by Yu Hua
When Xu Sanguan heard them say they would take him to an inn, he fell silent and simply let them convey him to the nearest available place. They set him down in a dormitory room with four beds and piled all four of the quilts on top of him. Despite being smothered under four quilts, Xu Sanguan’s body continued to tremble. They stood over him and asked, “Feeling any warmer?”
Xu Sanguan shook his head. His head, protruding from underneath the quilts, seemed very far away.
When they saw his head shake, they said, “If you still feel cold even under four quilts, it must be the hot-and-colds. Once you get a case of the hot-and-colds, you feel cold whether you have four quilts or ten, because the cold is on the inside and not on the outside. You’ll feel better if you have something to eat.”
They looked on as the quilts themselves began to quiver. After a little while Xu Sanguan extended one hand from underneath the quilts, clasping a ten-fen note. “I’d like to eat some noodles.”
They went to buy him a bowl of noodles and then propped him up in bed to eat. Having swallowed the noodles, Xu Sanguan felt his body regain a little of its warmth. And after a moment he was able to speak more clearly, so he told them he didn’t really need to use all four of the quilts. “I’m begging you. Take two of them away. I can hardly breathe.”
That night Xu Sanguan shared the room with a man who arrived after dark. Well into his sixties, he was wearing a tattered cotton-padded jacket, and his dark, ruddy face was cracked and seamed by the winter wind. He walked into the room cradling two little piglets in his hands. Xu Sanguan watched as he laid the piglets out on top of the bed. The piglets began to cry. The sound was sharp and thin at the same time. The piglets lay draped across the bed, their feet bound together with string.
The man said to them, “Sleep, sleep now, it’s time to go to sleep.” As he spoke, he covered their little bodies with a quilt, then borrowed under the covers at the other end of the bed.
After he had lain down, he noticed Xu Sanguan looking at him. “It gets awfully cold in the middle of the night. I’d rather let them sleep with me than risk that they freeze to death during the night.”
He saw Xu Sanguan nod in reply and let out a friendly chuckle. He told Xu Sanguan that he was from the country outside of North Marsh, that he had two daughters who were already married and three sons who were still single. He had two grandsons too. He had come to Hundred-Mile to sell the piglets. “Prices are higher here in Hundred-Mile, so I can make a little more money.” Finally he added, “I’m sixty-four years old this year.”
“I would never have guessed it,” Xu Sanguan said. “Sixty-four and still going strong.”
With this, the other man chuckled again. “My eyes are still good, I can still hear pretty well, and there’s nothing in particular the matter with me. It’s just that I’m not as strong as I once was. I still work in the fields every day, and I can do just as much work as any of my three sons, but I’m not as strong as I once was. When I get tired, my back starts to hurt.”
When he noticed that Xu Sanguan was lying underneath two quilts, he asked, “Are you sick or something? You’ve got two quilts, but you’re still shivering like a leaf.”
Xu Sanguan said, “I’m not sick, I’m just cold, that’s all.”
“There’s another quilt over there. Want me to put it on top of you?”
Xu Sanguan shook his head, “No, I’m already feeling much better. I was really cold after I sold blood this afternoon, but I’m much better now.”
“You sold blood today?” he continued. “I sold blood once too. When my youngest was ten, he had an operation and needed to have a blood transfusion, so I sold my own blood to the hospital, and they gave it to my youngest. After I sold the blood, I felt really weak.”
Xu Sanguan nodded. “If you sell just once or twice, you feel weak. If you keep on selling blood, all the warmth in your body escapes, and you just can’t get warm.”
As he spoke, he poked his hand out from under the quilts and pointed his finger toward the other man.
“I’ve sold blood three times in three months, two bowls each time. That’s four hundred milliliters, as they would say in the hospital. I already sold all my strength. All I had left was my warmth. But the other day I sold blood in Lin’s Pier, and today I sold two bowls here in Hundred-Mile, so now even the little warmth that I had left is gone.”
When he finished speaking, he breathed heavily from the exertion.
The old man from the countryside around North Marsh said, “If you keep on selling blood like this, won’t you end up selling them your life along with it?”
Xu Sanguan said, “In a few more days I’m going to sell some more in Pine Grove.”
The old man said, “First you sold your strength. Now you’ve sold your warmth. What’s left but your life?”
“If that’s what it takes, I’m willing.” Xu Sanguan explained, “My son has hepatitis. He’s in a hospital in Shanghai. I have to find enough money to pay for his treatment. If I stopped selling blood for even a few months, there would be no way to pay his hospital bill.”
He paused to catch his breath.
“I’m almost fifty now, and I’ve had a taste of pretty much everything life has to offer. Even if I were to go, it wouldn’t really be much of a loss. But my son’s only twenty-one, and he hasn’t really lived yet. He hasn’t gotten himself a woman, hasn’t known what it is to be a man. If he were to go now, it would be too unfair.”
The old man nodded repeatedly as he listened to Xu Sanguan’s speech. “You’re right, you know. When you’ve lived to be our age, you’ve pretty much learned all there is to know about what it is to be a man.” The two pigs began to squeal. The old man said, “I bumped them just now when I moved my feet.”
Xu Sanguan was still shivering under the covers.
The old man continued, “You look like a city person. I know you city people like to keep clean, but we don’t care as much about all that down in the country. What I’m trying to say is . . .” He paused for a moment. “What I’m trying to say is that if you don’t mind too much, I’ll put the pigs in bed with you. They’ll help keep you warm.”
“Why should I mind? That’s awfully kind of you. Why don’t you put one of them over here? One should be enough.”
The old man stood, hoisted one of the piglets, and set it down by Xu Sanguan’s feet. The piglet had already fallen asleep and seemed not to notice its passage from one bed to the other. But when Xu Sanguan pressed his icy feet against its side, the piglet suddenly squealed and curled itself into a quivering ball under the quilts.
The old man asked apologetically, “Think you’ll still be able to sleep?”
“My feet are too cold. Woke the little creature up.”
The old man said, “Pigs are just animals after all. It’d be better if you had someone to share the bed with you.”
“I can feel his warmth. I’m feeling a lot warmer already.”
FOUR DAYS LATER Xu Sanguan arrived in Pine Grove. By this time his face was gaunt and yellow with fatigue, his limbs were weak, his head felt dizzy, his vision was blurred, and his ears had begun to ring. His bones ached, and when he swung his legs forward to walk, they seemed to flutter underneath him.
When the blood chief at the Pine Grove Hospital saw Xu Sanguan standing in front of him, he waved him away before Xu Sanguan had even finished a sentence. “Go take a piss. Your face is so yellow, it looks gray, you can hardly get out a word before you start to pant, and you expect me to buy some of your blood? I’d say you better go get yourself a blood transfusion instead.”
Xu Sanguan left the hospital and sat down in a sunny corner sheltered from the wind. He sat for nearly two hours with the sun’s rays shining into his face and across his body. When his face grew hot from the sun, he stood up and went back to the blood donation room at the hospital.
The blood chief saw him walk in but didn’t recognize him as the same man who had come in earlier. “You’re all skin and bones. A nice gu
st of wind, and you’d be flat on the ground. But you do have good color. Your face is nice and ruddy. How much blood do you want to sell?”
“Two bowls,” Xu Sanguan replied, pulling a bowl out from his sleeve to show him.
The blood chief said, “You can fit about ten ounces of rice in two bowls like that. How much blood that works out to, I don’t know.”
“Four hundred milliliters,” Xu Sanguan offered.
“Go to the end of the hall and have the nurse in the clinic take your blood.”
A nurse wearing a white face mask drew four hundred milliliters of blood from Xu Sanguan’s arm and then watched as he slowly steadied himself and stood to leave. As soon as he had managed to stand up, though, he tumbled to the floor. The nurse cried out in alarm, and they carried him to the emergency room. The doctor on duty in the emergency room laid him out on a gurney and began to examine him. He rubbed his temples, held his hand against the arteries on his wrist, lifted his eyelids, and then checked his blood pressure. When he saw that Xu Sanguan’s blood pressure had fallen to sixty over forty, he said, “He needs a blood transfusion.”
And so it was that the four hundred milliliters of blood Xu Sanguan had just sold to the hospital found its way back into Xu Sanguan’s bloodstream. Only after the doctor supplemented this first transfusion with an additional three hundred milliliters of someone else’s blood did Xu Sanguan’s blood pressure return to one hundred over sixty.
When Xu Sanguan came to and discovered to his fright that he was laid up in the hospital, he immediately slid out of bed and made his way toward the exit. But they stopped him before he could get away and told him that although his blood pressure had returned to normal, he needed to stay an extra day for further observation because the doctors hadn’t yet been able to determine the reason for his illness.
“I’m not sick! I just sold too much blood.”
He told the doctor that he had sold blood a week ago at Lin’s Pier and again three days later in Hundred-Mile.
The doctor gazed at him aghast and, after a moment of silence, spat out a question. “So you’re suicidal?”
“No, no, I’m not suicidal. It’s my son—”
The doctor cut him short with an abrupt wave of his hand. “Get out of here.”
The hospital in Pine Grove charged Xu Sanguan for seven hundred milliliters of blood, plus emergency treatment, which amounted to roughly the same sum he had earned from his last two blood-selling transactions.
Xu Sanguan went to find the doctor who had accused him of being suicidal and complained, “I sold you four hundred milliliters of blood, and you sold me seven hundred milliliters. Let’s forget about the blood that you gave back to me for now. But I never asked for someone else’s blood. Let me give those three hundred milliliters back to you.”
The doctor said, “What in the world are you trying to say?”
“I want you to take back three hundred milliliters of blood.”
The doctor said, “You’re sick.”
Xu Sanguan said, “I’m not sick. It’s just that I sold too much blood and got cold. You sold me seven hundred milliliters of blood. That’s about four bowls. And now I don’t feel cold anymore. In fact, I feel kind of hot, too hot, really. So I want to return three hundred milliliters to you.”
The doctor pointed one finger at his own head. “I meant that you are mentally ill.”
Xu Sanguan said, “I’m not mentally ill. I just want you to take back the blood that isn’t mine.” He looked around at the people who had gathered in a circle to listen and pleaded, “People should be even-handed when it comes to doing business. When I sold you my blood, everything was aboveboard. So how come you never even asked me how much blood I wanted back?”
The doctor said, “We saved your life! You were in shock. If we had waited to tell you what we were going to do, you’d be dead by now.”
Xu Sanguan nodded. “I know you were trying to save my life. And it’s not like I want you to take back all seven hundred milliliters. All I want you to do is take back the three hundred milliliters that don’t belong to me. I’m almost fifty years old now, and I’ve never taken anything that doesn’t belong to me.”
When he looked back toward the doctor, he realized that he had already left and that the people standing around him had broken into a gale of laughter. He realized they were making fun of him, then fell silent, stood for a moment, turned, and left the hospital.
It was almost dusk. Xu Sanguan walked through the streets of Pine Grove for a long time, until he came to the banks of the river. He walked until the railing by the water blocked his path forward. He stopped and watched as the setting sun dyed the river red. A tugboat approached from far in the distance, its wood-burning engine chugging noisily as it moved down the waterway. Xu Sanguan watched it pass, watched as the waves rippling from from its stern slapped noisily against the stone piles along the embankment.
He stood for a while until he began to feel the chill. Then he squatted down next to the trunk of a tree. After he had squatted for a while, he extracted all his money from inside the lining of his jacket and began to count. The total was thirty-seven yuan and forty fen. He had sold blood three times but had only two bowls’ worth of blood money to show for it. He carefully folded the bills and put them back in his inside pocket. He felt wronged. Tears welled up in his eyes, and a cold wind blew the tears down to the ground, so that by the time he tried to wipe his eyes, they were already dry. He sat for a little while longer and then got up and continued to walk. He thought to himself that it was still a long way to Shanghai. He knew he would still have to pass through Big Bridge, Anchang Gate, Jing’an, Huang’s Inn, Tiger’s Head Bridge, Three Ring Cave, Seven-Mile Fort, Yellow Bay, Willow Village, Changning, and New Village before he got there.
Xu Sanguan decided that he could no longer afford to take passenger ferries. He figured that it would cost him three yuan and sixty fen to get to Shanghai from Pine Grove by boat. Since he had sold blood twice to no avail, he couldn’t spend his money so carelessly anymore. And that was how he decided to hitch a ride on a concrete river barge loaded with silk cocoons manned by two brothers called Laixi and Laishun.
Xu Sanguan had caught sight of them as he stood on the stone steps by the river. Laixi was standing at the prow brandishing a bamboo pole used for pushing the boat down the river, while Laishun stood at the stern waving a long oar. Xu Sanguan waved and asked where they were headed. They said they were going to Seven-Mile Fort. There was a silk factory in Seven-Mile Fort to which they would deliver their cargo of cocoons.
Xu Sanguan said to them, “We’re going in the same direction. I’m going to Shanghai. Do you think you could give me a lift to Seven-Mile Fort?” By the time he explained himself, the barge had already glided past him.
Xu Sanguan ran along the bank of the river in pursuit of the barge. “One more person won’t sink the boat. And I can help you row. Three people rowing is bound to be easier than just two. And I can help out with your food expenses. It’s cheaper for three to eat than two—everyone can eat an extra bowl or two of rice, and you don’t need any more vegetables.”
The two brothers realized that Xu Sanguan was talking sense, so they brought the barge to a halt against the banks and let him climb aboard.
Xu Sanguan didn’t know how to row, and almost as soon as he took the oar from Laishun, it slid out of his hands and into the water. Laixi hurriedly brought the boat to a halt with his bamboo pole, while Laishun bent over the stern and fished the oar from the water when it floated up on the current.
Having retrieved the oar, Laishun pointed at Xu Sanguan and yelled, “You said you could help row, but all you know how to do is drop the damned oar in the river. What else did you say just now? You said you could do this and help us with that, which is the only reason we let you on in the first place. So that’s what you call rowing? I wonder what else can you do?”
“I said I could eat with you, because it’s cheaper for three to eat than two.”
“I have no fucking doubt that you can eat!” Laishun shouted.
Laixi broke into laughter at the prow. “Well, you can cook for me. That’s a start.”
Xu Sanguan went up to the little brick stove on the deck. There was a wok on top of the stove and a bundle of kindling next to it. Xu Sanguan began to cook.
When night came, Laishun and Laixi moored the barge by the bank, opened an iron hatch on the deck, crawled down into the cabin, and wrapped themselves in a single quilt. Noticing that Xu Sanguan was still outside, they called up to him, “Come down and get some sleep.”
Xu Sanguan, seeing that the cabin was even smaller than a single bed, demurred. “I won’t crowd you two. I’ll sleep up here.”
Laixi said, “It’s wintertime. If you sleep outside, you’ll freeze to death.”
Laishun added, “If you freeze to death, we’ll be in trouble too.”
“Come on down,” Laixi continued. “We’re all on the same boat, so we have to take the good and bad together.”
Xu Sanguan knew he was right: it really was very cold outside, and when he remembered that he would have to sell still more blood at Huang’s Inn and could not afford to get sick, he slid down into the cabin and lay down between them. Laixi passed a corner of the quilt to him, and Laishun pulled enough of the fabric in his direction to cover him.
Xu Sanguan said to them, “You two are brothers, but somehow Laixi always sounds nicer than Laishun when he’s saying something.”
The two brothers’ chuckles quickly gave way to snores. Xu Sanguan was squeezed between them, and their shoulders jutted into his shoulders. And after a little while their legs were draped across his legs, and after a while longer their arms were sprawled across his chest. Xu Sanguan lay pressed beneath them, listening to the motion of the water. The sound was extremely clear and distinct. He could even hear the sound of drops of water splashing above the current, and he felt as if he were actually sleeping submerged in the river itself. The sound of the river brushing his ears kept him awake for a long time, so he thought about Yile and wondered how he was doing in the hospital in Shanghai. He thought about Xu Yulan, and he thought about Erle lying sick in bed at home, and he thought about Sanle watching over Erle.