The Eastern Wing

> The journal of Ning Caichen, examination candidate of Zhejiang. The writing on the following pages changes: the earlier pages are dated in the traveler's neat hand; these are dated at the top in the same hand, but the entries grow shorter, and the final lines of the last entry are written as if by a man who is writing while looking over his shoulder.

> — Note of the Keeper, Lanruo Temple

**Tenth day, the tenth month. The moon is red.**

The voice came from inside my own room.

I tell myself now, by daylight, that I did not open the door. But the voice was already in. I sat up against the wall, my sword across my knees, and I answered it—I, who had decided never to answer it:

"Who are you?" No answer. The room was dark, the moonlight red at the window, and I could not see to the far corner. "Who are you?" I said again, and I heard my own voice tremble, and hated it. A sound from the corner of the room. Not footsteps. Not cloth. A small, dry sound, like a shoe being set down on a floor. "Traveler," the voice said, "you asked the innkeeper about me, and you asked the old man about me, and you dug at the grave of the white poplar." A pause. "You are the first man who has asked about me in a long time. Why are you afraid to look at me now?"

I did not answer.

"I am not a ghost," the voice said. "The dead do not ask questions." The moon moved past the window frame. The room went dark, then the red light returned, and in the corner, against the wall, I saw a woman standing. I saw her face. I will write down what I saw, so that the record may be complete: she was young. She wore a plain white dress. Her hair hung loose past her waist. And her face—her face was lovely, in the way a face in a painting is lovely: all the features in their right places, all the lines where they should be, and no expression at all, as if the painter had left it unfinished.

I said: "Go out." She did not move. "Go out," I said, "or I will draw my sword." She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, very softly: "You grind your sword thirty-seven times a night. I have counted. Do you think I do not know what you are sharpening it for?"

The sword was in my hand.

She said: "I came to thank you. You are the only man in this village who did not open the door." And then, before I could speak: "There is a woman in the east wing. Her name is not mine. Do not let her in, no matter what she calls herself."

She was gone. I did not see her leave. One moment she stood against the wall; the next, the corner was empty, and the red moonlight lay across the floor like a pool of water.

I did not sleep. At midnight I heard, through the wall—from the east wing—a voice, very soft, reading aloud, in the same rhythm as the first night. I sat against the wall with my sword across my knees, and I listened, and I did not sleep.

**Eleventh day, the tenth month. Clouded.**

In the morning I walked the temple. The east wing door stood ajar, as before. I stood in the doorway and looked in. The room was empty: bare platform, bare walls, dust on the floor.

And in the dust, fresh footprints.

Small, bare. Crossing the floor, from the window to the door. Stopping at the threshold. And beside them, at the very edge of the doorway—the print of a bare foot, toes, heel, exactly at the line where the door would close.

As if someone had stood there, looking out, in the moment before the door was shut.

I found the old man at the gate, smoking. I asked him: "Who lived in the east wing?"

He drew on his pipe and did not look at me.

"Many people," he said.

"Who lives there now?" He looked at me then. He studied my face for a long time, and said:

"Traveler, that is not the question. The question is: who do you think lives there?" He would say no more. In the afternoon I went to the village. The innkeeper was standing in his doorway, as if waiting for me. He looked at me a long time, then said:

"You have not left." "No." "You have not died." "No." He nodded slowly, like a man weighing a thing, and said: "Then I will tell you something. In the east wing there lived a girl. A scholar's daughter, they say. She died here—" he paused—"a long time ago. And after she died, the villagers buried her under the white poplar, and closed the temple, and moved the monks away. Not because she was a ghost. Because of the other thing."

"What other thing?"

He looked past me, at the temple wall, and said: "Because whatever she was, she was not the only one." He would say no more. But as I left, he called after me: "The scholar who rented the east wing before you—his name was Fang. He was a careful man, like you. He stayed a whole month, and then one morning he packed his books and moved out. He said the room had mice."

"Was that a lie?" "He said it to the monk. The monk told me. The monk said—" and here the innkeeper's voice changed, and he mimicked the dead monk's tone—" 'He said the room had mice. But he moved out without his mirror.'"

I asked: "His mirror?" "He left his mirror on the wall of the east wing. It hangs there still. He never came back for it."

I walked back to the temple in the fading light. I did not believe in ghosts. I believed in robbers, in madmen, in the fear that makes men see things. I told myself this as I walked, and I almost believed it.

At the gate the old man was waiting. He said, without looking at me:

"The innkeeper told you about the mirror." "Yes." "Did he tell you that Scholar Fang moved out on the night of the eleventh day of the ninth month, and that the mirror is the only thing that has ever been left behind in the east wing in twenty years?" "No." "Then I will tell you one more thing," he said. "Do not look into the mirror." "Why?" He knocked the ash from his pipe, and the ash fell into the dust and did not scatter, and he said:

"Because what looks back at you may not be you." I went to my room. I barred the door. I sat against the wall with my sword across my knees, and I did not sleep, and I listened. Nothing came that night. No voice, no footsteps, no reading from the east wing. The temple was silent as a held breath, all night long.

And in the morning, when I came out, I saw it: my shoes, sitting in the middle of the courtyard, side by side, neatly placed.

The shoes I had kept inside my room. I did not sleep in that temple that night. I walked the two li to the village and slept at the inn, and the innkeeper gave me a room and asked no questions, and I lay awake and heard, through the wall, the innkeeper's wife saying to him: "He is still here. Do you think he will last the month?" And the innkeeper said: "Fang lasted a month. He was a careful man."

I know what he meant. **Twelfth day, the tenth month. Clear.**

In the morning I went to the east wing. The door stood ajar as it always did, as if it had never been closed, as if it had been waiting for me to come and look in. I stood in the doorway and looked at the far wall, and there it was: the mirror. An old bronze mirror, round as the moon, hanging on the wall, its face turned to the room. It was the only thing in the room.

I stood in the doorway a long time. Then I stepped in. The floor was dust. My feet left prints beside the small bare ones. I walked to the mirror and stood before it. I did not look into it. I reached up, took it from the wall, turned it face down, and carried it out into the sunlight. And then, because I am a cautious man, I turned it over in the light and looked into it once. The mirror was old, the bronze pitted. I saw my face in it: haggard, unshaven, the face of a man who had not slept.

Behind my face, in the mirror, there was a doorway.

A doorway that was not behind me.

I dropped the mirror. It rang against the stone, and I heard the sound echo off the temple walls like a voice answering. I did not pick it up. I left it face down in the dust of the courtyard, and I went back to my room, and I packed my bag. But as I stood in the doorway with my bag in my hand, the old man came up the steps, slowly, his pipe cold in his hand. He looked at the mirror on the ground, then at me, and for the first time his face had an expression on it—almost, almost a smile.

"Traveler," he said, "you looked into it."

I said nothing.

"Good," he said. "Now you know what is waiting for you." "Who is she?" I asked. He was silent a long time. Then he said: "She is the one who was buried under the white poplar, and she is not the one who lives in the east wing. There are two of them, traveler. There have been two of them for twenty years."

Two.

I thought of the small bare footprints, stopping at the threshold of the east wing door. Of the voice that had come to my room and called herself the girl in the east wing, and warned me not to let in the woman who lived there. Of the reading voice, every night, from a room with no door. The old man picked up the mirror. He did not turn it over. He held it face down, the way a man carries a thing he does not want to see, and he said: "Tonight the moon will be full. The east wing will have a visitor. She will come to your door, and she will tell you she is afraid, and she will ask you to let her in."

"How do you know?" "Because that is what she does," he said. "And because tonight, traveler—" he looked at me, and for the first time there was something like pity in his eyes—"tonight, she has a name for you."

"A name?" He nodded slowly, and said: "Your own." That night I did not bar my door. I left it open, and I sat in the middle of the room with my sword drawn, and I waited. The moon rose, full and white, and the temple stood silent, holding its breath.

And at midnight, I heard the footsteps. Small, bare, crossing the courtyard.

Coming to my door. She stopped outside. I could hear her breathing—soft, regular, like someone who has walked a long way and is glad to stop. "Traveler," she said. I said nothing.

"Traveler," she said again, and her voice was exactly the voice of the girl who had stood in the corner of my room, exactly, "I am afraid. There is someone in the east wing. Please let me in."

I held my sword and looked at the open door. And in the moonlight, on the threshold, there were no shadows.

No shadow of a woman standing there, though I could hear her breathing, though I could hear her voice.

"Please," she said. "It is cold out here."

I looked at the threshold. There was nothing there. And the voice said, in the tone of a woman who has just understood something, very softly: "Oh. You have been told about me." The door stood open between us, and I did not know, in that moment, whether I had been waiting for her—or whether she had been waiting, all these nights, for me.