Everyday by Tina Brown (free ereaders txt) 📖

This is how you talk about a city you love. You talk about it as if it's the only place in the world where this story can happen.
     A friend of mine fell in love with someone when she went for a bite at winter night. There was no snow; there is very little snowfall during winters. The film below the skies turns from yellow to gray, then the winds come and we would say, it's so cold already there might as well be snow. Some days there are, and those are the days when photographers go out to make postcards of fresh powder collecting over the shoulders of the stone lion finials perched on the gables of the Forbidden City.
     But those are postcards. There are times you feel cheated when you glance at them and wonder at your inability to recall a greater feeling of grandeur when you had bought them in front of house. The event, like infinity, had been too big to be grasped and had only given way to frustration, a voice insisting with the strongest conviction and the vaguest meaning that there should have been something more.
     I had flown to home with a postcard in my hand. My grandmother didn't want me to. Why should I go back to the place she had taken so many pains to run away from sixty years ago because the sun never sets in the Western empire. Before I left for the airport, my grandmother told me to be careful in the mud alleys.
     The postcard I had was a picture of a language university that specialized in teaching to foreigners. I had spent the night before reading out loud from my little exercise book and hoping school would be canceled the next morning. It was monsoon season and the floods rose from the gutters blocked with garbage and the beggars' children played naked in the waters. But the storm left at dawn, and memory is unreliable, selective, compressed. The next day I finally received on my palm the two red stripes that I had been avoiding during the entirety of my young life in school.

    
*


     My friend looked like me and studied in the same building as I did, but she was from Canada and never got stripes for not being able to speak the language. Love at first skewer just outside the campus gates, where the red-cheeked lady selling small bottles of fermented milk on her bike would look enviously at the little fish-cake stall across from her. Chocolate fish-cakes were pastries shaped like fish with hot chocolate inside, sold for one yuan each. No one bought fermented milk. The man who sold fish-cakes was called 'Uncle;' business was doing so well that for one week Uncle's stall disappeared because he was hiding from the police for making too much money without a license. He reappeared just in time for the winter frost.
    
    
*

NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER WANTED. My friend had found a company searching for someone to teach English to their representatives, but they turned her down, saying she looked too much like a local. This is a story . It is not likely that it would have turned out another way. It is likely that an Italian with a working facility in English would have been hired, but my friend did not look Italian.
     He spoke little English , so they used the language they were only beginning to grasp. They found the distance that they would need for their own defense later. All of us who knew transience understood that what happened stayed there.
     I met my language partners every Friday in the school library, two local girls who wanted to practice their English with me, but they frequently slipped back because there were too many interesting questions to be asked.
    

     What do foreigners think of us?
     I did not quite look at their eyes. Perhaps if I had greater proficiency in their language, I would not have sounded so simplistic.
    
     I found myself talking about the 'free world' as if months before I would not have laughed at myself for using those two words with such idealism . But when a language fails you, you use wide blanket statements and say to yourself, This conversation isn't so important anyway. Every minute I looked up to see if the middle-aged lady who had come and was standing nearby could hear us.
     Across the restaurant was a frozen lake, fenceless, unwatched. I had never stood on iced water before. It was too dark to see how the ice was, but it seemed thick enough, and I stamped on it, the cold escaping into the soles of my shoes. Figures of twos or threes whispered and laughed softly around me, but the lake was quiet and the world was calm.
    
*


*


    
     I went to parks often to escape the crowds. One of them had a small pavilion midway the hill, the small inlaid paintings of willows and lakes on the ceiling restored. When I reached the pavilion, a few lights were turned on softly and old fifties music was being played and people were dancing. They were middle-aged, people who could have afforded to take dancing lessons. The music crackled through a radio somewhere. Some wore cocktail dresses; others office clothes. Swing, tango, waltz. They shook their arms and legs to help their blood circulate after every set as people walked around to change partners, their faces drenched in perspiration. Then the music would start and they would laugh and take each other's arms and twirl over the floor, these old people, lost in the sepia-colored music I was hearing. Spring was turning to summer. I sat on a nearby bench, feeling the air turn humid, and a dragonfly landed on my shoulder.
    
*

My friend and her boyfriend went traveling the weekend after they moved to their new apartment.
     There my friend saw the saddest opera singer in the world. Up on a pavilion the middle-aged lady was dressed in her gaudy finery, a green lace tunic over a white gown with sleeves to the floor. Her face was powdered with the rouge opera and she wore a headpiece of braids. The pavilion was in the middle of the souvenir bazaar that had been built for the tourists. People were looking at maps, calling lost friends on mobile phones, and had crowded there, drawn by the human tendency towards collectivity. She sang to the tourists , her eyes far away, one hand on her heart, the other arm up in supplication. She looked exhausted. The people below the stage came and went. My friend had written on the back in English: The meaning of indifference.


*

The indifference is almost symbolic. a pregnant woman dressed in raggedy overalls kneels on the sidewalk, her stomach bulging, her eyes caught in an empty stare at the asphalt. A rusty pan sits between her spread knees and she seems to be on the verge of giving birth.
     Now you want to know how many people stop to put change into her pan to see if it matches with what my friend had written on the back of the Polaroid.
     I had stood there on the sidewalk, all senses stirred by the lovely sorrow of it all. If only I could have taken a photograph. But I had driven past worse scenes of poverty i where I had learned I didn't want my money spent on drugs or drunk husbands. When I walked past her, I looked at the pan. A few cents.
     I once read in a magazine about a man aboard a train who had been accosted by an old woman when the train stopped at a station. Through his window she tried to sell him cold bottles of mineral water, but he didn't want to buy any because he knew she would slink away without giving back his change. As she coaxed him noisily through the window, he grew more and more revolted by her presence until he resigned himself and pulled a note out to buy himself some silence. As she handed him a bottle, the train began to roll. The old woman had his change in one hand and she tried to run after his open window, her arm outstretched. Your change, your change! He was entranced by the sight. In her haste the old woman tripped and fell, and when she raised her head he saw a trickle of blood on her forehead.
     I saw more pregnant women kneeling on the streets on different days. To redeem myself I finally gave a few notes to a bent old lady who cried her thanks to me while I turned and walked away.
     Once, an old man in tatters and his sick wife stopped me on the way back to the university. His accent was missing the growl. He said they had come to the city because his wife needed to go through a surgical operation for her stomach. The wife was moaning to herself and her husband was close to tears. They were hungry and needed some money for a subway ticket to the hospital.

     I told them to wait. I went to a small restaurant nearby and bought them two meals and bottled tea. Both of them were crying. I gave them some money for the trip, and as the old man took the coins he whispered to his wife in a dialect before thanking me and turning away.
     A week later I heard someone saying that he had just given an old couple from the provinces some money for a subway trip to the hospital because the wife needed surgery.
     It's very hard to talk about indifference without a photograph.
    
*

The months passed quickly. We overcame our brokenness in the language. We couldn't rely on blanket statements anymore to cover us with indifference.
    
*

'Have you decided which computer to buy?'
     'Sort of. One of my Korean friend's classmates has a desktop she wants to sell before leaving . I'm going to take a look at it sometime this week at her house.'
     'Her?'
     'You can relax, she knows I have a girlfriend.'
     'I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.'
     'By the way, I've been thinking, I'm probably going to transfer schools next month.'
     'Oh? Why's that?'
     'Too expensive here. And there's a cheaper one nearby, the one across the bakery. You know that?'
     'Oh, that. Yeah, I do. It's pretty small.'
     'Yeah, but it's not bad. You're going to be looking for work when you get back , right?'
     'Yeah. When you finish your bachelor's then go bum around for a while, you know it's time to get a job.'
     'If I'm lucky, I can get a good job next semester and earn enough to visit you before I go back with the proficiency certificate.'
     'That's too tempting. Don't get my hopes up.'
     'It can happen.'
     'Well, what about '
     'What?'
     'I don't know. Everyone's just been asking.'
     'Well, what if I ask you what happens ?'
     'Were you thinking of asking me that?'
     'We still have two