by Yu Hua
Orchid shook her head. “No, I don’t.”
Summer Typhoon
CHAPTER ONE
1
Bai Shu emerged from the little house at the north end of the school compound to find himself under the somber summer sky of 1976. The sky appeared before him suddenly when he came out the door, and its resonant gray expanse took him by surprise. The valley of memory then began to reverberate with the glimmer of days gone by, although the moss that grew on its stony sides marked how swiftly that light had passed.
It was as though a glance glittering with life had suddenly died, for the sky darkened as the boy walked on and the scene ahead of him re-created in his mind a hazy image from years before: a wooden bed with peeling paint on which his father lay, his eyes open but unseeing, as old and worn out as the bed itself. That night, as the moonlight came and went, his footsteps echoed along Riverwater Street and a flute cast its melancholy tune in all directions.
Now, above the grass in the middle of the playing field, countless scraps of paper—fragmentary vestiges of revolutionary slogans and big-character posters—were whirling about, while the dust on all sides was tossed into the air and blew toward the paper scraps, making them dart about like birds alarmed by the twang of a bowstring. He could hear, in the distance, his name being called, for news of the Tangshan earthquake had begun to spread. It was Gu Lin or Chen Gang who had hailed him; the two were sitting there where the paper scraps were flying, while other classmates lay sprawled on the grass in the bright sunshine. Their question had to do with the earthquake monitoring station that he and the physics teacher had set up in that little house. Standing next to the stunted fir tree, he heard the gentle swaying of its needle-covered branches and then the lilt of his own voice: “We detected the Tangshan earthquake three days ago.”
This was greeted with roars of laughter, and he laughed too, saying to himself, Actually, it was I who detected it.
The physics teacher was absent when it happened. The monitor had been quiet ever since it was installed, but at that particular moment it suddenly indicated an abnormality. The physics teacher had not been there to see—it had been ages, in fact, since his last appearance at the monitoring station.
Bai Shu had not told Gu Lin and the others that he was the one who had detected the tremor, for he felt that he should not exclude the physics teacher. And so their mockery was not directed at him alone, but the physics teacher could not hear it.
Their laughter swirled in the wind like those countless paper scraps, but the paper continued to flutter over the grass long after the laughter subsided. With the sun gone the grass looked all the more lush and green and the dancing paper took on a strange beauty. As Bai Shu walked on, still thinking about the physics teacher, he noticed how the leaves on the trees were drooping under a heavy coat of dust.
It was I alone who detected the Tangshan earthquake. He was convinced of this.
When the monitor indicated there had been an event, he was seized with panic, and after he left the house it took him a while to realize he was running as fast as he possibly could. After passing many trees and scaling many steps, he saw the chemistry teacher and the Chinese teacher making faces at each other in the staff room and only a globe visible on the desk of the physics teacher. He stood in the doorway until the Chinese teacher barked, “What do you want?”
This left him all flustered. Later, when he tapped on the door of the physics teacher’s house, he made a noise as slight as the sound of his own breath, fearful that the teacher would not have the patience to hear him out. The door stayed closed.
At that moment the physics teacher was standing next to a line of faucets not far away, carefully washing a gaudy pair of panties and a white bra. When Bai Shu bashfully arrived by his side, he gave a grunt of acknowledgment and continued his scrubbing. He listened to Bai Shu’s report and nodded. “I understand.”
Bai Shu was expecting a further reaction, but the teacher did not raise his head or look at him again. He stood there a long time before plucking up the courage to ask, “Should we report to Beijing?”
Only now did the teacher raise his head. “How come you’re still here?” he asked.
Bai Shu looked at him helplessly. The teacher said nothing more and simply raised the panties to eye level as though to check whether any spot had escaped his attention. Sunshine illuminated the colorful underwear, and Bai Shu, noting how freely and deeply the light entered, felt a tremor of excitement.
“What did you say just now?” the teacher asked.
Bai Shu licked his lip. “Should we report to Beijing?”
“Report?” The teacher frowned. “How do we report? To whom?”
Bai Shu was embarrassed. In the face of the teacher’s impatience, he did not know what to do.
“If by any chance it’s wrong, who’s going to take the blame?”
He didn’t dare say anything more, but continued to stand there until the teacher said, “Off you go, now.”
But later, when questioned by his classmates on the playing field, he told them, “We detected the Tangshan earthquake three days ago.” He didn’t say that he alone had detected it.
“So why aren’t you reporting it to Beijing?” They burst into laughter.
The physics teacher’s comment was right on the mark. How to report? And to whom?
The scraps of paper continued to flutter. For some unknown reason, the monitor had suddenly stopped working. At first Bai Shu thought it was a power outage, but the dim yellow light of that 25-watt bulb was still shining. There must have been some malfunction in the instrument. He could not decide: Should he try to investigate this himself? Later he left the little house at the north end.
Now the paper scraps on the ground flew into the air far behind him. He walked out the school gate and followed the perimeter wall, toward the physics teacher’s home.
The door to the teacher’s house was painted light yellow, a choice his wife had made, for another home she’d known had a door that same color. As Bai Shu knocked, he could faintly hear someone singing inside, and in his mind he pictured the ripples that used to spread across a pond in the early morning, agitating the strands of waterweed that floated on its surface.
The physics teacher’s wife stood in the doorway. It was dark inside the house, but her figure was luminous, for with the light from outside shining on her she glowed like a lamp. Bright eyes looked at him, and then her bright lips began to move. “You’re Bai Shu?”
He nodded. He saw how her left hand leaned against the doorframe, four fingers bent as though stuck there, one finger invisible.
“He’s not home. He went out,” she said.
Bai Shu’s hand fumbled around on his leg.
“Come in,” she said.
Bai Shu shook his head.
The laugh of the physics teacher’s wife spilled out of an open book, and he heard the sound of an organ slowly rise from the classroom downstairs. In the songs that she sang in her music classes there was the same laughter as now. At one such moment the tree leaves stretched toward him through the open window, but he was forced to leave them and move toward the blackboard, where the physics teacher handed him a piece of chalk. As he stood there in front of the class, the organ downstairs seemed to strike a desolate note.
“You can’t just stand there,” she said with a smile.
It was always at that moment, when the organ music floated up from downstairs and the leaves outside the window reached toward him, that he was forced to abandon them both. He turned to leave, saying, “I’ll go and look for him.”
As he followed the perimeter wall, he sensed that she was still standing in the doorway, her eyes pinned on his figure. This thought made him walk with a swagger.
As he left the blackboard and returned to his seat, Gu Lin and the others burst out laughing.
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br /> The monitor broke down this morning—that was something Gu Lin and the others did not know, otherwise they would burst out laughing once more.
Having walked the full length of the wall, he had returned now to the main gate, and there he ran into the physics teacher on his way back from town. On hearing Bai Shu’s report, the teacher nodded curtly. “I understand.”
Bai Shu followed him. “Are you going to take a look?”
“All right,” the physics teacher said. But he continued to walk toward his house.
“How about you go now?” Bai Shu persisted.
“All right, I’ll go now.”
The teacher walked a fair distance before he realized Bai Shu was still following him. He came to a halt. “Go on home,” he said.
Bai Shu stood there watching as the teacher walked toward his house. The teacher didn’t need to knock—all he needed to do was fish the key out of his pocket and he could enter, enter through the door that her hand had just touched. Because there was no light on inside, his wife stood shining in the doorway. She wore a black dress that came from a lively, bustling city.
He could see that the physics teacher was distracted as he handed him the chalk. The organ music from downstairs was wafting between them, and once more that lovely pond on the west side of town appeared in his mind’s eye, along with the shrubs and trees that sheltered it. The organ continued to play its haunting tune. But he didn’t know what he was supposed to do when he got to the blackboard. He and the teacher were equally bemused as the music rose and fell and the tree leaves swayed from side to side. He turned round and gazed inquiringly at the physics teacher, who had forgotten the task he had planned to assign. The two of them stood there looking at each other, until Gu Lin and the others started chuckling. “Go back to your seat,” the teacher said.
His classmates hooted.
2
The physics teacher sat in a chair, his feet scuffing the floor restlessly. “It’s bedlam out on the streets now.”
She stuck her hand out the window, and the breeze blew the curtain toward her face. A brown cow passed by, mooing as it went. A long time ago, an expanse of rapeseed blossom had glittered in the sunlight and a white lamb had come trotting down from the distant grassy slopes. She closed the window. She had never paid another visit to her grandmother in the countryside. Now the light was on inside the apartment.
He turned to look at her and through the window beyond saw that the sky was murky. “The old guy who sells soy sauce—the one who lives opposite the west wharf—saw a pack of rats early this morning, all in a tidy line as they crossed the street, each gripping between its teeth the tail of the one in front. He said there were at least fifty of them, crossing the street in an orderly way, without the slightest panic. A driver from the machine plant saw them too. His truck didn’t run them over—somehow that whole long procession managed to pass under his wheels.”
She was in the kitchen now and he heard rice being poured into the pot. “That’s what the old guy said?” she asked.
“No, not him. Someone else.”
Water splashed into the pot.
“I always wonder how credible these rumors are,” she said.
Her fingers stirred the pot and the water was dumped out.
“But everyone in the street is saying the same thing.”
More water in the pot. “All it takes is for one person to say so, and everyone follows suit.”
She knocked over a broom as she moved around in the kitchen, and then he heard her light the briquette stove.
“Last night there was a well south of here that seethed for two whole hours,” he went on.
She came out of the kitchen. “That’s just another rumor.”
“But lots of people went to see, and they all confirmed it.”
“Still just rumor.”
He said nothing and simply put his hand to his forehead. She went over to the window. Even before the onset of night, the sky was already a leaden gray. Outside, a hen was stretching its wings and chasing something. She closed the curtains.
“Did you hear chickens and dogs last night?” he asked.
“No.” She shook her head.
“Neither did I,” he said. “But everyone else heard them—they were making a racket the whole night, apparently. We’re the only ones who didn’t hear, so we’ve got to believe them.”
“Maybe they should believe us.”
He got up from his chair. “Why do you never believe other people?”
“Is it heroes who create history? Or is it the masses who create history?” The politics teacher had asked.
“The masses create history.”
“Who are the masses? Cai Tianyi.”
“The masses are the entire working people.”
“Sit down. How about the heroes? Wang Zhong.”
“ ‘Heroes’ means slave-owners, capitalists, the exploiting classes.”
On that day, the news of her grandmother’s death in the countryside was still making its way toward her.
3
For some time now, reports had been circulating that an earthquake was imminent. Zhong Qimin sat by the window, his right hand on the windowsill, his left hand holding a flute. His eyes skimmed over the open lot before him, and through the leaves of the distant elm trees he looked for the sky. He could dimly make out a pale strip of light, bent like a worm. All at once its glow split into two pieces, and then the brightness at the two ends shrank until the light disappeared. But the sky kept on drifting just as calmly as before.
Wu Quan came back from the street with worrying news. “There’s going to be an earthquake any moment. That’s what the loudspeakers are saying.”
Wu Quan’s wife was standing at the doorway. For a pregnant woman, she had an unusually pale complexion. She watched in alarm as her husband walked toward her. He came up to her and said a few words, and she turned her ponderous body and went into the house. Wu Quan switched his attention to the anxious neighbors. “There’s going to be an earthquake. The next county over made the announcement last night, but only now are they telling us here.”
His wife emerged and slipped a roll of banknotes into his hand. “Be sure to collect all the valuables,” he muttered.
He stuffed the money into his pocket and marched toward the street, crying at the top of his voice, “Earthquake’s coming!”
As his shout receded into the distance, Zhong Qimin gave a sigh of relief, happy to see him go. A few people remained on the vacant lot, talking quietly.
“Earthquakes most often strike at night,” Wang Hongsheng said.
“Usually when people are sound asleep,” Lin Gang added.
“Earthquakes seem to prefer places where there are lots of people.”
“Yeah, if there’s nobody around, an earthquake is pointless.”
“Wang Hongsheng!” an angry voice called.
Lin Gang gave Wang Hongsheng a push. “You’re wanted.”
Wang Hongsheng turned in the direction of the caller.
“Get back here! Help me figure out what to do.”
Wang Hongsheng, looking bored, answered the summons. The others stood for a little while longer before they too dispersed. Now Li Ying appeared in the doorway, a woeful look on her face. “How come my husband’s not back yet?”
Zhong Qimin picked up his flute and put it to his lips. One eye on the plaintive Li Ying, he began to play. It was as though a strip of water, broad but thin, hovered in the sky. There were trees moving in the fields, their limbs emitting a soughing moan. When the river steamer left Wanxian, the night was deep, the massed mountains on both banks rising and falling like waves in the moonlight, their summits glistening. In the silence of night the river flowed, and the wind that blew across the river had no place to go
, so it arrived with a wail and left with a wail as well.
With the rumors that an earthquake was on its way, his window had lost its former calm. Everyone seemed to have moved their beds closer to their doors, and he was constantly hearing the noise of furniture being shifted around, tables and beds driven this way and that like beasts of burden. As night fell, the doors stayed open, and when sunlight shone in the next morning he got vague and partial glimpses of people in sleeping posture, and thus dawn’s calm was silently shattered.
As the sun rose, an expanse of light grew freely in the crystal-clear waters and the azure sea sang as it flowed past the bow to mark a happy dawn. But later, sailboats began to appear in the far distance, their sails stuck into the ocean surface like dilapidated feathers, rocking back and forth in loneliness. That’s the heartbreak a vagabond feels as he follows his endless trail.
Li Ying’s husband came back from town, bringing still more alarming news. “Everyone’s buying bamboos and plastic sheeting.”
Zhong Qimin laid the flute on his right arm and watched as Li Ying’s husband walked toward his front door. Well, at least he doesn’t look so threatening, he said to himself.
“They’ve rigged up lots of shelters in the courtyard of the County Revolutionary Committee,” Li Ying’s husband was telling people, “and the school has put up shelters on the playing field too. Nobody dares stay inside anymore—they say there’s going to be an earthquake tonight.”
Li Ying came out of her house. “Where the hell have you been?” she yelled.
On the streets everyone was rushing to buy bamboo and plastic rain sheeting. The window, tranquil for a while just now, was thrown into disturbance once more.
The inns where he had stayed had been on busy streets, and it was always impossible to gain a respite from all the noise. Clamor and din lacked the harmony and beauty that he craved, trumpeting and roaring for their own narrow purposes. If people just had a common goal, Zhong Qimin thought, then every little corner could give birth to music.