"Of course, you cannot live here any longer," he said after I had told him of my desire to go elsewhere to find a position. "But where to go? It is very difficult. Your—what should we call her? Suppose we call her your friend. Do you know that she has died?"
I was speechless.
"Is it true?" I asked finally.
"Of course it is true. Our servant Wang Sheng comes from the same village as she did."
"But—how did she die?"
"Who knows? She just died, that's all."
I have forgotten how I left him and how I managed to get back to my lodgings. I knew that he was not one to tell stories. Tzu-chun would never come again to see me as she used to last year. Even if she had wished to walk along the so-called road of life with a heavy burden of emptiness on her back and with nothing to encourage her except harshness and cold glances, it was now no longer possible. Her fate was sealed when I presented her with the truth and she had died in a loveless world!
Of course I could no longer live here, but truly "where to go?"[1]
All around me was limitless emptiness and a deathly stillness. I seemed to see the blackness faced by those who die loveless and to hear the sound of their tragic and hopeless struggle.
I still waited for something to happen, something I could
- ↑ The repetition with quotation marks of the question that the narrator's friend put to him has the effect of emphasizing the helplessness of the situation and perhaps of the speaker's perfunctory solicitude. It is a device which Lusin uses frequently, though its full effect is not felt in translation.
