Chapter Ninety-Four: Snow Reed

The wind was a blade, cutting straight to the bone. Shivering, Luo Hanya groped in the depths of his down jacket and drew out a bottle of fiery liquor. The red star on its label blazed strikingly in the night’s harsh monochrome. Before middle school, a cheap bottle of this strong spirits had been his father’s favorite, the quickest way to warm the body through winters with no heating at all. And after every winter, those red bottle caps became the only ornaments in their shabby, impoverished home.

He raised the bottle to his lips and took a hard swallow. While the liquor’s warmth still lingered, he gently pressed along the lines of his arms and legs to keep them from numbing in the extreme cold.

As the burning heat of the liquor spread through him, long-sealed memories were quietly turned over by fate. It was a time Luo Hanya did not want to revisit, a darkness buried deep in his heart. Yet the memory hovered before him like a ghost, returning again and again, vivid and immediate, as though it were within arm’s reach.

Once nostalgia took hold, every recollection unfolded before Luo Hanya like scenes from a film.

That year he had been only nine. His father’s fourth attempt at starting a business had failed, and the family, drifting without roots, had settled in the bleakest corner of the city.

He had also changed schools again, continuing his fourth-grade spring term at the public elementary school in the western suburbs.

On the first day of the new term, he and she were the only new students who appeared at the unfamiliar classroom door. She wore pure white clothes; her somewhat pale skin was almost the same color as her garments, and strands of black hair half-covered her cheeks.

The two of them arrived at nearly the same time. Luo Hanya stared with curiosity at her lowered lashes. Perhaps sensing his gaze, she suddenly lifted her head and looked at him. At that instant, when their eyes met, his heartbeat quickened. A girl’s face with large eyes came into view, her fair cheeks fine as porcelain. Though still young, she was already breathtakingly beautiful.

From the teacher’s introduction, Luo Hanya learned the name of this girl, beautiful beyond measure: Xue He, the Xue of snow, the He of grain. “What a lovely name!” more than one child exclaimed instinctively.

Xue He was the prettiest girl in the school. In those years when an elementary school child seemed to hold limitless possibility, nearly every boy with normal inclinations wrote her a love letter. But Xue He’s temperament seemed very reserved; almost everyone who tried to curry favor with her was met with a soft but pointed refusal. The other girls, driven by their natural jealousy, deliberately shut her out as well. So she seldom spoke to anyone, wandering alone, with scarcely any friends at all.

Perhaps it was because they had arrived almost together. Perhaps it was that instant of meeting, ordained by heaven. More likely, it was shared misery. Without anyone’s knowledge, Luo Hanya and Xue He became each other’s best friend. Only before Luo Hanya did Xue He hide all her sadness and reveal the happy side of herself, the most beautiful side.

Perhaps heaven was mocking Luo Hanya, letting all the suffering in the world fall upon his best friend.

It was the winter of his fifth-grade vacation, in the bitterest cold, when the plum blossoms outside the window were in full bloom. Bathed in Xue He’s silver-bell laughter, the two spent a joyful afternoon together. When it came time to part, Luo Hanya broke off a few white plum blossoms and gave them to her. He never imagined that farewell would be their last.

After they separated, three straight days of heavy snow fell. All the signal equipment in the western suburbs was damaged by the storm. Curling up at home, Luo Hanya wrapped himself as tightly as he could, and could only rely on the liquor his father had left behind to keep warm in some small measure. The only food in the house was noodles and radishes and cabbage. Though long accustomed to solitude, he still found those three days of loneliness and hardship unbearable.

What Luo Hanya never expected was that behind that endless loneliness and meager existence, there awaited still greater suffering, even harder to endure.

After he had somehow survived what was nearly the hardest period of his life, and the weather had cleared, his first thought, aside from missing his parents, was to find Xue He and speak his heart, or perhaps it would be more fitting to say to share his pain.

He could never find her again. No matter how he knocked, there was no response from the little rented room where Xue He’s mother had lived. The landlady, looking at Luo Hanya with a touch of pity, shook her head and said that three nights earlier Xue He’s mother had already given up the lease.

For a ten-year-old child, that moment was almost as if the sky itself had fallen. His best friend had suddenly left him, yet after the first surge of pain, his young heart still brimmed with hope that one day they might meet again.

But hope remained only hope. All beauty withered beneath ugliness.

Half a month later, a murder case plunged Luo Hanya completely into darkness.

Xue He was dead. She had died that very night, in a makeshift room on the east side of the third floor of an abandoned building not far from Luo Hanya’s home. That place, too, he would remember for eight full years. He clearly remembered every detail of the report on the case.

The girl had suffered severe sexual assault before her death.

The girl was suspected of suicide after being unable to bear the humiliation.

A malicious rape of a young girl could not be ruled out.

The girl’s mother disappeared afterward.

Because the awful weather had concealed all traces related to the crime, and the best time for solving the case had passed, the matter unfortunately became an unsolved mystery.

He also remembered the darkest year that followed Xue He’s death. He hated the damn criminal, hated the incompetent police of that time, hated Xue He’s missing mother, and hated even more his own helplessness.

Only when his father’s stocks suddenly succeeded in middle school, and they moved away from this place, and he met a group of good friends, did Luo Hanya slowly begin to emerge from the shadow. Yet even now, in those occasional bouts of insomnia, on nights so black they seemed nearly dead, he would once again soothe the wounds buried in the depths of darkness.

As time went on, a dark creation seemed to take shape somewhere deep within Luo Hanya’s heart, making him more sentimental, more timid.

At some point, Luo Hanya, lost in memory, found his eyes turning blood-red. He panted heavily, and as though in anger, he drank the liquor down into his stomach, as if trying to use the alcohol to wash away the pain in his heart. Unconsciously, he recited the poem he had loved most in the dark year of his childhood:

You have become a ghost,
forgotten by all,
yet before my eyes
you linger,
near and far at once.

In that strange land,
when apples scent the air,
beneath the distant night sky
you shine with stars above you.

You fell ill in silence, died in silence,
as though singing in your sleep.

Perhaps in your mind
there is no shadow of me,
and no acceptance of
this sorrow of mine.

May you rest forever
beneath the tree heavy with green apples.