When Red is Black

will be no fish; as long as things were not too muddy, it was not up to him to investigate.
     
    For the moment, he would choose to believe that it was a tragic love story, one that lightened up the darkest moments in the lives of Yin and Yang. After Yang’s death, Yin had tried hard to continue living in the story, through her writing and through his writing too, but in the end she did not succeed.
     
    Chen produced a photocopy out of his pocket. It was a poem which, for some reason, was not included in Yang’s poetry collection. The poem was titled “Hamlet in China’:
     
    A rustle of the synapses rushes me
    to the stage, to a sea of faces
    drowning in the dark, and clutching
    for a straw of meaning, in my stepping
    into the light. A role, like
    all others, is to be played in
    [in] difference, mad or not
    mad. A camel, a weasel, and a whale,
    to construct and to deconstruct,
    when reality is the ever-changing
    signifier. What is the meaning? A dictionary
    entry that defines me with a sword
    killing a rat or a rat-like noise.
    O father, whatever it is, tell me.
     
    In his novel, Yang had tried to emulate Pasternak’s narrative structure with twelve poems grouped together at the end of the novel, lines supposedly written by the protagonist, in sequential reflections on his life, crushed in the those years of socialist revolution under Chairman Mao. Chen wondered when Yang had written “Hamlet in China.” Judging from its order in the sequence, it might have been composed during the Cultural Revolution. If so, the stage in question could have referred to the “stage of revolutionary mass criticism,” upon which Yang had stood as a black target, with his “crimes” written on a blackboard hung around his neck. Yang had rendered it in such a universal way, however, that a reader unfamiliar with Yang’s real experience might have come up with a totally different interpretation. It needed such an impersonal distance—which reminded Chen of another great poet—to represent Hamlet in the waste land.
     
    Even today, Chen felt connected to that poem. After all, a role is to be played, whatever meanings or interpretations may be imposed on it, like the role of Chief Inspector Chen.
     
    Surprisingly, the novel manuscript did not have a title. Chen thought he might as well call it Doctor Zhivago in China. Eventually, he would find a way to have the manuscript published. He made a pledge to himself. He did not really consider it a conflict with his political allegiance as a Party cadre. Like Boris Pasternak, Yang had passionately loved his country. The novel was not an attack on China. Rather, it represented an honest, patriotic intellectual’s unwavering pursuit of his ideals in an age when everything in his country had been turned upside-down. It was a novel written with unrivaled passion and masterful technique. China should be proud of such an excellent literary work produced in the darkest moment of its history, Chen concluded.
     
    But there was no need to act in a reckless hurry, nor to take any unnecessary risk. The manuscript had been finished years earlier, and it still retained its power. First-class literature does not suffer with the lapse of time. It should not matter too much if the manuscript were to lie unpublished for a few years more.
     
    Internal Security was still on the alert. They had inquired about how the chief inspector and his partner had come to find the manuscript, and he had simply said that it had taken Detective Yu’s hard work to trace Bao and obtain his confession, and that they had at once marched Bao over to the police bureau with the manuscript. The press conference was scheduled for the next day. They could not afford to delay any longer.
     
    He had not mentioned that he had had the manuscript in his hands for about two hours, and been busy copying every page of it at a street-corner copy shop, before he returned with it to Bao’s room. His story was plausible, but Internal Security had never really gotten along with him, and he had to be very careful.
     
    Besides, the way things were changing in China, in five or ten years, publication of Yang’s novel might not be totally unimaginable—
     
    “Chief Inspector Chen.” The young nurse approached him again in the lobby.
     
    “Oh yes, how is she?”
     
    “She is doing all right, still asleep.” she said. “But when she is out of the hospital, you have to pay more attention to her choice of food.”
     
    “I