Chapter 397: Han Chongli Said

At 4:40 p.m., the bus stopped at the mouth of the alley. The shoe repairman had packed up his stall; his wooden board leaned against the wall. She climbed the three stone steps. The door on the second floor stood half open. Downstairs, the exhaust fan over the stove was running, and the smell of scallion oil drifted up in waves.

Two sheets of paper lay spread on her desk. One was the main page of Qinghe's Remediation Supervision Form; the other was a draft showing how to fill in the "Replanting Quantity Confirmer" column. A pen rested on the corner of the draft, cap on.

Lu Jibai sat at the desk by the window. He looked up and said, "Director Cai is coming at ten tomorrow."

"I know."

"She said she wants to go over that column in person."

"We'll go over it tomorrow." She hung her bag on the back of the chair, pulled the chair out, sat down, and pulled the papers over, going through them line by line.

He said nothing more, lowering his head over the two pages on his own desk. The half-open window let in a strong wind; the corners of his papers lifted, and he got up and pushed the window down halfway, then sat back down without a word.

Her bag still hung on the chair back, zipped shut. Her phone was inside, half charged, and she didn't take it out to plug in. The wall of the reception room, the wall clock that ran a minute faster than her phone, the red dot on the screen that never stopped—they were still moving behind her eyes. The small print on the paper only settled after she made herself pause. Her pencil tapped two small dots beneath the Confirmer column; the tip pressed down, but the paper didn't tear.

She went through the dates on the main page against her calendar once more: the effective date was April 24; May 30 to May 24; the 180-day period ran to October 21. The "Post-Rain Re-inspection" column was blank. Beside it, she had added in her own handwriting: "Person who checks signs; organization written on the line beneath the name." The characters were small, squeezed in at the edge of the column.

On the draft page, Cai Qingru had written half a line: "To be filled in after on-site confirmation by the Center," the rest left blank for her to complete tomorrow. She pulled the draft closer: the replanting count would be based on the day-of-acceptance tally; whoever counted signed. She needed to write those two sentences down, and tomorrow she'd still have to clarify whether they were counting seedlings or holes. The form had only those few boxes; one wrong entry meant another trip on acceptance day. She circled "count seedlings" at the edge of the column.

Her notebook lay open beside the papers. At the top of that page she added a line: May 14, 10 a.m., Center—go over that column in person.

From her bag she took out the pen she'd brought with her that morning, capped it, and put it back in the pen holder—in the same slot it had come from.

At 4:55, from the window side, he said, "Tomorrow at ten—do you want me to stay?"

"No." She said, "She'll leave as soon as she's done talking."

"Mm." He turned a page.

Li Huilan came back in from outside. She set her cloth bag on her desk, pulled out the photocopy of the mediation order from the fifty-nine-year-old woman's case, and tucked it into the file. "The day after she signed for receipt, her son had someone bring her a pair of shoes." She slid the drawer shut, sat back down at her desk, flipped through her page, and added, "These next couple of days I need to go to the detention center. The man in there has a terrible memory. I ask three things; if he remembers two, that's already good. That character I wrote at the bottom of the page this morning—I remember it."

"Go slow," she said.

"Right. Slow." Li Huilan smiled faintly. "That's the one thing I can still manage."

Downstairs, the exhaust fan stopped for a while, then started up again. The sound of him turning pages was very light—one page, then the next. At 5:20 she slipped the two pages into the Qinghe file and put the file back on the second shelf of the metal cabinet. The paper label on the cabinet door—the one reading "Qingshi Village"—had a corner lifting. She pressed it down; it wouldn't stay flat.

The window was still half open. Downstairs, someone was washing a pot; the rush of water cut off with a clatter.

At 6:10 she went downstairs to eat noodles. He Xiufen lifted the noodles into a bowl and carried it to the small table by the door. "Just you?"

"Just me."

The stool by the stove sat empty, the water still boiling in the pot. He Xiufen turned the flame down a little and wiped her hands on her apron. "Zhi'an at home?"

"He is."

"Then finish up and go home. If it's not enough, tell me and I'll add more." She pushed a small dish of pickled radish toward her hand and didn't ask where she'd been that afternoon.

Halfway through the noodles, from upstairs came the sound of someone opening a drawer, closing a drawer—twice. She didn't look up. He Xiufen swept the floor, working her way to her feet, and said only, "Vinegar's on the windowsill."

At 7:05 she got home. Zhi'an was in the inner room, the door open a crack, the desk lamp throwing a vertical strip of light. He stuck his head out and looked at her, said there was still rice in the pot. She said she'd eaten downstairs.

She washed the bowl, dried her hands on her apron, and took the phone out of her bag.

The first thing she did was not listen. She connected the phone to the computer and copied the recording over, watching the progress bar creep forward in tiny increments until it reached the end. She named the file with the date and place: May 13, Hengzheng, First Floor. She kept the copy on her phone. When the transfer was done, she put on the earbuds—first at minimum volume, afraid the inner room might hear; after two sentences she took them out, set the volume to the middle, and put them back in.

At 8:00 she played it from the beginning.

The first pass: she paused it only once.

The first sentence in the earbuds was her own voice: "I'm recording." It was smaller than she remembered, and flatter. After that came his "Go ahead." Her words and his passed in segments, with her own breathing in between.

There were two empty seconds before "I'm recording." What she'd been thinking then, she couldn't recall now. Those two seconds felt longer in the earbuds than they had at the time—long enough that she thought the recording had cut out. She waited for them to pass on their own.

She heard her pen touch the paper, then fail to land. She heard the three taps on the edge of the desk, and lifted her eyes—back then she'd thought he was counting days. Now those three taps fell in the recording just as light, just as slow, with the same even spacing between them.

One spot she paused, rewound, listened again. She'd asked, "That night—which night is that? You said it so easily." He'd said, "You heard it just as easily." The gap in between was long enough for her to drink a mouthful of tea. Three passes, each one exactly that length.

Further on, she said, "What you owe my dad isn't two sentences." After that line came the sound of a teapot lid lifting and settling back. She hadn't noticed it then; she heard it now.

The recording ended with his line—"There won't be a second one from me"—and then the sound of the phone being picked up and the recording stopped. A little over fifty minutes, and it was done. She took out the earbuds. There was a buzzing in her ears, and the refrigerator humming from the kitchen.

The second pass, she listened and wrote at the same time.

She turned the notebook to a fresh page and wrote the header: May 13, Hengzheng, First Floor. Below, she began, one sentence per line, and after each sentence she noted: Han Chongli said.

"He admitted it. The characters were signed by him; beyond that, he won't say a word. Three years." —Han Chongli said.

"If he'd been willing to bring it out, you wouldn't be sitting here today." —Han Chongli said.

"When Jibai ran that errand, he didn't have his license yet." —Han Chongli said.

This one she rewound and listened to once more. In the recording, he said the name—just once—and the name he said was "Jibai."

"Your father's three years bought him one practicing certificate." —Han Chongli said.

Halfway through copying this line, the pen stopped. She finished the half-line without adding a single character, and wrote the note after it as usual: Han Chongli said.

"That sentence—your father never asked me about it, not even at the end." —Han Chongli said.

"What I didn't say, don't take as an admission." —Han Chongli said.

"I don't want anything. I only said the half-sentence your father never said—said it for him." —Han Chongli said.

"You want to turn it over, you can turn it over. But once it's turned over, think about who'll be the first one standing in the light." —Han Chongli said.

"No. If you come again, there won't be a second one from me." —Han Chongli said.

"Who signed the sample submission form—you already know." —Han Chongli said.

She took out the page she'd written on the bus and laid the two pages side by side. The earlier page had three items, each with a line of response beneath; this page had one sentence per line. Beneath the second line, the words "No answer"—and the recording matched: she asked, he stopped, and after the pause he said, "You changed your question." And then still no answer. Both places were blank.

She rewound to that spot and listened once more. Still empty. The pen cap scraped against the paper, and she kept writing.

By this point, the pen tip felt dry. She drew a line in the margin at the edge of the notebook, turned the pen around, and continued writing. At the very bottom she added a line: Not once did he say my dad's name—always "your father." She read the page over after adding it. There was nothing else on the page.

At this hour, Director He still hadn't locked up. She wanted to ask one question—where to file the petition for review. Just that one question; nothing else needed to be said. The phone was in her hand, the screen lit, the room silent except for the refrigerator. She pressed the screen dark and set the phone back on the desk. Among the names in her contacts, she pressed none of them. Not today.

The inner room door creaked. Zhi'an came out to get water and saw the open notebook and the earbud cord on the desk. He stood in the doorway.

"The recording?"

"The recording."

"Anything useful?"

"Don't know yet."

"Tomorrow morning I'm sweeping the floor. If you're not up, I'll move your notebook aside." He carried the water back into the inner room and pulled the door to, leaving a crack.

[Thud. What you copied down is what he said. Of what he did—not a single word.]

The System said nothing further. She picked up the phone and glanced at the length of the recording, then set it back down.

She remembered leaving the reception room that afternoon with this page still blank. She set the earbuds on the corner of the desk, slid the notebook a little closer, capped the pen, then opened it again to check the date at the top of the page before closing it for good.

At 9:20 she got up and poured half a glass of water. The water was cold; she drank two mouthfuls. The bottom of the glass struck the wooden table with a small sound.

On the desk corner sat the stack of nine volumes. The first volume was still wrapped in those two sheets of old newspaper, their edges yellowed. Volume Eight lay at the side of the stack—she'd taken it out on April 23 and hadn't opened it. On the table-of-contents page after the first volume's title page, the last box in the row for Volume Eight was still empty.

She walked over, wiped her hand on her pants, and picked it up.

The spine was a little loose. The paper label on the spine was in her father's handwriting, the strokes straight. She moved the glass to the edge of the stack, set Volume Eight under the desk lamp, pulled the chair half a foot closer to the desk, and opened it.

She recognized the format: the date at the top of the page, then "morning" or "afternoon," then line after line below. The first page had only a few lines, the rest blank. There were creases at the edges; the folded corners had been pressed flat. At the top: March 22, morning.

The first word beneath it: Pump House.

Out in the alley, someone was closing an iron gate. The metal clanged once. She pressed her palm flat on the edge of the page. Early on March 21, those two cardboard boxes had been carried from the Village Committee office into a truck and sent to Qingyuan. On the morning of the twenty-second, he had gone up to the pump house.

She shifted the lamp a little closer to the paper. The bottom of the page was blank.