“Do you have plans the rest of the day?” she asked into his shoulder.
“None,” he said. “What do you want to do?”
“Spend time with you. Let’s watch this morning’s movie together. What else?”
“The band is playing jazz from America tonight,” Laurence said.
“Let’s do that, then, just us. I’ll tell Tinseng to keep everyone away for a few hours.”
“Have I ever told you you’re brilliant?” Laurence asked, and she laughed, easier this time. When they finally rose from bed, her anger wasn’t gone, but it no longer felt like a consumption. That was all she could hope for.
The rest of the day, Yukying kept her promise. They listened to American jazz and shared an extravagant dessert ordered to their room. They ate it in robes in the middle of their bed, despite Laurence’s protestations that they would drip chocolate sauce on the sheets. It was nothing they couldn’t do at home, and yet they’d never done it. The day felt decadent, all the more because they planned to do nothing tomorrow. The ship would anchor at Gibraltar for a half-day for those interested, then they’d set off again that night, sailing the short distance to Málaga and docking there for the night. Yukying went to sleep knowing she’d have to find Marissa the next day, but after the despair of earlier, she found herself eager for action. Tinseng needed help and she was determined to do something. Whatever she could, to keep him safe.
Five Days Ago. June 20, 1963. Gibraltar.
On the fifth day of her vacation, Yukying woke naturally and lay in bed, pleasantly lazy, waiting for sunlight to leak in around the edges of the curtains. When it did, she rose and pulled on a simple cheongsam, slid on flats, and pinned up her hair in a quick bun, hiding the imperfections under a hat. With a kiss to Laurence’s forehead, she slipped out of the room and walked up to the first-class deck.
No staff guarded the boundary at this hour, to the benefit of some enterprising children playing in pools usually off-limits to them. A few roller-skated around the empty deck. On their next pass, she waved to them, but they ignored her, uninterested in an adult; she smiled at the rejection, remembering Chiboon and Tinseng’s absolute disdain for authority, and scanned the deck for a seat with the best view. Gibraltar would reveal itself soon, proclaiming its majesty out of the horizon. In one of the chairs, she recognized a familiar profile. He stared out at the sea from his chair, his gaze unwavering. It flickered when she reached his periphery, then returned to the unending stretch of blue.
“Isn’t the sky beautiful here?” she asked Shan Dao. “I think I could look at it forever. It’s so different than Hong Kong.”
“How so?”
“That’s right,” she said with a laugh, “I keep forgetting you’ve never been. You seem such a part of everything already.” That seemed to embarrass him, though she thought she caught a smile as he ducked his head. “In Hong Kong, the sky is rarely so uninterrupted. Even when I stand on the edge of the shore, the ocean doesn’t feel endless. I suppose because I can still hear the city right behind me. But right now . . .”
A quiet awareness rushed into the space she left between them. In the distance, seagulls greeted the morning. The hum of the ship’s massive engines rumbled beneath them. Around the corner, roller skates thumped on the wood planks. The children laughed as they skated past. Shan Dao exchanged a bemused look with her, then smiled fully as she laughed.
“Still,” she said, “this is still much quieter than it ever is back home. Was it quiet where you lived?”
“Yes. Then I had to move suddenly. Tinseng was gracious and offered his home. His neighborhood was loud, but I’d visited before and knew to expect it.”
They hadn’t told her they had been living together. She was careful not to react in case Shan Dao thought she had already known.
“Tinseng has never lived somewhere quiet, so I imagine that brought him comfort. But I hope it didn’t bother you too much.”
“I adjusted.”
“What was his apartment like? I never got the chance to see it.” She would never know that part of his life now. Tinseng had already moved on, in that way of his that left no room for questions. “I hope he kept it clean when you lived with him.”
“It was . . . reflective of his personality. Not polished, but well-loved.” With fondness, Shan Dao added, “I did have to buy him bookshelves.”
Yukying shook her head. “He was always tripping over something he’d left out.”
“He split his lip once on Les Contemplations. It was untenable.”
“He’s lucky you were there to look after him.” She turned to better face him. “Did you like living in Paris?”
“Tolerably.” He seemed to recognize that one-word answers bordered on rude, so expanded, “It wasn’t my plan to stay as long as I did. I was visiting to conduct a lecture series. Then I met Tinseng.”
“Where did you want to go?”
“Back to China, to join my brother. It was my father’s wish for a long time, and we had finally made it happen. Then . . . my priorities shifted.”
“And now you’re going to Hong Kong?”
“Mm. I will go wherever Tinseng goes.”
Shan Dao’s sentences sat disconnected, missing all their sinew. Yukying tried to hear everything he wasn’t saying. Did he mean they had talked about their plans? Would they both be moving in with her after all? They’d lived together in Paris—but Shan Dao made it sound like a temporary situation, and Tinseng was always the type to help a friend in need. Was Shan Dao helping Tinseng through this blackmail crisis to repay his debt, or was he really as lovelorn as he seemed? And did any of that matter while Tinseng was in danger? Perhaps it mattered even more than in regular times.
“I feel so confused,” she admitted with a slight laugh. “I apologize, Shan Dao, I’m being a horrible conversationalist. I just keep thinking about this man, Grodescu. Why would he want to do this? I mean,” she continued, “I understand why. I won’t ask something like, why is there evil in the world, that would be silly.” Those had never felt like questions for her. She didn’t read Proust; she read movie magazines. And yet. “But . . . ever since yesterday I’ve been thinking about a line from Li Xifeng’s journal—I don’t know if you’ve read it. She was writing about a dinner party of her husband’s colleagues; they were discussing nuclear war and how China had nothing to fear, because even if China lost half their population in a war, there’d still be three-hundred million left to build a communist society afterward. Three-hundred million dead, but that was acceptable. And she wished she had quoted Khrushchev to them, the one when he said: ‘I can’t say let us make war, half would die, the other half would survive; they would put me in a straitjacket.’” Yukying ran her hands down her dress, then tucked her feet under her. “But it’s really what she wrote after that. I wish I could remember exactly . . .”
“‘Is everything so hopeless? Can nothing be done?’”
Yukying looked up, surprised. “You’ve read it.”
“Closely.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. What can be done. She wrote a question, but she already knew her answer. She didn’t think everything was hopeless, or she wouldn’t have tried. I was thinking about it because it seems to me that she could have gone along with the popular opinion, but she didn’t. She was doing something, wasn’t she? Maybe not the right thing, but . . . at least she was trying to help. If we’re not trying to help, was it really the right thing to do?”
Between men who thought a sacrifice of half the population was an acceptable loss and a man who considered that idea morally insane, Yukying knew whose side she would be on, even if those men at the dinner held the more popular idea. Between the men in her life who loved differently than how the world wanted them to, and everyone who would gladly see those men destroyed, it was another easy choice.
Shan Dao had been staring at her with a strange expression for a long time, she realized.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t usually ramble like this.”
“No, I—I was rude for staring. I was lost in thought. I . . .” Shan Dao trailed off into a murmur. “‘She craves not Spring for herself alone.’”
