Love story. Beijing.
That summer, Cedric Samuel did not leave his house for days on end. He descended from his bedroom once per day to the kitchen he shared with the man that occupied the other bedroom in the sharehouse. He fried a pan of beef chuck, then carried it back upstairs to eat with bread and pickled peppers, sitting on the tatami. The rest of the day, Cedric Samuel worked. Around the beginning of April, Cedric Samuel gave up altogether on his daily rides out of Hakata into the hills. Around the end of April, Cedric Samuel gave up altogether walking in the city. In May, Cedric Samuel thought he could write a novel. In June, he was sure that he would produce a revisionist history of the Lod Airport massacre. In July, he devoted himself to translating Yu Dafu’s journals into English. When Li Gu’s wife invited him to Beijing, he agreed. Cedric Samuel was happy to speak about Li Gu’s book. Cedric Samuel was happy for the chance to live in a hotel room in Beijing. There would be a trip to the author’s hometown in Fujian, too. For several hours, he drafted, then rejected messages to send to Sara, asking her for advice, asking if she would be there, and asking what she thought about Li Gu. When Zhou Wenjin from the China Consolidated Publications Control and Promotions Group called him the next morning to request he take part in a series of events at the Beijing Global Publishing Fair, he told her that he would not be available. The excuse that Cedric Samuel came up with was that he had a lover and that she was pregnant. Cedric Samuel had to imagine a lover. She was the woman he had met at the girls bar in Shianbashi, who wore a patch over her right eye. In his memory and in his imagination, she was uncommonly beautiful. Cedric Samuel could not remember her name. He called her Haruka, instead, which was the name of a woman with a fat, little nose that he had met a year before in Shimokitazawa, for whose kiss he had humiliated himself. In his imagination, her tanned belly swelled with his child and was streaked with stretchmarks, and she was beside him on the tatami, dressed in white Family Mart bra and panties, moaning softly about some discomfort that she was unable to fully explain. She reached out for him, even as Zhou Wenjin begged him to come. He turned to Haruka and pleaded with her, asking for just a few days in Beijing. She moodily acquiesced. Zhou Wenjin bought him a plane ticket out of Tokyo, since Cedric Samuel didn’t feel like explaining that he had moved to Fukuoka. He wanted to tell Sara that he was going, but instead, he scrolled through her Instagram. A few days later, he packed his bag. While rifling desperately the pockets of a jacket hanging near the front door, he found a notebook.
Cedric Samuel took out his notebook for the first time that day while sitting in Mitsuomoto Tei in Narita. He had not bothered to record anything while on train east. The notebook had stayed in his back pocket, stuck in behind his passport. He maneuvered it on the table so that it didn’t touch the puddle of condensation trailing his glass of cream soda. He only wanted at first to flip through its pages as a distraction. He read directions he had written for himself years before to walk from Nanjing Road to the Grand Central Hotel. He couldn’t remember whether or not he had actually made the trip. He read notes he had made for a workshop in Xi’an. They made little sense to him. He had forgotten everything he had ever read about translation theory. He forgot whether or not he had used them. On the next page, he found descriptions of the clothes that his students that day had been wearing, written as they took turns reading out complicated questions on translation theory. On another page was a caricature of an American translator named Mike, made after he had visited him in Penang. He had blotted out his eyes with a hashmark doodle. Below it, he had written from memory some of the things that Mike had said about young women that passed by the window of the bar in which they were sitting. He studied the men at the tables around him. He studied the food, which had arrived while he read about Penang. He turned to a blank page. He wrote: I dread being flown business class. He turned the page and wrote: NARITA Mitsumoto Tei canned mushrooms frozen peas beef pulled frozen from a box shipped in from NEBRASKA. Dried parsley. I can be nostalgic for this, too. He had in his head a story about going to a book fair. He flipped back a page and wrote: I don’t want to stare at a bulkhead. A line down: I want to write a memorial to the last generation of Korean Air flight attendant uniforms. He tried to come up with a description of the particular blue of their jackets. He blotted it out with hashmarks, and then wrote below: A carton of Lucky Strike smallest purest bottle of Terre d'Hermès. X’s advice to his fellow martyrs: accept the glory of death and spray cologne on your throats. I will arrive in Beijing with my jacket smelling of stale smoke sweat and my collarbone bergamot vetiver cedar sweat. He wrote: Jana. There’s no need to write her name. I hope only to glimpse her. For a year that sustained me. Last year it was the third floor of the convention center, in the crowd. She was talking about her translation of Ertong. I picked up the original and tried to do it myself, just a few poems. So, she is brilliant. I would be satisfied if I could speak to her. He stopped writing.
In a middle seat on the twelfth row of a Japanese Airlines flight to Beijing, Cedric Samuel took out his notebook again. “Jana” would be Sara. Cedric Samuel wanted to see Sara. Until then, Cedric Samuel wanted to write about her, because he was in love with her. They had been at the same events together. He wrote about that. The third floor at the convention center had been to celebrate a book by Xu Lejiang. He wrote about that. He sat on a panel beside an Iranian woman. Cedric Samuel had seen Sara after. But he had been unable to work up the courage to talk to her. They knew the same people. She sent him a message on Twitter. They exchanged emails. They talked in a way that meant never arriving at any conclusion. Sara told Cedric Samuel about studying English literature. Cedric Samuel told Sara about not leaving his room for a month during the pandemic. They talked about translation. Cedric Samuel was afraid to tell Sara that he thought she was beautiful. He hoped she might assume by his noncommittal devotion that he adored her. Cedric Samuel was not sure what else he could do. There was nothing he could do. When he drank too much, he went out and found other women, or he typed messages to them on his phone. When he drank too much, he was sure not to send messages to Sara, because he feared that he would be too bold. Cedric Samuel feared that he would say to her that he could not stop imagining what it would be like to kiss her. Even if she were to be alarmed, he suspected she might continue to be polite. Even if she were polite, and even if she were flattered, there would still be nothing that he could do. With his shoulders pressed forward to avoid brushing those of the men to his write and left, he wrote in his notebook: She sat on the divan and he sat at her feet. She raised her chin and glanced over his shoulder — and he turned. Filler: sound of traffic outside, TV set. She asked him to recite — accent vaguely Continental, lips clean — as best he could every detail he could about her. He put down his tray table. He didn’t know her. His fantasy turned toward things that he didn’t want to write down, and which were too speculative, anyway. He put the notebook away in his breast pocket. He fished the pouch of nicotine gum from his pocket, but didn’t bother putting one in his teeth. He decided to close his eyes and pray. “It would be better not to meet her,” he said in his own head. This seemed too specific a thing to pray. Cedric Samuel decided he would give a prayer of thanks afterwards, whatever happened. He wrote in his notebook: Jana. He made tail of the a a curlicue to blot out the scene in the hotel room.
The architecture had not been changed in twenty years. But cameras were added. Fingerprint readers. But all within the same structure: the high ceilings, the rows of barriers to mould the crowd, the border guards in their booths. Cedric Samuel felt sweat under his arms. He felt his pulse in his temples. The guards never asked his reason for coming to the country. He was prepared to answer. He had a speech prepared. He wondered what they knew about him. He had fantasies. They were useless: the guard stamped his passport. He walked through the gate. He took the train to the next terminal. A driver with a sign bearing the logo of the China Consolidated Publications Control and Promotions Group met him. The driver led the way to his car. On his way, he asked Cedric Samuel, in English, “Can you speak Chinese?” “Uh-huh,” Cedric Samuel said. “That’s good,” the driver said, in Chinese. But they didn’t speak again. The car was an electric sedan. The airconditioning was cold. Cedric Samuel looked out the window. It had been a year since his last time in Beijing. It had been twenty years since his first time in Beijing. He flew that year from Oklahoma City to Denver, then Denver to San Francisco, then San Francisco to Beijing. He had another flight down to Shanghai, where there was a hostel room, then a dormitory cell waiting for him. His bags never arrived. He missed the flight. That was why he left the airport and went into the city. He told a taxi driver to take him to a hotel. He stayed there for four days. He slept with a prostitute from the hotel’s sauna. Cedric Samuel showed her the money that he had earned selling his Camaro, so she called another woman for him. They rolled naked on the bed, glorying in the airconditioning. It lasted for three hours. There was nothing left to do after that. He walked on Wangfujing. He took a picture of the blocklong mural of Kobe Bryant. He took a picture of a foreign man fumbling with a map. He took a picture of the railway station. He thought about telling all of this to the driver. No. The driver was already on a phone call. He wanted to tell somebody. No. There was nobody to tell. He took out his notebook. No. He had already written down the story somewhere else. He was too ashamed to turn the story into something he could publish. He picked up his phone. No. There was a message from Sara. She asked him what time he was landing. Her flight from Doha took ten hours, she said. She had to fly over India. She asked him what hotel he was staying at. He paid attention to the messages and forgot the city slipping by outside. He wasn’t sure where he was going. The driver pulled up in front of the hotel. Cedric Samuel took his bags and walked inside.
Cedric Samuel paced the room. He turned on the television and flicked between RT and CNA. He hung his clothes in the closet. He washed his shirt in the sink, wrang it out, and hung it over the bathtub. He put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, then went to walk. There was a street of hotels. There were a few restaurants. There was a hospital for Chinese medicine. The street smelled of licorice, mugwort, angelica, and clove, mixing with the synthetic cedar from hotel lobbies, then boiled crawfish and ginger. There was a low, filthy river. Bridges across it were lit with purple and green lights. He crossed a bridge and came to a square. The sun was setting. He watched kids filming each other doing kickflips. He watched a man launching a glowing bulb up into the sky with a slingshot, then catching it as it fell. He watched women dancing. A man sidled up to him. “This is a Chinese song,” he said. He spoke English. Cedric Samuel nodded. “Do you like this song?” Cedric Samuel asked. “I like,” he said. He saw that Cedric Samuel was smoking. “American cigarettes?” “American cigarettes, made in Japan,” Cedric Samuel said, switching to Chinese. “Nobody can beat China now,” the man said, switching to Chinese, too. “We were beaten by so many countries, even the Japanese." He gestured at the cigarette in Cedric Samuel's hand. "But nobody can beat us now. We don't want to interfere with other countries, either." “That’s right,” Cedric Samuel said. “What country are you from?” the man asked. “I’m American,” Cedric Samuel said. Even though the man frowned at this, Cedric Samuel decided it would not be appropriate to begin explaining what his nationality meant to him. He knew that it was meaningless to explain that he had grown up in Stuttgart and Okinawa, and that he had lived most of his adult life in Shenyang, Vancouver, Mombasa, or Nagoya. He meant it as exculpatory evidence. He had not set foot in the United States in fifteen years. “You are American,” the man said. “That’s right,” Cedric Samuel said. He started walking away. Cedric Samuel went back toward the hotel by another route, across another bridge. He stopped at a restaurant selling banmian and ate a bowl. He went back to his room. He sent Sara a message, asking her what she needed to do the next day. She was going to sit on a panel about Middle Eastern literature in Chinese translation. She didn’t know what she was going to say. He said that he was going to give a talk about the American publishing industry and prospects for the promotion of Chinese literature in translation. He wasn’t sure what he could say. She sent the name of her hotel and he opened Baidu Maps to see how long it would take to walk there. He told her that he ate banmian and asked her what she liked to eat in Beijing.
In the morning, Cedric Samuel put on a tweed jacket. He drank a warm bottle of Coca-Cola while watching RT. He was greeted in the hotel lobby by a woman from China Consolidated Publications Control and Promotions Group. She addressed him as laoshi and lay over his head like a garland of flowers a card on a lanyard, which identified him as a “Sinologist.” They rode together in a taxi across town. The name she gave was Julie. Her family name was Zhu. She was in her twenties and wore her hair short. She wore glasses. She sat in the front seat and turned around to speak to him. “I wonder, laoshi, if I can ask you a few questions about translation.” “Yes,” Cedric Samuel said. “When you want to translate a book, who do you talk to first?” “I try to contact the author. I ask for permission. I ask about the rights, but not formally—just to see if the situation might be complicated.” “And then who do you take the book to after you translate it?” Julie asked. “I don’t translate it. I find someone that might be interested. If they will pay me, I can translate it.” She turned around again, then turned back, and asked, “How did you know Li Gu’s books? How do you find books you want to translate?” “I read Douban,” he said. “I read Douban, too,” she said. “Which writers are you reading now?” “I liked the last Wang Zhanhei collection,” Cedric Samuel said. He was sure he had not read it in full. He glanced at his phone to see if Sara had replied to his last question. “Ban Wang. I’m reading Hu Lingyun’s book.” “I don’t know him. Do you read old books?” “I like Qiu Huadong,” he said. “What is he like?” “He wrote a book about an artist coming to Beijing. He wrote about the suburbs.” “Who is he like? I mean, which Western writers is he like?” Cedric Samuel paused for a long time. “Maybe he’s like Jack Kerouac sometimes. I never thought about a comparison. What do you read?” “I read Western literature,” Julie said. “I read Kerouac. He wrote On the Road, right? He wrote another one. Dharma something.” “Dharma Bums.” “I like Nabokov,” Julie said. “I read old books. I like Donald Barthelme.” “Pale Fire,” Cedric Samuel said, remembering the Chinese title. He had never actually read it. “Did you ever write a novel?” Cedric Samuel asked her. He wanted to ask the same question to Sara. She must have. He had told every woman that he had ever fallen in love with that she should write at least a short story. But he wouldn’t need to tell her. She must have. “No,” Julie said, “I never write my own stories.” Cedric Samuel wondered if she was lying. Since he wasn’t in love with her, it could be possible. They rode the rest of the way in silence. He turned back to his phone.
Julie followed Cedric Samuel as he walked across the square. The sun shone down and radiated back up at him. She unfurled a parasol. She tried to hold it over him. He told her that he wanted to feel the sun. She pointed out the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube, the Olympic Tower. They went into the convention center. “Do you need water?” she asked. He said he would be fine. She led him through the exhibitors’ halls. People’s Literature and the Saudi Arabian Arts Bureau. Kodansha and Taschen. Everything made of styrofoam. Particle board. It could be pulled down in a hurry. Men in business casual. Women in business casual. Wide screens, broadcasting words of support from publishers that didn’t make the trip. Julie led him past all of this, then down into the basement, which was reserved for more minor guests, like the Light Industry Publishing Company of Hebei, an Italian picture book publisher, and the Social Sciences Press. He was set up in a corner, and told that he would speak in fifteen minutes. He sent a message to Sara, asking her where she was. She asked him where he was. He looked at his notes. He greeted a man from Libya that apologized for his poor English. He greeted a man from Syria. He greeted a blond woman from an American publishing house. It was her first time in Beijing. Julie led him to a low stage and pressed a microphone into his hand. He spoke about the declining audience for literary translation, then, warming to the topic, announced to the small audience, made up mostly of other translators and publishers, that stupidity was so endemic that it could threaten not only publishing but also humanity. The microphone cut out. Julie rushed to bring him another one. “There is hope,” he said, “I think, although we must find alternative models. None of us have the solution—I don’t, at least, but I can’t speak for you. I don’t want to dissuade anyone. I don’t have the solution, but there must be one, probably in something that we’ve all of us already laughed off or decided was impractical. I have high hopes for the future.” He handed the microphone back to Julie. She smiled at him. The man from Libya spoke next. He began his speech by saying that there was no paper in his country. Before Cedric Samuel could hear an explanation, Julie was at his elbow, directing him down a hallway. They entered a gallery where a ceremony was already underway to celebrate the sale of Arabic rights to a book that a Frenchman had published with the China Industrial Press. It was called Imperial Death Drive: The American Monster Unmasked. He was led to a seat on the panel, beside a French publisher and a Syrian editor. On a screen, the author of the book was speaking about how his colleagues had been ostracized for holding pro-China positions. Cedric Samuel was not expected to speak.
That afternoon, Cedric Samuel sat on a panel called “A Dialogue with the World: Respected Sinologists Discuss Li Gu in Translation.” He was seated beside two stern-looking men, both about fifty, and both in navy-blue jackets and light blue shirts, one of whom had translated Li Gu into Italian, the other into Portuguese. The host was an enthusiastic young man of about thirty, who wore a Uniqlo polo shirt. He asked each panelist in turn to introduce themselves. The Portuguese man and the Italian man both spoke in Chinese. Cedric Samuel followed them. He used up as much time as possible thanking his host, the audience, and the China Consolidated Publications Control and Promotions Group, and the organizers of the Beijing Global Publishing Fair. Cedric Samuel began telling the story of the first time that he had come to Beijing. He said that he had stayed in a hotel in a hutong north of Wangfujing. It was in the years before the Olympics, so everything was under construction. He wondered what the reaction would be if he began to weep. There were a dozen or so people in the chairs below the stage, then about the same amount beyond the cordon. He told them that he was coming back to a city that had changed beyond the imagination of anyone that saw it twenty years before. The pause went on long enough to signal that he was about to reach his conclusion. Cedric Samuel explained that he believed something similar to Beijing’s transformation had happened in arts and literature over the same period, that Li Gu stood as one of the towers on their skyline. The host thanked Cedric Samuel. When the discussion concluded, Cedric Samuel told Julie that he would walk on the square. She let him go. He took the escalator to the third floor. He sent Sara a message, telling her where to find him. He sat beside a window. He waited. He watched her pass once, then called out to her. He touched her hand. He did his best to seem hesitant to commit to anything to which she would not commit. But Sara wore cedar and oud at her breast, and rose and patchouli in her curly hair. She wore gray. She had freckles across her nose. And Sara was more beautiful to Cedric Samuel than he could have imagined she would be. She settled down on the steel bar below the window. They talked about being Sinologists. Sara told Cedric Samuel facts about herself that Cedric Samuel had already committed to memory: her father was an engineer, who had trained in the Soviet Union, that he had told her that studying English was a dead-end, that she had gone to stay for seven months at a college in Weihai, where she had translated a book of poetry by the dean. They talked about people they knew. They said they admired each other. Cedric Samuel was unsure of what else he should say to her.
That night, Cedric Samuel and Sara ate dinner together at a restaurant in Dongcheng. He had been there before. It had been with Caicai, years back, who had come to him at the Beijing Global Publishing Fair and begged him to translate her father’s book of short stories. Cedric Samuel had no interest, but he wondered if he could sleep with her. He invited her to his suite in the Grand Mercure. She poured her heart out to him. She had no happy memories of her father, she told Cedric Samuel. His stories had given her a new perspective on him. She realized her father had suffered for her, as much as for her half-sister and his second wife. Cedric Samuel lost all interest in sleeping with her. He told her that he would work on the book. They walked that night down to the Yunnan restaurant for a dinner to which he had been invited. Caicai was uncomfortable and left early. After that, he remembered Nicholas, the British translator, and probably Erica, the American agent, and perhaps James, nationality and occupation unknown, who lived in a single room in Jiaodaokou with his ex-wife, who had around that time published a book of poems about the end of their relationship. They had talked about books that night. Cedric Samuel and Sara talked about other things. She talked about her father. Cedric Samuel told her about the first book he was writing, if his agent ever got back to him. Cedric Samuel told her about the seconds book he was writing, if he ever got an agent for it. She asked him if he was married. He said that he wasn’t, but he had been before. He talked about how he had met his first wife and what had happened between them. She talked about her husband and how they had met. They ate beef and mint, a salad of toon and dried tofu, and grilled goat's milk cheese. They walked together outside. Cedric Samuel ran out of sensible things to say. He shared his findings on the Lod Airport massacre. He talked about religion. They arrived at the train station. He touched her hand again. That night, he sat at the desk in his room and texted Sara about the things he saw on television. He felt no closer to deciding what he should do. He confirmed that it would take an hour to walk to her hotel. He decided not to ask her if he should. He imagined sleeping in the same bed as Sara. When he knew it was too late, he went out to the convenience store beside the hotel, bought a razor and shaving cream, a bag of marinated quail eggs, and a box of condoms. He sat at the desk, waited for the airconditioning to tighten his scrotum, then trimmed away any stray hairs he saw. He shaved the base of his penis. He dabbed away a few droplets of blood with a tissue.
Julie came to his hotel room at six. Cedric Samuel invited her in. She watched him brush his teeth. She asked if he was going to wear a jacket. No need. She asked if he had slept well. Good. He told her that the rain had awoken him. She told him to close the window tonight. He’d had a dream that he was driving down a highway somewhere outside Cumberland, and the sound of the rain hitting the flat roof outside the hotel window had become the sound of insects hitting the windshield. Julie was worried that he had not eaten breakfast the day before, so, she led him to a room off the lobby and watched as Cedric Samuel filled a bowl with rice porridge and another with pickled radish. She watched him eat. They rode a car to the convention center. “Laoshi,” she called to him from the front seat, “I want to take a nap.” She slipped off her shoes and curled her feet underneath her, leaned against the door, and was asleep in a few moments. She mumbled in her sleep. The driver woke her as they pulled up out front of the convention center. She slipped her shoes on and sprang out of the front seat to open Cedric Samuel’s door for him. She led him upstairs. Julie told Cedric Samuel to speak for twenty minutes on his work as a translator and his collaboration with publishers. His audience was made up of junior employees of the China Consolidated Publications Control and Promotions Group and a few foreign translators whose trips to Beijing they had paid for. When Cedric Samuel was done speaking and answering the questions that the translators had been compelled to prepare, Julie took him to eat lunch at a cafeteria downstairs. Afterwards, she led him back upstairs to the same hall. He was expected to listen to a panel on African literature in translation. He excused himself, and went to find Jonathan Chang of Sinovision Publishers, who had requested a meeting about an unfavorable review of one of their books that he had written a few months before. He told Sara to meet him on the way. There was no time to talk. She followed him into the meeting, held in a glass cube on the third floor, then, before he sat down, she quietly left. He wondered if she was waiting outside. He could not pay attention to Daniel Chang’s presentation. He texted Sara. He asked where she was. She was giving a speech downstairs. She told him not to be busy later. He said he wouldn’t be. She reminded Cedric Samuel that he was supposed to leave in the morning. He had forgotten about Haruka. He cursed his own stupidity. He sat beside the window where he had first met Sara. That was where Julie found him. “Laoshi,” she chided, “you have to look at your phone more often. Li Gu wants to have dinner with you!”
Cedric Samuel arrived to the dinner with Li Gu early. It was at a mall on Liangmahe. He watched the birds swooping over the river. Two women greeted him. One of them was a vice-president at the China Consolidated Publications Control and Promotions Group, and the other was her assistant. Cedric Samuel had never met them, so it was easy to find things to talk about. The two women asked him where he had lived before in China. He told them that he had gone to school in Shanghai. That was mostly true. He said that he had worked at a software company in Guangzhou. It had only been for a day, then he had spent another six months living off savings, going to shows, and trying to hold onto his youth. He told he had lived in Hohhot. He didn’t explain that. He didn’t explain Dalian, nor Zhengzhou, nor Wuxi. He made apologies for living in Japan. He wasn’t interested in the culture, and the people were cold, but it was cheap and frictionless, and it wasn’t hard to get a visa. Li Gu came late. He was in his fifties, a former newspaper man that had made a fortune with a series of somewhat literary detective novels. The book Cedric Samuel translated was his attempt to cut ties with the past, to write something more literary and personal. It was a book about an alcoholic detective that goes down to the countryside to uncover the truth about a murder right before Liberation. Li Gu came with his wife, who wore a tight, sleeveless dress that showed off the width of her hips and her flat stomach. He came with his daughter, who was dressed as a princess. The two women from China Consolidated Publications Control and Promotions Group related everything that he had told them. Another writer followed. He was a middle-aged poet, who had just won a prize in Italy. Another writer followed him. He was a middle-aged journalist, who had just published a book about his year in Xinjiang. Li Gu offered compliments to Cedric Samuel. Cedric Samuel, he explained to the writers and to his wife and the women from China Consolidated Publications Control and Promotions Group, had translated his book flawlessly, without ever once asking for assistance. Cedric Samuel nodded. It had been years since he had worked on the book. He had thought it quite simple to translate. Cedric Samuel felt it would be inappropriate to say that, but he would have meant it as a compliment. Cedric Samuel nodded again. He looked down at his phone. Sara was at a dinner across town. He told her to meet him at Sihui Station. His hotel would be within walking distance, he thought, so he could take her there. He had no particular ambitions. Cedric Samuel went in the car with Li Gu and his wife and his son. The driver dropped them off at their hotel in Guomao, then drove him to Sihui.
Cedric Samuel met Sara outside of a McDonalds in the station. She asked him where he was taking her. He told her that they could walk along the river. They walked out of the station. He told her to sit on a bollard. He sat across from her. He wanted to ask her what she really wanted from him. He talked about his dinner with Li Gu. She asked to see the river. Cedric Samuel told her that it had once been part of the Grand Canal. He knew that it had become more recently a sewage channel. He led her there, and, on the way, she took his hand. His pulse raced. He was embarrassed. He led her over a bridge. He stopped halfway across. He paused and gestured to the skyline of the city. “This is what I like about Beijing,” Cedric Samuel told Sara, “that there can be a perfect, modern city right there, then this bridge, which looks like it was put up by a single carpenter last week.” She was unimpressed. They crossed the bridge and he led her down to the path that ran beside it. They walked under the bridge. They stopped at the railing. He vowed not to try to kiss her. He felt guilty. He felt as if she was too beautiful and too clever to want to be kissed by him. He felt as if his self-loathing was going to save him from disappointment. He knew that she would kiss back, if he tried, but that would mean, either, upsetting her, or that he would need to return to Fukuoka alone, even more fixated on her. But Cedric Samuel kissed her. Sara kissed Cedric Samuel back. She unbuttoned his shirt. He put his hand up her shirt. When they were done, Cedric Samuel asked if she would come to his hotel. She asked him if he would go to her hotel. They walked back to Sihui Station and took the train. They missed their stop and took a taxi. They walked for a long time. Sara was staying in a luxurious guesthouse built by order of Hua Guofeng. She had a large room. Inside it, they kissed and undressed. He touched her body and she touched his. She asked him to choke her, and to slaped her cheeks and her breasts. They lay in each other’s arms. Cedric Samuel talked about how smooth her knees were, and about how he had thought about her at least once a day for the past year or so, and about how the casualties of Lod had been cut down by gunfire from overeager Israel Defense Forces men, and about how he would never forget the scent she wore between her breasts. Cedric Samuel fell asleep in Sara’s arms, early in the morning, with her saliva drying on his cheeks. He awoke to her murmuring him and kissing his arm. He rose. He took from her bedside a bottle of musk made by Ajmal to celebrate Qatar’s national day.
Sara paid for Cedric Samuel’s taxi back to his hotel. He showered there. He had slept for only two hours. He packed his bags. He smeared musk on his throat. He was met by Julie in the hallway. They got in the car together. Julie told him that the event was important. He should have worn a jacket. The event for Li Gu was one of those intended to mark the end of the Beijing Global Publishing Fair. Fifty Sinologists, publishers, and foreign bureaucrats were arranged at two long tables before Li Gu. He had translated his latest book into English, so Cedric Samuel was invited to sit beside Li Gu and his agent. He was invited to speak. He was distracted. He was sending a message to Sara to apologize for not kissing her when he left in the morning. It had not been clear to him that she had wanted him to. He didn’t say that. He made excuses. Cedric Samuel praised Li Gu and Li Gu praised Cedric Samuel. Li Gu’s wife met him after the speeches were made. “We are going to eat lunch after this,” she said. She paused. A faint smile undercut her suddenly slightly stern tone: “You are going to become a father soon. You can wrap her in this. It’s very light. It’s good for the sort of weather you have in Tokyo.” Cedric Samuel nodded and took the shopping bag she handed him. Sara met him as he stepped away from her. She gave him a book of poetry that she had translated. She wrote a message to him inside the front cover. He couldn’t read it. He gave her the copy of Li Gu’s book that he had translated. He wrote in the front cover: Sara. Please read this. Cedric. They spoke with their colleagues. Sara was cool. Cedric Samuel was cool. He realized that what they had done should be kept secret. He watched how she spoke to people she knew. He tried to find something in her body language that might be significant. She followed him into the basement. They stood together beside the Light Industry Publishing Company of Hebei’s booth. Sara told him to miss his flight. Cedric Samuel said he couldn’t. Cedric Samuel said, “I don’t think I should kiss you now. Is that right?” Sara said, “That’s right. You can’t do that here.” He hugged her. Julie appeared over her shoulder. “Laoshi,” she called, “Li Gu wants you to eat lunch with him. He’s going to treat you to Vietnamese food!” Cedric Samuel followed Julie upstairs, to where a car was waiting. “I don’t have time,” he said. “I will miss my flight.” Cedric Samuel regretted telling this to Julie. Julie took out her phone and typed on it for a few minutes. When she was done, she said, “The car will take you to the airport. Thank you, laoshi.” He apologized to her for all the trouble he had caused. She smiled and looked quickly away.
Cedric Samuel was somewhere over the Bohai when he took out his notebook. He began to write: oud musk amber freckles on her JANA SARA MARA nose led her from brushed aluminium bathroom on the number one across the bridge hung with fairy lights to the sewage channel. He stopped. He began to write: I have without thinking volunteered to have my heart broken / apartment in Fukuoka / next year in Jerusalem / oud musk amber. perfume on my hat. To have fallen in love is excusable. But I. He stopped. He watched a movie. He ate vanilla ice cream. He landed in Tokyo. He took the Tokyo Monorail to Hamamatsucho. He checked into a business hotel. He checked his phone. He told Sara everything that came to mind, except that he had fallen in love with her. He felt as if that was a meaningless sort of thing to say. He told her about the heat of the city. The city felt wet. The musk that he had smeared on his neck had been rendered inert by airliner circulators, but the humidity made it bloom as he walked to the Family Mart. He told her this. He told her that until he had seen her that day, seated on the bed in her bra and panties, hands propping herself up, that he had never before known what a woman was. He said that she had ruined Tokyo for him, that the only consolation for its grimness had once been its beautiful women, that now he only looked for her. These things seemed better than saying that he was in love with Sara. Cedric Samuel wished that there was another way. He wished that he had missed his flight. He wished that he had worked up the nerve to talk to her, all those years ago. He wished that he had simply admitted to her, those months before, that he fantasized about her. He said those things to her, too. And in the morning, Cedric Samuel got on a train back to Fukuoka. When he returned to his room and began to unpack his bag, he took out the shirt that he had worn the night he met her. He smelled its breast. He smelled his cap, onto which she had sprayed her perfume. Sitting on the tatami, he lifted each of his things out of his bag. His melancholy turned to panic. The book that Sara had given him was not in the bag. He tried to remember where he had left it. It didn’t matter. It was gone. He could never tell her that, he decided, unless it was in person. He could tell her after he had kissed her again. If he kissed her again in this life, they could laugh about it. The book was lost. Until then, it needed to be kept from her, as carefully as he held back the avowal of love. He rose to his knees and said a prayer of thanks, then checked his phone.
