Couple of Mirrors - Chapter 10: Heart to Heart

 

'Careful!' shouts Yan Wei. 'Xu Youyi!'

And she grabs hold of Xu Youyi.

'What is it?' asks Xu Youyi.

'Er...' says Yan Wei. 'I was afraid you would trip and fall.'

Xu Youyi turns, looks down, and sees the hump in the uneven floor.

'I'm all right,' she tells Yan Wei. 'You didn't have to be so worried.'

'That was close...' says Yan Wei, and we see that she's clutching the blade just behind Xu Youyi's head.

'I thought I heard something move behind me...' says Xu Youyi, beginning to turn, which is when Yan Wei slams a hand across her eyes, and says, 'Don't move!'

'Why are you covering my eyes all of a sudden?' asks Xu Youyi.

'I... I...' Yan Wei begins, and then breaks into poetry. 'I will keep still and wait ... like the night with starry vigil...'

'The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish...'

'...and thy voice pour down in golden streams, breaking through the sky. Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds' nests.'

Yan Wei leads Xu Youyi to the door, her hand still over Xu Youyi's eyes.

'...is that a Tagore poem...' asks Xu Youyi.

'Yes,' says Yan Wei, pushing Xu Youyi unceremoniously outside and slamming the door behind her.

The door locks with a firm 'click'. A confused Xu Youyi knocks, asking, 'Yan Wei? What's going on with you...'

'You smell very strongly of smoke,' says Yan Wei from inside the room, where she's putting the blade away. 'You should go and have a shower.'

Xu Youyi, even more confused, sniffs at herself. 'Do I?'

'Yes,' says Yan Wei, bending to pick up the fallen grenade. 'I'm very sensitive to cigarette smoke.'

'Oh, all right then,' says Xu Youyi. The smell must have got onto my clothes when I was fighting off Zhou Heng, she muses.

Xu Youyi walks into the bathroom, where she's confronted with another surprise. Why does this showerhead look so strange? she wonders.

Xu Youyi turns on the tap, and soon the bathroom is filled with strategically-placed clouds of steam. As Xu Youyi showers, she thinks: So many unfortunate things have happened lately, I really should have a good wash...

Yan Wei is making up a bed on the sofa when a voice interrupts her. 'Yan Wei ... you can't really be expecting me to sleep on the sofa...'

'Sorry, I...' Yan Wei begins, and then she looks up.

Yan Wei is at a complete loss of words for a few moments, and then she continues, 'I'm not used to living with other people.'

'Oh, all right then,' says Xu Youyi. 'Since it's your roof I'm living under...'

'I'm going to the kitchen to see if the porridge is ready,' says Yan Wei.

Yan Wei serves up two bowls of prawn and celery porridge, and tells Xu Youyi, 'Let's eat.'

'You've improved so much,' Xu Youyi teases her. 'Have you been secretly practising over these last few days~'

Yan Wei only buries her face in her bowl, eating away industriously.

Xu Youyi sees the copy of Vicious Rumours still on the dining table. 'Mn? You haven't given this book to Hongmei yet?'

Yan Wei slams down her bowl. 'Hongmei died in a car crash two days ago,' she says.

'I'm sorry...' says Xu Youyi.

'Why are you saying sorry,' Yan Wei responds. 'You're not the one who killed her.'

At this point, Yan Wei's cat Good Luck makes an appearance, meowing.

'Everything in life is truly impermanent,' muses Xu Youyi, stroking Good Luck. 'Within two short days, we've each lost a friend...' She picks up Good Luck. 'The whole world is speculating that I killed Zhang Wan, but nobody else knows what our friendship of ten years was like...'

She flashes back to a memory of sitting/lying side by side in bed with Zhang Wan, who's reading out a poem: 'Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.'

In the flashback, Zhang Wan reads out another poem: 'The road is lonely in its crowd for it is not loved...'

Xu Youyi then flashes back to Zhang Wan telling her, 'Youyi, I've decided to stop drawing. I'm going to become your agent, and help you get your books published.'

'Zhou Heng wasn't even in the picture at the time...' Xu Youyi recalls.

'The dead are gone, the living carry on...' says Yan Wei.

'Really?' asks Xu Youyi. 'To tell the truth, no matter how much I blamed her, how much I hated her, I never really wanted her to die. Do you believe me?'

Yan Wei says nothing for a moment, and then replies, 'I believe you.'

***

Please view the original manhua here.

Translator's note:

• Yan Wei quotes from the Rabindrath Tagore poem 'Patience'. Zhang Wan's quotes are from Tagore's Stray Birds collection, poems 82 and 114 respectively. Translations into English are Tagore's own.