Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 297: Written Down Clearly

Shen Zhixia wrung out the rag until no water came. She wiped from the windowsill to the far end of the long table. The tabletop had rings of tea-cup stains, old ones that the rag couldn't touch; she had to scrape at them with her fingertips. She moved the two chairs to the wall and pushed the long table forward half a foot. The space by the window opened up. The floor kept four dents from the chair legs. They wouldn't wipe away.

At 8:45, the smell of scallion oil climbed the stairs from downstairs.

At exactly nine, He Xiufen came up carrying a tray with two bowls of noodles. The steam coated the wall, damp.

"She's not here yet," Shen Zhixia said.

"Noodles first." He Xiufen set the tray on the corner of the long table. "Weather like this, coming from Jianping Lane means two bus transfers. She'll be frozen before she gets on. Once she's through the door, she needs something hot in her stomach before she can talk."

At 9:10, the stairs creaked, one slow step at a time.

Kang Wenying stopped at the top of the stairs. Sixty-three years old. Her padded jacket was gray, the cuffs worn shiny. Her hair was dyed, but the new growth showed white above her ears. In her left hand she clutched a washed-out cloth bag, its mouth bulging; something hard was tucked inside.

"Lawyer He."

"Come in, sit." He Xiufen pushed one bowl toward her. "Eat first."

"I already ate."

"Then eat half a bowl more." He Xiufen laid chopsticks across the rim of the bowl. "Nobody walks up these stairs without sitting down first."

Kang Wenying sat at the long table, the cloth bag on her knees, both hands pressed over its mouth. She looked at the noodles, picked up the chopsticks, ate three bites, and pushed the bowl half an inch away.

"My mother's last two months, she couldn't get a single mouthful of noodles down. We spooned water into her, and it ran out the corner of her mouth." She paused. "Every time I smell scallion oil, my chest tightens."

"Then finish this bowl."

Kang Wenying looked up.

"Even with your chest tight, finish it," He Xiufen said. "You came here to talk today. Talking takes strength."

Kang Wenying ate the rest. She drank the soup too. He Xiufen stacked the two bowls on the windowsill and wiped her hands on her trousers.

"The pages."

Kang Wenying untied the cloth bag. Inside was a cut-up cardboard box panel with two sheets of paper clamped between. She pulled the sheets out and spread them on the long table one by one, pressing her palms flat against the edges, as if afraid they'd curl up on their own.

The paper was a size smaller than A4, with rough, torn edges, the kind of roughness that came from being torn out of a notebook. The writing was in ink, black, a fine nib, running line by line down the page. The characters were small, each stroke firm—horizontal was horizontal, vertical was vertical—and not one crowded against another.

He Xiufen didn't bend over right away. She fished her reading glasses out of her apron pocket, wiped them on the hem of her shirt, put them on, and braced both hands on the edge of the table. She read from top to bottom. When she finished, she straightened up. Her finger paused over the edge of the paper but didn't touch it.

"Zhixia, read it aloud."

Shen Zhixia opened her notebook and began from the first line: "I, Feng Wenzhen, live in Jianping Lane. I am eighty-three this year, my mind is clear, my hands and feet still work. Today I write this page myself."

"This house in Jianping Lane is what his father and I built brick by brick. These years I have lain in this bed, and Wenying has carried three meals a day to my bedside and gotten up twice a night. This house goes to her."

She paused at that point. The last line of the first page was three characters: Feng Wenzhen.

"Keep going," He Xiufen said.

"The paintings in the two chests—his father collected them one by one. I don't understand them, and I can't bear to throw them away. Wenying gets one chest, Youxing gets one chest. Nobody takes more than their share."

At the bottom of the second page, the same three characters, followed by a date: January 28, 2025.

Two pages, two signatures, one date. Shen Zhixia finished the last line and looked up at He Xiufen.

He Xiufen laid the two pages side by side, edges aligned, before speaking. "When did this paper come into your hands?"

"October fourth. She passed that morning. That afternoon my brother and I were cleaning the room. Second drawer of the bedside table, pressed under an old almanac."

"Were you there when she wrote it?"

"No." Kang Wenying said. "That day was New Year's Eve. I was in the outer room chopping filling. The light in the inner room stayed on. Past eight, I brought her half a bowl of soup. She was sitting on the edge of the bed writing. When she saw me, she turned the paper over and said, don't look."

"What did you ask?"

"I asked what she was writing." Kang Wenying's hand rubbed her knee through her jacket. "She said, 'Getting things down clearly.'"

He Xiufen repeated the phrase: "Getting things down clearly."

"The next day I asked again. She said, 'When I'm gone, then you can look.'"

"When did she start taking sleeping pills?"

"For years. Couldn't sleep. The doctor prescribed them. The first few years, one pill. Later, half."

"How many. You never kept track."

"I did." Kang Wenying said. "She never let anyone handle her pills. Which meal, how many—she counted them herself."

He Xiufen didn't follow up on that. She pushed her glasses up and asked the next question. "Your brother says the paper is fake. His exact words."

"He said, in those last years she took sleeping pills every day, her mind was muddled, and someone coaxed this writing out of her." Kang Wenying paused. "He used the word 'coaxed.'"

"Has he seen the paper?"

"A glance. In October he came over, and I spread it out for him. He didn't finish reading. He said paper like this, a hundred yuan gets you one outside."

Shen Zhixia's pen stuttered on the page.

"When did he start saying the house should be divided?" He Xiufen asked.

"He said it while Mother was still alive. Back then he said, 'Her house can't all go to you.'"

"Your mother heard."

"She heard." Kang Wenying said. "That day she shoved her pillow back and said, 'I'm not dead yet.'"

He Xiufen straightened, took off her reading glasses, and hung them back on her apron pocket. "How well could your mother read and write?"

"As a girl she kept the books at her family's shop. She could work an abacus faster than I can."

"What shop?"

"Pickled vegetables."

"That lane in Jianping—I worked cases there twenty years ago," He Xiufen said. "The pickle shop was at the west end. Two crocks out front."

Kang Wenying looked at her. "That's the one."

"All right." He Xiufen folded the two pages once, held them in her hand. "This paper stays with me for now."

At five to ten, Shen Zhixia printed out two copies of the Engagement Agreement and two Powers of Attorney. The paper came out hot.

He Xiufen pushed the contract in front of Kang Wenying, and the pen too. "Sign here. Write your name exactly as it is on your ID. One stroke at a time."

Kang Wenying fished her own reading glasses out of the cloth bag, then her ID, pressing it against the edge of the contract. She read slowly, word by word. Her pen touched down, then stopped halfway. "What does 'agency' mean here?"

"It means from now on we go to court on your behalf—we file papers, we receive them, and we speak for you," Shen Zhixia said. "The fee is per contract. Look at this line first."

The fee line was still blank. He Xiufen took the pen from her and wrote two characters in the box: "Waived." Below it she signed her name and wrote the date, November 26.

"That won't do." Kang Wenying set the pen down. "Nobody fights a lawsuit for free."

"This one won't be fought."

"Then charge anyway."

"You keep your money." He Xiufen turned the contract to the second page and pointed at the line about scope of authority. "There'll be plenty of places to spend it later."

Shen Zhixia ran through this month's accounts in her head: rent, utilities, Zhi'an needing a new padded coat for winter. He Xiufen glanced at her.

"What are you calculating?"

"This month."

"Finish, then put it down," He Xiufen said. "This one's free. We'll charge for others."

On the Power of Attorney, He Xiufen ticked "Special Authorization." Shen Zhixia read it out item by item to Kang Wenying: authority to admit, waive, or amend claims on her behalf; to reach a settlement; to sign for legal documents.

"What's a settlement?"

"Both sides give a little, end the matter, and sign a paper. After that, everything goes by that paper," Shen Zhixia said.

"And who am I giving to?"

"We're not there yet."

Kang Wenying nodded and signed both forms. Her name came out slow and steady, every stroke squared—nothing like the hand that wrote "Feng Wenzhen" on that paper.

He Xiufen filled in the internal register: client, matter, date. Under "Handling Lawyer" she wrote "He Xiufen," then added a vertical line and two more characters: "Co-handler." She pushed the register over.

"I'm lead on this one. You're co-handler. From today on, you follow this file from start to finish."

[Thud. One sheet of paper, two accounts. Go.]

Shen Zhixia tucked the contract into the file folder, her pen pressed against the second line of the register.

"How many years was your mother ill?"

"Seven."

"Start from the beginning. What year?"

"Autumn 2019. She fell in the yard and broke her hip. Recovered for nearly half a year, could walk holding the wall. From the third year on she couldn't walk at all. Bedridden."

"Those seven years—who was there?"

"Me."

"What did you do before?"

"I worked at the printing plant. Retired at fifty-five. The year I moved back, she could still go out and buy tofu herself."

"After she was bedridden?"

"The first two years, I got up once a night. Then twice. Turning her, changing diapers, giving water. Three liquid meals a day—meat and vegetables blended together. She couldn't taste, she only knew whether it burned." Kang Wenying wiped the back of her hand. "In winter, everything I washed hung over the radiator. The whole room smelled of damp."

"Doctors came?"

"A community doctor came once a month, wrote a line in a notebook before leaving. The neighborhood committee came too."

"Did the committee give you anything?"

"One certificate." Kang Wenying pulled a stack of papers from the cloth bag. The top sheet had a red official stamp. "It says: long-term care provided by her daughter, Kang Wenying."

Underneath were more: the death certificate, the property deed for the old house, her mother's household register, receipts from the funeral home. He Xiufen turned through them one by one. When she finished, she pushed all five back toward Kang Wenying.

"Take these home tonight. Put them under your pillow. Bring them back tomorrow, and we'll go through them one at a time."

Kang Wenying looked at the stack. "My mother said the same thing. Everything important went under her pillow."

Shen Zhixia carried the two-page will to the corner to photocopy. The machine warmed up, beeped, and the pages it spat out still carried heat at the edges. She made two copies: one for Kang Wenying, one for the file.

He Xiufen fished a key from the drawer and crouched to open the metal cabinet. It sat in the corner, gray-green paint, a stack of case files piled on top. Inside was a row of kraft paper envelopes. She pulled out an empty one, slid the two pages inside, and wrote on the flap with a pen: Kang Wenying, original will, two pages, November 26. When she finished, she pressed the flap shut, locked it, and tossed the key back in the drawer.

"The original stays with me. Nobody can take it," she said. "What you have is a photocopy. Photocopies are for showing people. Originals are for showing the court."

Kang Wenying tucked the photocopy back between the cardboard panels, slid it into the cloth bag, and rolled the bag's mouth twice.

At eleven, they walked her to the top of the stairs.

"Lawyer He."

"Hm?"

"Will my brother sue me?"

He Xiufen rested one hand on the stair rail and stood for a moment. "If he sues, the papers go to the court, and we answer on paper. If he doesn't, this matter still won't rest." She paused. "If you don't want to tear the last layer of face with him, there's a way that keeps it."

"What way?"

"Let me first read this paper to the bottom of it."

Kang Wenying went down two steps and looked back. "Lawyer He, my mother's handwriting—I know it."

"I know you do," He Xiufen said. "But whether I know it, I have to see for myself."

The stairs creaked downward, one step at a time.

He Xiufen turned back, moved the two chairs to the table, sat down, and untied her apron, draping it over the chair back. The window glass still held the steam from the noodle soup, cooled into a white film. The lane below was no longer visible.

"Getting things down clearly." She said the phrase again. "An eighty-three-year-old, five years in bed, and on New Year's Eve she doesn't make dumplings—she writes this."

Shen Zhixia waited for her to go on.

"Her mind was clear when she wrote it." He Xiufen said. "That's a sentence I can't say out loud right now. Before I say it, I need paper to say it for me."

"What paper?"

He Xiufen pulled the reading glasses from her pocket and weighed them in her palm. "A woman who counted her own pills and kept her own ledger—she didn't leave nothing behind from the daily business of living."

The stairs creaked. Someone was coming up for noodles.

Shen Zhixia added a line in her notebook: November 26, 11:00, two pages.