably only… a sudden impulse. I cannot deny that for six years I had kept him carefully somewhere in my heart. But perhaps time had washed that memory clean, inch by inch. After two thousand days and nights, what remained of him was no longer the real person, but a symbol, a private totem I had made for myself.
What had Ren Fei become?
In the courtyard of the inn stood a xiangsi tree planted by the previous owner—a love tree whose very name in Chinese carries the idea of longing. Its trunk was straight and graceful, its foliage deep and lush, with an elegance that reminded me of him in university. And now? What was he like now? Sometimes I could not help wondering.
When I was little, I once got lost chasing a butterfly. At an unfamiliar crossroads, I wiped my eyes and cried at the top of my lungs. From then on, a butterfly-shaped shadow was branded into my childhood. I cannot say whether that experience was good or bad. I only know that I thought of it often. I was not sure whether Ren Fei, in my private definition, had become something like that butterfly too.
Across the Atlantic, in the middle of the night, Xiao An worried at me over the phone. “Qin Ran, pining for a married man is wrong. A crime. A serious crime.”
Yawning, I toyed with the new pot of mimosa by my window. “Thinking about it won’t get me pregnant. I’m delighted to hear you’ve recently converted to Catholicism, but has the Almighty Lord given you any basic reproductive health lessons?”
She mumbled, “Not exactly.”
I did not argue. This was not pining; it was memory. Pining belongs to the future; memory belongs to the past. But there was no need to explain that to Xiao An. Later we began discussing her seventh boyfriend. An open world, an open America, an open Xiao An. When she was little, she wore two horn-shaped pigtails, and if a boy accidentally brushed her hand, she would cry until the sky seemed to fall. She would run over and ask me, “Ranran, am I going to get pregnant?”
To be honest, at that age I did not know whether holding hands could make someone pregnant either. I answered irrelevantly, “If it’s a boy, I want to be his godmother.”
Then she cried even harder.
The inn had already built up a stable base of guests under its previous owner, so it ran without much strain. A few days earlier, a group of students from the Academy of Fine Arts had come to sketch and were staying with us. My mother liked them very much. Every morning she rose early to make breakfast, setting an old-fashioned round table in the flower-filled courtyard and inviting the early risers to eat together. I guessed she had begun to miss the days when she made my breakfast and hurried me off to school with my bag on my back.
From time to time, scattered laughter drifted up from the courtyard and floated into my dreams. Yes—when they were having breakfast, I was usually still asleep. Each morning, when the sun had moved to the middle of my quilt, I would rub my eyes awake and look through the open window at the white clouds resting in the far sky. After a quick wash, I would step onto the bluestone slabs, worn smooth as jade by generations of tourists’ shoes, and drift to the old street next door to buy an egg pancake for breakfast.
Those art students devoured my mother’s breakfasts every day. They did not even leave the pickles.
My mother did not believe I would spend the rest of my life in this ancient city. She thought I had merely grown tired of the cutthroat chaos of office life and fled here for a while. Her proof was that we had signed the inn’s lease for only five years. She often joked, “If you’re going to waste the best years of your youth here, I may as well choose a eligible boyfriend for you from among the guests.”
My parents had finally begun to worry about my marriage. I was twenty-seven, but I did not think that was old enough to make marriage necessary.
My father made a trip back to our hometown and brought me some books I had loved in middle school, along with a few little odds and ends. Leafing through them in idle moments, I even found several Ultraman (a classic Japanese superhero) paper cuttings. I discovered that my taste as a child had been truly mysterious.
Time, once gone, never returns. Only the sky above this ancient city remained, blessed day after day by ancient sunlight and moonlight, at ease in its own long leisure.