“The most frightening thing is the thing we most want to experience,” Ida spoke with deep sympathy. “Your boy has a tenacious will.”
“I know,” Jade said distractedly. She kept looking toward the stairwell, seeming afraid her mother would appear there without warning.
“What are you afraid of?”
“My mother doesn’t approve of my sentimental side. She thinks I should concentrate all my attention on handling these mice. Of course, she is right.”
Days passed quickly at the bar. Although almost every day had the same substance, Ida still hoped to prolong each one as much as possible. When she had free time, she thought, harboring an infinite longing, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches, but what were things like in the south on that rubber tree plantation? Every day when the business of the bar began at midnight, when the guests came in one after another like shadows, Ida would hallucinate, thinking she was working as before on the rubber tree farm, and that these customers were her co-workers in disguise. Why did the bar owner always put on solemn, abstruse classical music? Could Mr. Reagan already be here, mixed in among the guests? Perhaps it was because of her longing that the days went so quickly, she thought. Escaping her own lover was a good thing. Hadn’t Jade escaped hers? Before, Ida had never known there was a kind of longing like this: longing for the thing or person one absolutely needed to escape. This new form of longing, while unable to bring her fulfillment, could fill out and enrich every day. Look, Jade was even more fulfilled.
Jade’s mother was looking around at the end of the passage. She saw that her daughter’s door was closed, and tiptoed over. Ida watched her place the object she was holding in her hand on the ground. It was a little white mouse.
“Ida, Ida, do you think Jade is happy?” she asked anxiously.
Ida saw the falling dust all over the woman’s clothes, and her hair was a mess, but this could not conceal her innate beauty. That beauty was a bit like the green beauty of a newborn plant, quiet and noiseless, but astonishing. Ida avoided her ardent glance and answered indifferently: “I suppose she is happy. Every day she looks forward to the next, doesn’t she? Her mother is truly daring. Who else is brave enough to raise so many little mice? This really is something like a dream becoming a reality.”
The woman smiled, as if freed from a mass of worries. She reached out a fair hand and stroked the old pieces of furniture. It seemed they were like her infants.
“These were purchased at a secondhand store. Her father is set on believing that the furniture belonged to his former family, and was scattered after the mudslide. But I have two friends who happened to come upstairs to look at them, and they said these were their family’s old things. What do you think, what is this memory then, after all?”
“Memory is the things people think up.” Ida spoke too freely.
The woman looked at Ida with some surprise. She walked past and began to lightly knock on her daughter’s door.
Ida thought it inappropriate to stand there, and went downstairs.
The bar owner was not downstairs. Someone else sat behind the bar counter, a waiter with an almost fierce expression. Ida had never understood why the owner had recruited someone who looked like this to work at the counter.
This waiter, Mark, was fiddling with the worn-out record player. It was playing the same music Ida had listened to every day until it became familiar. But under Mark’s hands the music became, at intermittent moments, strange sounding, and hearing it Ida’s whole body broke out in goose bumps. She swiftly turned to go outside, but tripped over something. Lowering her head she saw that it was the bar owner. He was lying on the ground reading a book. From his appearance he seemed to focus his entire attention on it, and was undisturbed by the outer world. Because the light in the room was dim, Ida could not tell what book it was. Alvin sat up and asked Ida benignly, “Ida, do you still remember what it looked like at the very last moment right before the floodwater swallowed your home?”
“I’ve completely forgotten. It was chaotic then.”
“All those things are written inside this book.” With both hands he hugged the book, which was as thick as a brick, to his chest. “Only it doesn’t say them openly. They are riddles, which I have to guess. That’s what this sort of book is like. I carried several books here from my hometown. When there’s nothing to do I lie on the floor and read. Why do I lie on the floor? For convenience’ sake. I only need to place my ear against the floor and the things described in the book make all sorts of sounds. I call this ‘listening to books.’”
“Could I listen to books?” Ida asked.
“You couldn’t, Jade can’t either, but Jade’s mother can. This kind of thing requires reading experience. And there’s that fellow Mark, he can, too. Look, isn’t he lying on the floor? He’s listening to music. What he hears and what you hear are completely different.”
Ida walked over to the counter and looked behind it. She saw Mark’s body curled up in a ball on the floor. He was crying.
“Mark is our restaurant’s treasure. The customers say his entire body is musical.”
Ida walked out the main door and stood under the Green Jade grape trellis, her whole body bathed in its light.
“Ida!” Jade called from the window of her bedroom, with tears in her voice. One of her hands caught at the clothes at her chest, and her eyes bulged with fear.
“Jade! Jade!” Ida waved toward the second floor. She remembered that Jade’s mother was inside the building.
What was Jade’s mother doing inside? Intimidating her daughter? It seemed the woman was always stealthily forcing her daughter to do something.
Jade’s whole upper body extended from the window, as though she were going to jump from it. Once and then again she rushed toward the outside, but she could not get through. Ida understood that it was her mother pulling her back. Ida wondered, since it was like this, why did the mother continue to force her? Perhaps it was because mother and daughter were naturally too beautiful. Overly beautiful people often prefer an extreme sort of life. Something was thrown from the window. Oh, it was a little mouse!