When Red is Black

no such textbooks. Perhaps a place like Golden Time Rolling Backward symbolized a cultivated taste a notch above that of the common folk who drank tea with leaves in their cups, a sense of being part of the social elite. Whether she genuinely enjoyed the taste of the Lipton teabag tea or not did not matter that much.
     
    An elderly couple rose from their table. The music was good for dancing. They started doing slow steps in a space in front of the grand piano, a hardwood area large enough for ten or fifteen people. Chen caught White Cloud looking at him expectantly. He was going to reach out to her when she touched his hand, tentatively. Dance could be an excuse, he had read, to hold someone it was otherwise impossible or impropriate to hold.
     
    But why not? It was fun being a Mr. Big Bucks for the evening, with a young pretty girl—a little secretary—stroking his hand across the table. He did not have to be Chief Inspector Chen, a “politically correct” Party cadre every minute of the day. He, too, was doing well. He had a powerful position, and a generous advance payment from a business project.
     
    However, it was not destined to be an evening of Golden Time Rolling Backward for Chief Inspector Chen.
     
    His cell phone rang. It was Zhuang, the senior lecturer White Cloud had interviewed. Chen had left several messages for him, and now Zhuang was finally calling back.
     
    “I’m glad you called me,” Chen said. “I have just one question for you. In your conversation with White Cloud about Yang, you mentioned Doctor Zhivago. Now, was Yang reading the novel, or writing a novel like it, or writing poetry like Doctor Zhivago?”
     
    “Did I say that?”
     
    “Yes, you did. The exact words were, ‘still reading, and writing, something like Doctor Zhivago.’ You don’t have to worry, Comrade Zhuang. The case has nothing whatsoever to do with you, but your information may help our work.”
     
    There was a short silence from the other end of the telephone.
     
    A young man approached their table, holding out his hand to White Cloud in a gesture of invitation. She flashed Chen an apologetic smile. Chen nodded in encouragement as he heard Zhuang continuing in a more subdued voice. “Now that both Yang and Yin are dead, I don’t think that anybody can get into trouble.”
     
    “No. Nobody. So please go ahead and tell me.”
     
    Another short silence ensued.
     
    He took a sip of wine. Not too far away, White Cloud started moving gracefully with the young man in front of the piano. A perfectly matched couple, both of them young, energetic, dancing with a rhythm perhaps slightly too wild for this upscale bar.
     
    Zhuang spoke. “I met Yang in the early sixties, during the so-called Socialism Education Movement, you know, shortly before the Cultural Revolution. The school authorities assigned Yang and me to the same study group. We were both single then, and both listed as special targets for brainwashing, so we were put into a temporary isolation dorm room for ‘intensive education’ at night. Yang said that he did not sleep well, but one night I discovered that he was writing—in a notebook, under the quilt. In English. I asked him what it was about. He said that it was a story of an intellectual, something like Doctor Zhivago.”
     
    “Did you take a look at what he was writing?”
     
    “I did not understand English. Nor did I really want to read a single word of it.”
     
    “Why, Comrade Zhuang?”
     
    “Yang said it was a story of an intellectual, and he was an intellectual himself. That’s it. If the school authorities ever looked into the matter, I could claim that it was his diary—at least so I thought. It was no crime to keep a diary. But if I read it, and it was a book, I would have turned into a counterrevolutionary by withholding the information from the authorities.”
     
    “Yes, I see: you did not want to get him—and yourself too—into trouble. Did Yang tell you anything else about it?”
     
    “It was really naive of him to tell me that he was writing a story. Fortunately, I had no idea then who or what Doctor Zhivago was— perhaps a doctor Yang knew personally. Zhivago surely sounded like a Chinese name. The Chinese translation did not appear—let me think—until the mid-eighties. It had been banned, as you know, as an attack on the great Soviet Revolution. In those years, a Nobel-Prize-winning book had to be counterrevolutionary.”
     
    “I know. I happen