When Red is Black

manuscript down. He could see why Yin had cherished the manuscript. It contained wonderful love poems, as Yin had said in the Afterword, which also evoked the most memorable days of their lives. In the cadre school, they would have pored over those poems together, in English and in Chinese, holding hands. On such a night, they might have felt as if the poem of Su Dongpo had been written for them, and that they themselves were united forever through its lines:
     
    The night watchman struck the third watch.
    Golden waves of the moonlight fading,
    a jade handle of the Dipper lowering,
    we calculate with our fingers
    when the west wind will come,
    unaware of time flowing away like a river in the dark.
     
    The Afterword was written in a clever way. Yin did not try to say too much, but merely presented the scenes in which she and Yang had read and discussed those poems at the cadre school. She ended, however, with a scene in which she stood alone, reading a poem written by Li Yu, which had once been recited to her by Yang, deep in the night:
     
    When will the endless cycle
    of the spring flower and the autumn moon
    come to an end?
    How much remembrance of things past
    does a heart know?
    Last night, in the attic revisited
    by the eastern wind,
    it was unbearable to look
    toward home in the fair moonlight.
     
    The carved rails and the marble steps must remain
    unchanged, but not her beauty.
    How much sorrow do I have?
    It is like the spring flood of a long river flowing east!
     
    The manuscript had enormous sentimental value. Chen touched it gently. No wonder Yin had kept it in a bank safety deposit box.
     
    Now he stood up and moved to the window, looking out at the street waking under his gaze. Across the road, he saw a Young Pioneer hurrying out the door, tying his red scarf with one hand, holding a fried rice cake in the other, a heavy satchel on his back—it appeared, for a fleeting moment, as if he was Chen himself, hurrying to school, thirty years ago. The chief inspector collected himself and turned back to the desk littered with dictionaries and papers.
     
    Now he had something else for White Cloud to do in the Shanghai Library. Some of the poems translated by Yang might have appeared in English study journals, although Chen was not sure when that might have occurred—perhaps before the Anti-Rightist movement in the mid-fifties. If so, some annotation there might throw light on the mysterious abbreviations in the manuscript. They might not turn out to be important or relevant, but he was curious. In addition, the library must have some catalogs from Chinese and foreign publishers. He could try to contact some of them, to see whether they might be interested in publishing the collection. There was no hurry, but it gave him comfort to think that he was attempting to do something for the dead.
     
    In that way, Chen could also keep White Cloud busy, and away from his room. Then he felt he would be able to settle down to working on his translation. And he did just that, productively, for a couple of hours, before she arrived for the day. The laptop helped.
     
    When sunlight came streaming through the window, and White Cloud entered the room, carrying a paper bag of fried mini-buns, he had already finished several pages. He explained her new assignment: To find poems in magazines translated by Yang, and to identify publishers that might be interested in publishing a collection of such poems. Also, he had an elusive feeling this might uncover something else, even though he did not know what. It was a long shot. He himself would probably not go to the library on the basis of that sort of hunch, but having White Cloud available made it possible.
     
    “I have to assist Detective Yu, as you know, anyway I can,” Chen explained to her, “but I do not have time to do so and to work on the translation for Mr. Gu too. So you are really helping a lot.”
     
    “A little secretary is supposed to do whatever her boss wants her to,” she said with a sly smile. “Anything. You don’t have to explain. Mr. Gu has emphasized it many times. But what about your lunch?”
     
    “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “It may take you several hours. Take your time at the library.”
     
    Surprisingly, he received no phone calls that morning. The translation progressed smoothly. A sparrow twittered outside his window in the cold wind despite the barrenness of the twigs. He forgot about his lunch, for he was transported