The flat had to be empty by the end of the month, so on a grey Sunday in March, Chen drove out to clear it. His father had lived there for fifteen years, alone for the last six, and had thrown away almost nothing in that time.
Chen had expected the job to take a weekend. It took three, and not because of the volume. The amount was easy. Clothes went into bags for the charity shop; the bed, the table and two chairs were carried down by men who charged for each floor and complained about the stairs. What slowed everything down was the small stuff, the drawers full of objects that meant nothing to anyone alive except the man who had put them there.
A ticket to a football match in 1994. Eleven keys, none of which opened any door in the flat. A photograph of a woman Chen did not recognize, standing in front of a hospital, smiling at the person holding the camera.
He found himself doing something he had not planned. Instead of deciding what to keep, he started deciding what each object had been for, and in most cases he could not. His father had been a quiet man who explained very little. Chen had assumed there would be time to ask about all of it, and had been wrong in the ordinary way, the way everybody is wrong about that.
By the third weekend he had reduced the whole flat to four boxes. Papers and photographs in one. Tools in another, good ones, properly cared for. A box of his mother's things that his father had clearly never opened after she died, because the tape was still sealed and her handwriting was on the top. And a fourth box that Chen could not give a name to, which held everything he could not throw away and could not explain to anyone, including himself.
The last object in the flat was a radio on the kitchen shelf. It was at least thirty years old, the plastic gone yellow at the edges, and Chen remembered it being on every morning of his childhood, always the same station, always too loud. He plugged it in, mostly to see whether it still worked.
It did. A man was reading the weather for a province four hundred kilometers away, in the flat, careful voice used for such reports, and the sound filled the empty kitchen exactly as it had filled it when there was a table and a pot of tea and his father standing with his back to the room.
Chen sat down on the floor with his coat still on and let it play to the end.
Then he switched it off, put it in the fourth box, swept the floor because it seemed wrong to leave it dirty, and locked the door behind him. He posted the keys back to the owner that evening.
He does not listen to the radio. It is on a shelf in his own kitchen now, not plugged in, and every few months he moves it to dust underneath and puts it back in the same place. His wife asked him once whether he was going to fix it up. He said it worked perfectly, which was true, and did not explain further, which he recognized, some time later, as exactly what his father would have done.