“Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.”

Who Has Seen the Wind by Christina Rossetti.

At that point in history, the war had already spread to almost all over the world. Those days have been forgotten in many ways: but not in the Headline of the Newspaper, the ideas shouted from the loudspeakers on the street, and those whispers will never disappear. But also these persistent things could travel through the glass of time and come to our ears again. But in fact, people should have known from the start that a revolution will always result in prison, penal servitude, and the pain that homelessness brings.

The war was over, and what was left for the common people were only the numbness and fear; they had been forced into a huge Labour Camp. Thousands of men in their innocence had been arrested; their hearts had no resistance, their minds as obedient as little lambs. What our government was doing was just horrible: making people lose their own thinking ability, eliminating everyone’s individuality, forcing every leaf in the forest to look the same.

“I would like to be a free person in this chaotic world” - this was what my language teacher told me when I was only a child, and I took several decades to understand it.

When my homeland was already not the one cherished in my memory, then I couldn’t see the point of staying. I ran away from it, letting my feet take me wherever they wanted; that’s how I came into this forest that people called the “unknown.”

Mist shrouded the land, but as I continued into the forest, the land got wetter. There was nothing here: dead leaves were everywhere, broken and tattered. The only voice came from my feet; oak leaves were crying dearly, these weak little things that became debris under my feet, but there was no comfort to share: their cries made me think about those invaders. When they were attacking my village, they stepped on my neighbor’s body like I was stepping on the leaves. No mercy, without empathy, those invaders saw them like these dead leaves, destroyed them, and went on their journey again.

And I also knew that, far far away in another world, there was another forest. There, golden leaves became as one in the afterglow of the sunset, wild apples were picked by those foxes, the singing of ravens echoed in the whole forest: but it didn’t belong to me. That world is too bright, full with light and hope—it was too good for people like me. I belonged to this dying Empire where time stopped.

There was a wooden house near. The sky was horribly cloudy at this point; I thought, it won’t take long before Thor’s gift comes down to the earth, and the forest would be really dangerous at that time. No one knows what made the forest like this, just like no one can say the mystery of time. People were living in this world without knowing it was already falling apart; was this how the forest lost all its leaves at one night?

The door of the house was open. There was only a wooden desk and a chair with a big hole in its seat. The desk was near to the window, but there were no glasses on it: there was some glass residue on the ground, because it made a sound when I stepped on it. No other people, no animals, it was just me and a tree behind the window. I realized that everything beautiful would come to an end. The Empire, the house, the trees, the sounds I had loved throughout my life: the rustle of leaves, the sweet sound of music. All of this beauty would end. The only thing that would last was time itself. Time for itself was eternal, increasing minute after minute and never turning back. It went in different directions and sought different goals: to create the destiny of mankind, to continue the most normal elapsing of one moment to the next, at once ordinary and mysterious.

But if I had to choose between eternal time and ethereal beauty, I would choose music.

In the evening, the clouds covered all the sunshine, and I had my flashlight out and was writing in my diary. Wind was coming in from the empty window; the loneliness that belongs to the night was coming soon. I had a piece of bread and cheese to comfort my starving stomach, and then I opened the sleeping bag to try to get to sleep very quickly. When I took off my shoes, I heard a sigh come from the window’s direction.

I got my little red Swiss army knife quickly. “Who’s there?”

“You can hear me?”

“Who are you, and more importantly - where are you?”

“Put down your knife, boy. There’s no need for weapons here. Come to the window, then you can see me.”

With my flashlight on, I saw there was an old man with a mask, sitting on the ginkgo tree.

“Hey there, I’ve been watching at you for the whole day.”

“What are you?!”

“I’m this ginkgo tree, child.”

I thought that old man had a crutch in his hand, but I saw that I was wrong—it was not a crutch, but a branch of the tree with some ginkgo tree leaves on it.

He continued. “It’s been a long time since the last people came here. I thought we were all forgotten!”

“I mean no disrespect, sir,” I told him. “I’ll leave in the morning. Sorry for disturbing you.”

“Alone? Ha! Being alone is freedom, just like the wind goes wherever it wants. ‘The wind is rising; we must try to live.’ The wind is blowing, do you hear it?”

I didn’t hear any voices, but I saw the leaves on his branch were shaking. “I didn’t hear the wind. I saw it.”

Suddenly, he started to laugh very loudly. “See the wind? That means you’re mad. No one can see the wind. What’s your name?”

“Cassius. But it’s just an alias.”

“Cassius? What a weird name.”

“It’s from Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar,” I explained to him. “The one who started the whole conspiracy. But he was in the ninth circle in Dante’s Inferno.”

“I’m not interested in human stuff, boy, and I don’t have any religion. I’m just a tree.”

He was mocking me.

He smiled. “Where’s your Brutus, then?”

That’s how I met Mr. Ginkgo.

I gave up the idea of leaving the next day and stayed in this “unknown” to find out its deep dark secrets. Once, it was a lively forest full of birds, fish, beasts, bugs, trees, and humans. But the only thing living now in this forest was this ginkgo tree. “Each forest is a little society, just like your world,” he told me on the second day when I was having my breakfast.

“Why? Because there’s nothing still alive today?”

“Because of me.” That was the only thing he told me.

But still, I found the reasons for his solitude. He told me everything on the third day when I was having my last instant noodle. About twenty years ago in human history, there was a great development in technology; what came after it, of course, was worse and worse pollution. This ginkgo tree was just an arrogant young man at that time, and he left all the purification efforts to the other trees. When he finally woke up from his daydream, the forest was already dead. It makes me think about myself somehow, those memories I want but I can’t recall. The trees spent their life purifying the forest, but the outcome was the death of the forest; Mr. Ginkgo chose not to purify the air, and his fate was to sit alone till his dying day.

“I always know what I SHOULD do, Mr. Cassius,” he said. “But do you know why I never do it? Because it’s too hard.”

The time was still running; its clockwise march never changes. I decided to leave the forest in the afternoon and continue my journey.

I told Ginkgo my plan.

He stayed silent. When I was packing my bag, finally he spoke. “The time of the music is ending, second comes after second, moving towards its finale; but time itself is eternal, increasing in the form of one minute after another, never turning back. I chose music and fun for the moment, but that’s not eternity; my friends spent their lives to purify the air, and they have chosen time—they are living in another way of life. Have you heard the wind, Cassius?”

And then he left. The last leaf of his branch fell down slowly, and his body disappeared in the dusk of sunset, those leaves on the tree blowing away with the wind. What happened next brought me an unbelievably beautiful scene: the forest came back to life at that second. The leaves turned from bud to green leaf, from green to yellow—the golden color that only belongs to this season. They came back at that one moment. A group of birds flew from the other side of the forest, and that was not the end. The merlin’s song echoed in the forest, and a red cardinal’s shadow flew in front of my eyes. Chasing that shadow, I saw a shy squirrel. Not very far in front of me, two blue butterflies chased each other on a branch that flowered.

Now incompatible with this beautiful sight, the only dead tree was the ginkgo tree in front of the window of the wooden house, but I believe it will grow new leaves. It might take decades, even hundreds of years, but it will come back. You ask me why I believe in that so deeply? Because I can still hear the last word from the old man before we said goodbye: “they have chosen time.”

——————

Almost the same second, I felt like I just woke up from a deep, deep dream. White wallpaper was the first thing I saw after I opened my eyes. While my ears started to work again, I found myself screaming loudly. They took me off the chair, two people holding each of my arms, and they took me out of the room. I couldn’t control myself, but I wanted to know what was going on. I saw a spiral staircase and a man in white. The last scene I saw when I was still waking was the painting of the ninth circle of hell hanging on the wall. Then I felt dizzy and my sight turned black again, but I had the courage to face what happened next.

“I will choose the time.”