by Yu Hua
Rather than answering, she asked him instead, “Do you have money?”
To her surprise Guoqing brought out a ten-yuan note. She did help him then, but she looked at him warily, the way one eyes a pickpocket.
Once the eight brothers and sisters of Guoqing's mother had assembled, they made an impressive party. Together they marched off toward his father's new house, Guoqing in the middle, the grown-ups surrounding him with determined looks on their faces. Guoqing had worn an expression of sheer misery the past several days, but now, pampered by his aunts and uncles, he walked among them with his confidence fully restored. At regular intervals he would turn back toward Liu Xiaoqing and me and call: “Be sure to keep up with us!”
It was late in the afternoon by then. Walking with this group of adults, I felt very important, almost as important as Guoqing; Liu Xiaoqing was also looking cocky. Guoqing declared jubilantly that his father would soon be moving back home.
It was my first outing after dark since I had come to Little-marsh. When I asked Wang Liqiang's permission to leave the house I told him what had happened, and I was grateful to him for allowing me to go out so late in the day. While sympathizing with my desire to stand with Guoqing in his hour of need, he cautioned me not to open my mouth. In fact, however, Liu Xiaoqing and I would never have been allowed to enter Guoqing's father's new home; we had to wait outside. A squat little building stood before us, and we found it strange that Guoqing's father would leave the two-story house for such a modest dwelling.
“There's no view here at all!” Liu Xiaoqing and I agreed. We could hear the voices of the eight visitors from out of town. Their city accents evoked tall buildings and asphalt roads. At this moment two boys much younger than us came swaggering over and told us presumptuously to clear off. Only later did we realize that they were the darling sons of Guoqing's father's new wife. The idea that we could be driven away by two smaller boys was ridiculous, of course. We warned them that they'd better push off themselves. They spat at us then, and Liu Xiaoqing and I gave them each a punch in the face. These two little fellows were all bark and no bite, for they immediately burst out crying. But reinforcements arrived promptly, charging out of the house in the form of a woman as fat as a tub of lard. Guoqing's father's bride bore down on us with spit spraying from her mouth and such a murderous gleam in her eye that we fled in terror. She followed close behind, cursing us fiercely in language we thought only men were accustomed to using. One minute she threatened to toss us into the cesspit; the next minute she vowed to hang us from a tree, describing to us as we ran a whole series of awful fates. As I tired, I turned my head to look back; my scalp went numb when I saw the way her flesh wobbled as she ran. All she needed to do was sit on us and she would crush the life out of us.
Only after we ran across a stone arched bridge did we see her stop and turn around, still hurling curses. She probably felt that it was more vital that she go to the aid of her husband. After establishing that she was not waiting in ambush at some point along the road, Liu Xiaoqing and I fearfully edged our way back, vigilant as scouts in a movie who venture deep into enemy territory. By then the sky was dark, and when we returned to our original spot under the lamplight we still heard only the impassioned voices of the eight uncles and aunts. We wondered why Guoqing's father was saying nothing. After a long time we finally heard a different voice, the voice that had pursued us. His wife was saying to them, “Did you come here for a fight or for a discussion? For a fight you need a lot of people, but for a discussion one is enough. I want all of you out right now. One of you can come back tomorrow.”
When this vulgar woman opened her mouth, somehow she projected power. She told them to leave just as arrogantly as her sons had told us to clear off. For just a moment the eight urbanites were silenced, and then they all burst into frantic protest. Liu Xiaoqing and I could not make any sense of what was said: with so many people talking at once, the hubbub that reached our ears was just a wall of sound. Then Guoqing's father spoke up, just as we were becoming convinced he wasn't there. He yelled angrily at the eight uncles and aunts: “Why are you all shouting? How irresponsible can you be? With you all making so much noise, how am I going to live this down?”
“Who's being irresponsible?” A quarrel erupted, as loud as a house falling down, and it sounded as though several men wanted to beat Guoqing's father and several women were trying desperately to stop them. Guoqing's mother's brothers and sisters were reduced to a state of helpless indignation, for after they had exhausted themselves explaining the rights and wrongs of the case, the obstinacy of the newlyweds made them suddenly realize that it was impossible to have a serious discussion with them. The oldest brother, the most senior figure of the eight, decided against leaving Guoqing in the newlyweds’ care. He said to Guoqing's father, “Even if you wanted to raise him, we would absolutely refuse to let you. A man like you is just a beast!”
As the eight visitors came out the door, we heard a tumultuous expulsion of breaths. A traumatized Guoqing walked in the middle of the group, looking uncertainly at Liu Xiaoqing and me. I heard one of the men say, “How could Sis have married someone like that?” He was so exasperated that he had begun to think the fault lay with Guoqing's deceased mother.
The uncles and aunts assumed the responsibility of supporting Guoqing, and from then on they each sent Guoqing two yuan monthly. The forest green post office became the conduit for Guoqing's wealth. Several times each month he would announce to us proudly, “I have to go to the post office today.”
When Guoqing began to receive his sixteen yuan for living expenses, I was to enter the most extravagant phase of my whole childhood, and the same was true for Liu Xiaoqing and a few other classmates. We stuck close to Guoqing, who often hankered for candy and olives. He was a generous boy, sharing with us the same pleasures that he allowed himself. He squandered his limited fortune as recklessly as a rich man's son, and on our way to school every morning we secretly looked forward to his big spending. The result was that by the second half of that month Guoqing was flat broke, and he was forced to depend on our charity to stave off hunger. But none of us could throw money around as freely as he, and we began to pilfer things from our homes: a handful of steamed rice, a piece of fish, a chunk of meat, some bits of vegetable, wrapped up in dirty paper and presented to him. Guoqing would open up the packages and spread them out on his knee, then eat their contents with gusto. He would smack his lips so loudly that even we who had already had a full meal found our mouths watering. This situation did not last very long, for soon our teacher, Zhang Qinghai the knitter, made himself responsible for managing Guoqing's living expenses and gave him only fifty cents a month as pocket money. That still left him the most affluent of any of us.
After his abandonment Guoqing gradually got used to handling his own affairs. But he never truly reconciled himself to his father's departure, and he did not follow his father's lead and repudiate him in turn. On the contrary, his father continued to exert control over his thinking. Our teacher tended to forget about the change in Guoqing's circumstances, and he would still sometimes threaten to inform Guoqing's father as a way of cowing him into submission whenever he did something out of line. It seemed never to occur to Guoqing that he was now free as a bird, that his anxiety was quite unnecessary. In his mind his father seemed still to be always watching him, and he was naive enough to be unsettled by the possibility that the man might appear in front of him at any moment. In fact, if his father did show up, it was only in a chance encounter. The man's standoffish attitude demonstrated that he had no plans at all to drop in on Guoqing.
I remember that the three of us were once standing on the side of the road, throwing pebbles at the streetlamps. It was Guoqing's idea, but we were all gung-ho, each hoping we would be the one to smash a light. When an adult came over to intervene, Liu Xiaoqing and I took to our heels, but Guoqing didn't budge an inch. He stood his ground and said defiantly, “Hey, it's not your light.”
Just at
that moment Guoqing's father appeared. Guoqing's nerve failed him; he went over, quaking, and called, “Hi, Dad.”
He tried to clear himself of any suspicion of wrongdoing, insisting that he wasn't involved, and he even went so far as to defect completely from our camp, pointing at Liu Xiaoqing and me and saying, “They're the ones doing it.”
But Guoqing's father said heatedly, “Who are you calling Dad?”
For him to forgo the right to punish his son was a much bigger blow to Guoqing than his refusal to look after him. How pitiful Guoqing now looked: when he crossed the street we saw that he had bitten his lip in a desperate effort to hold back the tears that were all ready to flow.
Even after this he still insisted that he would wake up one morning and find his father at his bedside. Once he told me with great conviction that when his father got ill he would “come and find me.” He asked me to confirm that his father sought his help whenever he was ill; again and again he would say, “You saw that, right? You saw it.” He no longer dipped into his little cardboard box, and even if he had a bad cough he wouldn't open one of his vials. Somehow he believed that as long as there was medicine in the pillboxes sooner or later his father would return.
Now when he talked about his mother, the past, though still remote, no longer seemed so hazy. He often used the expression “in those days”: in those days, when his mother was alive, how good things were. He never gave us specifics of his happy life then, but heaved plenty of wistful sighs, making us wildly envious of “those days.” He began to conjure up images of his mother; the imagination of this boy of nine was not focused on the future, but was connected—unusually for someone so young—to the past.
When we were small, we were fascinated by the horse on packs of Flying Horse cigarettes. The flatlands where we lived were traversed only by cows; the few sheep we glimpsed were always shut up inside pens. There were pigs, of course, but they left us cold. It was the white flying horses that we adored, for none of us had ever seen a horse. Later an army detachment came to Littlemarsh, and a horse-drawn carriage cut through the town in the early hours and rolled onto the high school grounds.
At the end of school that morning the three of us dashed toward the high school, waving our satchels. Guoqing ran ahead, spreading his arms wide like a huge bird. But it soon became apparent that I had misinterpreted his gesture, for he cried, “Hey, I'm a flying horse!” As Liu Xiaoqing and I ran behind, we followed his lead excitedly.
We were now a trio of flying horses, neighing with spirit and flying over the department store, the theater, and the hospital. But after sailing over this last building Guoqing let his arms drop to his sides, as though he had been shot; his ride was cut short. Looking miserable, he headed back in the direction from which we had come, hugging the wall. He did not say a word to us, and as we had no clue what had happened we chased after him seeking an explanation. But he just kept going, and when we tried to stop him he angrily pushed us aside and said with a sob, “Leave me alone.”
Liu Xiaoqing and I looked at each other and watched in astonishment as he walked off into the distance. Then we put him out of our minds altogether. Liu Xiaoqing and I flapped our arms and set off at a gallop once more, intent on seeing the flying horses.
What we found in the little grove next to the high school were two chestnut horses. One was drinking water from a wooden trough while the other kept rubbing its behind on the trunk of a tree. They had no wings whatsoever and their coats were filthy. Their rank, horsey smell made us grimace. I whispered to Liu Xiaoqing, “Are those horses?”
Liu Xiaoqing went up to a young soldier and asked him timidly, “How come they don't have wings?”
“What? Wings?” The soldier waved us away impatiently. “Get out of here! Off you go.”
We hurried away while the people around us tittered. I said to Liu Xiaoqing, “There's no way these can be horses! Horses should be white, surely.”
An older boy said to us, “You're right, they're not horses.”
“What are they, then?” Liu Xiaoqing asked.
“Rats.”
Could rats be as big as that? We were shocked.
Guoqing had seen his father at the entrance to the hospital. This was why he was so upset: his final hope had come to nothing, so he was in no fit state to enjoy the flying horses.
It was the next day that Guoqing told us why he had turned around and left so suddenly. He said in anguish, “My dad is not going to come looking for me again!” Then he cried, “I saw him go into the hospital! If he doesn't come to see me when he's ill, then he'll never come at all!” Guoqing stood there under the basketball hoop, weeping loudly. Liu Xiaoqing and I angrily drove away the classmates who had begun to gather around.
Guoqing, deserted by the living, began to develop a close relationship with the old lady downstairs who had been deserted by the dead. In her black silk clothes, with wrinkles in her face as deep as waves, she gave me the willies, but Guoqing was unafraid. He spent more and more time with the lonely old lady. Sometimes I would see them walking hand in hand down the street, and Guo-qing's features, normally so animated, seemed a little glum next to her. She was depleting Guoqing of his energy, and now when I think back on my childhood friend what I see in his young face are the dim shadows of decline.
I shuddered at the thought of them sitting together in that room, the doors and windows tightly closed, and felt convinced that they were headed for a collision with the spirit world. When the old lady talked about the dead, she spoke of them with a familiarity that I found chilling, but Guoqing was clearly intrigued, and now he often spoke of his mother with Liu Xiaoqing and me, of how she would come in silently before dawn to say a few words to him and then leave without a sound. When we asked him what she said, he told us gravely that this had to remain a secret. On one occasion his mother forgot that it was time for her to go back, and the cock's crow alarmed her. In her rush she did not leave through the door but went out through the window, taking off like a bird.This final detail enhanced the authenticity of Guoqing's account, but it also left me bewildered: Guoqing's mother's jumping out the window made me anxious on her behalf, for they lived on the second floor, after all. I asked Liu Xiaoqing in a low voice, “Couldn't the fall kill her?”
His answer was, “She's dead already, so she's got no reason to worry about being killed in a fall.” This sounded right to me.
When he talked about his reunions with his mother Guoqing was so earnest, so happy even, that we could hardly discount his reports. But I found his tone of voice disturbing, for the intimacy of his encounters with the dead reminded me so much of the old lady in the black clothes.
Another thing: Guoqing claimed often to have seen a bodhi-sattva as big as a house, as golden as the sun, who would appear suddenly in the sky above, then vanish like a flash of lightning.
Late one afternoon as we sat by the riverside I challenged him on this. I rejected the notion that such things existed, and to underscore my disbelief I heaped profanities on the bodhisattva's head. Guoqing sat there quite unmoved and after a moment he said, “It must be really scary to curse the bodhisattva.”
If he hadn't said that, I wouldn't have worried, but as soon as he did all of a sudden I felt frightened. Dusk was falling, and I saw darkness spreading across the sky; so unsettled was I that my breathing became ragged.
“People who have no respect for the bodhisattva,” Guoqing went on, “get punished.”
In a quaking voice I asked, “How are they punished?”
Guoqing thought for a moment and said, “Grannie would know.”
I did not find this reassuring.
Guoqing said softly, “When people are scared, that's when they can see the bodhisattva.”
I opened my eyes as wide as I could and gazed intently at the ash gray sky, but saw nothing. I was practically in tears by now. I said to Guoqing, “You're not trying to pull my leg, are you?”
Guoqing then showed me what a good friend he was, with gentle w
ords of encouragement: “Take another look.”
I opened my eyes wide once more. By now the sky was completely dark. Through a combination of fear and zeal, I finally did see the bodhisattva, but I'm not sure if I really saw him or just imagined it. At any rate I did glimpse a bodhisattva as big as a house and as golden as the sun, though he disappeared in a flash.
The old lady, so close to the dead and so unconstrained in relaying their affairs, at the same time could not avoid contact with reality (for which she felt little affinity), because her life, much to her annoyance, showed no signs of ending. While she pacified Guoqing by means that I found unnerving, he for his part shielded her from the real world.
Her greatest source of anxiety was the brown dog that liked to sprawl in the middle of the alley. When she had no choice but to go out to buy rice or salt or pick up some soy sauce, the dog struck much greater terror into her heart than she had ever managed to instill in mine. Actually this ugly, unloved old dog barked at absolutely everyone, but she somehow got it into her head that she was its only enemy. As soon as the dog saw her it would put on a show of great ferocity, barking madly and threatening to leap at her, when in fact it was just jumping about in place. At moments like this the dead people on her wall were powerless to help her, and I saw her reduced to a quivering wreck. As she retreated headlong, her bound feet acquired an unexpected flexibility and her body swung from side to side like a fan in motion. This was before Guoqing's father moved out, and the three of us burst out laughing at the sight of her overreaction. As I walked to Guoqing's house that day, I had no need to fear her half face behind the door, for she was too busy crying to monitor our arrival. We glued our eyes to the door, admiring through the crack how she dried her tears with the hem of her jacket.
Later, through their common interest in the dead, she developed a special understanding with Guoqing and ended up benefiting from his protection. By having him accompany her every time she left the house, she relieved herself of a great deal of stress. When the brown dog barked and tried to block their passage, Guoqing would bend down and pretend to pick up a stone, and the dog would turn tail and dash off. As they proceeded on their way, the old lady would look at Guoqing adoringly and he would say to her with pride, “Even a dog meaner than that one would be afraid of me.”