by Yu Hua
At the entry to the alley he almost ran into someone, a middle-aged man who muttered something and then walked away. He was heading in exactly the same direction that he had been taking to go to Yazhou’s house. Why wasn’t the man going somewhere else? He suspected that this man was the one whose silhouette he had just seen: after dodging into the alley he had come out again, pretending to be completely uninvolved. It seemed the man knew that he was planning to visit Yazhou, and so he was heading that way too.
After proceeding some twenty meters, he noticed, the man came to a stop and glanced around in all directions, resting his eyes on him briefly, only to look away at once. The man was monitoring his movements, he sensed, and was simply pretending to look around in order to disarm suspicion.
The man remained standing there, but no longer looked his way. The man’s head was slightly tilted in his direction, however, so he felt that he was still in the man’s line of vision. He stood where he was and just stared at him.
Another middle-aged man came over and said a few words to the first one, and the two men walked off together. After going a little way, the second man turned his head and threw him a glance. His companion patted him on the shoulder, and he did not look back again.
6
Now it was dusk. He stood on the balcony and gazed at the building opposite. Some of its windows were bright, and some were dark. The bright windows seemed to him like a series of rectangular lights, and together they formed an intriguing picture: not symmetrical, perhaps, but perfectly proportioned. He tried to think of what the picture looked like, but couldn’t come up with an answer. This was because whenever he thought of something, two windows would suddenly brighten and the composition would be critically altered. So he had to start from the beginning again.
Just now, when he was in the kitchen washing the dishes, all of a sudden he had become aware of a distinct possibility that his parents were discussing him. He had pricked up his ears to listen. Faint though the voices were, there was no doubt that he was being talked about. After a little hesitation he had edged closer, but by then they were on another subject and he couldn’t make much sense of what they were saying. It had seemed to him that their conversation was strained: evidently they were having to rack their brains to find words that they would understand intuitively but that would leave him none the wiser.
He had suddenly felt as though he was a barrier that inhibited communication between them.
“Have you finished the washing up?” his father had asked.
“No.” He shook his head.
His father looked at him with disapproval. His mother had then struck up a conversation with someone on the adjacent balcony. “Are you pretty much all ready now?” she asked.
“How about you?” the neighbor responded.
His mother did not reply, but switched to another topic.
Then he had gone back to the kitchen, and this time tried to make as little noise as possible when washing the dishes. Soon he again seemed to hear them talking about him. Their voices began to get louder, and several times he heard his name mentioned, but then they appeared to realize their mistake and promptly lowered their voices.
He put the dishes back in the cabinet, then went out onto the balcony and leaned against the railing in the corner opposite them. Despite that, he still sensed that he was getting in their way.
They clearly found his reappearance displeasing, because again his father had a bone to pick with him. “You’ve got to stop being so aimless,” he said. “You ought to study.”
So he had no choice but to leave. Once back in his room, he picked up a book. He didn’t know the title—all he knew was that it had words printed on its pages.
On the balcony, his parents continued their discussion, punctuating it with chuckles. They chuckled without restraint.
He felt uneasy, and after a moment of hesitation he took his book and went out onto the balcony.
This time his father had said nothing, but had eyed him silently, just like his mother. Even without looking at them he could tell what kind of expression was in their eyes.
It was then that dusk had arrived, then that he gazed listlessly at the building opposite. He had been eager to hear just what they were saying. But all he could see was a mysterious picture.
Later he gave a start, because he discovered that he was standing by the door to their bedroom. The door was tightly shut. They were no longer talking without a pause as they had been earlier—they now spoke at intervals and their words were difficult to make out. The only two that came across plainly were “April Third.” But he was hard put to discern their import.
Suddenly the door opened and his father emerged. “What are you doing here?” he asked testily. He saw that his mother was looking at him with feigned astonishment. There was no mistaking it—her surprise was just a performance.
He didn’t know how to answer his father’s question. He just looked at him dumbly, then walked off. He heard his father grumbling as the bedroom door closed behind him.
He went back to his own room and lay down in bed. Now everything around was in darkness, but he felt his eyes were glowing bright. There was noise outside, some of it close by and some of it far away, but by the time it reached his room it had all become a monotonous hum.
7
According to the arrangement he had imagined the night before, today he ought to wake up at 8:30. Then, after seeing the sun filter through the curtains and linger on the socks that were hanging on the footboard, he would get out of bed and hear a knock on the door.
Before the old wall clock emitted its lonely chime, he had been sunk in a deep whirlpool of confused slumber. Even in his sleep, however, he had heard various noises outside his room, and the noises had simply added to his lassitude. When the old clock chimed, it changed everything, like a light that comes on suddenly in a darkened room. So then he woke, to find himself covered in sweat.
Wearily, he propped himself up. Sitting there in bed, he felt a lot more relaxed. At the same time he glanced at the clock: 8:30. He leaned back against the headboard and began to think about something or other. Suddenly he gave a start and threw another glance at the clock: he was now convinced that 8:30 had indeed been his wake-up time. He looked at the sunlight, which was lingering on his smelly socks just as expected. All this was in keeping with the arrangement he had made in his imagination the night before.
What should follow was a knock on the door. But that should happen after he got out of bed. Even though the first two points had been verified, he was somewhat doubtful whether the knock on the door would materialize. He lounged on the bed, unwilling to get up, for in fact he wanted to limit the possibility of hearing the knock after he got out of bed. If someone was really going to knock on the door, he would prefer to hear the knock when lying in bed.
So he stayed in bed until 9:30. His parents left for work at 7:30, so he could listen very single-mindedly to the clock without any danger that he would be distracted by other noises in the house.
By 9:30 he felt he was not going to hear a knock—that was last night’s imagination, after all. He decided to get up.
After getting out of bed he first opened the window, and the sunshine burst in boldly, accompanied by a breeze and some noise. The noise annoyed him, because to his ears it seemed remote and unreal.
On his way to the kitchen he heard a knock. It was after he had gotten up, and he turned pale with astonishment that things had turned out just as he had envisioned.
When last night he imagined hearing a knock on the door, he did not turn pale but simply felt a little bemused; he’d then gone over and opened the door. The time for surprise would have been after he opened the door, because that was when a middle-aged man (the smoker who had leaned against the plane tree) entered the room without saying a word.
He would ha
ve challenged the visitor, obviously. “Can I help you?”
But the man ignored his question. Instead the man came closer and closer, forcing him to take several steps backward, until he was up against the wall and could not retreat any farther, at which point the man stood still. He had sensed that something would surely happen next. But what precisely was going to happen, he had not been able to imagine the night before.
Now, when he heard the noise, he couldn’t help but tense up. He stood still, as if unwilling to open the door. The knocks became louder and louder, making him feel the visitor was sure he was inside, and given the visitor’s confidence on this score, he felt there was no way to avoid all that was about to happen. At the same time, from another angle, he was keen to find out just what would transpire.
He opened the door and was startled (just as projected in last night’s imaginings), because the man was knocking on the door on the opposite side of the landing (an act different from what he had imagined). He saw a sturdy figure, and, judging from that, he thought the person had to be a middle-aged man (the man’s age, then, was consistent with what he had imagined). But was it the man so closely associated with the plane tree? He found it hard to make a determination. It seemed that he was the man, and also that he wasn’t.
8
The shop’s display window functioned somewhat like a mirror. He walked back and forth in front of it, turning his head sideways and looking at his reflection. But the moving image was blurry, and impaired by the items on display.
As he stood in front of the pharmacy window, he noticed that three boxes of herbal extract ingeniously formed his abdomen, while his shoulders were replaced by a triangle of bottled calcium tablets. The apex of the triangle ended precisely underneath his nose, so his eyes were not compromised. He looked at the reflection of his eyes, and it was very much as though another pair of eyes was watching him.
Then he walked over to the window of the department store. There his abdomen was restored to him, but his chest was obstructed by a child’s shirt. And his head disappeared, its place occupied instead by a pair of swimming trunks. But his hands were free: when he stretched out his right hand it could touch the bell of a bicycle, and when he stretched out his left it almost made contact with a badminton racket, but not quite.
Just at this moment the window reflected several hazy human shapes, also interrupted by items on display. He saw half a head saying something to most of a face, as several legs shifted about, and a few shoulders as well. Then he saw a complete face appear, but without a neck—there was a red bra where the neck should have been. Detecting a furtiveness in several of the fragmented reflections, he spun around, only to see a number of people standing on the opposite sidewalk pointing at him and making remarks.
Because he had turned so suddenly, they all appeared a bit flustered. “What are you doing?” one of them asked.
He gave a start, for he could see they were all looking at him in amusement and he couldn’t tell which one of them had asked the question. He felt he didn’t know who they were, although they looked familiar.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
Again he could not discern which of them had spoken. But it was true he was waiting for someone. How would they know that, though? He was taken aback.
Seeing that he didn’t react, they seemed a bit embarrassed. They talked in low voices and then left together. Strangely, they did not look back.
He began to walk. What had just happened was puzzling, and now the stuff in the window seemed as dull as dishwater. So he switched his attention to the street. There were not many pedestrians about; those that he did see were half in light and half in darkness.
“Why didn’t you answer?”
Zhu Qiao’s voice sounded in his ears and gave him a start. Now Zhu Qiao was standing in front of him. Zhu Qiao seemed to have suddenly emerged from hiding, and he was rendered speechless.
“Why didn’t you answer them?” Zhu Qiao asked once more.
He looked at him in confusion. “Who are they?” he asked.
Zhu Qiao gave an exaggerated expression of surprise. “They’re your classmates.”
He seemed to remember now: they were indeed his former classmates. But when he saw Zhu Qiao smiling so comically, he couldn’t help but doubt that this was so.
Zhu Qiao patted his shoulder warmly. “What are you doing here?”
He found this familiarity rather excessive. But that was a minor issue—the big question was why he was asking this.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
It was obvious: Zhu Qiao had some obscure connection with those other people just now, and it seemed they were all concerned about who he was waiting for.
“No, I’m not.”
“Well, why have you been standing here all this time?”
This was a shock. Clearly Zhu Qiao had been watching him from some hidden vantage point. So it was pointless to argue that he wasn’t waiting for anyone.
“What’s the matter?” Zhu Qiao asked.
He could see that Zhu Qiao was on edge—having noticed his wary manner, no doubt. Uneasily he turned his head away, and he contrived to take a casual look around.
It was then he realized with surprise just how many people were paying attention to them. Practically everyone in the street was acting strangely, he felt. Even though their surveillance of him might take different forms, just a single glance revealed their inner secret.
Opposite him were three people standing in a cluster and chatting as they kept him under observation, and similar situations unfolded to his right and left. People walking along the street would cast a glance in his direction, then quickly avert their gaze as though fearful he would notice. He suspected that Zhu Qiao was talking to him now as a way of diverting his attention. He discovered that those people who seemed to be strangers to one another turned out to be slowly coalescing into a group as they walked. Although they soon separated again, he knew that they had had time to exchange remarks—brief remarks, perhaps, but concerning him.
Later, when he looked back, Zhu Qiao was nowhere to be seen. He had no recollection of when he had left.
9
The brawny figure in front of him reminded him of a stone monument. When he had seen such a monument and what exactly it was like were not questions he was inclined to consider in more detail. What was more to the point was that this figure was knocking on the door. And he knocked with care, using two knuckles, but the noise was very loud, as though he were pounding on it with both fists. The man’s feet were not being employed, but if they were—he supposed—the outcome would surely be ugly.
He stood by the door, waiting, it seemed, for this man to turn around. He tried to guess what a frontal view of him would be like. All he could be sure of was that he would look more complicated from the front than from the back. Would he turn out to be the middle-aged man who had leaned against the plane tree?
But the man continued to knock on the door, with a beat so steady and mechanical it sounded like the rhythm of a lathe.
Given his interest in seeing the man’s face—an interest he could not contain—he decided to say something to him. There was no other way.
“There’s nobody home,” he said.
The man turned around, finally exposing his face. His front was not as solidly built as his back, but his eyebrows were short and unnervingly bushy, so it looked almost as though he had four eyes. He could not readily establish whether this was the man who had leaned against the plane tree, but he was disinclined to rule out the possibility.
“There’s nobody home,” he repeated.
The man looked at him as though looking at a door. “How do you know there’s nobody home?”
“If there were, they would have opened up by now.”
“Would they open up if I d
idn’t knock?” the man asked mockingly.
“But if there’s nobody home, they won’t open up no matter how much you knock.”
“But if there is somebody there, they will open up if I keep knocking.”
He took a couple of steps back and shut the door. He found the exchange perplexing. The knocking on the door resumed. But he didn’t want to pay it any attention, so he went into the kitchen, where a couple of fried dough-sticks awaited him. His mother had bought them that morning, in keeping with her usual practice. Left on top of a bowl, they were now drooping at both ends. He picked them up and ate them, at the same time picturing how straight they would have been when just purchased.
After he had finished, a strange thought struck him: the dough-sticks might have been poisoned. And soon he realized he was quite convinced that this was the case, because he could feel a discomfort in his stomach, though it stopped well short of acute pain. He stood still, waiting for the disturbance to develop further. But after a little while it subsided and his stomach reverted to calm. He stood a bit longer, and finally heaved a sigh of relief, as though unburdened of a heavy weight.
The man was still pounding on the door. And the more he pounded, the more it sounded like the man was knocking on his door. He began to suspect that that was really what was happening. So he stood by the door and listened intently. Yes, the door was being knocked on—he seemed to feel the door trembling. He took a deep breath and threw the door open.
What he saw was the neighbors’ door slamming shut. It must have just been opened, because the burly figure was no longer there.