The Secret Talker Read online

  By late fall, the children had stopped going to the haystacks in the evenings to hear the city boy play his harmonica. Only one eleven-year-old girl would show up every day. The boy would play his harmonica for her, and she became the only recipient of his complaints about the little village. One evening the streetlights were coming on and the voices of women rose and fell as they called their children home, a beguiling scene. The boy slid down the haystack, wiping his harmonica against his trousers. Suddenly, he stopped moving and just stared at the girl. She smiled, not finding this strange. He reached out with both hands and grabbed her waist, then lowered her to the ground from the haystack, ending up face-to-face with her. The girl could hear her mother calling for her. She didn’t answer, just twisted her head away. When she turned back, she no longer recognized the person in front of her. His eyes were almost shut behind his glasses, though not tightly, the whites gleaming faintly between his lowered lids. His lashes trembled violently. She’d never seen such droopy eyelashes. She called his name twice, and he smiled terrifyingly, pressing his lips to her forehead. She started pushing away his hands, and her legs resisted too, though she made sure to keep a smile on her face, as if it would be too much to shame him. His lips were scalding hot as he pressed them to hers, and for a moment she had no idea if this sensation was good or bad. She could smell Donghai cigarettes on his breath, spicy and bitter, a masculine scent, permeating her body. A peculiar lack of strength opened her whole body to him, melding with the tobacco fragrance. She wondered if she ought to run away or scream, but then her lips were forced apart by something. It took her a long while to realize it was his tongue. Then he slowly pulled her beneath the haystack. Someone had hollowed out a space here. She could barely move. He curled around her body.

  Afterward, he pulled her out and got her to stand up so he could straighten her clothes and brush the straw from her hair. He smiled awkwardly. There was nothing scary in this smile. She looked at him, a secret emotion appearing in the darkness of her body, like a tiny flame. He asked her to come back the next night at the same time. She nodded and turned to go. She couldn’t make out whether she liked or didn’t like this sort of thing, nor did she understand what on Earth the city boy had just done to her. He’d lit a flame inside her body, and it was filling her with warmth.

  The next night, she came back to the haystack. The boy had turned the hollow into a nesting cave, and he told the girl they had nothing to be afraid of, not even if it rained or the wind turned cold.

  The third night, the boy was startled awake by some noise. When he peeped out the window of his house, he saw all the men in the village circling it, holding up hoes and pickaxes. He fled out the back window and found all the streets and alleyways full of people. Sixty or seventy dogs were barking at the same time. He could hide himself only in the hollow he’d made. The villagers stuck pitchforks into every haystack.

  Afterward, they lit them all on fire. The boy from the city didn’t come out.

  The villagers said he’d seduced six or seven girls in their early teens. In order to protect their reputations, they were never named. These girls had been too greedy, the townspeople said. They’d gone into the haystack with him for a paltry piece of candy. The eleven-year-old girl thought what had happened between him and her was more than just a piece of candy. He’d never offered her anything in return for those kisses and caresses. By the time he was pulled out from the smoldering ashes, the pale-faced student had become a human-shaped lump of charcoal. Only the harmonica had survived intact.

  His descriptions of foreign countries now seemed completely wrong. But this was what the little girl had aspired to as she grew up. From the age of eleven, she had known for sure that she would travel farther than any other woman from their village—farther than those girls who’d ended up working in cotton mills in Shanghai or Nanjing, farther than the women who’d left with the land reform brigades in the fifties, farther than those who’d gotten into Tongji University in the sixties. She was the only female student for hundreds of miles around, in thousands of years, to get a place in the Military Academy of Foreign Languages. She was sixteen years old, the youngest candidate.

  That girl was Hongmei.

  Before meeting in person, Hongmei wanted to tell the secret talker her deepest secrets so this relationship could be built with the highest degree of honesty. Their beginning would be different, no longer full of beautiful misunderstandings or lies. She had told him this and wanted him to see what sort of creature she was, always giving in to emotion. The longings of her heart and flesh were more important to her than truth or falsehood, love or hate. She finally felt free.

  12

  It was only half past six when she got to The EndUp. Half an hour to while away. She decided to go to a nearby hotel with a dimly lit bar. A pianist was playing in the lobby, which soothed her quite a bit, at least temporarily. A waiter glided over and asked in a hushed voice what she’d like to drink. She grinned wildly and said a Bloody Mary. She drank very slowly, as if this could stretch out the time before her fall. There was no going back now.

  It was almost seven, but the summer night was still far away. She opened her purse but found her wallet missing. In her romantic frenzy, she’d packed a toothbrush but not her wallet. She looked around for the waiter and saw him busy chatting with another couple of guests. Summoning all her old military skill and training, she slipped out behind his back.

  Having successfully ducked the bar bill, she wandered tipsily on. He must already be inside, hoping to actually get his hands on his prey this time. She stumbled toward his trap. Armed only with a toothbrush, she was heading for a beautiful, if hygienic, night. The waiter must have noticed she was gone by now and must be thinking that a woman like her was too old to be dodging a bill. She thought, What a mess I am, doing two dastardly things in one night.

  Was Glen searching for her now? Never in his life would he imagine she’d be so depraved as to come to The EndUp, a place where people stripped off their pale human skins to show the monsters within. The EndUp—a good name. Two hosts, dressed all in black, came toward her to ask if she had a reservation. There weren’t many people inside, but the secret talker was surely already waiting.

  The hosts came even closer and said very distinctly, “Do. You. Have. A. Reservation?”

  The alcohol was getting to her. She could smell the musky scent of a wild animal pursuing her, with a hint of bougainvillea.

  She could feel Glen’s note crinkle in her pocket. Suddenly, the smells, the alcohol, the note, unlocked the final piece of the puzzle—she understood the whole situation. She turned and ran, her leather sandals going tap, tap against the sidewalk, like another person’s footsteps. She thought of Glen’s eyes. The same eyes set in a much younger and female face—the girl in the pictures Nini had sent to her. How could she have been so dense? She should have pieced together everything much earlier. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to know the truth. Living with secrets had become the norm, her natural state. She got to the parking lot, keys already in her hand, and a minute later was roaring out onto the road.

  She found the archway surrounded by vermilion bougainvillea. So many years ago, nearly a decade, Glen had taken her here, a walk on his favorite street he had claimed—perhaps he had wanted to confess something then. That was why this place had looked so familiar to her. They had walked over the bougainvillea leaves, holding hands as one. As time passed and they shifted apart, she’d forgotten it. Maybe she hadn’t been fair to Glen either, hadn’t listened to him or paid attention to his feelings. Maybe if she had, she would’ve known the truth all along; she wouldn’t have been a disappointment too. But now, bolstered by her newfound clarity, she rushed over, and sure enough, the tip of the fire tower was visible diagonally behind it. Such attractive surroundings didn’t match the nefarious reasons she’d invited herself here. She rang the bell and heard a woman’s footsteps crossing a little courtyard, coming to the outer door. The peephole was about the size of a fist,
revealing a youthful face. “Who are you?” asked the woman, but then recognition flickered in her familiar eyes.

  Hongmei beamed. She couldn’t smile so warmly if she were sober.

  “I was looking for you.” She said the woman’s name.

  Two more people appeared in the courtyard, one male and one female, about the woman’s age.

  Hongmei was invited in. They’d been having dinner—half a pizza was still piping hot in its take-out box, and three beer bottles stood empty. She quickly said, “I’m so sorry to disturb your meal.”

  “Would you like to join us?” said the woman, polite but distant, just like her father.

  Hongmei recognized at once the shawl on the living room sofa. She walked over, one step, two steps, three steps, heel, toe, heel . . . bent down, reached out. The embroidery on the shawl, which she’d bought so many years ago, just before leaving the little village, on a day that happened to have a temple festival. She’d stitched this piece of embroidery onto an ordinary wool shawl and had made a unique garment. But how had it ended up here? By the time she turned around, to face this long-lost daughter, she’d decided what to say.

  “I was supposed to meet your father elsewhere, but I came here.”

  The woman stared at her. Finally, she opened her mouth.

  “I know who you are. He talks about you a lot.”

  Hongmei’s hands were still running over the shawl as she looked at the girl’s eyes. Weren’t they the same familiar eyes that had shone on her every day from the most intimate perspectives? How could have she missed it? How could she have missed the same grayish blue, the same deep folds, the same slight weariness from having seen too much?

  She found herself saying, “I didn’t expect you to be all grown up.”

  “It’s been more than ten years since that awful affair.”

  “Twelve years since he vanished.”

  “He told you everything?”

  “In a way, yes.” Hongmei smiled. “In the most impossible way.”

  The girl smiled too. “He’s an impossible father.”

  The woman looked pained for a moment but immediately pulled a face and smiled again.

  Hongmei thought with some emotion that even with all the mystery and lies, there had been sincerity in this shared father-daughter pain after all.

  “Why not publicly acknowledge your father? He could come out of hiding.”

  “He only got in touch with me two months ago.”

  Hongmei thought, That’s right. He had talked about reuniting with his daughter a couple of months ago. That had sounded made-up, but it actually had happened.

  “We’d have to make a lot of arrangements first,” said the woman. “How to deal with the media, and my mother . . . We’ll have to plan everything thoroughly. To my father and me, this was a total catastrophe. We’re too battle-scarred to be able to defend ourselves against the media and all the public figures who’ll line up to attack us again.”

  The woman’s huge, deep eyes had fine lines around them. Hongmei thought, They even wrinkle in the same way, these old-seeming eyes.

  As the woman said goodbye, she said not to worry. Her father would definitely wait for Hongmei—he indulged the women he loved. The woman raised an eyebrow, trying to look cheeky, but her wounds had brought her preternatural maturity, so her expression was at odds with her face.

  “You understand my father better than I do. You know how much he’ll give in to you,” she said.

  “Huh. That’s not how it felt in his messages. He was always distant. Everything was a secret.” Hongmei paused, smiling a little. “He writes well, though, apart from not being able to spell the word ‘disappointed.’”

  “Missing the letter a? Yeah, he always gets that wrong. Maybe there’s some special reason. You should ask him.”

  Hongmei pulled the shawl around her shoulders and headed back outside. As she opened her car door, the woman smiled and waved. That smile was so familiar, it made Hongmei dizzy.

  She drove through the city center. There were long lines of candles on either side of the street and people singing “Give Peace a Chance.”

  A short Asian man holding a wooden sign, speaking loudly, kept flickering in and out of view in the candlelight. He was a professional protester—no matter what the cause, he’d turn up with that placard, saying the same thing, standing earnestly among the crowds. He was like the professional mourners in Hongmei’s home village, except he wasn’t getting paid. Enmities and alliances would transform, the power balance would shift, and national governments would fall—but he was eternal, unchanging.

  Hongmei navigated the crowded streets with difficulty, finally returning to the south side. It was almost nine. Even so, he was surely still waiting in The EndUp. Her heart was full of tenderness for this poor, wounded soul. She was a gentle pacifist on this antiwar night. No matter who became enemies with whom the next day, or who made up with whom, she wouldn’t change; she would be eternal and go on loving.

  She parked the car and walked toward The EndUp. This area grew abandoned after dark, apart from drunkards lounging on the steps of closed factories and shops. She walked down the street, seeing The EndUp in the distance like a mirage. Even this road felt wild and dangerous, the silence before an ambush.

  It was ten past nine. Her footsteps were steady and determined, this person late for an appointment. No need to retreat again.

  Ten paces from The EndUp.

  In the entryway of the bar, she finally pulled out the note that Glen had left for her on the fridge. She stood in the dimness, with the note in her palm, and read every word as if it were the first time she had truly paid attention to Glen’s words.

  Hongmei, I am afraid I’m a constant disppointment to you. There’s something important I need to say to you, Glen.

  There it was, the omission between s and p. Not only a missing letter: so many things had gone missing from their smooth, inert married life, one after another, over the years. The courage with which they had overcome impossible obstacles a decade ago in her far-off homeland had long since disappeared. They had no capacity to dive deeper into the stormy waters of their feelings, choosing to hurt in silence, in secret. But maybe now with the lies peeled away, it could be different.

  She stepped through the doorway.

  About the Author

  GELING YAN is one of the most acclaimed contemporary novelists and screenwriters writing in the Chinese language today. She published her first novel in 1986 and since then has written over twenty books and won over thirty awards. Her works have been translated into twelve languages; several have been adapted for screen. She has also worked with directors like Zhang Yimou and Ang Lee. She currently divides her time between Berlin and China.

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  Here ends Geling Yan’s

  The Secret Talker.

  The first edition of this book was printed and bound at LSC Communications in Harrisonburg, Virginia, April 2021.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  The text of this novel was set in ITC Legacy Serif, a typeface designed by Ronald Arnholm in the early 1990s. Arnholm, then a graduate student at Yale, drew inspiration from Nicolas Jenson’s (1420–1480) early Roman typefaces. ITC Legacy maintains the beauty and elegance of Jenson’s original, while improving legibility with its open counters and clean character shapes.

  An imprint dedicated to publishing international voices, offering readers a chance to encounter other lives and other points of view via the language of the imagination.

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE SECRET TALKER. Copyright © 2004 by San Min Book Co., Ltd. English language translation copyright © 2021 by Jeremy Tiang. All rights reser
ved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by June Park

  Cover photographs © keithferrisphoto/E+/Getty Images (man); © Mint Images - Liesel Bockl/Getty Images (girl running); © Ariel Skelley/Getty Images (girl flying kite); © Idea Images/Getty Images (woman); © Tetsuya Tanooka/Aflo/Getty Images (blossoms); by Vista Wei/Unsplash (village)

  FIRST EDITION

  Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-300405-4

  Version 02062021

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-300403-0

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