Deep, sensual tones slip from the cello as Yo Yo Ma’s bow glides across the strings. He is playing a Mongolian Long Song. The song is a nomad, and I am winding through its melody. He is playing my years of wandering… these years in China… the separation I have decided must come. I will be leaving China.

 

I am sitting in this theater in the gardens of the Forbidden City. I am listening to this Mongolian Long Song that Yo Yo Ma is playing… the song that has come after the six-floor walk-up room in the mountains… that place of harvested rice paddies… diminutive red dragon flies hovering over the brown water and the darkness of night that eases the affliction of secrets not mine.

 

I leave the theater. It is dark and cold. I walk under a wisteria arbor. A few yellowing leaves still cling to the mammoth, twisting vines. The leaves dance in the wind before they suddenly turn out the lights, and the leaves continue their dance undetected. I am remembering a night in this garden last Spring when the leaves of this wisteria were emerging from the claw-like clusters into ovals of pale green… a different night… a different concert.

 

 

The Polish pianist has played Ravel for the entire evening. I really must leave or I will miss the train. I wander through the unlighted garden… an awestruck child lost and peering into the shadows… stones in the shape of birds and animals and Chinese mountains… covered walkways leading through a maze of bushes and trees… the fragrance of magnolias, dirt and spring.

 

 

I wander and wander having no idea where to go until I spy a towering gate to the Forbidden City open just a crack. I turn toward the sliver of gray light, not really believing that it is an exit, but, it is. I pass through the narrow slit in the red wooden door. It is completely deserted. Suddenly, there is the whiz of traffic and brilliant lights down Chang’An Avenue. I am facing Tiannanmen Square. I rush past the Gate of Heavenly Peace with the picture of Chairman Mao above me. He looks down on me. He shares no secrets.

 

 

I am thinking about that night when I was lost in the gardens of the Forbidden City as I walk out with the resonating sound of the cello still in my ears… that spring evening moment when I passed through the deserted gate… that fragrance of spring, dirt and magnolias… the long shadows in deeper and deeper shades of blackness. Even then, I calmly realize that it is time to go… time to leave this life I’ve had in China. That walk through the garden is a moment that has no thought… has no passion or longing associated with it… no sadness, no joy… no tension or relief… a moment, finally again, that requires nothing of me. It is just a moment… a pristine moment…

… there are few pristine moments in life.