“A poem.”

“For you to publish?”

Chen took out that piece of paper and started reading.

Mother, I have tried to make the far-off echoyield a clue to what is happening to me;in the old mansion people come and go,seeing only what they want to see.The recall of the red mandarin dresswears me out, flashing in the flowers,your bare feet, your soft hand: the stressof memory strips me of waking hours.But we are flattened, framed in the zoomof one moment, click, and cloud and rainapproaching fast, a doomful gloomscurries across the horizon again, Oh that is all I know, all I see.Mother, you drink the cup for me.

“There’s no cup in the picture,” Yu said in bewilderment.

Chen wasn’t sure if the last image about the cup came from Hamlet, in which the queen drinks the poison for her son. In his college years, he had read a Freudian interpretation of it. He vaguely remembered.

“It’s about Hamlet and his mother,” Chen said, deciding not to explain any more. “There are more things in heaven and earth than in a case report.”

“I’m damned,” Yu said, shaking his head like a rattle drum.

Qiu Xiaolong

***