An Inexperienced World

Translated from the Chinese by Eric Abrahamsen

The screen prints red characters, the train is late. The woman retreats to a distant corner, pillar at her back, holding herself apart from the press of higher-order animals, sniffing the mingled scents of male and female, and thinks shapeless thoughts of humans and things. It is Saturday, March 17th, and it is drizzling. The woman generally enjoys the weeping lament of the city, it brings a kind of grace into her bones, such a welcome release from the so-called writer with her feigned cool, her speculations about the world and its people.

The train persists in being late. What does heaven have in store for her? The woman fingers her fruitless conjectures until they are as crumpled and distorted as the train ticket in her palm. Bored, she st­udies the ticket’s creases and wrinkles, thinks of past loves she has crushed through her lack of patience. The wasp of experience darts at her, stings her heart and it swells; soon experience allows her to ex­tricate herself with ease, and recover her reason. Experience hops onto her lap like a small furry creature, warming her hands. Once again she is the ‘writer’; she swiftly eliminates the swelling of her heart. She peers at the males and females embracing within the crowd; blinks at the shoulder-bags of small-time businessmen; squints at men in suits, corpulent and crab-walking; stares at the rings thick as armour on the fingers of frizzy-headed young artists…The woman secretly seizes upon these details and what they reveal. A male in a white tracksuit passes before her eyes, a crane among a flock of geese; she wonders whom he has pressed into his arms in secret.

Luggageless, she finds her place, glances at the empty seats opposite her, counts the raindrops on the window, returns to her identity as ‘woman’, is dragged into an eddy of old sorrows. Other passengers straggle onto the train, plant themselves like saplings in their seats, each leafs forth a mood. A round-faced girl sits next to her. The woman has occupied the girl’s window seat but the girl doesn’t mind. The woman has nothing to say to her.

A woman like this, well past thirty and possessed of a certain experience of life, has long since surrendered the field of love. She conceals no quivering creature in her breast, has ceased feeding old flames. Life’s moment of glory has faded like the sun over the plains, and dusk has fallen. She has no desire to linger over the history of her loves, though it would be untrue, naturally, to say that all the old wounds were healed. She still feels occasional yearnings but they are insubstantial, and quickly pass. It would be vain to encourage real hope; dalliance with a young man in his prime would be impossible without extraordinary mutual attraction.

The protagonist of the woman’s story takes the stage abruptly, catching her off-guard. The woman cannot describe the details of his appearance; his simple body has blocked the wellspring of her words. There is a period of emptiness and silence. He and his companion sit down across from her. Her vocabulary has already begun to recover; strangely, it is her seasoned heart that has received the heavier blow. Heart-stung and agitated, the woman notes that she has neglected to make herself up before embarking on this journey; she thinks of the days of travel and the weariness which must have taxed her looks, and grows even more flustered. She lowers her head, combs her hair with her fingers, it insists on tangling, she must go to work on it. Damned experience withholds rationality from her, denies her its impregnable calm, brings only mortification. Her face burns hot at her own thoughts and actions.

The woman tidies herself, raises her head. There are two new bottles on the table, one pale blue, one bright orange. Gatorade, a product of the Pepsi-Cola company; the price sticker on the cap reads six yuan. The fingers of the drink’s owner play nimbly on a cell phone. They are young, after all, and heedless of the woman’s furtive coquetry. The one in the white tracksuit, across from the round-faced girl, is the young crane from the waiting room. The woman faces a youth in a blue tracksuit; they are separated by his half-bottle of orange beverage. The sun breaks through the drizzle and gives off dazzling rays. No one speaks, a thread of restraint runs through the atmosphere. The train is full of empty seats but they chose to sit here, and juggle feet and knees. She puts this down to the allure of the mature woman – a common error for a woman of a certain age, who mistakes the promptings of plain vanity for calm judgement. A secret within her is revived by a chance look from the white-clad youth – his gaze ignites a withered wick, and the walls of the woman’s dark lonely chamber are illuminated. A girl re-enters the woman’s body; her blood bashfully reverses its flow.

The woman attempts to describe his appearance, but finds language drab and dull. There is this about a woman of experience: she desires to attract attention, but is also wary of appearing frivolous. Feeling this constant friction, the anxiety of the display, she knows that wasting words on the youth’s external appearance is beside the point. The woman represents the world of experience, and how can that world comport itself before a world that lacks experience? He is no more than three feet distant from the woman; the boys look at each others’ cell phones, chuckling easily. His jacket is only halfway zipped up, ex­posing a V-shaped expanse of flesh and a large ring threaded on a rough silver chain, lying between two ridges of muscle. That exposed chest gives a sensation of strength, it draws her and fascinates her. He has perfect masculine fingers, both strong and soft, clean close-cut nails, fine wrinkles on the knuckles. They move nimbly over the Nokia’s colour screen, evoking bursts of music.

The woman lives alone. She has long been sexless. When lustful dreams trouble her, reminding her she has a body, she reaches her legs to the other side of the bed, and lurches onto the cold emptiness. The bed seems wider than the world, her heart empty as the heavens, no boundaries in sight and no one to hear her plaint. Before others she is exaggeratedly happy, covering over the cold wounds of those dreams, laughing easily, not the kind of woman people pity. The title and identity of ‘writer’ is draped on her like a tiger’s skin, terrifying the herbivores; even the carnivores dare only watch from a distance. The woman licks her paws to pass the time. If she were licking them as a prelude to snaring her prey the scene might bear a thrill, but it clearly indicates only regret and bitterness over the waste of such rich physical resources. This is the consequence of experience. Experience has taught the woman to see at a glance how this or that meat would yield to the tooth; to gauge weight and height from the beast’s posture in flight; to accurately judge age by the sound of its cry; to know by its scent the purity or pollution of its soul. Experience has left the woman cold; experience has made her supremely discriminating.

Now the lioness faces a prey the scent of which captivates her, brings saliva to her mouth. Yet she feels only a deep sorrow at her own abrupt loss of savagery, her powerlessness to pursue. His masculinity is on such immoderate display; he must be familiar with the desires of the opposite sex. In his world of inexperience there must be many young females as inexperienced as he, and perhaps his interests extend no further than them? Could he understand the woman’s desires? Would he open himself to them? How can the woman enter his world? Her imaginings grow nimble as his fingers. Faced with experienced males, the woman’s own experience lends her confidence and ease, but now it is a source of shame. Wind brings flowers to earth, leaves green the treetops. The woman cannot help linking the thought of fallen leaves with fallen women.

The journey is only two hours long. The rhythm of the wheels urges the woman to make haste. The girlish woman. The di­ssolute woman. The struggling woman. The north wind extinguishes ima­gination and the woman is left chagrined. She cannot be as innocent or naïve as a girl – even the loveliest of hens cannot flutter or dance like a butterfly – nor can she be full of love and tenderness like his young mother: the woman’s motives are not pure. How must she seem to him now? He may think of her as an old woman and nothing more. The old woman must rely on experience to feel her way forward, and to avoid humiliation.

After the train has been moving for ten minutes the woman, so recently rocked by vast and tumultuous emotion, once again transforms into a ‘writer’. The outsider’s role creates a sense of disgust, filling the woman with self-loathing and shame just as she plans to strike up a conversation.

You’re students? she asks them. This is clumsy; her experience is entirely sufficient to judge their identity accurately. But she is s­atisfied with the impression of inexperience that this clumsiness creates; it brings her closer to his world, invites his answer, and the manner of his answer will be a signpost to his thoughts.

They turn to look at her together, the faint surprise on their faces swiftly overtaken by bashfulness at being addressed by an unfamiliar woman. She thinks suddenly of a time five years ago, when she met an aviation-school student in the soft-sleeper compartment of a train; their mutual attraction. She was less experienced then and there was no confluence of the sexes, they only chatted together happily in their facing bunks, thought tentatively of something more, dared make no move. Experience muddies us, dirties us, like the woman at this moment – her complex desire springs forth like a clear brook, while another facet of her character restrains her. When experience is the measure of worth, how many still recognise the charm of inexperience?

We’re athletes. He hurries to speak first. He seems proud. The other smiles and continues to play with his cell phone. Hearing the sound of his voice, the woman surrenders a corner of her soul. They are athletes. There’s nothing surprising about that. Everything about their appearance points unerringly to this fact. They add: We are pr­ofessional athletes. Her heart continues its agitations, and she flirts coyly – she feels her present identity begin to blur and slip.

Professional athletes? Do you play basketball? she asks. The woman knows nothing about sport, and faced with professional athletes she is happy to display her female lack of experience. Experience tells her to be solicitous of his masculine confidence, then steadily to break him down.

No, we’re not tall enough. This is his answer. The woman asks him how tall he is. He answers 1.89 metres. Watching him as he says this – ‘1.89 metres’ – another patch of the woman’s soul is lost. Saying he’s hot, he takes off his jacket, his sleeves sliding over his joints and revealing most of his arms. Her heart is scalded, rising several degrees in temperature. The woman is loath to describe the youth’s eyes, his nose, the flavor of his smile, whether or not his teeth are clean and straight. She forces down the experience that threatens to burst her, feigns a quiet innocence. Her gaze does not linger on the physicality of his body; she only laughs and says 1.89 metres, that’s tall! Maybe you can’t compare to a giant like Yao Ming, but isn’t there a basketball star who’s only 1.68? Playing ball is all about technique. The ambiguity of the word ‘technique’ lights a carnal warmth within her; she cannot help cursing her crude habits of thought and association, the legacy of middle-aged lecherous men. She’s become nothing but a puff of stench released into the dawn air – though this touch of corruption is in­visible to him the woman is still mortified. She strives to match her tone of voice and speaking style to his, all the while mocking herself for a made-up old floozy; a hormone-addled tart.

Actually that’s not the reason. Sports like basketball or football or ping-pong are all so popular, it’s hard to make a name for yourself. We play a less common game. As he speaks he glances at the woman, and there is a pause. A sudden coolness sweeps her face. He does not loathe her. Still she cannot bear to describe his beauty – forgive her her greed, she will not share. He has lobbed the ball into her court: What uncommon game? Hockey? She racks her brains for an un­familiar sport. No, handball, he answers. She makes a noise of interest. Do you know handball? he asks: he will not let her off the hook, and his ex­pression, his tone of voice, give the woman a moment of vertigo. She shakes her head frankly, not wanting him to look away, not wanting him to stop talking for an instant.

Handball was invented in Europe in 1920, about the time basketball appeared in the US, and now it’s played around the world. It’s like basketball; it’s basically a mixture of basketball and football. Some of the rules were just taken straight from basketball. The ball is smaller and easier to control, and it’s easier to exert strength on it. The round-faced girl, silent until now, suddenly offers this apparently professional explanation, disturbing the woman’s fantasies. She is obliged to turn her head towards the girl and regard her with polite interest.

The woman is impatient with the girl’s entrance into the con­versation. She will now claim a share of him, particularly since she is closer to his own age. The woman wants to end the topic of h­andball, but her hands are tied by courtesy and she can only continue to raise questions. If she’s lucky enough to stump the girl, she’ll be bound to shut up. Who would have guessed the girl could know so much – handball had its first Olympic outing in 1936, when the com­petitions were held on an open-air football green; it wasn’t until Munich, in 1973, that they were officially conducted indoors; women’s handball was formally introduced in 1976, and on, and on…The facts are orderly, and without end. The woman is taken aback, unable to deny her admiration for the girl’s knowledge. She praises her, then turns despondently to look out the window.

Outside is ink black. Night has come on, unobserved, and the window has become a mirror. From her angle the woman can see both him and herself. How exceptional must his parents be, to have raised such a one as him. How might the woman leave behind blind muddled experience, and join his world of inexperience? How will she step back through that distant door and regain an earlier, simpler age? She would give anything to be able to connect to the boy in the mirror. The dim light vanishes on his face. She feels that he is entering her marrow, powerfully, engraving himself on the remnants of her soul. How or why this should happen, all the woman’s experience is powerless to explain, or to resist.

Uh, the Munich Games, when handball was moved indoors, should have been in 1972, he says, rubbing the callouses on his palms. The round-faced girl laughs lightly, not in the least embarrassed, and the atmosphere lightens slightly. The woman asks him directly how handball is played. He answers, there are seven players to a team, and the hands are used for passing, catching and blocking the ball, as well as scoring – the ball can reach speeds of 100 kilometres per hour. The games are fast-paced, split into two halves of thirty minutes each, with a ten-minute halftime. The highest-scoring team wins.

The woman nods. Recently she has been watching Huang Jianxiang’s daily sports meets, and is developing an interest in games. Though she’s never seen handball, her experience provides an appropriate rejoinder: it sounds as though handball requires excellent teamwork in addition to physical strength and technique. What are the rules of the game? Can you walk with the ball?

He drops his hands, looks at her, says: It goes like this. When the match starts one player stands with one foot on the half-court mark, and passes the ball to the players behind him – the receiver should be at least three metres back. The offensive players have to find a way to get the ball past the goalkeeper and into a three-by-two-meter goal. But apart from the goalkeeper, no one’s allowed within the goal zone. Players can pass and receive with any part of their body except their legs and feet. The ball can stay in your hand at most three seconds before you have to pass, bounce or shoot. You can only take three steps once you’ve got the ball. If you bounce the ball, you can take another three steps. Three metres is also the minimum distance for shooting the ball. Intercepting players can use any part of their body to block other players, but they can’t grab or slap the ball out of another player’s hands.

It all comes down to speed. So how do you compare to your teammates? The woman cares nothing for the rules, she has been devoured by the way he looks as he talks, she has become shards and splinters. Yet she appears calm. I don’t like practice, it’s so tiring. He shakes his head. He looks just like a child, one who’s fed up with p­ractising. The woman feels a stab of sympathy, of trepidation. She asks, did you choose handball yourself? He answers, no, the coach picked me. She asks, what about your humanities studies? He answers, we have some make-up classes every week. She asks, where are you from, Hebei? He says, right, Hebei.

It can be solemnly sworn that at this moment the woman’s heart was pure; she had abandoned physical lust. Motherly nature had k­nitted together the shards and splinters into a great green tree that might shelter him from the elements. She asks him, you went all by yourself to the south, did you ever cry? He laughs, no…well, once. My mum saw me off, and when she turned to go my nose prickled a little. So how about you? Where are you from? The woman answers, Hunan.

Really? Where in Hunan? The round-faced girl suddenly springs back to life, grasping at this straw and swimming back over. She shows a surprise that bespeaks a lack of experience, an expression she must believe fetching, clearly for the benefit of the two boys opposite – she can’t fool the woman of experience. The woman’s face turns to the girl, her thoughts on the boy, and politely responds, Yiyang. The round-faced girl says she’s from Hengyang, and it’s the first time she’s left home. The woman reminds her that, when away from home, she must ‘be careful of your purse’. The two boys both laugh, and he repeats, ‘be careful of your purse’. The woman doesn’t know what’s so funny, scolds him, immediately realises that she’s being petty, and blushes. Perhaps he has noted something, his guileful gaze easily claims another portion of her soul. Now she is the inexperienced one; she cannot gauge him; he seems to have the surety of a young man, but the innocence of c­hildhood. How much does he actually know of the game of the sexes?

The round-faced girl natters on about leaving home; she hears only noise. At last the girl shuts up, but her conversation with him cannot be recovered. He retreats into his world, sends text messages. The distance between them draws out beyond measure. Sorrow seeps from the cracks in experience. Would he be willing to cross b­oundaries? How can she convey to him the tremors that shake her? While she frets, beside herself, he plays music from his phone, its screen flashing where it lies on the table. A completely unfamiliar song. The woman asks him who is singing, he answers, Zhou Jielun! His tone has changed, he enunciates clearly. The woman says, Oh I thought so, I used to really like Zhou Jielun’s ‘Broken East Wind’.

At the time Zhou Jielun’s ‘Broken East Wind’ was popular, the woman was painfully involved with a married man. That was one entry in the ledger of experience, though the name and occupation of the depositor is of no importance now. Thinking of that middle-aged male while facing this youth, she feels sullied. His mouth and eyes as he says ‘Zhou Jielun!’…The woman has a gift for accurately rendering all manner of things into words, but he alone she cannot describe, still she is beside herself, her heart and head swollen. She feels that she is made of clay, while he is water – even impure thoughts might taint his clarity.

She suffers silence. The train moves swift and heartless. He has divined nothing about the woman’s interest; she scorns herself. Her impure desires, her motherly instincts, her fluttering anxiety and her seductive forays are simply the antics of a clown. Experience has educated the woman’s emotions but it has also dismantled her youth, leaving her breached and riddled, varnished with a mixture of self-respect and self-contempt, irreparably debased.

The woman perceives, with what soul remains to her, the message of regal authority conveyed by the brilliance of his flesh. She is a straggling weed outside his glorious castle, with no hope of ever entering its gate. Her will slackens, she bows to defeat. The old female tiger renounces greed for the prey, grows sluggish, lowers her head and resumes her old occupation of licking her paws. Sorrow yellows the plains in an instant, dry sticks scraping, fallen leaves rustling.

When the other youth, who’s hardly spoken, gets up to use the toilet, the first moves into the seat directly across from her, and the woman’s tidy ranks break and run. She lowers her head, aware of every exposed part of his body, glittering like the silver chain around his neck, and giving off a scent of nature. Everything that comes from his body bears a mortifying sweetness. She breathes shallowly, afraid of being scorched by its blaze. The space becomes cramped, suffocating; her heart seeps a green-apple tartness that flows through her veins to her fingertips. You nameless youth, why have you sat in front of me, in such close quarters, your arms on the table, your short hair so near to hand? Her trembling hands struggle like chained dogs beneath the table.

They are playing with Zippo lighters. He swipes the lighter across his hand and a spark flashes out.

Do you smoke? Experience tells her he is trying to attract her attention. He strikes the dead wick to life, casting a circle of orange light.

We’re men, of course we smoke! He answers immediately, as if he’d been waiting for the question.

The woman smiles to herself as he says ‘men’. You were born in the nineties, right? Already smoking at your age… 

No, I was born in 1988, he was born 1989. His expression haughty.

Good lord, 1988! Their ages aren’t far from what she’d guessed, but she can’t suppress a jolt of surprise. She refuses to describe his smile, as if this were some crude romance: luxurious adjectives would only detract from his glory. She grows dizzier as he comes closer, and her heart thumps. Life may hold no greater sweetness than this. Once again she is pulled into his whirlpool and her defeated, dispirited heart springs to new life: she will continue her…one could almost call it seduction.

The youth in blue claims he’s lying; the two bicker briefly, innocently.

They are enjoying themselves, putting on a bit of a show. The woman feels on the one hand as if they had suddenly become her c­hildren (she could take them somewhere beautiful for a vacation), and on the other as if she were a tiger feigning sleep to watch her prey gambol. She savours the pleasure of the scene, greedy but restrained. The slanting sun looks like a flower, trees line the horizon and birds are scattered like seeds on the sky. The two little animals yelp and play. The dimly beautiful scene draws her gaze along the passage of time. She looks down at the new lines around her wrist and makes an admission to herself: when she was leaving middle school he was only just being born; when he went into kindergarten she was already experienced; when he was feeling first love she had already began to wilt; when he strides fearlessly onto the field of love, she will be chewing her food with her gums.

He inspects his hands again, and again she is at a loss for words. She cannot look at the window, the sense of separation she sees reflected there leaves her feeling inadequate, unworthy. There is no need for her to look at his hands, she knows that neither Michelangelo nor Dante could ever have expressed such life. Those hands are inscribed with the woman’s love. In some future space, they will rest on the woman’s still-flat belly, and, when they wake, creep over the woman’s body, as hesitant, lingering and shameless as a stranger in a foreign land. The woman is an experienced old farmer, and the rhythm of crops and seasons is a part of her soul. She knows the silence of nourishing spring rain and the rich harvest augured by timely snows, knows when a seed dropped on the ground will sprout, when it will leaf. The woman might impart experience to those hands; they might one day know and receive things far beyond what their owner could imagine.

Those hands and their owner have now closed the woman outside of their experience, however, rejecting the outside world through their silence. The woman finds herself abandoned in a dry riverbed and her heart begins to parch, beating only with difficulty. Her womanly sense of failure mixes with her experience and washes her into the gutter. The woman must ask ‘woman’ to retreat into the shadow of ‘writer’, and for ‘writer’ to hoist up its vast bulk, and exert its empty, m­ysterious charm.

A woman’s dignity…a woman’s desires.

What do you do? he asks, and the moment he speaks, the ‘writer’ vanishes, leaving the shocked and quivering ‘woman’ suddenly exposed to view, her soul scrambling for shelter. Experience is there to restore her collapsed hall to wholeness, as if by magic, and swathe it in colour; her soul resumes its place upon the throne, unveiling again its ineffable visage. Her sorrowful soul laughs, she answers that she is a writer. His surprise is what she had hoped for, and the undisguised excitement of the round-faced girl satisfies her vanity; her questions are once again numerous. She asks the woman what she writes, the woman answers, carelessly, fiction. The woman asks him if he’s heard of such-and-such a writer, and is disappointed when he shakes his head. Writers are to him as handball is to her: two overhanging cliffs, forever opposed.

The round-faced girl squeezes in between them. She also writes; she asks the woman’s name. The woman hesitates, then says it. She is saying it for him, for the day when her name might emerge from his enchanting lips, fall into the depths of the black night and smash into stars. His mouth…that tasting mouth, what would it taste like? Her wounded soul longs to keep it company. In future, however, the woman must be more restrained about revealing her name. She has been caught in a trap of her own devising. The inclusion of the round-faced girl has changed the atmosphere for the worse. The train clatters forward. The girl keeps intruding upon the woman’s unbridled fantasies, hindering her exploration of the boy, but at the same time the woman is grateful for her assistance in allowing her to fully assume the role of ‘writer’. Her petty wants are momentarily dignified by the girl’s adoration; but it is from him that she wants this adoration. She tells the round-faced girl that she has just published a new book, called An Inexperienced World, and there will be a signing at a bookstore tomorrow afternoon. She asks him if he has the time to attend, and he chuckles, saying he’s afraid not. She steels herself and asks, so young and you’ve already got a girlfriend? He’s frank: of course, and I’m not young. The woman turns a mental somersault and asks if she’s also an athlete. He says synchronised swimming. The woman thinks of the easy motions of youth. There’s no doubt, the girlfriend is a lovely mermaid, supple of waist and round of hip, the light limpid on her as she surfaces like a water lily. The woman is again at a loss for words. He drains his blue-bottled beverage. The empty bottle spins once clockwise in his palm and slips into the trash.

That angelic, radiant face; how could the woman bear to mar him?

Faced with this white-clad youth the woman feels the depredations of experience all the more strongly. A woman equipped with experience is a greater caution than a woman versed in politics or philosophy. They muffle the natural scent of a woman’s body. Those girls like flitting, cooing birds, they’ll steal away what’s yours before you know it. They’re like the female antelope, zebra or sika deer, all those species with their soft, watery eyes, who mindlessly produce and rear their young, carrying on the line, in between being eaten and being protected. But the woman herself is beset by experience; how shall her line be continued? Can she abandon everything, and abdicate all want? Her experience is not water in a sponge, to be wrung out; it permeates her, dictates her thoughts. She can only disguise it, could only perpetrate an honest-hearted fraud upon the lusty physicality of the animal world.

The woman of experience is undergoing a collapse in morale, but he, in his youth, grows expansive. The woman imagines herself an oyster, tight-shut and virtuous, which, upon exposing its tender, bl­ushing innards, finds that it lies on the diner’s plate. Shame creeps upward from the soles of her feet, biting flea-like with abandon, le­aving her in tatters. If he were a middle-aged male then a tacit ag­reement might be reached in the air between them. The roundabout talk, the pains­taking explorations, the disguise of experience as naïvete, all that would be unnecessary: she might directly praise him as handsome, even sexy. She would joke with him, revealing her intentions gradually, the two on equal footing. She’d naturally ask for his phone number, and the rest of the story would be easy to imagine.

The train will arrive in twenty minutes. The woman’s thoughts are an army hospital in uproarious disarray. In the corridors of the hospital the sound of footsteps is tense, staccato; cries and moans sound urgently. Against a backdrop of rumbling tanks and exploding bombs a ravaged body is carried in. It is love; wounded love has fainted from loss of blood, and there is shrapnel embedded in his skull…he is dying, he wants to live, his breath is weakened yet stubborn…the woman is desperate that her own hands should be of use; she will infuse her own blood in the body of love…give him everything…throw aside shameful lust and draw out the shrapnel of experience…to sacrifice her own life for his!

How much do you get for writing a book? He is speaking to her. His eyes are also speaking to her. Black night embellished with starlight; the hazy outline of a laurel tree. The woman emerges from the noisy hospital, watches him; the virility of spring and her heart’s longings incite her to defile him.

The woman answers him: they pay royalties. So far, a German translation has earned the most; 20,000 Euros. She is exaggerating, but not excessively. She looks at his cell phone, wonders whether it will ever display a call from her. Oh, he says, lightly, and instantly she thinks less of herself. Her use of her identity as ‘writer’ has ensured her own defeat; now that the tokens of currency have entered into it, she is left with only lewd vulgarity. A half-second later the round-faced girl has translated this sum into yuan, and her astonished expression revives the woman’s wavering courage. The woman sits carefully in her seat, silently digesting her melancholy, until a railway employee selling newspapers dispels whatever is pent in her heart. She buys a paper as a pretext, swiftly flips through it, drops it in the trash. Their destination is drawing near. His cell phone slides in front of the woman; he lets it. The woman wonders if he is hinting something. What should she do? Pick it up and call her own number? Pretend to admire it, then ca­sually ask for his number? Agitated, she becomes weak and silent; finally she is defeated by false modesty in the presence of the round-faced girl. The woman retreats into the deep ruminations of a writer, but her mind holds nothing but his body and his face. Yearning becomes an apple that enters his mouth, becomes a pendant nestling against his chest, even a speck of dust that is content only to settle upon his skin. The sadness of being away from home hangs about him, the discomfort of a northerner in southern lands. The woman tells him, entrust to me your life, your body, your love; I will care for them. Remove all guile from me, let me be eighteen again, belonging to no world but that of love. Never give me ex­perience, the potentiality of all that’s dark and corrupt in life.

So do you have names like other athletes? Like Liu Xiang – when he hurdles his arms really do look like wings. The woman sees that she hasn’t given up hope, like an old man determined to snare a young girl. He shakes his head, laughing. He retrieves his cell phone, prepares to get off the train. The woman, a fisher with no catch, is unwilling to bring in her net, and lingers in despair. His movements are slow and lingering, he tells the story of the origins of his name – a dream his mother had. The woman’s mind has collapsed, she can’t hear what he’s saying, can only watch him speak.

At the last moment the woman tries once more to describe his appearance. His outline sears her heart, causing her pain. She will never be able to describe the way he looks. He is both simple and fat­homless; he has seen her thoughts, he understands her humiliation, he chooses to pick up the thread of conversation just as she is retreating into silence. He asks her how much she writes every day, what sports she likes, whether she smokes or drinks. The flower opens silently; in his smile there is a restrained radiance, a virtue that lecherous older men could never feign. The happy atmosphere of a train approaching its des­tination chills and saddens her; not only can’t she be rid of the baggage of experience, she must guard against its loss. There is no method of obtaining his phone number that does not bear the marks of ugliness, that would not make her a laughing stock with the round-faced girl – her machinations exposed, her dignity in ruins.

She feels a sharp revulsion: the round-faced girl’s very existence seems more scandalous than the woman’s lust.

The train halts like the tolling of a bell, and the woman’s questing spirit is immediately cloaked in ash. She glances at him, mournfully. He is like a bible in the hands of a priest, his face slowly closing, showing a gloomy cover. She is struck with melancholy and her head hangs low, then rises up again, bewildered. The passengers stand upright as if growing from the earth, then crowd into the aisle. They will spread in all directions like water, flowing into the container of memory without a drop left behind. Like waterweeds he tangles her legs; she cannot stir. She is asphyxiating, she struggles, grasps at a last hope. She sees her legs, interlocked with his – orderly, tacit. Her high-heeled shoes, with their white bows, are frail between his white Nike tennis shoes.

The aisle gradually clears. He retracts his feet, puts on his coat.

The round-faced girl follows, interposed between him and the woman.

He turns back to look at her, she turns back to look at where they had been sitting.

Maybe we’ll meet again! He waves the hand she already loves.

See you later! the woman answers, desolate.