by Xiaolu Guo
I stiffen almost unconsciously, as if bracing myself for a shock.
The old man is still standing outside. ‘May I come in?’ he asks politely.
We gaze at each other for a few moments. His is the face of a kind man; he seems harmless enough.
Without bothering to answer his question, I leave the front door slightly ajar and rush back into the apartment to tidy myself up. I duck my head under the tap in the bathroom and towel off the bits of mask still sticking to my skin. Without even bothering to dry my face, I throw on a change of clothes. I am agitated, filled with conflicting and powerful emotions. My heart is racing.
After a quick glance in the mirror, I make my way back to the front door, open it wide and invite the man to come in.
Now that he can see my face clearly, the old man seems somewhat shocked. His eyes remain riveted to my face.
Have I forgotten to wash something off? I wipe at my face self-consciously.
The man enters the flat rather timidly and stands in the small corridor between the kitchen and bathroom. From the corridor, he can see right into our messy bedroom. Piled upon the bed, in a tangle of sheets, are Red’s pants and socks and my underwear. The old man casts a sidelong glance at the poster from Ulysses’ Gaze that is hanging on the bedroom wall. Harvey Keitel stares right back at him.
Before I can say a word, the old man turns to me and says, very slowly and deliberately: ‘I am your father.’
For a moment, the world stands still.
I stand in the cramped corridor staring at this man, this stranger who claims to be my father.
What should I say? What can I say?
I have nothing to say.
The only words I can manage are, ‘Have a seat.’
The words are absolutely meaningless. Both of us remain standing.
Regardless of whether the man really is my father or just some crazy person, I feel that I ought at least to offer him something to drink. I go into the kitchen and pour him a glass of water, then set it on the small table in the hallway.
At this point, I have no idea what I should do next. Check his residence permit? Ask for his name? Place of birth? Age? Occupation? Ask where he has come from, or how he has come to be here? Or, assuming he really is my father, ask him why the hell he hasn’t tried to find me sooner?
The old man does not even touch the glass of water I have poured for him.
I look down at the shirt covering my short negligee. The shirt comes down to my thighs, and my legs are bare. I realise belatedly that it must look as if I am wearing nothing at all underneath.
We stand awkwardly, face to face in the cramped hallway. Before us is a bedroom strewn with underwear, behind us is the front door. To the left and right are the kitchen and bathroom. There is nowhere for us to go. At least, nowhere that seems appropriate.
The old man speaks first. ‘My name is Jiang Qinglin. I haven’t been back to the Village of Stone in decades, but a few years ago I heard that you’d left the village, so I started asking around. I talked to a lot of people, spent a lot of time looking before I finally found you. I’m sorry to show up unannounced … I know this must seem very sudden. Do you live here alone?’
I find myself nodding before I realise, a moment too late, that I do not in fact live alone. I hasten to correct my mistake by shaking my head.
I suddenly remember what my grandfather said to me just before he died, on that rainy day:
‘Little Dog, if you ever meet your father, tell him that I am an unhappy man.’
My grandfather’s words were like an epitaph carved on the gravestone of a father I had never met, words attesting to my father’s mistakes. I never expected to have a father turn up in my life at the late age of twenty-eight, in a city so far from my home town.
And yet now, twenty years later, I find an old man standing opposite me, telling me he is my long-lost father. How should I answer him? Should I tell him about my grandfather’s last words? Maybe I should tell him how my grandfather died. Or does he already know?
Face to face with this man who claims to be my father, I have no idea what I ought to say.
He must sense this, for he suddenly straightens up and turns as if to leave. I have the feeling that he wants to say more but cannot quite find the words, or that he is hoping I will ask him something.
But I have no idea what to ask.
As he nears the front door, the old man seems to find the words he has come to say: ‘Coral, I have cancer. They say it’s terminal.’
I am dumbstruck.
As he opens the door, he fishes out a tattered business card.
‘My telephone number is on the front.’ Oblivious to the surreal nature of a father handing his daughter his business details, he passes me the card.
He is almost out of the door now. I make no effort to persuade him to stay longer. Suddenly, he seems to hesitate, as if he knows that this is the last time he will be allowed inside my apartment. As he tightens his grip on the doorknob, I notice that his hands resemble mine.
I hear him saying, ‘I wasn’t planning to tell you I was sick, but I found out that you were living here and I thought that you ought to know. You’re my only living relative. The doctors say I haven’t got long to live, two months at the most. I just wanted to meet you once. I don’t expect you to take care of me. I just wanted to know how you are doing. Now that I’ve met you and seen that you’re doing well, I can rest much easier.’
With that, he slowly opens the door and starts to leave.
‘I’m sorry, Coral. I know this must have been quite a shock.’
As I watch him disappear down the corridor, I am struck by how very much he looks like an elderly Japanese man. There is something about his bearing, so polite and scrupulously poised, as if he is keeping himself in check. Then the main doors close behind him and, just like that, the old man stricken with cancer, the old man who claims to be my father, is gone.
After he has left, I wander around the flat in a daze. My mind is a complete blank.
I try to remember what the old man was wearing. He seems to have been dressed in a fairly common dark blue shirt, the sort of inexpensive shirt one can buy anywhere on the street. The fabric was of rather poor quality, his grey slacks looked as if they had never been pressed and his brown leather shoes were covered with scuff marks. His clothes were no different from the clothes worn by every other man his age. If he was my father, how could he look so identical to all of the other fathers in this city? How could the father I have imagined so often over the years look so ordinary in real life?
I begin to realise that imagination, like memory, is fallible. As time goes on, neither is to be trusted.
Though I had not imagined that my father was still alive, there have been times when I have secretly prayed that if he were still alive, he would stay away. But he has not stayed away, and now I have an image of him in my mind. Regardless of whether I want any connection with him, he has already forced a connection by telling me that he has cancer and has only two months to live. Whether this is true or not, it creates a certain pressure in my life.
I begin to feel depressed and irritable. I wish I had gone out with Red instead of hanging around the flat waiting for a madman to come knocking on my front door. If I had gone out, I would never have known about the old man with terminal cancer. I would never have known that there is an old man living in this city who claims to be my father.
It is afternoon already. I know I should eat something, but I am in no mood to eat.
I open the refrigerator and close it again. I do not feel like cooking for myself. I know that even if I do eat something, it will taste like wax.
Red comes home dripping with sweat, his body sunburned as red as a boiled lobster. He carries his Frisbee in his backpack, and his white T-shirt is covered with grass stains and bits of grass.
As he sets down his backpack and strips off his sweaty T-shirt, Red seems to notice that I am out of sorts.
‘How was yo
ur day?’ he asks. ‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing,’ I lie.
‘You didn’t do anything at all?’
‘Uh-unh.’
‘What did you have for lunch?’
‘I didn’t have lunch.’
‘You didn’t eat anything at all?’ Red looks at me curiously.
‘Nope.’
‘What’s wrong? You haven’t been yourself these last few days.’
‘Really? How so?’
‘I don’t know.’ Red glances up at the calendar. ‘It must be that time of month. That’s probably why.’
I say nothing.
‘I’m dying of thirst,’ Red mumbles as he picks up a glass of water from the hall table and tips it into his mouth. I notice that it is the same glass of water I poured for the man who claimed to be my father.
Red drinks the water in a single gulp and sets the glass back down on the table. Noticing the name card beside the glass, he picks it up.
‘Jiang … hey, that’s the same name as yours … Mr Jiang Qinglin. Who’s Jiang Qinglin?’
For a moment, I panic. What should I say?
‘Oh, that … well, I don’t know him. He … he says he’s my father.’
‘What?’ Red looks as if his eyes might pop out of his head.
‘Well, he came knocking on the door this morning, looking for me. He says I’m his daughter.’
‘But I thought you said you didn’t have a father.’
‘That’s what I thought, too.’
‘Where on earth did he come from?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘But, if you’ve never met your father, how can you be sure this man really is him?’
Almost unconsciously, I begin moving around, just to have something to do. My mind is a blank as I tidy up, tossing Red’s sweaty T-shirt into the washing machine and adding some powder.
But Red wants to know more.
‘What did he look like?’
‘A bit like me, I suppose.’
‘So you look like him, you mean.’
‘Especially the hands.’
‘Hands? How can you tell if a man is your father just from his hands?’
‘And he also called me by my first name. The way he said my name was different, somehow, from the way other people say it.’
‘But the way I say your name is different too, isn’t it?’
Red seems unwilling to accept such a sudden turn of events.
‘He came to tell me that he has cancer. The doctors say that he only has two months to live.’
‘Oh?’ Red seems rather sceptical. ‘He’s probably just some old con artist looking for a handout.’
‘Could be.’
‘Or maybe he’s really sick, and is just looking for someone to take care of him in the hospital.’
‘Possibly, but he said he doesn’t expect me to take care of him. He just wanted to see me once, that’s all.’
Puzzled, Red ceases his questioning and goes into the kitchen for a lemon soda. After taking a few sips, he resumes his contemplation of the man who claims to be my father.
‘Let me get this straight, Coral. A strange man with hands a bit like yours comes to our door this morning looking for you, and tells you he’s the father you’ve never met before. You see from his card that he has the same surname as you. Then he tells you that he has terminal cancer and has only two months left to live, but he says he doesn’t expect you to take care of him. And then he just leaves, without asking you for anything.’
I nod, unsure where Red is going with this analysis or what conclusion he is heading towards.
But he is making no conclusions.
‘And just like that, he left,’ Red mumbles to himself.
‘Yes, he just left,’ I answer disappointedly. This seems to be the only point we can agree upon.
‘You should consider him gone, then. Just pretend he was never here.’
I do not answer. The man may have been a stranger, but he came to see me. He wouldn’t have come to see me if he hadn’t needed me. If I am going to ignore the unexpected visit, I might as well pretend that it was a dream. A dream that I have woken from, a dream that I related to Red when he came home from playing Frisbee.
If I can’t forget about the brief encounter, I think to myself, I will just pretend that it was a dream.
20
FLIPPING THROUGH THE calendar, I notice that the date is 14 August, or the fifteenth day of the seventh moon of the lunar calendar. We are currently reaching the end of the thirteenth solar term, called Autumn’s Beginning, and in a few days will enter the fourteenth, the Limit of Heat. The city is moving into autumn. The dew on the grass, the colour of the leaves, the rhythm of the breeze, the height of the sun in the sky, the shape of the moon – all are testaments to a season’s quiet passage. It is the time of year when a hush seems to fall over the city and the weather, usually so harsh and arid, takes on a kinder, gentler mood. Autumn is the only season that Red and I, as residents of this city, really enjoy. But this autumn feels different. I look at the red circles I have drawn on the calendar to mark my period days. My last period was a month and a half ago. My breasts are swollen and painful. I feel frightened. I don’t know exactly what I am frightened of, only that it is not an external type of fear. It is coming from inside me, a profound loneliness that has seeped into the very marrow of my bones.
Thinking about my little home town one thousand eight hundred kilometres away, I realise that in the Village of Stone, the seventh moon was always a season of destruction. For the villagers, the seventh moon was neither summer nor autumn. It was the season of hurricanes, the season of death. But it was also the season when the catch was at its best. Crabs, for instance, had to be caught before the autumn set in. Once the autumn winds began to blow, the crabs lost their freshness and their flesh grew slack.
I look at the calendar again and read through the explanatory notes at the bottom of the page:
Inauspicious Omens:
Drinking spirits, planting crops, opening storehouses, entering into contracts.
Auspicious Omens:
Memorial services, funereal offerings, cleaning ovens and chimneys, changing seasonal clothes.
I request some time off work so that Red and I can go to the hospital together.
Red takes a seat beside three other men on a green bench outside the obstetrics and gynaecology department. With their furrowed brows and haggard faces, they look like a line-up of the world’s four most wretched men. The bench looks ancient, much of its green paint already chipped away. I wonder how many men have sat on the bench over the years, waiting for their women to emerge from the doorway marked ‘OB/GYN’.
In the hospital toilet, I urinate into a small plastic cup and take the urine sample to the lab. Ten minutes later, I receive my test results, a slip of paper with a red stamp that reads: ‘Pregnancy test: Positive’.
I go back into the waiting room, walk over to the green bench and hand the slip of paper to Red.
He glances at it, but says nothing.
‘They said that if we’re in a hurry, we can get rid of it today,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll go in and talk to the doctor now, and they should be able to fit me in right away.’
Red remains silent. What is he thinking? Or is he thinking anything at all?
I take the slip of paper from his hand and begin to walk away.
‘What are you doing?’ Red sounds agitated.
I answer him calmly. ‘I’m going to talk to the doctor.’
‘About what?’
‘About the operation and when they can do it.’
With this, I walk into the doctor’s examination room.
The doctor is a compassionate-looking woman who seems as if she is quite used to dealing with women who have got themselves into trouble.
‘There are two different methods available,’ she tells me very matter-of-factly. ‘One is a drug-induced abortion, the other is surgical.’
‘Which one hu
rts less?’ I enquire, shamefacedly.
‘If you have a reasonable tolerance for discomfort, neither is particularly painful.’ The doctor looks up from my case history and fixes me with a frank gaze. ‘I see here that you’ve had an abortion before, so you should know what to expect. Of course, that was a decade ago, when it wasn’t common practice to use anaesthesia, but the surgical procedure is more or less the same today.’
I nod my head.
‘A drug-induced abortion happens in two stages, and is suitable for pregnancies that have not progressed beyond the sixth week, assuming the patient has no serious medical conditions or other complications. First we administer one thousand five hundred milligrams of mifepristone, then forty-eight hours later, six hundred milligrams of misoprostol. This will shrink the foetus, and cause some abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding, but most patients expel the foetus within six hours. At this stage, the foetus is nothing more than a small whitish lump. We’ll give you a small glass bottle so that you can bring it in afterwards for examination. It can take up to a week for some women to expel the foetus, although this happens in only a small number of cases. Some patients experience side effects from the drugs used in the procedure. The most common side effects are nausea, diarrhoea and mild fever. After a drug-induced abortion, there is usually a fair amount of bleeding, which can continue for ten to fifteen days afterwards. Drug-induced abortions have a slightly lower success rate than surgical abortions, but the difference is negligible.’
After a slight pause, the doctor continues.
‘Surgical abortion is a quicker procedure. These days, the vacuum method is the procedure of choice. Years ago, dilation and curettage was the most common method for terminating early-stage pregnancies, but this has been largely replaced by suction methods. For later-stage pregnancies, the saline solution method is quite effective and still relatively common. This involves a saline solution injected either into the womb or directly into the amniotic sac. Surgical extraction is a method suitable for pregnancies between the tenth and fourteenth week, in cases where other methods are inappropriate. The risks are relatively small, under the following conditions. One: patients should be free of vaginal conditions such as pelvic inflammatory disease, trichomoniasis, yeast or other bacterial infections. Two: patients should be in good physical health, with no history of anaemia, hepatitis, angina, heart failure, problems with kidney function or kidney failure. Three: the procedure cannot be performed on patients with a fever, because if body temperature exceeds thirty-seven and a half degrees, there can be complications. Four: patients should abstain from sexual intercourse for at least three days before the procedure.’