by Yu Hua
But her face was suffused with innocence as she put on a show of being astonished that she and I just happened to have taken the same bus. When she invited me to sit down in the empty seat next to her, I had no choice but to comply. No sooner did I sit down than I could feel her body pressing up against me. She had a lot to say, but I didn’t take any of it in and had to keep nodding in order to give the impression I was following what she was saying. All this exasperated me, and when she quietly curled her hand around my fingers, I pushed her hand away. It maddened me that she could still carry on like this. Only then did she register how furious I was. She stopped talking, and naturally gave up on efforts at physical contact too. She turned away, feeling mistreated it seemed, and began to survey the bleak scenery. But she did not stay quiet for very long, for when the bus shuddered as it went over a bump she gave a giggle and murmured in my ear, “The baby felt that.”
Her joke only provoked me further. “Shut your mouth,” I muttered, through clenched teeth.
Later I saw a row of ships moored by the shore. Two of them had been stripped down to miserable-looking shells, and only one was still intact and undamaged. A few gray birds hovered over the seaweed on the shore.
Soon after the bus arrived at the station, two young people emerged from the exit. When a truck drove past, their bodies were obscured by the dust it threw up.
The boy, livid, walked on ahead without a word. The girl followed along behind, glancing apprehensively at his side-turned face. Instead of heading straight for the hospital, the boy turned into an alleyway, and the girl did the same. He did not stop until halfway down. There they watched as a middle-aged woman approached and then walked out onto the street.
“Why did you call me?” the boy barked.
The girl, hurt, looked at him. “I was afraid you’d get tired standing all the way.”
“How many times have I told you: don’t look at me!” he cried. “But you just kept on looking and calling my name and squeezing my hand.”
Two men approached from the end of the alley. The boy said nothing more, and the girl made no attempt to defend herself. The men looked at them curiously as they passed. Then the boy set off toward the end of the alley, and after a slight hesitation the girl followed.
They walked in silence along the street. Though no longer in a rage, the boy seemed increasingly fretful as they approached the hospital. He threw a glance at the girl, who was now gazing straight ahead, and he inferred from the look of hesitancy in her eyes that the hospital must be very close.
They arrived at the hospital lobby to find the registration office empty and desolate. The boy now lost his nerve so completely that he marched straight outside to the courtyard. Gripped by a fear that he might be held for questioning, he was simply not prepared to run the risk. She would have to confront the dangers alone, leaving him free to make his escape. By the time the girl joined him, he had thought of a way to conceal his spinelessness. It would really be too dangerous for him to stay with her, he said: other people would be able to tell in an instant what they had got up to. “Just go in by yourself,” he told her.
She made no protest and with a nod headed back inside. He watched as she went up to the window of the registration office, and when she took money from her pocket she showed no obvious stress. He heard her provide name and age—both were fake. These subterfuges were not things he had arranged ahead of time. “Gynecology,” he heard her say.
The word made him shudder. He detected a weariness in her voice. On leaving the window, she turned to look at him, and the medical record flapped in her hand as she went up the stairs.
The boy watched until her silhouette disappeared on the stairs; only then did he turn his gaze elsewhere. He felt his mood getting darker, and his breathing became labored. As he stood waiting, he looked out distractedly at the people on the street, then eyed the patients as they came down the stairs. Still no sign of her. He was seized with dread, a fear that upstairs his secret was being exposed. This thought became more and more real, until he couldn’t bear to stay in the hospital a moment longer. He crossed the street and didn’t stop when he got to the other side, but rushed straight into a shop.
It sold basic household supplies, and a slatternly young woman stood behind the counter, a bored expression on her face. At the other end were two men cutting sheets of glass. He went over to watch, at the same time glancing frequently at the hospital across the street. The men smoked as they worked, and little heaps of ash had accumulated on the dark green glass. The vacant looks on their faces made him all the more glum. As the cutting tool’s diamond tip slid across the glass, a white scratch appeared and a rasping noise sounded in his ears.
Before long the girl appeared on the street opposite. She stood next to a plane tree, looking lost. He glimpsed her through the dusty shop window and did not step outside until he had verified that she was not being followed. She saw him crossing the street and gave a rueful smile as he approached. “I am pregnant,” she said quietly.
The boy stood as still as a tree. The desperate hope he had been harboring was now utterly shattered. He looked at the doleful girl. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she muttered.
“What do we do?” he repeated.
“Let’s not think about that,” she said consolingly. “Let’s have a look around the shops.”
He shook his head. “I don’t feel like it.”
She said nothing, and simply watched the traffic going back and forth on the street. People came toward them on the sidewalk, laughing loudly. After they passed, she gave it another try. “Let’s have a look in the shops.”
“I don’t want to do that,” he repeated.
They stood there for some time, and eventually the boy said listlessly, “Let’s go back.”
The girl nodded.
So then they headed back the way they had come. Before they had gone very far, the girl came to a stop in front of a window. She tugged on the boy’s sleeve. “Let’s have a look in this shop,” she said.
After a little hesitation the boy entered with her. They stood for a while in front of a white Dacron skirt. The girl could not take her eyes off it. “I really like that skirt,” she told the boy.
Her voice had already settled into place when she was sixteen. In the ten-odd years that followed, her voice would linger in my ears almost every day, and this overfamiliar sound had scoured away all my passion. And so, as dusk fell and I gazed at my wife who sat opposite me, I could only feel more and more weary. She was still knitting the sky-blue scarf, and her face was the same old face, except that it had lost some elasticity. Under my glances her wrinkles had deepened and were now as familiar to me as the palm of my own hand. She had begun to pay attention.
“Before you even open your mouth, I can tell what you’re going to say. At eleven thirty every morning and at five o’clock every afternoon I know you will soon be home. In a crowd of a hundred women, I can recognize your footsteps right away. And as far as you’re concerned, aren’t I just as predictable?”
She stopped knitting and looked at me pensively.
“So neither of us can give the other any surprise at all,” I went on. “All we can do is give each other a little pleasure, but that kind of pleasure is available anywhere in town.”
Now she began to speak. “I understand what you’re saying.”
“Are you sure?” I didn’t know how to respond, so that was all I could think of to say.
“I understand,” she repeated. Tears began to slither down her face. “You want to dump me,” she said.
I didn’t try to deny it. “That sounds so crude” was all I said.
“You want to dump me,” she said again. More tears.
“That’s not a nice way to put it,” I said. “Let’s think about all the things we have done together.”
“
Is this the last time?” she asked.
I dodged the question. “Where shall we begin?” I went on.
“Is this the last time?” she repeated.
“How about we start from that autumn, back in 1977?” I said. “We took that clattering bus all those twenty kilometers to find out if you were pregnant. What a wreck I was that day!”
“No, you weren’t,” she said.
“Don’t try to make me feel better. I really was a wreck.”
“No, you weren’t,” she repeated. “In all the time I’ve known you, there’s just once you’ve been a wreck.”
“When was that?”
“Now.”
A History of Two People
1
In August 1930 a boy named Tan Bo and a girl named Orchid sat side by side on a step untouched by sunlight. Behind them stood a vermilion gate, its copper latch in the shape of a lion. Tan Bo, the young master of the family, and Orchid, a maidservant’s daughter, often sat together in this spot, while the maidservant went to and fro, carrying out her various duties amid the repetitive drone of the matriarch’s mutterings.
There on the step, in lowered voices, the children talked about their dreams.
In his, Tan Bo was often tormented by a need to urinate. He would search high and low for a chamber pot, for the one that lay next to his bed in his comfortable south-facing room had vanished into thin air, and nowhere could he find the vessel that would release him from discomfort. Finally, in desperation, he would dash out to the main street, where rickshaws raced back and forth and beggars shuffled past. Unable to hold out a moment longer, Tan Bo would pee into the gutter.
Then the dream faded away. The sky was a patch of gray in the window as dawn began to break. What in the dream had been a street was actually a wooden bed, and as he woke Tan Bo felt a damp patch on the sheet and smelled a warm odor. Eyes wide with confusion, the boy painstakingly replayed the scenes from his dream but was soon jolted into full consciousness, and his wetting of the bed filled him with shame. As a bright glare began to fill the window, he closed his eyes once more and fell into a deep sleep.
“How about you?”
The boy’s inquiry was suffused with eagerness. Clearly he hoped that in her dream the girl would have had just the same experience.
But faced with this inquiry, she proved bashful, clamping her hands over her eyes as girls her age are wont to do.
“Did you do the same thing?” the boy persisted.
A long, dark alleyway lay before them, high gray walls on either side. In the cracks between the bricks the recent years had planted coy little bunches of grass that quietly swayed back and forth in the breeze.
“Tell me.” The boy’s tone became aggressive.
The girl blushed red with shame. Hanging her head, she related a similar sequence of events. In her dream she too was desperate to pee, and she too looked everywhere for a chamber pot.
“You peed in the street too?” The boy was excited.
But she shook her head. She always found the chamber pot in the end.
This discrepancy deeply embarrassed the boy. He looked up, and above the alley’s narrow walls he saw clouds floating through the sky and sunshine bathing the uppermost bricks.
Why can she find the chamber pot, when I can’t? he thought.
Jealousy burned like a flame in his heart.
“Was the bed wet when you woke up?” he asked.
She nodded.
So at least the ending was the same.
2
In November 1939, seventeen-year-old Tan Bo no longer sat with sixteen-year-old Orchid on the stone steps in front of the gate. Now he wore a black school uniform and held in his hand a collection of Lu Xun’s short stories and a book of Hu Shi’s poetry. He was always in good spirits as he went in and out of the family compound. Meanwhile Orchid had inherited her mother’s position. Dressed in a floral smock, she busied herself with household tasks amid the endless mutterings of old Mrs. Tan.
They were bound to exchange words from time to time, of course.
Youth surged through Tan Bo’s body, and sometimes he would stop Orchid in her tracks and with animated gestures expound to her some progressive idea. On such occasions Orchid would lower her head and say nothing—the days when they shared everything without hesitation were long past, after all. Or perhaps Orchid was beginning to set store by Tan Bo’s status as the young gentleman of the house. But he, immersed in the spirit of equality and mutual love, was hardly likely to realize the distance that was quietly developing between them.
On the last day of November, Orchid was running her dust cloth over the rosewood furniture. Tan Bo sat by the window, reading Tagore’s lines about the stray birds of summer. Orchid did her utmost to clean the furniture without making a sound, as she glanced at Tan Bo in slight agitation. She hoped that the current silence would not be interrupted. But reading is tiring and Tan Bo was bound to say something once he closed the book.
As a seventeen-year-old, he often dreamt that he was traveling on an ocean vessel, rocking back and forth in the waves. In his waking hours a longing to leave home would seize him.
He began to tell her about the restlessness that now infected his dreams. “I want to go to Yan’an,” he told her.
She gazed at him in bewilderment. Clearly Yan’an was a meaningless blank as far as she was concerned.
He had no plans to make her understand anything further—all he wanted to know was the dreams that she had been having. The habit formed in 1930 died hard.
She blushed hotly, just as she had nine years earlier. Then she related a somewhat similar dream. The difference was that she was not on board a passenger ship but sitting in a sedan chair carried by four men; on her feet were pretty cotton shoes. The sedan chair threaded its way through the many streets in town.
He gave a little smile. “Your dream is different from mine.” He paused. “You want to get married, I can see.”
By then the Japanese had occupied the town where they lived.
3
In April 1950, Tan Bo, director of a performance troupe in the People’s Liberation Army, a leather belt at his waist and puttees on his legs, returned to the home that he had not visited for ten years. The nation was now liberated, and between careers Tan Bo came back to have a look.
Orchid was still living in his house, but she no longer was his mother’s servant, for she had begun to enjoy an independent life. Two rooms in the house had been assigned to her as living quarters.
The sight of Tan Bo striding energetically into the house left a deep impression on Orchid. By this time she had several children and had lost the slender figure of yesteryear; the turn of her broad waist was enough to efface the beauty she had once possessed.
Orchid had dreamt that Tan Bo would return home in precisely the manner in which he did. So, early one afternoon, her husband having left for work, Orchid told Tan Bo the scene from her dream. “You came back just as I dreamt you would.”
She was no longer bashful and coy, for she was a mother of several children, of course. As she described the scene, there was no hint of lingering emotion—her tone was as level and bland as if she were telling him that someone had left a bowl on the kitchen floor.
Tan Bo recalled a dream he had had on his way home. Orchid had appeared in that dream—not the woman before him now, but the girl she had once been.
“I dreamt of you, too,” Tan Bo said.
Seeing Orchid so coarse and dumpy, he saw no point in describing her former charm. Dreams of her would now vanish from his sleeping consciousness.
4
December 1972. Tan Bo returned home in deep despondency, for he had been labeled a counterrevolutionary. His mother had died and he had come back to handle the funeral.
By this time Orchid’
s children had grown up and gone their own ways. She was still without a formal occupation. When Tan Bo stepped in through the door, she was scrubbing plastic sheeting. This activity was her main source of income.
As he passed her in his tattered black padded jacket, he stopped for a moment and smiled at her awkwardly.
Seeing him, Orchid gave a little gasp of surprise.
Only then did he go on toward his room in relief. Before long, Orchid knocked on his door and asked, “Is there anything you need?”
Tan Bo looked at the tidy arrangement of the room and didn’t know what to say.
Orchid had made it her business to inform him of his mother’s death.
This time, neither of them had any dreams to share.
5
October 1985. Tan Bo, retired and living at home, spent the day sunning himself in the yard. It was autumn yet, but he was sensitive to cold.
Orchid, now a white-haired old lady, was still hale and hearty. Though surrounded and sometimes harried by a flock of grandchildren, she took their demands in stride and never wearied of their company, while still attending to her chores, inside and out.
She laid a basin of clothes on the concrete pavers and began to do the laundry.
Tan Bo had to squint as he watched the vigorous movements of her arms. Amid her loud scrubbing he recounted with foreboding a couple of dreams that he kept having. A bridge collapsed just as he was crossing it. And when he was walking by the house, a roof tile hurtled toward his head.
Orchid said nothing and just kept on washing the clothes.
“Do you ever have dreams like that?” Tan Bo asked.