At the ticket window, he turned in his special old cadre pass with the invitation. Tickets had been reserved for old high cadres like him, one of the few privileges he still enjoyed.

But he saw several young men approaching him near the entrance.

“Do you want a ticket? R-rated.”

“Nudity. Explicit sex. Fifty Yuan.”

“A boost to an old man’s bedroom energy.”

It was not supposed to happen, Zhang thought, that those young rascals, too, held tickets in their hands. The movie was not supposed to be accessible to ordinary people. The bureau should have put some cops at the ticket window.

Zhang hurried in and found himself a seat at the rear, close to the exit. To his surprise, there were not as many people as he had expected, especially in the last few rows. There were only a couple of young people sitting in front of him, whispering and nestling against each other. It was a postmodernist French movie with an inexperienced interpreter doing a miserable simultaneous translation, but with one graphic scene after another, it was not too difficult to guess what was happening to the people in the movie.

He noticed the young couple continuously adjusting their bodies, too, in front of him. It was not difficult for him to guess what they were doing either. Soon Zhang heard the woman moaning, and saw her head sliding down the man’s shoulder, and disappearing out of sight. Or was this a scene from the movie? There were explicit images being juxtaposed on the screen…

When the movie was finally over, the woman got up languidly from the man’s arms, her hair tousled, and buttoned up her silk blouse, her white shoulder flashing in the semi-darkness of the theater.

Commissar Zhang strode out of the theater, indignant. It was hot outside. There were several cars waiting on the street- imported cars, luxury models, shining in the afternoon sun. Butnot for him. A retired old cadre. Marching along Chengdu Road, Zhang sensed the cars rushing past him like stampeding animals.

Back home, he was exhausted and famished. He had had only a bowl of green onion instant noodles in the morning. There was nothing but half a dry loaf left in the refrigerator. He took it out and brewed himself a pot of coffee, using three spoonfuls. That was his dinner: bread that tasted like cardboard and coffee strong enough to dye his hair. Then he took out the case file, though he had already read it several times. After a futile attempt to find something new, he took out the magazines he had borrowed from the club in the morning. To his surprise, there was a poem by Chief Inspector Chen in Qinghai Lake . It was entitled “Night Talk.”

Creamy coffee, cold;

Toy bricks of sugar cubes

Crumbling, a butter blossom still

Reminiscent of natural freedom

On the mutilated cake,

‘The knife aside, like a footnote.

It is said that people can tell the time

By the change of color

In a cat’s eyes-

But you can’t. Doubt, a heap

Of ancient dregs

From the bottle of Great Wall

Rests in the sparkling wine.

Zhang could not understand it. He just knew that some images were vaguely disturbing. So he skipped a couple of stanzas toward the end, to reach the last one.

Nothing appears more accidental

Than the world in words.

A rubric turns by chance

In your hands, and the result,

Like any result, is called history…

Through the window we see no star.

Mind’s square deserted, not a pennant

Left. Only a rag picker of the ages

Passes by, dropping scraps

Of every minute into her basket.

The words “mind’s square” suddenly caught his attention. Could that possibly be an allusion to Tiananmen Square? “Deserted” on a summer night of 1989, with no “pennant” left there. If so, the poem was politically incorrect. And the issue about “history,” too. Chairman Mao had said that people, people alone make the history. How could Chen talk about history as the result of a rubric?

Zhang was not sure of his interpretation. So he started to read all over again. Before long, however, his eyesight grew bleary. He had to give up. There was nothing else for him to do. So he took a shower before going to bed. Standing under the shower head, he still thought that Chen had gone too far.

Zhang decided to sleep on his misgivings, but his brain kept churning. Around eleven thirty, he got out of bed, turned on the lights, and donned his reading glasses.

The apartment was so quiet. His wife had passed away at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Ten years, the living, the not living. It’s more than ten years. Then the telephone on the nightstand rang.

It was a long distance phone call from his daughter in Anhui. “Dad, I’m calling from the local county hospital. Kangkang, our second son, is sick, his temperature is 104. The doctor says that it is pneumonia. Guolian has been laid off. We’ve got no money left.”

“How much?”

“We need a thousand Yuan as a deposit, or they won’t treat him.”

“Give them what you have. Tell the doctors to go ahead. I’ll express mail it to you the first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you, Dad. Sorry to touch you like this.”

“You don’t have to say that.” He added after a pause, “I’m the one to blame for all this-all these years.”

So Zhang believed. For whatever had happened to his daughter, he held himself responsible. Often, with unbearable bitterness, at night he would recollect the distant moments of taking her to school, hand in hand, back in the early sixties. A proud child of a revolutionary cadre family, a bright student at school, her future in socialist China was rosy. In 1966, however, all that changed. The Cultural Revolution turned him into a counterrevolutionary, and her into a child of a black capitalist roader family, a target of the Red Guards’ revolutionary criticism. As a politically discriminated-against educable educated youth, she was sent to the poor countryside in Anhui Province, where she worked for no more than ten cents a day. He could never imagine what had happened to her there. Other educated youths received money from their families in Shanghai, or came back for family reunions at the Spring Festival, but she couldn’t. She had no family; he was still in jail. When he was finally released and rehabilitated in the mid-seventies, he could hardly recognize his child, now a sallow, deeply wrinkled woman in black homespun with a baby on her back. She had married a local mine worker- a survivor’s choice, perhaps. In those years, a mine worker’s monthly salary of sixty Yuan could have made a world of difference. There she soon became the mother of three. In the late seventies, she passed up the opportunity to return to Shanghai, for Party policy forbade any ex-educated youth like her from bringing her husband and children to the city with her.

Sometimes he felt that, by torturing herself, she was torturing him.

“Dad, you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

“What else can I do? I have not taken good care of you. Now I’m too old.”

“You don’t sound well. Have you overworked?”

“No, it’s just the last task before my retirement.”

“Then take care.”

“I will.”

“Next time I come to Shanghai, I’ll bring a couple of Luhua hens for you.”

“Don’t bother.”

“The folks here say Luhua hens are good for an old man’s health. I’m raising half a dozen. Genuine Luhua.”

Now she was sounding more and more like her poor and lower-middle-class peasant self again.

A click. He heard her putting down the phone. And the empty silence. She was thousands of miles away. So many years had passed since he talked to the daughter in his heart.