by A. Yi
“126?”
“Yes, 126 total.”
“It doesn’t matter if she scored 126 as long as her little brother can score 621.” Later, recounting this story to others, Little Big Zhang, once and only once, showed his humorous side. It seemed he had been waiting for the day to rent his daughter a shop close to Jigong Ridge, on Qiuzhi Road facing Number One Middle School, a shop with a sign reading Advertisement Design Center, doing typing and copying work. “You can type, can’t you?” he asked. “I can,” his daughter said. That year, his mother, Grandma Zhang, found that if she poked her swollen calf, the indentation would stay for a long time, so she did it in his face. “I can’t work anymore,” she spoke the line long-prepared in her heart. City folks were already retired at her age, free of all duties. They only had to open their mouths to be fed and hold out their hands to be dressed, and enjoyed the support of their children. In order to get similar treatment, she spent the first six years in the city cooking for Ruijuan (though she only cooked once a day and they ate leftovers for breakfast and dinner). She believed she had done enough. No matter what it was her turn to lead a leisurely life like the song that says: ‘You’re too tired, time to have a rest’. She widened her eyes, which easily got teary and red in the wind, and shut her lips. She had her counter ready in her head as she gazed at her seventh and weakest son. The latter closed his eyes and considered it a moment, then made a decision even God might praise:
“For now on Ruijuan will cook for you.”
From then on, every day at eleven thirty young Ruijuan would get on the electric scooter she bought on installment from the store next to the printing shop, and rush back to Jigong Ridge to cook for Grandma. Meanwhile, the latter would be holding her belt, complaining as she walked around the neighborhood. “I peed blood again this morning, peed this much,” she’d say, making gestures to justify giving up kitchen service. People, including Aunt Liang, Aunt Ai, Aunt Wen, and Aunt Chen, said afterward that the illness which kept her from oil smoke came from her wish. Grandma Zhang didn’t want to cook anymore, so her body made the illness to exempt her from cooking. (Doctor Zou Huoquan, who ran a clinic near the train station, said: “Old woman, you’d better take it easy.”). Before, so as to be more comfortable, save some effort, she would just make a quick meal, offhandedly give it to her granddaughter, offhandedly have it herself. Now she found her granddaughter treated her that way too. Sometimes she’d finish eating and her granddaughter would snatch the stainless bowl, put detergent on it, rub it in the bucket of dirty water then rinse it in the bucket of clean water – in 20 seconds everything was pretty much finished. When the old woman, forgetful of her past meanness, banged the table and reproached her, the girl would remind her, sometimes even of the exact day. “Besides, you and I eat the same,” Granddaughter said. This was exactly what the old woman had once said to the girl. Things seemed to have achieved an equilibrium with the beauty of geometric symmetry (like Borges said in ‘The Immortal’: Because of his past or future virtues, every man is worthy of all goodness, but also of all perversity, because of his infamy in the past or future.)
When Grandma Zhang implied her granddaughter’s behavior to Little Big Zhang, she received only the other’s bitter remarks.
In the end what Grandma Zhang could do was watch the clock (or ask the time from Old Wang, a retired hydroelectric worker who listened to the radio) to see if her granddaughter had come back to cook on time or not. Being punctual was something she could have a clear conscience about. Though a bad cook, there had never been a day she didn’t cook on time. Around noon she got agitated, thinking her granddaughter wouldn’t came back on time and that she would be neglected or mistreated by the girl (which she had said would happen sooner or later in complaints to neighbors). It had never occurred to her that her granddaughter, seeing cooking as a burden, wanted to have it done as early as possible so she could return more quickly to her own, youthful world. In her own world she talked about her grandma like this: “Bad teeth, can’t chew nothing, and don’t know when she’ll die, she had so many kids, had 10, all sons, unbelievable, a woman with 10 sons.” She also talked about other things, for example, the closeout sale of Camel Outdoors lasted 10 years; Yishion began to sell menswear and its staff just left the air conditioners on despite the large space; whether Propitious Phoenix had copied Auspicious Phoenix; Digital Telecom also selling gray market goods; and the pharmacy trying to recruit trustworthy night-shift workers but paying too little. But there weren’t many things worth talking about, only five or six each quarter. Then one day, Ruijuan herself became a hot topic.
A locksmith with a long dick became Ruijuan’s first love. Anyone who knew thought it was a scam. The poor girl who was just out of school had no idea of the abyss she faced. The man was collecting women. So far his collection included the deaf-mute at the foundry, the spinster with an artificial limb who worked as an accountant on the distant tree farm, and other half-alive women like Ruijuan herself whose skin was ashen from malnutrition. Some said that for years he’d been sending women to Guangdong to work as prostitutes.
“What do you like about me?” Ruijuan asked him one day. What she disliked the most about herself was her eyes, which were too wide-set, almost without eyelashes and eyebrows. Everyone said that while answering this question the man’s eyes rolled rapidly. He was thinking in front of her.
“There are good things about you,” he said.
“What are they?” she asked.
“Well, there are good things. Don’t worry about it. You just need to know I like you,” he said.
People thought Ruijuan would have left a man so short on words, but their relationship lasted a very long time. Sometimes he told her bullshit like, “You’re the bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” When the words seemed insufficient to express his loyalty, he would gave her things hard to come by in the little city, like a Coach bag and a pair of leather ECCO shoes. When she first received that coral-red, litchi-skinned handbag, she carried it for 24 hours, refusing to let go, unable to resist walking around to show it off. That was the year I went back to Ruichang and saw her. I was heading southward on Qiuzhi Road to Central Hospital to see my father. She was coming in the opposite direction, up the ramp I was going down. She was eating one grain at a time, her body incredibly thin. The exposed ribs around her chest reminded me of a grill, each bar clearly distinguished. Her skeleton was big, bones from the genes of the shabby working class, which must have done a lot of work and taken a lot of beatings. She wore a pair of six-centimeter platform shoes and an above-the-knee dress bluer than the day’s sky (which was so blue it was almost unsettling). The dress was so startlingly blue that I couldn’t help but turn several times to look. In the hours of afternoon slumber, she was walking on the glaring street alone and sweating as she exhibited. I saw dense blue sweat trickling down between her legs like blue menstrual blood.
Later in Ikea I saw – I have no idea why I mention this – an extendable dining table with the following description: The extendable dining table has one spare leaf, seats four to six people, and can be adjusted as needed. When not in use, the spare leaf can be let down under the table, ready at hand. I stood there, unable to help but stroke it, then knelt down to insert the spare leaf. Meanwhile I felt a sense of shame and resentment, was eager to leave with my wife. I told her I would never buy a product like that. If it weren’t for that I never would have realized I only owned under 50 square meters of living space. Later, I also saw things like drop-leaf tables and foldable chairs. They seemed to have eyes that looked at me scornfully (sometimes in a slightly fancy restaurant or clothing shop, I also felt condescended to by sophisticated attendants). I have no idea how this was related to seeing Zhang Ruijuan on Qiuzhi Road, nor why I talked about it when talking about Zhang Ruijuan. I guess the dining table, which became as spacious and luxurious as the tables of the rich when the spare leaf was inserted, and the flamboyantly colorful dress even a
supermodel from Paris wouldn’t dare wear revealed shabbiness one cannot stand. When she held the parasol, stepped on the muddy bricks, and one step after another climbed the stairs leading to Number One Middle school, I felt my gnawing at my heart. A few days later, after I left my hometown, I heard this girl I saw was dead. It seemed somehow related to a strange curse.
* * *
One morning the sanitation worker Li Shili found Zhang Ruijuan’s body on a four-feet-wide cement path off Railway Dam. The rail tracks, shiny from the grinding of wheels, were still dripping with water. The deceased’s hair was soaked through and parted into several strands, her skin horrifyingly white and covered in goose bumps, her fingers and palms soaked in water were slack and thus so shriveled skin was about to come off. The body lay prone, facing south, seemingly trampled prior to death, the mouth and nose submerged in a small puddle a cow could drink in a gulp, and bubbles came out the nose. One hand holding the garbage grabber, the other holding the strap of the windproof dustpan, Li Shili stood vacantly in the falling drizzle. Then as if suddenly remembering something, she hurried to the nearby early market, gesturing her discovery to the vendors dumping vegetables in their stalls before finally making herself clear.
Then came the spooky probable cause of death. After hearing Ruijuan had died, Aunt Wen, one of the residents of Jigong Ridge who had resolved to hide some things, who was known for her integrity, strained to hold the doorframe but was still unable to prevent herself from collapsing. When she came to from a brief stupor, there were three things:
– the unquestionable existence of the netherworld (she thought of her sister who had gone missing 38 years ago)
– the selfishness, tyranny, narrow-mindedness, and ignorance of human beings
– God’s complete indifference
she kept crying for. She was horrified. But it was the hatred toward one person and the sympathy for the other that made her tremble. Then she summoned courage and disclosed what Grandma Zhang and Ruijuan had told her before their deaths. This caused a great stir in the little city. Many people, including government officials, who were sworn atheists and had been accustomed to think in an atheistic way, participated in the discussion and dissemination of the story. Even when there was nothing more to discuss, they were not willing to leave, just lingered and kept sighing.
First Grandma Zhang, who lived on 43 City-Country Commerce Street in Jigong Ridge, went out at noon the day before. The weather was awful and gloomy, the rain seemed to be approaching yet distant, only wind chased fallen leaves about. The old woman wore a brown outfit like a monk’s robe whose neck exposed the red cotton-padded jacket inside. A hairnet wrapped around her iron-gray hair. Her face was as skinny as her son’s and was covered with tired wrinkles. Stooped, she held a dragon-head walking stick as she went down the street. She showed people the metal clock in her left arm which she’d just taken down from the wall of her house. “I can’t read, even if I could, I can’t see clearly. Tell me, is it one thirty?” she asked.
“It is, Grandma,” somebody answered.
“Look at your watch. Is it one thirty?” the old woman asked again.
“It’s one thirty.”
Then tears poured out of her bloodshot eyes as if a rock stopping them had been removed. “Poor me. Nobody came back to cook for me yet.” She pulled out a decades-old handkerchief. She wiped tears, shaking and explaining her tragic situation. Soon people crowded around to watch. She seemed to think they were qualified to witness, whether quantitatively or qualitatively, and some other day they would attest to her sorrow and outrage that day. So she leaned her walking stick against an electric pole and threw the clock on the ground. It was dented.
“Come to my house to eat, Grandma Zhang,” somebody said.
“Eat and go to my death? Eat at your house. My house isn’t empty.” She picked up the walking stick, knocked the end against the ground, and walked off in anger. Then as she walked she kept wailing, “Does anyone really care? Don’t you all really just want this old woman to starve to death? Nobody starved to death when the Nationalist Party was in charge. Now someone will.”
In fact, prior to this, at home, she’d thrown everything on the ground. You could say it was on purpose and could say it was by accident – at first it was by accident, but she had a chance to stop and instead indulged in the consequences. After breaking a porcelain bowl came the recklessness of one murder means death and so do 10 murders, or tearing the imperial cloth means death and so does killing the prince. . .teacups: four, porcelain bowls: four, porcelain plates: four, black-and-white Kunlun TV (really basically only the cathode tube was left): one, Hong Deng radio: one, iron wok: one, red thermos with printed on it: one, porcelain teapot painted with pine trees: one, a mirror: one, a flower pot: one, a flower vase: one, and a bottle of Hero carbon ink were broken. There was no way to break the water dispenser, so she pushed it over. Same with the chest of drawers. All her granddaughter’s clothes that could be ripped were ripped. The shoes were thrown into the water tank. Actually this fire had started three days ago and never extinguished. Like fire buried under ash, with a good stir it spreads. Three days prior Granddaughter came home at eleven fifty. Two days prior it was twelve fifteen. One day prior, at one in the afternoon. When she saw Granddaughter come back, Grandma Zhang muttered: “So you still know you need to come home. Why not come back even later, do you still care about this grandma, you really made a waste of all the time I spent looking after you for six years, six years, why don’t you just put rat poison in my food and kill me, poison me to death and get even?” Ruijuan just tossed her a cold, baffled look, not explaining, not responding. She left after cooking like hired help, without a word. This day, Grandma Zhang started expecting Ruijuan at eleven thirty, thought the girl should be back at twelve, if not twelve then twelve thirty. But at twelve thirty she still wasn’t back. Grandma Zhang thought, when you’re back at one see how I rip off your ears, how I use my dragon-head walking stick to break your dog legs. But at one she was still not back. The old woman went out a few times, all she found was vacant, boundless air and the smell of food cooking in other houses. What made her fly into a rage was when she asked Aunt Chen at the grocery store to call her granddaughter (she found five cents, but Aunt Chen pushed it back, saying she couldn’t accept money from her). Expecting a big scolding over the phone, the latter didn’t answer. She didn’t answer then turned it off. Grandma Zhang then smashed everything she could smash.
Grandma Zhang left the clock, walked down Guilin Road, passed People’s Park and the old prison all the way to Number One Middle. From there, she turned east onto Yanpen Road. After walking almost two kilometers, someone reminded her, and she turned back, then walked down Qiuzhi Road where her granddaughter was. Store by store, she asked, “Have you seen my granddaughter, my granddaughter is named Ruijuan,” (somebody said her granddaughter had left at 10 and not come back) until she got to her granddaughter’s store. The door was open. A white printer inside was plugged in, still humming. The old woman raised her walking stick and struck the cover, then the paper tray. The owner of the store next door, Chen Li, rushed in, grabbed the walking stick, and said: “Don’t break it, the thing cost more than 10,000 yuan.” The old woman wouldn’t listen. She said, “What do you care if I break my granddaughter’s stuff? You want to be nosy I’ll go break the stuff in your store.” That Chen Li defended herself, “If your granddaughter hadn’t asked me to look after her store I wouldn’t. Since she trusted me I have to be responsible, if you want to break stuff you can wait for her to get back.” They each gripped one end of the walking stick, shoving it left, shoving it right, on and on. Then the old woman almost knocked the young one over. So the young one said: “Grandma, I really don’t want to say this but with this energy you could have cooked the meal and washed the dishes by now. You don’t have to make things difficult for your granddaughter. It’s not like you can’t do it.” The old woman gaped, pointing at th
e girl, unable to speak. Then an acquaintance came to mediate. Seeing there was a mediator, the old woman said toughly to the girl: “What’s your name, tell me.” The girl wanted to say, My name is none of your fucking business. Just fuck off so I can attend to my store. The words almost slipped out of her mouth, but she gritted her teeth. That was when Grandma Zhang started to cough. She forgot how she got home, just remembered coughing all the way home. “See, I coughed up blood,” she said to Aunt Wen, her only visitor, and folded the bloodstained handkerchief in half to preserve the evidence. A while later, she unfolded it again to look at the red bloodstain one more time. Then she shut her eyes and squeezed out a pool of tears. “I’m so pathetic,” she cried, gripping Aunt Wen’s hand. “Pathetic.”
The old woman passed away at five in the afternoon. Aunt Wen (to this day she regrets visiting the Zhang home, the old woman wasn’t without children. Then, when Grandma Zhang had just returned to Jigong Ridge with a handful of dried grass from the park, she tried to set the house on fire with it, but her hands kept shaking and the matches kept breaking. A failed attempt. Seeing Grandma Zhang vent her childlike anger in such an extreme way, people called Little Big Zhang. Little Big Zhang said: “Let her, let her do whatever she wants to do, she has that kind of temper.” So everyone left except Aunt Wen who couldn’t face her own indifference. Holding a bowl of rice soaked with shredded meat soup, she avoided the broken porcelain and glass on her way to the second floor of the Zhang home) said she saw astonishment in Grandma Zhang’s eyes, the kind of astonishment she’d seen on a child’s face years before. The child kept jumping wildly on the roof of a hut in a brick factory. People warned him but it was no use. Then the roof, made of asbestos or linoleum, split open. He fell through like a heavy stove. Very heavy. Grandma Zhang sank into intense, resounding wails. Aunt Wen opened her lips and teeth with the spoon, forcing the food into her mouth, which had sworn never to accept food from anybody, the few calories from little food immediately being burned away by more manic wailing. “Go away. Go away. Pease leave. Just let me die,” she wailed feverishly, until she saw Death standing before her. Then her crying became real crying, and she seemed to become softer. She recalled to Aunt Wen the things she regretted most and told herself to take a pill, she’d feel a bit better if she took a pill. Then she must have remembered who caused all this (how could she censure herself, think she was in the wrong) and grabbed Aunt Wen’s collar to sit up, starting to curse angrily.