I try my best, but I am not a very good writer. But my English and Finnish are fine, so I can translate, and for once be happy with my writings.
So here goes, The Winterbird (original title Talvilintu ) by Marygold, translated from Finnish to English by yours truly. Enjoy.
A/N: I have used the outdated Wade-Giles system with Chang's name, because he is an established "historical" figure. However, in the case of the Yangzi River (Jangtse River), I have used the modern pinyin spelling, which is a more accurate system for littering Chinese with Western alphabets. Says the nitpicker.
The Winterbird
"Listen", I whisper into Chang's ear during the first night after his rescue from the snowy mountains.
From somewhere behind the window of the temple the notes of a sorrowful song drifts into my ear, a bird I have never heard in my life. In the silence of the early morning, its voice rings like the wind chimes I suspended on the trees back home a long time ago, like a jingle without a tune. It rises and falls along with the wind blowing from the mountain slopes, once in a while disappearing without a trace, only to awaken again somewhere on the other side of the valley.
"What kind of a bird would sing at this time, in a place like this?" I ask, conversing more to myself than to my friend, who is too tired to open his eyes to the night.
However, the sleep that has eluded me earlier is already beyond my grasp, so I arise from my mattress and walk barefooted across the cold floor to the window. It's dark outside, but I can still barely make out the steep summits of the mountains against the dark sky. I can see neither the bird nor the trees with the branches on which the bird could sit to sing. I wonder whether the voice I have heard is after all only the fitful wind circling around the temple. Perhaps it is the mountains which make it ring in such a melancholy fashion.
In the dark, I turn to glance at my friend who, curled up deep inside the covers, is sleeping so soundlessly that I can scarcely manage to hear him breathing.
When I look at him, a strange feeling takes hold of me, as if it is only now that I understand for the first time what has truly happened in the last few days. It is as if I have lived the past days in a thick fog, pursuing that single glimpse of the blue sky high above me I have somehow been able to see through the cobwebs of the fog. Not hunger nor thirst, not cold nor heat has touched me. Without a single pause, without a single doubt, and pushing aside everything in my way, I have only followed my impulsive heart, listened to its loud voice directing me, and all the while letting myself believe that hearing my name being called in a dream is enough evidence to prove that he indeed has survived the accident.
It is only now, when everything is over, that I finally understand how thin the line between life and death has become for him in those snow-capped mountains. It is only now that I know how close the happy ending came to escaping us.
What then made me do what I did? Friendship, maybe. Love, yes. And of course the endless sense of duty mixed with my reckless nature which sometimes leads me into such dangers anyone sensible would surely avoid.
But in reality, there was an even stronger force, which had made me embark into this senseless journey of mine:
Guilt.
Because as I had opened Chang's letter I had felt overflowing joy, but I had also been secretly ashamed of the fact that in all these years I had thought about him so seldom and written to him even less. Along with the letter and my dream a strange thought had captured me, a notion of how all these years I had carried him with me without ever truly pausing to think about him – how I had never honored him by brushing his name in my mind when I had in my wondrous journeys ended up everywhere between the deep ocean floor and the arid surface of the moon.
I could have picked him a moonstone as a souvenir, I could have sent him a piece of a coral reef, I could have written his name in the desert sands. But never did I do so.
Years and years ago, I let the flooding Yangzi River take my heart away. We were both children back then, and a child's heart, it so clumsy and careless. All those years we had been, somehow, attached to each other, his mind linked to my own, a silver thread between our hearts –
Still, I had never in my thoughts given him the honor he would have deserved. I had not done so, not before the horrible realization after opening his letter that just when I had been about to get him back, just when I had been about to get a chance to close all those years between us, I had lost him again.
And it is only now that I realize just how much time has passed since our previous meeting, and just how much the world between us, along with ourselves, has changed.
We are not children anymore, I think when I go back to my bed and drag the cover over my knees.
And the thought makes me a bit sad for some reason I cannot name.
I am just about to fall asleep, my head pressed against the pillows, when I hear the bird sing again. I open my eyes and listen, and this time I am certain – it is not only the wind. The song I hear, it is so wistful and lonely that I fear my heart might burst, and no matter how hard I try to press it into my mind to describe it the others later, I understand it to be impossible, because it has no distinguishable tune or sound. It digs inside the bone and the marrow like the winter's chill wind, making me shiver all over, it is beautiful and terrifying at the same time, like the shadows of the trees stretching ever longer at dusk, like the gossamer threads of frost creeping over the November's dying world.
Suddenly I am conscious of how Chang is awake, grasping my arm tightly.
"That voice –" I try to tell him something, but my words never come out.
"I can hear it, too", Chang says quietly. "I have heard it many times."
"What is it?" I ask, turning towards him and catching his gaze with my eyes.
When I watch him in the blue dark of the room, my shaking starts to slowly recede and the beating of my heart calm down. But one of the shadows left behind by the strange song still seems to linger around me as an odd restlessness which would not be completely calmed even by the sight of my friend and his touch on my shoulder.
"When I heard it for the first time, I thought I was dying", Chang whispers. "I was… I was so cold that I could not really feel anything anymore. And then I heard it, and for a moment I was certain that it meant I would die."
"But what is it?"
"I don't know."
"You heard it, and then you thought you would die. What happened then?"
To my surprise, Chang lets a delicate smile spread on his face as he shakes his head.
"Nothing. I stayed alive. Later, I would hear it three times more, but I believed it to be because of the fever or the mountains which make the wind circle in a curious way. But I know how you must have felt when you heard it – it is so sad, it moans as if it was trying to tell something important with untangible words… It makes one's heart feel as if something was irrevocably gone, never to return.
A deep silence follows during which we only look at each other, both of us lying on our own mattresses, between us a strange patch of emptiness. The song has stopped, and the brittle, golden thread filtering through the window heralds the morning sun rising somewhere far away on the horizon, slowly knitting away the darkness around us.
"After all that has happened it just feels so odd that something like that can make so incomprehensibly sad", I say after a long time. "As if something in the world could make me sadder than the fear of losing you I have been harboring the last few days…"
I so much would like to say something meant as a consolation for everything he has felt and experienced, something not intended only for myself.
Abruptly, I hope more than anything else that I could truly regain all those years, that I could return to the day I left him and live that time again beside him. So that I would now remember how he looked when he was happy, how his voice sounded when he laughed – so that I would know what makes his heart light, what makes him forget the passing of time, what is his favourite food in banquets, which coloured fireworks he likes the most. And so I could now, after all this, look at him feel as if I knew his thoughts instead of some part of me still feeling so terribly unfamiliar and distant.
Time flows in only one direction.
Now I finally understand what it means. I have left so many things, so many people in my past, imagining that I could go back anytime, that they would always wait for me exactly in the same places I have left them, maybe only with a thin layer of dust on them, like items alphabetically sorted on a shelf. Maybe I believed I could pick them up whenever I wished, and that nothing would have changed.
But time is not that forgiving.
One can get nothing back. Everything changes. It is much easier to lose things than to find them, so much easier to let go than to regain one's hold on something one has already once relinquished.
"Listen", Chang's soft voice cuts my musings.
This time, it is not the bird, but the gong's voice from deeper inside the temple as the first monks awaken to pray and to do their morning chores.
"Can I come to your mattress?" Chang asks, when the steps in the corridor have gone past us and become inaudible. "I am so cold."
I nod and lift the edge of my coverlet so that he can roll under them directly from his own bed. He presses himself against me, his head against my chest, and he slips his legs between mine; they are so thin, he's whole figure is so thin, and his skin still feels feverish, albeit not as badly as earlier in the day. But even though in that very moment he feels as fragile as those flowers folded out of silk paper we years ago made and then lowered on the surface of the water to drift, I know that it is not the whole truth.
He must be the strongest person I know, I think, when he after all that still is able to breathe so calmly.
"My brother, he has taught me to draw", Chang says without opening his eyes. "I'd like to show you… when I get better…"
"It would make me so happy to see your drawings, Chang", I reply, holding his hand in my own. "I… I would like you to be able to shrug off this horrifying pallor and cold from your mind, and – "
"Don't be worried about me", he sighs. "I won't be sad forever. Maybe for a time, but it will pass in time. Then everything will be just like before."
"Chang…"
He reaches his fingers to brush my hair from my face and smiles – it is a sad smile, but a genuine one nevertheless, and I value it how he struggles to keep it hanging on his face, only for my sake. His expression is so tender when he whispers to me that my eyes are like the sea and when kisses me swiftly on my forehead before he turns his back on me and says he still wants to catch a few hours of sleep before the morning.
Except that when I rise up in the morning I do not wake him, letting him continue his slumber, and he sleeps well into the afternoon, when I and the captain walk outside with my dog and eat and talk and play a game resembling chess with small, black and white stones.
"Does he still intend to travel to Europe, this Son of Heaven of yours?" the captain asks after having beaten me twice – my thoughts are wandering so much that I have hardly been able to concentrate on playing. "After all this?"
"I didn't remember to ask him", I reply truthfully.
"Well, then you can express my wish for him when he wakes up", the captain grumbles into his beard as he starts to gather the pieces from the board back into his wooden box. "It's less of a bother to save him the next time if instead of some new deathtrap we only have to go to London."
His words make me smile along with my bottomless gratitude towards him.
Once, a long time ago, I let a river named Yangzi take my heart with it.
Now, I have finally regained it. Sometimes it is sad and heavy, as all hearts sometimes are, but it is a real, genuine, live heart, which feels real, genuine feelings. Sometimes my heart might still wake me to that peculiar, melancholy song without a melody, to the song I first heard during that night amidst the snow-capped mountains – it is not truly a bird, I know it now, although I prefer to call it that – but it is not death, either. Maybe it is the mind calling for another, a longing that leaves an imprint in the heart like footsteps in the freshly fallen snow.
Maybe it is only us who can truly hear it, maybe the song is for us alone.