by Yu Hua
This had the effect of infuriating my father, who jumped up, spraying spit and cursing, “Get the fuck out of here!”
My brother came back with a stinging retort: “Try saying that to the Wang brothers.”
My father screamed like a child and threw himself at Sun Guangping. He didn't say he was going to kill him, but rather: “Let's have it out!”
Were it not for Mother, whose tears and diminutive figure were the only obstacles in the way of these two raging males, our home, already so ramshackle, might well have ended up a complete ruin.
As Sun Guangping marched out the door, his face livid, he happened to see me and said, “The old man can't wait to get in his coffin.”
My father was in fact quite isolated by this time. He and my brother had lost the sense of fellowship that had prevailed in the wake of my little brother's death, and it was now impossible for the two of them to sit together feverishly picturing their wonderful future. Sun Guangping's withdrawal left Father by himself in the fantasy world, and he alone had to contend with the dreadful thought that the government representatives might never show up. Just as Sun Guangping grew increasingly impatient with Father, Sun Kwangtsai likewise was on the lookout for opportunities to pick a fight with him. For a long time after that row, they were either looking daggers at each other or treating each other with coldness.
My father paid close attention to the little dirt road at the entrance to the village, on tenterhooks for the arrival of the government envoys in their formal wear. His secret was soon discovered by the village children, and often boys would run up to our front door and shout, “Sun Kwangtsai, the men in suits are here!”
The first few times he was thrown into a tizzy, as jittery as an escaped convict. I watched as he raced pale faced to the village entrance, then came back, utterly deflated. The last time that he was duped was during the onset of winter, when a nine-year-old boy ran over, shouting, “Sun Kwangtsai, lots of men in suits are coming!”
Sun Kwangtsai rushed out, clutching a broom. “I'm going to have the hide off you, you little bastard!”
The boy took off right away, and when he had reached a safe distance he shouted back, “If I'm lying, then my mom's a bitch and my dad's a dog!”
This oath, so disrespectful to his parents, left Sun Kwangtsai a bundle of nerves as he returned to the house and paced to and fro, wringing his hands and talking to himself: “If they really are here, what are we going to do? I've made no preparations.”
So anxious was he that he made another dash to the edge of the village, only to see empty fields and sparse, lonely trees. I was sitting by the pond, and watched as Father stood dumbly at the village entryway. He hugged his chest to shield himself from the gusting wind, and after a while he squatted down and began rubbing his knees. As dusk fell at the waning of the year, Sun Kwangtsai crouched there shivering, his eyes fixed on the track that wound its way toward him from the far distance.
Father clung to his dreams until, with the approach of Spring Festival, he had no choice but painfully to abandon them. From every house in the village came the sound of rice flour being pounded into New Year's cake, but our home, rent with divisions as it was, showed not the faintest sign of a holiday approaching. Finally Mother summoned up the courage to ask him, “What are we going to do for New Year?”
My father had been sitting dejectedly by the radio. After deep thought he said, “It looks like the officials are not coming.”
I began to notice that Father was sneaking glances at my big brother, and it was clear that he was eager they be reconciled. On the last day of the lunar calendar he finally spoke up. Sun Guang-ping had just finished dinner and was about to go out when Sun Kwangtsai called him back. “There's something I want to talk to you about.”
The two of them went inside and began to confer in whispers. When they emerged, both wore grim expressions. The following morning, the first day of the Chinese New Year, father and son set out to visit the family of the boy whose life had been saved.
Now that he had lost hope of becoming a hero's father Sun Kwangtsai drew inspiration from the prospect of monetary gain. He demanded that the family provide compensation for Sun Guangming's death, to the tune of five hundred yuan. Shocked by this exorbitant figure, the boy's kinfolk told their visitors that there was no way they could pay that kind of money. They reminded them that it was New Year's Day and asked them to please postpone discussion of the matter until another time.
The two guests insisted that the sum be paid immediately; otherwise they would smash all their furniture. Sun Kwangtsai said, “We're already doing you a favor by not demanding interest.”
Although I was nowhere near, the noise of the quarrel carried so far that I knew exactly what was happening. Later I could hear further commotion as my father and brother wrecked their house.
Two days later, three men in police uniform arrived in the village. We were having lunch, and some little boys came running up to the door, shouting, “Sun Kwangtsai, men in uniforms are here!”
When my father rushed out, broom in hand, he saw the three policemen walking in his direction and immediately put two and two together. “Are you here to make an arrest?” he bellowed.
This was Sun Kwangtsai at his most majestic. “Who do you think you are dealing with?” he shouted. Pounding his chest, he cried, “I am the hero's father.” Then he pointed at Guangping. “That's the hero's brother.” Then at my mother: “That's the hero's ma.” He glanced at me, standing off to one side, but offered no comment on my status. “So just who do you plan to arrest?”
The policemen were not the least bit impressed and simply asked coldly, “Which of you is Sun Kwangtsai?”
“I am!” cried Father.
“Come with us,” they said.
All along my father had been looking forward to the arrival of men in suits, but it was men in police uniforms who greeted him in the end. After he was led away, the production team leader came to see us, along with people from the house that had been vandalized, and announced to my brother and mother that we had to compensate them for their losses. I went over to the pond behind our house and watched our possessions being carted off.Items that had been purchased with such difficulty after the fire now became other people s property.
A fortnight later, when my father was released from jail, he was as white and shiny as a baby fresh from its mother s womb. In the past so coarse and slovenly, he now walked toward us as delicate and dainty as a town official. He would declare to all and sundry that he was going off to Beijing to protest the treatment he had suffered, but when people asked him how soon he would be leaving he told them that he needed to wait three months until he could cover his travel expenses. But three months later he had still not set off for the capital. Instead he had clambered into the bed of the widow whose house was diagonally opposite ours.
The image of the widow that lingers in my mind is of a woman in her forties, sturdy, full throated, striding rapidly along the path between the fields in her bare feet. Her most notable trademark was that she always tucked her blouse inside her trousers, with the result that her large bottom was invitingly conspicuous. For the widow to wear her clothes that way made her stand out, because in those days even an innocent young girl would not have dared so openly to flaunt her waist and buttocks. The widow had no waist to speak of, but the sway of her fleshy bottom conveyed a potent allure. Her chest failed to provide a comparable visual interest, replicating instead the flatness of the concrete streets in town. I remember Old Luo saying that the flesh on her chest had all moved to her behind. “That has its advantages,” he added. “If you pinch her ass, you're getting to squeeze her tits too.”
When I was young, as people knocked off in the afternoon, I would often hear the widow making a generous offer to some young man of the village: “Come over to my place tonight.”
The answer was always the same: “Who the hell wants to go to bed with you? That thing of yours has gone all slack.”
&n
bsp; At the time I didn't understand what was meant, and only as I grew older did I begin to know more about the widow's happy life of sensuality. Then I heard the following joke. A man climbs through the window one night and gropes his way to the foot of her bed. Amid sounds of frantic panting and moans of ecstasy the widow is heard to murmur, “Not now, I have company.” As the latecomer slips away, she delivers a piece of sound advice: “Come a bit earlier tomorrow.”
This joke actually did make a point—namely that after dark the widow's bed was seldom anything less than fully occupied. Even on the most sweltering summer night the sound of the widow's groans would float over to the drying ground where the villagers were trying to cool off. This supplied Old Luo with more grist for his mill: “Such a hot night, too—she's really a Model Worker.”
Tall and fit as she was, the widow liked to sleep with young men, and in my mind's eye I can still picture her shouting lustily to the village women from her end of the field: “Young guys have lots of stamina, they're clean, and no bad breath.”
But when the former production team leader, then in his fifties (later to die of tuberculosis), arrived outside her bedroom, she received him with equal alacrity. At times she had to defer to authority, after all. Later on, her looks began to fade and she put out the welcome mat for middle-aged men more generally.
It was at this point in time that my father Sun Kwangtsai, as though motivated by some philanthropic impulse, clambered into the widow's now more lonely wooden bed. It was an afternoon early in the spring when my father entered the widow's house, bearing a large sack of rice on his back. She was sitting on a stool sewing shoes and she watched him out of the corner of her eye as he came in.
A grin on his face, my father dumped the bag of rice at her feet, then made as if to enfold her in a bear hug.
She stuck out an arm to repel his advances. “Hang on a minute there! I'm not so easily bought,” she said. She reached out a hand and felt around in his crotch.
“Well?” said my father with a leer.
“It'll do,” she responded.
After leading a respectable life for so long, my father found that his inhibitions had been weakened by the shattering of illusions and the tricks that life had played on him. From now on Sun Kwangtsai would often go about sharing his newfound wisdom with the village youths, saying in the smug tones of a man of experience, “While you're still young, you should make the most of it and sleep around as much as you can. Everything else is a scam.”
When he clambered so confidently onto the widow's ornate antique bed, this did not go unnoticed by Sun Guangping. Father's brazen visits to the widow's home provoked great chagrin on his part. One day, after my father had wined and dined to his satisfaction and was preparing to set off for the widow's house to digest his meal, my brother spoke up. “You should have had enough by now, surely.”
My father didn't let this faze him in the slightest. “You can never have enough of that,” he said.
So day after day Sun Kwangtsai would march briskly into the widow's house, emerging some time later a good deal worse for wear. Moved by a morbid curiosity, I stealthily observed my mother and tried to gauge her reaction to events. My mother, who said little but whose hands and feet were perpetually in motion, bore the humiliation in silence, as though it was a matter of complete indifference to her. I wondered what went through her mind late at night, when Sun Kwangtsai would leave the widow's side and clamber into her bed. Here my thoughts would linger, and though my speculations were fueled in part by malice, I felt sorry for her at the same time.
What happened later made me realize that Mother's nonchalance was simply a cover for her burning indignation. Her hostility to the widow, to my mind, demonstrated the narrow-mindedness of women. Inwardly I admonished my mother over and over again: it should be Father you resent, not the widow. When he climbs out of the widow's bed and makes his way over to you, you should refuse him. No matter what happened, she would never reject him, but always let him have what he wanted.
Mother's rage finally exploded one day when she was fertilizing the vegetable patch. The widow was walking along the path between the fields, looking very pleased with herself, and her manner instantly made Mother tremble all over with long-suppressed rage. She swung the dung ladle in her hand, and filthy water splattered over the widow's smug figure. The widow's voice rang out like a trumpet. “Are you blind?”
Beside herself with anger, Mother cried out in a voice shaking with emotion: “The town's the place for you! You can lie down on the sports ground there and have the men line up to fuck you.”
“Hah!” The widow gave as good as she got. “What makes you think you have the right to say that? Shouldn't you go on home and give yourself a good wash? Your man says that thing of yours stinks to high heaven!”
When these two sharp-tongued women laid into each other with such crude obscenities, quacking like two noisy clucks, the village—usually rather quiet at lunchtime—was thrown into disarray After some further exchanges, my mother, forgetting how thin and frail she was, charged fearlessly toward the widow and attempted a head butt.
Just at this moment Sun Kwangtsai happened to arrive back from town, a bottle of spirits swinging behind his back. All he saw at first, off in the distance in the vegetable patch, were two women wrestling with each other, hair all over the place, and this spectacle tickled him no end. After advancing a few steps and recognizing the combatants, my father, flustered, climbed onto a path between the fields and tried to beat a retreat. One of the villagers blocked his escape route, saying, “You'd better go and sort it out.”
“No way!” My father shook his head vigorously. “One's my wife and the other's my mistress, and I can't afford to get on the wrong side of either of them.”
By this time my mother had already been knocked off her feet and her adversary's large bottom had pinned her to the ground. When I saw this from my distant vantage point I was stricken with heartache. After all the humiliation Mother had suffered she had finally blown her top, only to suffer further ignominy.
Several of the village women, who perhaps found this onesided contest too embarrassing to watch any longer, ran over and dragged the widow off. She swaggered home victoriously, nose in the air, saying as she went, “What a nerve! That'll teach you to provoke me.”
Back at the vegetable patch my mother burst into tears and wailed: “If Sun Guangming were still alive, he wouldn't let you get away with this!”
My older brother, who had at one time brandished the cleaver so gallantly, was nowhere to be seen. Sun Guangping had shut himself in his room. He was perfectly aware of what was happening outside, but refused to get involved in what was to him a pointless squabble. Mother's weeping only intensified the shame that he felt for his family and did not stir him to indignation on her behalf.
In her defeat, the only champion Mother could imagine was my little brother, now no longer with us. It was the one straw that she could clutch at in her moment of despair.
My older brother's unresponsiveness I first interpreted as a reluctance to show his face when our family scandal was gaining such wide publicity. After all he was no longer the Sun Guangping of the private plot fracas. He had sunk into a deep gloom and his dissatisfaction with our home life was more and more evident in everything he did. Although he and I were still at odds with each other, our shared discontent made it possible for us to feel a subtle empathy at times.
Not long afterward—shortly before I left Southgate—I watched as late one evening a figure emerged from the widow's window and sneaked into our house. I recognized the arrival right away as Sun Guangping. Then I realized there was another reason he had been so passive during the altercation between Mother and the widow.
The day that my brother saw me off to the bus station, he carried my bedroll on his back, and Mother accompanied us as far as the entrance to the village. She stood there in the morning breeze and watched us walk away—a little lost, it seemed, as though still unsure what
to make of the hand that fate had dealt her. When I looked at my mother for the last time I realized that her hair was streaked with gray. “Good-bye,” I said.
She showed no reaction, and her gaze seemed to be directed elsewhere. In that moment a warm feeling surged over me, for this image of my mother tugged at the heartstrings. But as I walked on, her fate seemed to change into a breath of wind and dissipate at once, leaving no trace behind. My feeling at the time was that I was never coming back. But, like Sun Guangming, I forsook her in a less callous fashion than my father and Sun Guang-ping, who not only deserted her but went to bed with her archrival, the widow. Unaware of that second betrayal, Mother was still devoting herself heart and soul to the family.
After I left, my father went full speed ahead in his campaign to be an utter scoundrel. At the same time he began to perform a deliveryman's duties, transferring a number of items from our house to the sturdy widow's, thereby lubricating their relationship and keeping things ticking over nicely. His show of loyalty was rewarded by a comparable demonstration on her part, for around this time her omnivorous tendencies moderated and she became quite abstemious. Now rounding on fifty, she was no longer inspired by the same lust that once used to sweep all before it.
Having lost the courage that he had at fourteen, Sun Guang-ping took his cue from Mother and swallowed his rage, watching in silence as my father did as he pleased. When Mother, much distressed, told him about this or that item that had been removed from our home, he would say consolingly, “We can always buy another one.”