by Xiaolu Guo
When I returned home at noon, the house was completely silent. I touched the stove and found it cold. I knew that my grandmother had just returned from drawing water from the well on the other side of the mountain, because I could see puddles where the water had spilled from the buckets and onto the black stone floor. My grandmother looked exhausted. Her back was bent and her hair dishevelled, falling around her cheeks in snowy wisps. Her wrinkles, piled one upon another like the steps in the Village of Stone, were tanned dark from the sun. As she sat near the threshold, wiping the sweat from her face and sighing to herself, I realised how old she looked, how terribly old! She had aged so much that she hardly seemed human. Looking at my grandmother, I suddenly became afraid. I felt as if I were going to cry, for I was terrified that one day I would be as old as she was. My grandfather had not gone to the well that morning, so my grandmother had taken it upon herself to draw water from the well. I watched as she took up a ladle and began to scoop water from the buckets and pour it into the vat where we stored our fresh water. The vat was so large and so deep that I feared I would drown if I ever fell into it.
After my grandmother had emptied one bucket of water, she sat down again, wiped the sweat from her brow and heaved a long sigh. Nervously, I walked over to the stove, stood on a stool and peeked inside the pot my grandmother used for making toffee. The toffee had congealed, and was now the consistency of a slab of metal. I was disappointed because I knew that my grandmother, after going to the well to draw water, would be too exhausted to make another meal that day. I wanted to go up to the second floor and eat lunch with my grandfather, but he had not called me yet, nor had I heard the sounds of cooking. Unsure what to do, I grabbed a handful of dried, salted shrimp from the kitchen cupboard and washed them down with a few glasses of cold water. By now, my grandmother was growing restless, pacing back and forth around the kitchen, idly touching this and that. She appeared to be preoccupied, but still she made no move to do anything. Was she worried that my grandfather was so late getting out of bed? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I had a belly full of cold water and that the dried shrimp I had just eaten were beginning to churn in my stomach. At that moment my grandmother, unable to stand it any longer, walked towards me and pointed upstairs. I understood immediately that she wanted me to go up to the second floor and see what my grandfather was doing.
I climbed the stairs. When I reached the first-floor landing, the house was silent. The only sound was the wind rattling the windows and doors of the house. I assumed that my grandfather had drunk too much the night before and was still in bed, sleeping. At the second-floor landing I noticed a terrible smell, rather like alcohol but more chemical. I held my nose and entered the room, but when I reached my grandfather’s bedside, I froze in shock.
My grandfather’s mouth was covered with white foam. His features were contorted in pain, his face a shade of bluish-purple that I had never seen before. The only thing I recognised was his familiar mane of white hair.
I stepped forward and tried to shake my grandfather awake. I thought he must be sleeping, for I had no idea what death looked like. First I tugged at his arm. When he did not react, I used both hands to shake him with much greater force, but he remained inert. I began to call out to him, my shouts growing louder and louder. Still there was no reaction.
My grandmother, as usual, did not even come upstairs.
Terror-stricken, I raced downstairs and told my grandmother, ‘Grandpa’s sleeping, and I can’t wake him up!’
My grandmother reacted as if she had been struck by lightning. Her eyes filled with tears and she began to weep. When I realised that my grandmother was actually crying, I began to feel truly afraid. She rushed towards the staircase and began to climb the stairs. Trailing after her as she laboured up, one slow step after another, I realised for the first time how very steep our staircase was. I wondered how many years it had been since my grandmother had last been to the second floor. How many years had passed since the last time she had entered my grandfather’s room? Ten years? Twenty, even thirty years?
‘He’s dead. He drank poison.’ These were my grandmother’s words as she stood by my grandfather’s bed. She began to cry once more, her tears falling onto the bottle of poison on the floor.
Was this how people died? I stood barefoot, beside the empty bottle of poison, feeling terribly confused.
I knew nothing about death, in the same way that I knew nothing about birth. Was death the same thing as sleep? If you fell asleep and never woke up, did that mean you were dead?
Though I had often anticipated my own death or the death of the mute, I now realised that it was not something to be taken lightly. Death was a terrifying thing.
When four men from the coffin maker’s shop entered the house carrying my grandfather’s red lacquer casket and my grandmother came out of the kitchen to meet them, she appeared extremely disoriented. Outside our house stood an electricity pole that provided us with a few hours of rationed electricity a day. It had been charred black in a fire. My grandmother stepped over the high threshold and, walking over to the pole, wrapped her arms tightly around it, then suddenly slumped to the ground and began wailing. She sounded like a madwoman, her loud wailing punctuated now and then by an unintelligible mumbling. A crowd of people began to gather around our door. At first it was only children, then fishermen’s wives, then old women on their way home from the fish market, still clutching their nets full of squirming shrimp. In the end, even the village fishermen joined the crowd. I thought I caught a glimpse of the mute and my heart skipped a beat, but when I looked again, he seemed to have disappeared into the crowd. If he knew what had happened, I hoped, maybe he wouldn’t ever bother me again … I dashed into the house, hid myself in one of the darkened corners of the kitchen and refused to come out again. It was too bright outside, but the kitchen was nice and dark. Nobody would be able to see me.
As the babble of voices outside grew louder, I overheard several of the fishermen’s wives gossiping.
‘The old girl never got along with her old man while he was alive. Now that he’s dead, what on earth is she crying about?’
‘You don’t understand. She has to cry. If she doesn’t cry, it means she isn’t loyal.’
A third woman broke in, ‘That’s right. Even if she doesn’t feel like crying, she has to fake it, at least. Because if she doesn’t cry in this life, she’ll be crying in the next one!’
I listened to my grandmother crying for a very long time. Her sobbing seemed endless. It was pitiful, yet not a single person in the crowd had any sympathy for her. She cried until her tears dried up, as if she had cried out all the moisture in her body. Clad in mourning black, racked with sobs and clinging to that blackened electricity pole, her body seemed frailer somehow, more shrunken.
My grandmother exhausted our ears with her sobbing. As for me, I never shed a tear.
That whole day, I hid in the shadows of the house and refused to come out because I did not want anyone in the street to see me. All the spectators gathered outside our door were adults and children I knew from the village. Even the old stationmaster, the most upstanding resident of the Village of Stone, was there, along with his pockmarked wife. It was as if an entire theatre performance had moved from the village auditorium to Number 13, Pirate’s Alley. Only this time, we weren’t performing Five Filial Daughters Wish Their Mother Longevity. We were putting on a tragedy, and everyone knows how much people love a good tragedy. I was completely humiliated. I felt as if there were no way I could go on living in the Village of Stone, not after this.
Inside the house, the coffin makers were busy putting the finishing touches to the casket. My grandmother was still outside, crying. I ran upstairs, hoping to escape the noise of the crowd and my grandmother’s infuriating wailing. When I reached the second floor, I saw my grandfather’s new funeral clothes laid out neatly on my grandmother’s bamboo bed. It had taken a local seamstress a whole day and night to finish sewing the black silk c
lothes in time for the funeral. My grandfather had never worn such fine clothes during his lifetime. I touched the silk and thought: These are things for the dead. I don’t know why, but it frightened me. As I stared blankly at the brand new funeral clothes, the sound of voices from the street reached my ears.
‘You know why the old man did it, don’t you? Because he wasn’t happy.’
‘Of course he wasn’t happy. He had no boat, his son was unfilial and, as if that weren’t enough, his wife was bad luck!’
‘His whole life was a tragedy. He had no children to look after him in his old age. Why else would he kill himself? He must have done something wrong in a previous life to be cursed with such bad luck …’
‘You could say the same about his wife. That’s probably why they ended up together …’
I leaned out of the window and looked down. The coffin makers had left, my grandmother had cried herself to exhaustion and the crowd outside was starting to disperse. Even the fishermen’s wives who had taken such pleasure in the spectacle began to leave, chattering among themselves as they returned home to finish their housework. The only ones left were the children, always indefatigable. So many children had gathered at our front door that they naturally fell to playing together. I saw Boy Waiting and two or three of her older sisters among them. The children were busy playing storm the fortress, swapping cigarette cards and getting into fights. The boys threw kicks and punches; the girls pulled each other’s plaits.
Eventually, my grandmother stopped crying and returned to her usual silence. It seemed as if she had cried enough to last a lifetime. She simply stopped in mid-sob, pulled herself up from the foot of the charred electricity pole and walked back into the house. After all, the coffin had arrived and there was work to be done preparing the body for the funeral.
My grandmother first set to bathing my grandfather’s body. While she washed his hands, his back and the soles of his feet, I helped by drawing fresh water. When she had finished bathing him, she began to dress him in his burial clothes. As she lifted his shoulders, I was shocked to see how rigid my grandfather’s body had become. His limbs were as inflexible as metal bars, and his joints popped loudly when my grandmother tried to lift his arms. It was impossible to get my grandfather’s arms into the sleeves of his funeral clothes. His hands were a terrible shade of bluish-purple, the fingers curled like talons, the veins bulging visibly beneath his skin. I had never seen my grandfather’s hands look like that, more like claws than human hands. I stood frozen at my grandmother’s side, staring at those awful hands. Could these be the same hands that had once spread green fishing nets, studded with colourful floats, on the surface of the ocean? The same hands that had pulled in nets full of shrimp and squirming fish somewhere on the open sea, far from shore? The hands that had once brandished fists at my silent grandmother in this three-storey house of stone? And though they now looked like the claws of a crab, these must be the same hands that had opened a bottle of poison and held it up to his mouth.
Once again, I heard my grandfather’s joints pop. The sound gave me gooseflesh. I glanced at my grandmother and saw that she had only been able to get my grandfather’s arms halfway into his sleeves, and yet her forehead was already covered with beads of sweat from the exertion. She sat down dejectedly on the bed, beside her dead husband, and wiped the sweat from her brow. Her voice listless, my grandmother ordered me to go next door and fetch Boy Waiting’s mother.
I rushed next door. Boy Waiting was not at home, but I found her mother sitting in the courtyard shelling shrimp. She was heavily pregnant. The cobblestone courtyard was covered with mountains of slippery white shrimp and their discarded heads and shells. I knew that when Boy Waiting’s mother had finished drying and salting the shrimp, she would sell them to the seafood cold processing plant, where they fetched seven cents per pound. I knew this because I had helped Boy Waiting shell shrimp many times. Boy Waiting’s mother spent most of her spare time shelling shrimp, and the tips of her fingers were bleached white from the salt water.
Breathlessly, I ran towards her and blurted, ‘She can’t … the clothes … she can’t put the clothes on!’
Boy Waiting’s mother stopped what she was doing and asked, ‘The clothes?’
‘She can’t put them on. The arms … they’re too stiff!’ I let my head drop sideways and raised my arms in a pantomime of a dead person.
Boy Waiting’s mother understood immediately. She brushed off her apron and heaved her pregnant body up from the bench, scattering shrimp left and right. Without another word, she hurried out of the courtyard and towards our house. Boy Waiting’s mother was a truly kind woman.
I was reluctant to go home, so I wandered around the courtyard a bit. Boy Waiting’s family had a fragrant jasmine tree in full bloom in the middle of their courtyard. It was wonderful. There was a long shallow basket, perched on two benches, filled with cuttlefish drying in the sun. Beneath the jasmine tree, there were also several yellow fishing floats and a pile of green nylon used for weaving fishing nets.
My grandmother often told me that everyone had past, present and future lives. If I had a future life, I hoped I could be reincarnated into Boy Waiting’s family, so that I could finally be one of them. Boy Waiting had many older sisters, so I would never need to worry about having no one to talk to. Even at night, I would never be lonely. So many times I had dreamed that Boy Waiting’s mother was my own mother, and the Captain my very own father. In my dreams, I was just like Boy Waiting, surrounded by older sisters, all those little girls that Boy Waiting’s mother had given birth to. We ran around, laughing and teasing and pulling each other’s plaits. In my dreams, I wasn’t afraid of death, because our house was so full of people, so full of life. Everywhere was the sound of joyful laughter. I wasn’t afraid of the mute either, because my father was a big strong fishing boat captain. He was brave and tall and nobody could beat him in a fight, not even the mute. I felt safe and happy in those recurring dreams, but when I awoke I discovered that I was still lying on my grandmother’s bamboo bed. The bed was always cold. My white-haired grandmother lay beside me breathing feebly, and the ocean breezes that preceded a typhoon whistled monotonously through the wooden shutters. In the silence between each gust of wind and the next, I could hear my grandfather snoring upstairs or, on nights when he could not sleep, tossing and turning on his bed made of palm wood. Night after night I would hear the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of those indefatigable waves beating on the reef. And night after night, there was no jasmine tree, no pile of fishing floats, no coil of green nylon rope and no basket filled with cuttlefish drying in the sun. There was no laughter from Boy Waiting’s older sisters and there was no father with his own fishing boat – my dream father, my father in a future life. I was still Little Dog, a seven-year-old girl nobody cared about, a strange child nobody wanted, not even the Sea Demon.
In the endless midnight that loomed before me after waking, I began to see that my dreams were nothing more than idle fantasy. Although that dream was taking place right on the other side of my wall, just next door in that jasmine-scented courtyard, I would never be able to scale that wall because it didn’t belong to me. This was my life, the only life that the gods in charge of this world had seen fit to grant me.
My grandfather’s funeral was held on the far side of the mountain. It was a place covered with weeds and headstones marking the graves where generation after generation of fishermen and their wives had been buried. As you rounded the top of the hill, you could glimpse two headstones, side by side. The grass around the headstones was not very high, thanks to my grandmother’s careful tending. These were the graves that my grandparents had chosen as their final resting place many years earlier, when my grandmother was still very young and had just entered my grandfather’s household. Though she was now an old woman devoid of language, devoid of happiness, you had to admit that she had chosen a lovely gravesite for herself: the vast blue sea at the foot of the mountain stretched as far as eyes could s
ee, seagulls flew overhead, coasting on rays of sunlight, and the valley below was filled with row upon row of closely planted pines. Each evening at dusk, the gravesite afforded a view of the deep red setting sun as it made its plunge into the sea.
When my grandfather’s coffin had been lowered into the ground, my grandmother made me kneel before the grave and touch my head to the earth three times. As I kowtowed, my grandmother began burning offerings of paper coins. She had been up all night making the coins, tearing sheets of cheap brown paper into tiny pieces. In his lifetime, my grandfather never seemed to have enough money. Some of the villagers even called him a miser, citing his unwillingness to spend any money at all on my grandmother. In the afterworld, among all those dead souls and demons, my grandfather would not need to worry about money, for I knew that, as long as she lived, my grandmother would burn a large number of paper coins for him each and every year. After my grandfather’s death, my grandmother finally had the chance to be a good wife.
I finished kowtowing in a daze, then stood up and brushed the mountain dirt from my knees. While the black-clad monks surrounded the grave and began beating their wooden fish in time to the chanting of the sutras, I quietly slipped away. I could not bear to linger any longer. I stood back and watched from afar as my grandmother drew a handful of paper notes from a large wicker basket and tossed them into the fire. After my grandfather’s grave had been covered with earth, I gazed at the empty grave beside it, my grandmother’s grave. I wondered if she were eager to be put into that silent ground as soon as possible, eager to be surrounded by the sound of the ocean and the wind through the pines. After all, was there any reason to want to linger in this life?
No one was able to locate my absentee father to give him the news of my grandfather’s death or to tell him the truth about what had happened. Although who really knew the truth? Nobody knew why my grandfather had killed himself or why he had decided to drink poison. Though my grandfather could write, he had not left a suicide note. He had written down no complaints or reasons for his suicide; he had given us no hints. Likewise, he had given me no hints about either my past or my future. One night, as he listened to the sound of the ocean tide coming in through a small second-floor window, he had simply decided that he wanted to die. He had left nothing to my grandmother, for he had nothing to give. Not a sampan, not a skiff, not even a torn fishing net.