Winter Cherry cried: “Things happen which are not of my doing. I meant to go, taking my sorrow with me. Now I seem as foolish as I am, for I did not know that Han Im, here, was following me, nor that you, sir, were awake. Thus I am made to appear stupid, which I did not wish to be.” She turned away again towards the door.
The poet clapped his hands. Nothing happened.
“My servants are asleep,” he cried. “But since they have no such cause as I for sleep, they must be awakened. And yet—movement seems to cut my head into two parts, slowly and painfully. I wonder if the Emperor would value, as an addition to the official list of tortures, that of enforced movement after a surfeit of wine. I must ask him.” He rose to his feet and went out.
Han Im said: “It is my duty not to leave you.”
She replied: “If one cannot be alone, it matters little who may be the company.” Then she smiled: “I am sorry. That was not what I would have said.”
Li Po came in again. He bore a jug of water, and his face was wet. “The worst moments have passed,” he said. “Now, hunger is a powerful irritant of sorrow, and (since my servants are unutterably lazy) I know that in my eating-room, through that door, will be the not unsubstantial remains of tonight’s feast. ‘Last night’s orgy’, would probably be more accurate. Come, girl, and you, Han Im.”
“I am not hungry,” Winter Cherry said, following the men.
Li Po said over his shoulder: “Repeat that, if you can, when a few sauces have urged your stomach.”
The room into which they came bore, indeed, every sign of having witnessed a party of several people. On the round, central table not even had the bowls been piled. Dried melon-seeds in little saucers showed by their disarray that the meal had, in the usual way, been finished with conversation. On the long table at the side of the room uneaten food remained. The chicken soup had globules of congealed grease on its surface: the noodles recalled the tired roots of convolvulus: a solitary piece of fried duckskin still looked almost appetising.
“You may eat, or cook and eat,” Li Po said. “Here is a small stove for the table, sent to me by the Governor of Kwei Sek, charcoal, tinder and flint. Cooking vessels in the kitchen, I think.”
Winter Cherry said: “Your servants are very remiss. But this is to our advantage.” Then she busied herself with forgotten arts.
Han Im took the poet out on to the verandah and they went to stand on Flying Tiger Bridge.
“Life,” Han Im observed, moving his head in the direction of the sounds of Winter Cherry’s activities.
“Or death,” Li Po replied. “We all wait for death, even if we do not know that we are waiting. All this is temporary stuff. Only Chung-nan mountain, fifteen miles over there, where you cannot see it, is eternal. We three shall moulder; the palace, the capital, Chang-an itself, shall pass. Only the eternal mountain shall watch our passing, and the passing of our thoughts. Or is that but a poet’s fancy?”
“The girl has not wept yet,” Han Im said. “It would be good for her to weep. The Emperor’s pleasantries are best thus washed out.”
Li Po struck the porcelain balustrade of the bridge with the palm of his hand. “You and I,” he said, “know these truths. She will learn these truths. Han Im, I am weary of this life for a little. So are you. So must she be.”
Han Im agreed. “Yes.”
A little later Winter Cherry called them. She had warmed what food was warmable, had boiled fresh rice and put clean bowls and chopsticks.
“You were right about hunger,” she said to Li Po.
Han Im put a saucer of melon-seeds handy, and sat down with the poet. The two men split melon-seeds delicately between front teeth, watching the girl eat.
Li Po said: “Whatever I said about hunger—and I have forgotten what I said—the truth is this: food in freedom tastes like imagined food on the terraces of the gods in the illimitable red clouds of sunset, whereas food eaten under constraint, however well it be cooked, turns in the mouth to strings and balls of undigested matter. It is, I suppose, something to do with the saliva. Wang Wei would know, for he is a physician. But he is not here. What do you say, Han Im?”
The eunuch observed: “There are freedom and freedom. And some of us can never be wholly free. To Winter Cherry, who has before her all forms of freedom, the constraint of the Emperor’s palace doubtless clouds all her mind. To you, who have the freedom of words and who add to that the freedom of wine, the freedom to be self-supporting looms small. To me, who lack the most conspicuous of man’s freedom, all food tastes the same.”
“This duckskin,” Winter Cherry-said, thoughtfully, “is better than many words. All that you say is true and doubtless it is satisfying for a man thus to have all truths set in the black and white of words, yet for me there are unshed tears between my eyes and my food.”
Li Po said: “Let us leave her.”