by Yu Hua
Lying in bed, I could sense that she had already left my inner world. She had risen when I was still asleep and was now making breakfast for me in the kitchen. I ignored the reality that there was no such room, for I could not persuade myself that no kitchen existed, given that she was in it. Her arrival had wrought a change in my living quarters.
I knew I ought to get up: it wouldn’t do for me to still be lounging in bed when she already had breakfast made. Once up, the first thing I did was to open the curtains. I was still sleeping when she rose, so of course she had left them closed—that’s the least a wife will do for a man. As I reached for the curtains, I realized there was no fabric for my hands to grip, and only then did I find that sunshine was already surging in. Outside, the river gleamed with unusual brightness and there were barges shimmering with light as they made their way along the channel. A few cabbage leaves floated past my window.
I walked toward the kitchen—knowing full well I did not have one—and went in. It was narrow, and I couldn’t help rubbing against her on my way to the sink. I thought I heard her clothes rustle as I began to brush my teeth. She seemed to be saying something, but I wasn’t sure what. I stopped my brushing and threw her a glance as soon as I realized my noise was drowning her out; she was looking at me, too. Her glance startled me, for up to this point she had existed only in my dim consciousness, but now I saw her glance in a very real way. Though I still could not get a full view of her eyes, her glance entered mine with unparalleled clarity. Her expression was calm—it had not annoyed her that I hadn’t heard what she said—but her glance was aimed at me, signifying that she was awaiting my answer, or my question. I turned away in surprise, and for a moment I didn’t know quite what to do. So her glance also shifted. Evidently, what she had said was of no special importance. As her glance moved away, I seemed to sense that her face was in motion. Then she left the kitchen.
Soon I left the kitchen too, and as I entered the bedroom I felt she was standing by the window. I went over and stood next to her. I tried to look at her glance from this angle, but could not see it clearly. She was gazing at the river below.
3
One afternoon many days later, I left my quarters. I had decided to go out for a while, because my living situation had begun to unsettle my nerves.
The girl who had come to me that evening and the glance she gave me the following day had caused my hitherto perfect life to acquire a blemish. Her glance roamed around my room the whole day through, but seldom could I actually see it. It was as though this girl who had only just come into my life had been my companion for a good twenty years, for she rarely looked at me and seemed much more inclined to gaze out the window. Her glance was always floating out of range, and I could never catch it. And so my exasperation grew with each new day.
On this particular afternoon I decided to subject her to a temporary abandonment. She stood by the window, gazing at the river that I had now come to resent. I moved toward the door, and as I did the whole room resounded with the weight of my shoes. Never before had I resorted to such loud footsteps, but I did so in order to make clear that I was leaving. I hoped that she would pay attention to me with her eyes, but when I reached the doorway and threw her a backward glance, she was still contemplating the river. This simply hardened my resolve. I opened the door and went out, closing the door with an even louder slam than my uncouth neighbors were wont to employ. I did not leave immediately, however, but opened the door once more. It seemed she was still standing by the window, impervious to my departure. When I closed the door a second time, the noise was just as dreary as my own mood, and as I walked away my steps sounded like dead tree limbs falling on the ground.
Once I was roaming the streets in broad daylight, I lost my customary wariness. On this first excursion in many days, I was not as circumspect as usual and no longer felt threatened by other pedestrians. Only now did it become fully apparent how lamentably her arrival had damaged my previous life. My footsteps felt disjointed and my glance was no longer on tentative lookout but had become as wild and uninhibited as a lunatic’s, and I found myself taking a confrontational stance toward the tangle of glances aimed in my direction. Although I was hoping to fend off the glances of others, I could not contain my own desire to gaze, and as I walked on I did not avoid a single glance that came my way. For me to so hungrily meet these glances took me completely by surprise. Many eyes shrank away from mine, while a few seethed with hostility, but this did not make me hesitate in the slightest. When passing among these adversarial glances, I felt that my own gaze must surely appear very much at ease.
It gave me great satisfaction to stride down the street so assertively. When turning a corner or crossing the street, I no longer appeared hesitant but exhibited the same boldness that I would show if I were to toss pebbles into the river. I didn’t know where exactly I was going, but I got the feeling that the glances on the street were growing fewer and I didn’t come to a stop until I saw no glances at all, when I realized I was now in the residential part of town.
I was standing near an open door, and I saw a young man in a black jacket talking to an old woman who sat shelling beans in the doorway. Her voice made me think of an old newspaper flapping in the wind. Her gaze strayed outside my line of vision, and she did not look directly at the young man, either. Instead her eyes roamed between the beans and a utility pole; she seemed to be recounting to the young man some past episode whose details had grown fuzzy in her mind.
As I was about to leave, someone behind me uttered a brief sequence of sounds that clearly signified a person’s name. When I turned my head, I saw that the speaker was another woman of much the same age as the first. The two women began to chatter in voices that seemed to have been pickled in salt, and their laughter sounded like two slabs of dried fish knocking against each other.
At this point the young man stood up—perhaps the woman’s story was finished. He was much the same height as me. As he came my way he threw me a glance. To my astonishment, I found it was the same glance as the one I saw that time I had been brushing my teeth in the kitchen. He strode past me.
My surprise soon wore off, and as he walked on I realized what I needed to do next. I had no choice but to follow him.
The quiet with which he crossed the intersection gave me a warm, familiar feeling. Then he proceeded up the sloping concrete road, and I saw that his stride looked just like mine. Soon he reached the entrance to the main avenue, and he hesitated there for quite some time. I knew that he planned to cross the street, step onto the sidewalk opposite, and then head either left or right, but he needed to wait for a gap in the traffic. Suddenly he dashed across, and I rushed across at practically the same moment, because the opening had also presented itself to me. The panic he showed as he dashed across the street made me cringe with shame: for the first time I saw what an embarrassing figure I must have cut when I crossed the street before.
After this he recovered an appropriate degree of composure as he—and I—stepped onto the sidewalk, his newfound calm in turn making me feel very satisfied with my own gait. He proceeded forward in a most ordinary posture—precisely my own practice. Like me, he walked that way so as to make himself invisible. Now nobody noticed him, except for me. Watching him, I felt I was watching myself.
His walk terminated in front of a small, one-story house overlooking the river. From his right pocket he produced a yellow key—in my right pocket I too have a yellow key. He opened the door and went in. He appeared to close the door carefully, making as little noise as I usually made when I went out. But I did not enter this house by the river—I stood next to a concrete utility pole outside, in a welter of indecision. Because my following him had been purely involuntary, now that the pursuit had ended I was like a leaf that leaves its branch: once it touches ground it does not know what to do next. I felt that if I remained standing there I was liable to attract attention, so I
strolled around a bit, at the same time trying to decide on my next step.
He emerged holding a sheaf of papers and a pencil. He closed the door and walked to his left; after a few more steps he turned the corner. Sidestepping a trash can, he went down the stairs toward the river. Then he clambered inside the arch of the concrete bridge. As he sat down, he appeared very much at ease.
I didn’t follow him down the steps, because my indecision had not yet concluded. I was wondering why I was following him, and this question lingered in my mind for a long time before I came up with the answer: I had come here because of his glance. The trail had now reached its end, and he was sitting under the arch of the bridge. What should I do next? This question made me fretful. I walked back and forth on top of the bridge while the glance I saw days earlier in the kitchen was under the arch below. I began to imagine the things that might be attracting its attention: perhaps at this moment it was focused on a dirty, broken tile or lingering over a shred of moldy straw. When some barges emitting silly diesel-engine noises came chugging along the river, that glance was very likely fixed on their clouds of black smoke.
I decided to go inside the arch. The space should be able to accommodate two people, I thought. So I went down the slope of the bridge and followed the stone steps toward the river. I stood for a moment on the bank. He was sitting upright some ten meters away, his glance fixed on the paper he was holding. It was a more attractive scene than the one I had just been imagining. I walked toward him.
When he raised his head and looked at me, his glance made me a little nervous. But he did not show the slightest surprise; instead he eyed me calmly, making me feel that I was not approaching him rashly but responding to his invitation. I clambered inside the arch and sat down opposite him. I gazed into his eyes and confirmed that it was the same glance I saw in the kitchen. But his eyes were very different, I felt, from those of the girl. They were somewhat narrow, and it seemed to me that the girl’s eyes were much wider.
“Some nights ago,” I told him, “a young woman came into my heart. In some vague way she spent a whole evening with me. When I woke up the following morning, she was still there, and she let me see her glance. Her glance was just the same as your glance now.”
4
After hearing my story, he raised none of the doubts that I had feared he might express. On the contrary, he seemed fully convinced that what I said was true.
“What you just told me,” he said, “is very like something that happened to me ten years ago.”
By “ten years ago,” he explained, he meant May 8, 1988. On that night the moon shone enchantingly, and as usual he went out to wander the streets of his hometown. The streetlights were amber, and in their halo the moonlight seemed to drift down through the sky like drizzle. He walked along a street as tranquil as his own disposition, for it had long been his wont to go out late at night for a solitary stroll. He liked the expansive calm that he could find outside then. But that night something unexpected happened on this customary walk. For no reason at all he thought of a girl. He had been crossing a humpback bridge and had just stopped to watch the river as it flowed quietly along. It was when he was descending the bridge that the girl appeared in his mind, and so as he went down the incline his mind was full of wonder. He carefully inspected the image that he had seen, to discover that the girl was completely unfamiliar. Compared to the few women who had left an impression on him, she was clearly a different being altogether. He felt that for him to think for no reason of an utterly unknown young woman was somewhat baffling, and so he understood her appearance as a fleeting fantasy and felt that before long he would forget her, in the same way he would forget a piece of paper on which he had scrawled a few words. He began to head back toward his home, and the girl walked with him in his imagination. This time he was unsurprised, taking it for granted that before long she would voluntarily detach herself from his idle fancy. And so when he opened the door and she came in with him, he took it in stride. He went into his bedroom, threw off his coat, and lay down on the bed. He felt her lie down next to him, and a little smile appeared in the corner of his mouth. He was intrigued that the inspiration that had come to him on the bridge could be sustained until now. But he knew that when he woke up the next day she would be gone, and he fell asleep with complete peace of mind.
When he woke early the next morning, he immediately was aware of her—and even more clearly than the night before. He felt she had already risen, and it seemed she was in the kitchen. Lying in bed, he reviewed his experience of the previous night and discovered to his surprise that he could still confirm her existence in his imagination. And in his memory this experience was genuine, as though it had really happened.
“When I went into the kitchen that morning to brush my teeth, I saw her glance,” he told me.
That was just the beginning. In the days that followed, he not only could not forget her but, on the contrary, in his imagination she became all the more clear and complete. Her eyes, nose, eyebrows, mouth, ears, and hair gradually emerged just as her glance had done, and all with unparalleled clarity, making him feel that she was truly standing right in front of him. But when he stretched out a hand to touch her, she was not there at all. He tried to sketch her image with a pencil on a piece of paper. Although he had never in his life learned to draw, within a month he could precisely and unerringly draw her face.
“She was such a pretty girl,” he said.
He stuck the pencil drawing on the wall by the bed, and after that spent almost all his time gazing at it. Only when his father discovered that he had an eye disorder was he forced to abandon the portrait.
He was treated successively in three different hospitals, the last of which was in Shanghai. There, on the afternoon of August 14, he was wheeled into an operating room and surgery was performed. On September 1 the dressing was removed. That was when he learned that on the morning of August 14 a seventeen-year-old girl had been brought to the hospital after a car accident and had died in surgery at 3:16 that afternoon. Her eyes were extracted and the surgeon performed a corneal transplant. After his discharge on September 3 he did not go home, but traveled to the town of Smoke, having learned that was where the donor had lived.
His gaze fell on a willow tree on the riverbank and after a few moments of deep thought he gave a smile. “I remember now,” he said. “The girl’s name was Willow Yang.”
But later he did not seek out the address he had been given and go knock on the black door of 26 Carpenter Square Alley. The change of plans came about because on the bus he had met a man named Shen Liang. Sketching the career of a Nationalist officer named Tan Liang, Shen told him how, during the evacuation in early 1949, ten time bombs were planted in Smoke.
On April 1, 1949, the day after Smoke was liberated, five of the bombs exploded, one after another. A People’s Liberation Army platoon leader and a cook named Cui died in the explosions; thirteen PLA soldiers and twenty-one civilians (including five women and three children) were injured, some seriously.
The sixth bomb exploded in the spring of 1950, just as a public sentencing meeting was taking place in the playing field of the town’s only school. Three mobsters had been earmarked for execution, and the bomb exploded underneath the stage that had been erected for the occasion. The condemned prisoners, along with the town mayor and three militiamen, flew into the sky in bits and pieces, and an old man named Li Jin still remembers how heads and arms and legs soared chaotically through clouds of smoke as a huge blast rent the air.
The seventh bomb detonated in 1960 in People’s Park but inflicted no casualties, because the explosion occurred well after ten o’clock at night. As a testimony to the crimes of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party, the park was left abandoned for the next eighteen years and was not restored until 1978.
The eighth bomb did not explode until the day that the young man in the black jac
ket and Shen Liang arrived in Smoke. Later the young man stood on the concrete bridge. Under a lowering sky the laborers dredging the river filled the riverbed like ants, forming a river of their own, though their flow was untidy and confused. As he listened to the hubbub that drifted up from the work site, he felt a heat flooding in from all sides and faintly heard the clang of metal on metal. A worker gave a cry of alarm and dashed toward the bank, struggling desperately because of the muddy ground, and soon all the laborers were fleeing pell-mell. That was how he came to witness the detonation of the eighth bomb.
A few days later he ran into Shen Liang a second time on the bridge. Shen Liang walked toward him in the bright sunshine, but the expression on his face made the young man think of an old wall covered in dust. Shen Liang came up to him and said, “I’m leaving.”
He looked at Shen Liang silently. In fact, even as Shen Liang was approaching, he’d had a hunch that he was about to leave.
The two of them stood leaning against the balustrade for a long time. As day turned to night, Shen Liang told him about the eight bombs.
“There are still two that have not exploded,” Shen Liang said.
In early 1949 Tan Liang had buried the ten bombs in an intricate geometric pattern. Shen Liang explained this to him one more time, adding: “All it takes is for one more bomb to go off, and the location of the tenth bomb can be worked out from the positions of the previous nine.”