Not long after spring began, she left, crossing the ocean with very little luggage to that place that might sink at any moment. He asked why she would not go west with him. She squeezed his hand and said nothing. Mr. Su said she had gone there to fulfill a dream. Everyone has dreams of their own. Since the world itself was going to be gone, let her fulfill what she wished.
Two months later, he received the first postcard she sent. On the front was a portrait of Kawatake Mokuami. On the back was a poem:
In the courtyard stands a wondrous tree;
green leaves send forth flowering splendor.
I climb the branch and break its bloom,
meaning to send it to the one I miss.
Fragrance fills my sleeves,
but the road is long and it cannot be delivered.
What value has this thing itself?
Only that it marks the time since parting.
At a glance he recognized it. It was the poem he had written in the first letter he sent her the year they met.
That was the first year of the Great Ravine.
Long after the performance had ended, the small square before the theater was still filled with soldiers wearing Space Force armbands, standing in twos and threes and loudly discussing the play: a drama adapted from Ouyang Xiu’s long poem “Song of the Japanese Sword,” starring Iya Santsuka Hisashi, the only remaining inheritor of the Ichikawa Sadanji line among the six great schools.
She stood at the end of the hanamichi, waiting with a group of young girls for Iya Santsuka Hisashi to come out from backstage. In her hands she clutched an ink painting by the monk Sesshu, auctioned by the local government. On it was a lush green tree, just like the height of summer’s heat at that moment. Although it was an authentic work, she still insisted on copying an ancient poem onto it: Akashite, kimi o ba matamu, nubatama no, waga kurokami ni, shimo wa furu tomo. This painting, together with a photograph of Iya Santsuka Hisashi and Japanese theater materials, would be sent back home. Food supplies there were already extremely tight, but she had heard that any materials valuable enough to enter the Museum of Human Culture could still be exchanged for a considerable amount of living supplies. She thought he would surely be able to use them.
By then, four counties in the China region had already run out of rice, and Yamaguchi Prefecture, where she was living, had long since restricted per-capita rations.
That was the second year of the Great Ravine.
Too near sunset, she came out of the school building with books in her arms. The autumn wind blowing in from the western karst terrain was wrapped in heavy grains of sand. She covered her nose and mouth with a scarf and lowered her head, walking toward the ration center in the middle of the city. There, a few scarce jobs could still be found, and the grain earned from them was just enough to fill the belly.
As she passed the school family housing, she saw a little boy sitting amid a pile of furniture. Before him stood a small cardboard sign on which crooked characters had been written: I’m hungry! Among the furniture there seemed to be a half-new electronic drum set. Dimly she remembered that long ago, what he had loved most was to light a PEEL and sit smiling nearby as he watched her play drums. She stopped, took the last piece of chocolate from her bag, and pressed it into the boy’s hand.
Only when she reached the entrance of the ration center did she discover that it had been placed under military control, and by military police from Kyoto at that. Several American soldiers in blue steel helmets saw her and immediately crowded around, waving military canned food and fruit in their hands, jabbering in Californian backcountry accents. She clutched the bag in her arms and was forced back beneath the streetlamp at the corner.
A brown Hummer braked sharply in the middle of the road. Seeing the Chinese flag hanging from it, the American soldiers turned and left. The door opened, and Mr. Su jumped down and said to her that he could not come to bring her home.
That was the third year of the Great Ravine.
Deep winter in Yamaguchi Prefecture ought still to have been warm southern weather, but that year a heavy snow fell, laying a thick cotton-like layer over the ridges of the fields and the roofs of houses. Alone, he took an old steam train of only five cars, from Okayama to Hiroshima, from Hagi to Yamaguchi, crossing the Chugoku region in haste toward the place he had thought of day and night. Before that, he had spent two months traveling from Mobei by Mi-26 to Jiaodong, then by cargo ship from Yantai to Tokyo. Along the way there had been only abandoned cities and crowds moving in the opposite direction.
A year earlier they had had the chance to reunite, but she had refused Mr. Su’s request to take her back to China and had resolved to stay where she was. While everyone else retreated toward the interior of the continent, she remained alone in a place surrounded by the sea on three sides. He could not understand her decision. In such an age, why insist on staying in a country that had once been the enemy?
The army was about to retreat north again, and in the dormitory he was packing up old belongings. The postcards she had sent him over the years slipped out of a large envelope and scattered thickly across the floor. He bent down and picked them up one by one. As he did, tears began to spill uncontrollably from his eyes, though his face remained calm, without the slightest sob. He straightened, tilted his head back, and blinked hard, but tears still streamed down from the corners of his eyes. At that moment he understood what his own dream was. Since the world itself was going to be gone, let him fulfill what he wished.
When he entered that little courtyard, she was sitting beside a flower bed, knitting a tiny sweater. At her feet sat seven or eight children, only five or six years old, waving their arms and legs as they sang the song she had taught them:
Time goes, goes, goes,
and when the dream wakes,
those words Mother spoke,
have they scattered in the wind?
She raised her head and saw him come in. She did not stand. She tried to smile at him, but her mouth only tightened, and then she covered her face and burst into tears. They streamed uncontrollably through her fingers, her shoulders shaking violently. The children all turned to look at him along with her gaze. He saw that they were abandoned children whose features were incomplete.
He walked close, gently held her head, and said, “Don’t cry. I’m here.”
That was the fourth year of the Great Ravine.
Great Ravine: in Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest, because of the approaching Trisolaran fleet, all nations shifted their economic focus to military industry and aerospace development. Grain production fell, daily necessities became scarce, and living standards underwent a severe regression. This period, known historically as the Great Ravine, occurred around the middle of the twenty-first century, lasted approximately fifty years, and reduced the global population to three billion.
Thanks to Xiaoxi for the beautiful postcard from Yamaguchi o(^_^)o