Free A Mind of Winter by Shira Nayman

photograph turned gradually to a sheen of dissimulation. And by the eighth or ninth slide, Han Shu’s face had evolved into the one I knew.
    “But here I am chatting away,” Han Shu said, with his usual mixed tone of calculation and conviviality. “You’re probably ready for some refreshment.”
    I put down the viewer.
    “Allow me.” He reached for the device and exchanged it for a delicate porcelain pipe. I waited while he prepared the pellet, watched as he passed it back and forth over the flame until it became sticky and soft and then placed it over the hole in the pipe. I closed my eyes and drew in the smoke. Han Shu walked to where an open glass cabinet stood against the wall and surveyed the rows of crystal on the shelves. Selecting a small cocktail glass, he filled it with cherry brandy, then returned to his seat.
    “Your health,” he said, raising the glass to me.
    I smiled at him through the smoke.
    He drained his glass in one toss, then rose to refill it. The second shot he drank while standing, directing an intent gaze toward me. This time, he did not sit down but simply stood there, holding his empty glass and continuing to stare at me as if trying to decide something. Then his face took on a queasy pallor, but for his cheeks, which turned a mottled pink.
    “I know this was not part of our initial arrangement,” he stammered. “Might I suggest—”
    This was something new, I thought: Han Shu, uncertain. He crossed the room tentatively, and when he placed his hand on my bosom, his touch was tender. I closed my eyes, allowed the tender feeling to seep through me. I found myself drifting back, back to my London lodgings. Even in the seismic drift, I knew the association to be absurd: two people more different from each other surely did not exist on the entire planet. Robert, Han Shu. And yet, there was something about the way Han Shu was touching me that recalled how I’d felt with Robert—something about the way he entered me while still leaving me free to travel to my own private place. Spiraling into the confusion—losing myself as children do in dreams, as perhaps the dying do in their approach to the blinding, allhealing light—I held one flickering, changeling thought: It’s a terrible thing to be known, it’s a glorious thing to be known .
    A beautiful odd sound reached my ears through the cottony fog: a filigreed tinkle as angels might make.
    * * *
    We were lying together on the floor when I opened my eyes to the astonishing fact of Han Shu quietly sleeping in my arms, the girth of him suddenly not Power or Force as it had been, but an amorous plumpness, soft to the touch.
    His eyes snapped open. He sprang up, looked at me with bafflement, then averted his eyes, the look on his face turning opaque.
    “Christine, forgive me. I don’t know what came over me.”
    I rose, smoothed my dress, attempted to rearrange the lavender handkerchief into the decorative knot.
    “It’s just that I, well, ah—” Han Shu muttered, batting a hand at his mouth as if to coax out the right words. He clutched my hand. “A beautiful woman like you. And me, a man—”
    I smiled. Looking at Han Shu, I felt oddly happy, as though I had reclaimed some piece of myself that had gone missing.
    “Really, Han Shu. It’s all right.”
    He stood stiffly opposite me, a terse smile on his lips. I retrieved my purse from the floor, where I noticed the shards of porcelain scattered under the chair. The pipe, I thought. That had been the tinkling sound.
    “Well, good evening, my dear,” Han Shu said formally, as he escorted me across the room. “Until—the next time. And thank you again for your fine …” but he closed the door before he had finished, allowing the sentence to dangle.
    I stood there, staring at the door, aware of the rise of something in my chest, a surge of—what? Aliveness? Was that it? I glimpsed a new world—some undiscovered continent I’d known existed all along. The place I sensed was dark,