When I was little, our family lived in a traditional Chinese courtyard house, a siheyuan. There was a flowerbed in the courtyard and a green grape trellis above it. In summer I often did my holiday homework beneath the vines.
In the courtyard of this inn, the previous owner had clearly put in a great deal of care. Beside the xiangsi tree, he had built a wooden shade pavilion from treated timber. Some unknown green plant with healthy, toothed leaves had once climbed over it. During my first week here, I replaced it with Japanese wisteria. It budded in April and bloomed in May; now the branches were heavy with flowers. From a distance, they looked like a vast, misty blue haze—fragile and beautiful.
The weather was fine today. I moved a small table and a wooden stool beneath the trellis to trace a pattern, in the old-fashioned way described in that famous Lu Xun essay from our middle-school textbook: laying a sheet of thin, translucent paper over a picture book and following the existing lines. A very old game.
Not far away, a little boy of six or seven clattered down the wooden stairs. He was probably one of the inn’s guests. He ran straight toward the small flowerbed in the eastern corner of the courtyard, sunlight stretching his little shadow long and slanting.
I whistled. “Little handsome guy, what are you doing?”
The boy braked with a tap of his feet and turned to look at me. Pointing at the flowerbed, he said, “Mom told me to come down and pick two of those flowers for her.”
I frightened him. “Those are poisonous. Very poisonous. If you get too close and smell them, you’ll get sick. If you pick them, that would be even worse.”
The little boy took a step back. “R-really?”
I looked at him with great seriousness. “Do I look like someone who lies?”
He thought about it, stared unwillingly at the flowers for a while, then clattered back upstairs.
The large pink-blue clusters in the flowerbed were irises, not poisonous plants. But if I had not said so, there would probably have been no way to protect that little garden from the guests. Some people like to keep beauty close at hand. I prefer to let it remain where it is.
I twirled the pencil once between my fingers and bent over the table again. Then a voice sounded behind me. “Since when are irises poisonous?”
Instinctively, I raised a finger to shush him. When I looked up, I saw Ren Fei leaning against the courtyard gate covered in wild roses, arms folded. He wore a white T-shirt like a university student, a faint, enigmatic smile playing on his face.
I froze for about five seconds. “Oh. It’s you.”
“It’s me.” He crossed the short stretch of bluestone path and came to stand before me, bending slightly. Sunlight sifted through the wisteria like mist and mottled his white T-shirt with patches of light, large and small. “What are you doing?” he asked.
The lines of his face seemed deeper than they had six years ago. In his hand was a book: Keigo Higashino’s latest mystery, *The Cuckoo’s Egg*.
“Drawing.” I handed him the picture book. “It’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
He took it and casually flipped through two pages. “Are they all the same thing?” he asked, unsure.
I could not understand how, in this place and at this moment, I could be speaking with him as if we were old friends. Although we had been in the same university class, we had belonged to different circles. Our worlds overlapped only along the narrow line of basketball: he was a forward on the university team; I was the friend of the girlfriend of the point guard. Occasionally, when team gatherings needed more people, they would pull me in as a plus-one guest. In dimly lit karaoke rooms, he would sing love songs in a low, beautiful voice. I usually sat alone in a corner, holding a drink with no alcohol in it.
I suppose he had never noticed me.
He turned to the last page of the picture book and paused there for a long time. Lowering his head, he asked, “It’s a flower, isn’t it? What flower?”
I poured apple black tea from the glass pot. “To be honest, I don’t know either. Would you like some tea?”
The steam carried a delicate green-apple scent. I handed him a cup and continued, “I had a ceramic pen holder I liked very much. I don’t know who gave it to me. The painting on it was probably done by the person who gave it to me. I broke it by accident while moving, so I wanted to paint another one. I finally found a similar pattern in an album, and I thought I’d trace it first for practice.”
He paused. “How do you know the person painted it by hand and gave it to you?”
I took back my tracing from him. “Because I once saw the exact same white porcelain pen holder in a shop, but the clerk told me that series didn’t come with that pattern.” I smiled awkwardly, aware that the answer did not quite connect. “But I have limited talent for drawing. I can never make it look right.”
He said nothing for a long while. Then he reached out, took my pencil, and opened *The Cuckoo’s Egg* to a blank inside page. The pencil touched the white paper and drew its first line. Only then did he seem to remember something. He looked up briefly. “Let me try.”
“Try what?”
He did not answer. He truly began to draw with my 2B pencil, focused and quiet. The scent of green apple had already faded from the tea steam. That summer, too, seemed to be dissolving slowly, like foam. Sunlight stood on tiptoe at the ends of Ren Fei’s hair. His profile, intent and still, looked like the most beautiful sculpture in the Louvre.
This was the boy who had occupied every longing of my university years. After he had become someone else’s husband, one day he stood so near before me. That feeling was not easy to name.
I tried to turn my attention elsewhere, and so I remembered the pen holder.