by Yu Hua
In my sparse memory, the episodes relating to the young lady were limited in duration, beginning with her first appearance on May 8 and ending with the unfortunate traffic accident. All that happened afterward was transmuted into a series of dark nights with no moon. My mood now as I wandered the streets was much like that of a bereaved husband, and as time stole by I began to accept that the wife I once had had died a long time ago.
Later, one day I quite by accident came across a yellowed sheet of paper on which was written: Willow Yang, 26 Carpenter Square Alley.
I had been sitting at my desk and for some reason I can’t explain I opened a drawer that I had not rummaged through in years, and in it found this piece of paper.
The characters written there pointed me toward some hazy episode in my past, and for a while I engaged in fruitless musing. Then my eyes fixed on the sunshine outside my window, and I connected that sunlight with all the other sunlight that still lingered in my memory. In so doing, I summoned back the sunshine that had warmed a courtyard next to a gaily-colored flower bed. A nurse walked toward me in the bright sun and her lips made enchanting shapes as she told me about a girl named Willow Yang.
The appearance of the yellowed paper at this moment served as a cue. Long ago, when I scribbled those words at the hospital, I didn’t really know my own mind—recording the address was purely a reflex action. Only with the paper’s resurfacing at this juncture did I understand what had led me to do so. Now, as I left the sunshine by my window and entered the sunshine in the street, I knew exactly where I was going.
The black door of 26 Carpenter Square Alley was mottled with age. When I knocked, I detected the tiny sound of flakes of paint falling to the ground, and this patter continued off and on for some time before hesitant footsteps could be heard inside. The door emitted a decrepit creak, and a man in his fifties stood before me. A look of surprise appeared on his face.
I felt embarrassed by my presumption.
But he said, “Come in.” It was as though he had known me for ages and simply hadn’t expected me to turn up at this moment.
“Are you the father of Willow Yang?” I asked.
He did not answer directly. “Come in,” he repeated.
I followed him inside, and after crossing a moss-covered courtyard we entered a south-facing room. It was furnished with several traditional-style wooden chairs, and I chose the one that was closest to the window. It felt a bit damp when I sat down. He looked at me with the gaze of an old acquaintance, maintaining the same composure he had shown when opening the door. His calm demeanor would make it easier for me to explain my purpose in coming.
“Your daughter—” I began.
I tried hard to recall the shapes formed by the lips of the nurse by the flower bed. “Your daughter died on August fourteenth, 1988?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“On that day I was lying on an operating table in the same Shanghai hospital,” I told him. I was hoping that his self-command would last another five minutes, for that way I could fit in all the elements of my story, from the traffic accident, through his daughter’s donation of her eyes, to the successful transplant.
But he did not let me continue. “She did not go to Shanghai,” he said. “In all her seventeen years she never once went to Shanghai.”
I was unable to conceal my puzzlement. My eyes must have been full of doubt.
Still he looked at me calmly. “But it’s true that she died on August fourteenth, 1988,” he went on.
He would never forget that sweltering afternoon. He and Willow had eaten their lunch in the courtyard. “I feel tired,” she told him.
He noticed her face was pale and suggested she have a nap.
His daughter stood up, looking out of sorts, and made her way shakily into her bedroom. She had seemed a bit distracted before, so he didn’t worry unduly and simply felt a loving concern for her.
Once in her room, she said through the window, “Please wake me at three thirty.”
He said he would do so, and then seemed to hear her murmur, “I feel I could fall asleep and never wake up.”
He did not pay particular attention to this remark. It was only later, when he recalled these last words, that he realized they were a signal. Her voice at that moment already sounded faint and unreal.
That afternoon he did not have a nap but simply stayed in the courtyard reading the newspaper. When it came around to 3:30, he entered her bedroom to find she was no longer breathing.
He pointed toward the room facing me. “That’s where Willow died.”
I had to believe him. A father who has lost his daughter would not joke about this, I thought.
“Would you like to see her room?” he asked, after a long pause.
His question took me aback, but I responded in the affirmative.
So together we went into her room. It was dark, and I noticed that the curtains, the color of green grass, were tightly drawn. He turned on the light.
I noticed two framed pictures next to the bed. One was a color photograph of a young woman’s face, and the other was a pencil drawing of a young man. I looked closely at the photograph, to find that the young woman in the picture was the very same one who had entered my heart so many years ago on May 8. As I gazed at her photo, an image of her turning her face toward me was superimposed on this picture. And so once more I felt that my past was very real.
“Do you see my daughter’s gaze?” he asked me.
I nodded. I saw the eyes of my departed wife.
“Don’t you feel that her gaze is very much like yours?”
It took me a moment to register what he said.
So he added, somewhat apologetically, “In the photo, maybe her gaze is a little blurry.”
Then, as if to make up for that, he pointed at the pencil portrait. “A long time ago,” he said, “when Willow was still living, all of a sudden one day she thought of a boy she did not know and had never seen. As time went on he kept appearing ever more distinctly in her imagination, and she ended up sketching his portrait.”
His account of the pencil sketch’s origins seemed to match my own past experience, so my glance left the girl in the color photo and rested instead on the pencil sketch. The person I saw there was not me but a totally unfamiliar young man.
As Willow’s father saw me out the door, he said, “You know something? I noticed you a long time ago, when you were living in a cottage by the river. Your gaze was just like my daughter’s.”
2
Once I left 26 Carpenter Square Alley, the encounter I had just had—and the voice of that middle-aged man—now seemed things from the distant past. And so, as I left the girl in the color photo, my emotions were not particularly stirred. Everything that had just happened seemed like a repeat of a past event, a little like me sitting by the window in my room and recalling the scene on the evening of May 8. All that was new was the door with the peeling black paint, the man in his fifties, and the two framed pictures. My wife died on August 14, 1988: as I walked along, I rehearsed this stale old line.
When I entered the street that ran parallel to the river, I noticed a young man walking toward me. In the bright sunshine his black jacket assumed a strange gaiety, and somehow I found myself watching his every move. He entered a little house overlooking the river, but before long he came out again, holding a pencil and a sheaf of papers. He went down the steps toward the river and made his way under the arch of the bridge and sat down.
For a reason I cannot explain, I too descended the steps. He showed no sign of disapproval as he saw me approaching, so I joined him under the arch. He pushed aside some sheets of paper that were lying on the ground, and I sat down. I noticed that the papers were covered with a complicated grid of lines.
Our conversation began a minute later. He knew,
perhaps, that I would listen quietly, however long he talked.
“Here in this town in early 1949,” he began, “a Nationalist officer named Tan Liang had ten time bombs buried in an intricate geometric pattern.”
His story stretched from 1949 until the present. During that period, nine bombs had gone off. “There is still one that has not exploded,” he told me.
He picked up the sheets of paper. “That bomb is now buried in ten places.”
The first place was in the cinema, beneath the third seat in the ninth row. “That seat is a bit dilapidated,” he said, “and the springs are showing.” The other nine locations were as follows: underneath the front door of the bank; the crossroads leading to the residential area; next to the crane at the cargo wharf; the hospital morgue (a dumb place to leave a bomb, in his view); by the second plane tree over from the entrance to the department store; the kitchen of room 102 in the machine factory dormitory; beneath the main road, sixteen meters from the bus station; immediately outside 57 Carpenter Square Alley; and directly below the fifth window to the right of the Workers’ Club Dance Hall.
After he had finished his recital, I asked, “Are you saying that there are ten bombs in the town?”
“That’s right.” He nodded. “And they could go off at any time.”
Now I realized why he had caught my attention and why I’d felt the urge to sit down with him. It was because he made me think of the pencil sketch in Willow Yang’s bedroom: the subject of that portrait was now sitting opposite me.
Love Story
The autumn of 1977 left a mark on two young people. On a day when the sun was shining they boarded a clattering bus and traveled to a town twenty kilometers away. It was the boy who bought the tickets, while the girl took cover behind a concrete utility pole some distance from the station. Dust and falling leaves fluttered around her and the hum of the power lines dulled the multitude of noises in the street. The girl’s emotions at that moment were as barren as a page in one of her school textbooks. She glanced from time to time at the bus station’s narrow door, a placid expression on her face.
The boy emerged, looking wan and haggard. Although he knew perfectly well where the girl was hiding, he avoided looking her way and instead walked toward the river, scanning nervously left and right. Soon he reached the bridge and came to an uneasy halt before finally gazing in the girl’s direction. Finding that she was watching him, he glared at her, but this seemed to have no effect. He turned away in disgust and then stood where he was, ignoring her. But he felt certain that she was looking at him the whole time, and this thought alarmed him. Only when he was sure there was nobody around did he walk back.
She had no inkling that he was in such a fearful state of mind; instead she felt touched by the sight of the pale boy walking toward her in the sunshine. A quiver of excitement seized her and a smile appeared on her face. But when he arrived beside her, he was fuming. “You can still smile?” he snapped.
Her lovely smile was nipped in the bud. So fierce was his expression that she looked at him anxiously, hoping for clarification.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” he said. “Don’t look at me. Pretend you don’t know me. Why do you keep looking? You drive me crazy.”
She made no protest and simply turned away. She looked at a pile of withered yellow leaves on the ground and listened as sounds emerged from his mouth.
“After we get on the bus, find a seat and sit down. If there’s nobody we know, I’ll sit next to you. If there is someone we know, I’ll stand by the door. Remember not to talk to me.”
He handed her a ticket and walked away—back toward the bridge, not the waiting room.
Some ten years later, the girl—now in her late twenties—sat opposite me as twilight fell outside our apartment and the open curtains framed the sun’s fading light. She was knitting a sky-blue scarf. The scarf was longer than she was tall, but still she kept on knitting. It was I who had accompanied her in the autumn of 1977 to that town twenty kilometers away. We were five years old when we first met, and that acquaintance eventually led—after a long and grueling process—to the institution of marriage. We had our first sexual experience near the end of our sixteenth year, and her first pregnancy occurred at that time too. Her sitting posture had repeated itself endlessly for five years, so how could there be any passion in my glance when I looked at her? For so long now, wherever I went she would follow, and this put me in a profound depression. My biggest mistake was that on the eve of our wedding I had failed to realize that all her life she would be hanging on my coattails, and that was why I was stuck in such a rut. Now, as she knitted the scarf, I held in my hand a letter from the author Hong Feng. His splendid career was an inspiration to me, and I felt I had no reason to continue a life as stale as an old newspaper.
So, just as she recycled her sitting position, I recycled words I had said before, reiterating that there was something awful about knowing someone since childhood. “Don’t you feel I’m just too familiar?” I asked yet again.
But she just kept gazing at me uncomprehendingly.
“We have known each other since we were five,” I went on. “Twenty-some years later, we’re still together. How can either of us expect the other to be able to inspire a change?”
At such moments she would always look stricken.
“To me, for ages now you have been like a blank piece of paper that can be read at a glance. And to you, aren’t I just the same?”
When tears began to spill down her face, I thought she simply looked foolish.
“All that we’re left with,” I went on, “is memories of the past, but too many memories make our past seem just like breakfast—always predictable.”
Our first sexual experience, as I said, occurred near the end of our sixteenth year. On that moonless night, we lay locked in an embrace on the grass of the school athletic field, paralyzed with fear. On a path not far away, people walked along with flashlights in their hands, their voices sharp as daggers in the night air, and several times we were about to flee in panic. When I recall that scene today, I realize that it was because she hugged me so tightly that I now cannot see just how pathetic I must have looked then.
As soon as I think of that night, I can feel the moisture of the dewdrops on the grass. When I slipped my hand inside her pants, the heat of her body made me shiver. My fingers dipped deeper, and I began to feel a wetness just like that on the grass. At the beginning I had no particular purpose in mind and simply felt like caressing her a little bit. Later I felt a strong urge to take a peek—I wanted to know what things looked like. But on that moonless night, what I smelled when I leaned closer was only a bland scent. The scent that wafted from that dark, wet place wasn’t like anything I had smelled before, but it wasn’t nearly as exciting as I had imagined it would be. That did not stop me, however, from going ahead and doing the deed. Desire had been sated, only to leave me racked with anxiety, and in the days that followed I considered various forms of suicide or flight. When she began to look pregnant, my despair was paired with resentment that I had enjoyed only a few minutes of earthshaking bliss. On that autumn day in 1977 I accompanied her to that town twenty kilometers away in the hope it would all prove to be a false alarm.
Her fear was not nearly as acute as mine. When I proposed she have a checkup, it was she who suggested that particular hospital, and her calm and coolheadedness took me rather aback. To me, the attraction of that facility was simply that it represented a basic level of security that would allow us to keep the matter secret. But she went on to enthuse about her visit to that town five years earlier, and I was infuriated by her descriptions of its streets and her lyrical accounts of the decommissioned ship that was moored by the shore. We weren’t going there to have fun, I told her, but for a damn checkup, a test that would determine whether or not we could go on living. If the test established that she really was p
regnant, I said, we would be expelled from school and driven from our homes by our respective sets of parents. Rumors about us would proliferate like the dust that blew about in the streets. In the end there would be nothing for it but to…“Commit suicide.”
That threat certainly did unnerve her. The look on my face, she told me years later, was quite terrifying, and my prediction of our grim future shocked her. But even in this apprehensive state she was never really in despair. At least her parents wouldn’t expel her from the family home, she believed, although she did concede that they would punish her. “Punishment’s better than suicide,” she told me consolingly.
That day I was the last person to get on the bus. I watched her from a distance as she boarded, and she kept turning around and looking at me. I had told her not to do that, but my constant reminders had fallen on deaf ears. The bus was already lurching forward when I boarded. I didn’t immediately head for the seat next to hers but stood by the door, my eyes scanning one face after another, and there must have been at least twenty people I had seen before. So I stood glued to my spot, as the potholed highway toyed relentlessly with our bus. I felt as though I were stuffed inside a bottle that was being constantly shaken. Later I heard her calling me—a sound that filled me with dread. Outraged by her lack of sense, I steadfastly ignored her, hoping that would shut her up. But her tiresome efforts to catch my attention just carried on regardless. All I could do was turn my head away, knowing my scowl had to be as ugly as the scrubby bushes by the side of the road.