Picture frames in the attic
The attics in Montmartre always carry the scent of old wood mixed with sunlight. As Ah Yu squatted on the floor organizing her suitcase, her fingertips brushed against a hard, protruding object on the bottom of the suitcase, like touching a rock buried in her memory.
"Need any help?" Lin Wanqing came up the stairs carrying a stack of old books, her skirt brushing against the creaking wooden steps. Today she was wearing an apricot-colored knit sweater, the sleeves rolled up to her forearms, revealing a light pink scar on her wrist—last year when she was cut by broken glass in the refugee camp in Paris, Ah Yu had bandaged it with strips of her windbreaker.
Ah Yu paused, then pushed the hard object further inside. The suitcase had been shipped from China three days prior. Besides a few changes of clothes, most of the space was crammed with random, seemingly unrelated things: his father's brass key, Zhong Hua's lost voice recorder, and a red string untied from a prayer wheel in Tibet. These items bumped against each other during the turbulent flight, as if having a quiet conversation in the dark.
"Where should I hang the Thangka I bought in Tibet?" He looked up and saw Lin Wanqing placing a book on the windowsill. The setting sun shone through the stray hairs behind her ears, casting dappled light on the yellowed pages. She had found this attic; she said a war correspondent had once lived there, and a world map painted in red paint still remained on the wall, the outline of South America blurred by rain.
Lin Wanqing followed his gaze to the corner of the wall: "Over there, right in the direction of the Eiffel Tower." As she bent down, the ends of her hair brushed against the zipper of her suitcase. "The lock on your suitcase is broken. Shall I find a brass lock to replace it for you?"
Before Ah Yu could respond, he saw her squat down, her fingertips groping for something at the bottom of the box. His heart clenched, as if burned by that scar—last year when it was bandaged, he had stared at her wrist like that until she suddenly laughed out loud: "If you keep looking, the wound will get shy."
"What's this?" Lin Wanqing's fingertip pointed to a small black object, shaped like half a pen. Ah Yu's breath caught in her throat. It was Zhong Hua's voice recorder. On the day of the truth-revealing press conference, she had rushed into the live broadcast venue holding it, but was later knocked off the steps by the chaotic crowd. He had secretly picked it up during the security evacuation.
For the past two weeks, he had been touching it late at night, but he had never dared to press play. It probably contained recordings of her interviews with Gu's employees, and perhaps even her silent sobs as he read the interview transcripts to her in the ICU.
"Don't move!" He practically lunged forward, his hand covering Lin Wanqing's hand a split second before it touched the recording pen. Her skin was cool, like the cobblestones of Montmartre in the early morning.
Lin Wanqing raised an eyebrow, not withdrawing her hand: "Hidden so well, are you afraid I'll hear something?" Her eyelashes were long, casting a faint shadow under her eyes when they fell. "Or are you afraid you'll hear it yourself?"
Ah Yu's Adam's apple bobbed. He recalled three days ago on a Seine River cruise when Lin Wanqing pushed red bean porridge in front of him: "Zhong Hua said in an interview that you hate sweet porridge, yet you always accompany her to that shop at the end of the alley." At that moment, he was looking out the window at the new bridge, the waves at the stern shattering the sunlight into stars, and suddenly he didn't dare to reply.
The recorder was between their palms, like a heart brimming with electricity. Lin Wanqing's thumb lightly rubbed the play button, and Ah Yu almost reflexively pressed the speaker, her fingertips turning white: "Don't listen."
"Why?" Her voice was soft, with the warm tone of the attic wood. "Are you afraid to hear her voice, or afraid to remember how you were back then?"
Ah Yu's gaze fell on the map on the wall. The red paint spreading across South America looked just like the little bit of blood foam that spilled from the corner of Zhong Hua's lips when he was in the ICU with an oxygen tube. That day, when he read out "the person I want to thank the most," her eyelashes trembled like a butterfly wing fluttering in the wind, and the beeping of the monitor suddenly skipped a beat.
“I heard it,” Lin Wanqing suddenly said. She pulled her hand back and tapped the recorder with her fingertips. “At the mudslide site, when you were carrying her up the ravine, this thing fell out of her pocket.”
Ah Yu suddenly looked up. He remembered that the rain that day was yellow, mixed with the smell of mud and grass, and there was a ginkgo leaf specimen stuck in Zhong Hua's hair—it was the first gift he gave her, tucked inside the interview she had written. His hands were covered in blood at the time, and he hadn't even noticed the recording pen.
“There’s a passage of her babbling while she was unconscious.” Lin Wanqing walked to the windowsill, picked up one of the old books from the stack, and saw a woman wearing a beret on the cover. “She said, ‘In Ah Yu’s camera, there are more photos of me than landscapes.’”
Ah Yu's neck suddenly stiffened. He remembered his phone's photo album, which indeed contained over three hundred photos of Zhong Hua: her biting a pen and revising her manuscript backstage at a press conference, her closing her eyes to make a wish in front of a prayer wheel in Tibet, and her disheveled appearance as she tripped over a stone while chasing butterflies with her camera. The note hidden in the plane ticket Lin Wanqing sent, which read "Go chase after the person who fills your phone's photo album," wasn't referring to the scenery of Paris after all.
"Listen." Lin Wanqing suddenly pressed the play button.
The static crackled first, followed by Zhong Hua's voice, clearer than he remembered, with the keenness characteristic of an interviewer: "Are you sure you're willing to testify publicly about the Gu Group's accounting issues?"
Ah Yu's breathing suddenly stopped. This was her last interview before the accident. He was waiting outside the coffee shop when he saw her give him an "OK" sign through the glass window.
“…There’s one more thing.” Zhong Hua paused in the recording, and the rustling sound of flipping through a notebook could be heard in the background. “Ah Yu…do you know him? He’s the photographer who always wears a windbreaker.”
Ah Yu's fingers tightened suddenly. He had no idea that the recording existed.
“He seems to be constantly taking pictures of me.” Zhong Hua’s voice lowered, as if it were a secret he was afraid of being overheard. “Last time I went to the fire site, he squatted outside the cordon and took pictures for three hours. In the end, his memory card was full, and all of them were pictures of my back…”
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