by Yu Hua
Only a few yellowed weeds remained. A wooden plank bridge lay atop the ditch. Rather than crossing and continuing down the path, Willow entered a thatched cottage by the side of the road.
The cottage doubled as a tavern. A few plates of white boiled meat were laid out on a counter. There were three people inside the tavern. The proprietor was small and thin, while the two waiters were tall and solidly built. They were wearing cotton robes, but the robes were clean, and Willow couldn’t make out any patches on the material. That the wine shop had managed to stay in business in times like these, like a weed sprouting out of a rock, was remarkable.
And, while the people in the shop were hardly glowing with good health, they were neither pallid nor emaciated. This was one of the few times along the way that Willow had actually seen people who still looked somewhat like people.
The night before, after he left town, Willow had walked by moonlight until just before dawn, finally rolling himself up like a bedroll in the corner of a broken-down roadside pavilion to sleep. He had risen with the first dim light of dawn and continued his journey. Now, standing at the threshold of the tavern, his body began to tremble, and his eyelids fluttered with fatigue. He hadn’t had a bite to eat or a drop to drink for almost two days. Nor had he slept well.
This kind of pace would be difficult to maintain. The proprietor beamed and gestured for him to come in. “What is it that you’d like?”
Willow walked into the shop, sat down at a table, and ordered a bowl of tea and a few griddle cakes. The propri-Classical Love 39
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etor took his order and, a moment later, brought him the tea and cakes. Willow drained his tea bowl in one swallow and then slowly began to eat the griddle cakes.
At this point, a man who looked like a merchant came into the shop. The merchant, clad in brocades, was quite clearly a man of some distinction. Two servants, bearing carrying poles, followed behind him. The merchant took a seat at a table, and the proprietor furnished him with a cup of good wine, at the same time ladling out a second cupful to set down on the table. The merchant drained his first cup in one draught, extracted a few ingots of silver from his sleeve, and slapped them down on the tabletop saying, “I want some meat.”
The waiters rushed over to his table, bearing two plates of white, boiled meat. The merchant glanced at the plates, pushed them toward his two servants, and added, “I want mine fresh.”
The proprietor hastened to reply, “Coming right up.”
So saying, he and the waiters walked into an adjacent room.
Willow finished his griddle cakes, but, rather than standing up to go, he sat for a while to rest. Spirits refreshed by the nourishment, he turned to appraise the merchant and his retinue. The two servants were seated, but, because their master’s meal had yet to be served, they didn’t dare touch the food on their own plates. The merchant drained cup after cup of wine, finally crying out impatiently, “What’s taking so long?”
The proprietor called back from the other room, “Coming right up. Coming right up.”
Willow stood up, threw his bundle on his back, and
made his way toward the door. A gut-wrenching, heartrend-ing scream erupted from the other room. The sound was suffused with such unbearable pain that it was as if a sharp sword had penetrated Willow’s chest. Willow was left dazed and frightened by this sudden eruption. The scream was 40 yu hua
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long, drawn out, as if an entire life had been expelled in one breath. The sound whistled across the room. Willow seemed to see the sound of the scream as it punched its way through the walls of the other room and into the shop.
The sound died down abruptly, and in the fraction of silence in between, Willow heard the squeak of an ax being wrenched from bone. Images of all that he had witnessed the day before at the meat market reappeared in his mind.
The screams rang out once more, this time in shreds of sound, as if the cries themselves had been chopped apart.
Willow thought these sounds were as short as fingers, flying neatly past him, piece by piece. In the midst of these minced cries, Willow heard the sound of the ax bearing down. The sound of the ax and the sound of the screams rose and fell in unison, filling in each other’s gaps.
Cold shivers ran down Willow’s spine. But the three men sitting at the table seemed not to have heard the screams, for they sat nonchalantly drinking their wine. Every once in a while, the merchant glanced impatiently up at the door.
The sound in the next room began to taper off, and Willow heard a woman moaning. The moans had already lost much of their intensity. They sounded almost calm, so calm that they hardly resembled moans at all, for they were as tranquil as the sound of a zither drifting through the air, as serene as chanted poetry heard from afar. The sound drizzled down like drops of rain. The scene of three years before, when he had stood entranced by the maiden’s recitation below the window of the brocade tower, hazily resurfaced in Willow’s mind. This image was quickly replaced by an awareness that the sound emerging from the other room was indeed a kind of chant. Without knowing exactly why, Willow suddenly began to suspect that this was the maiden’s voice and began to tremble.
Willow instinctively moved toward the door that led to the other room. Just as he reached the door, the proprietor and the two waiters emerged from the room. One of the Classical Love 41
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waiters was holding a blood-spattered ax, and the other was holding someone’s leg. The leg was still bleeding. Willow could discern the sound of each drop pooling on the dirt floor. Looking down at the floor, Willow saw that it was spackled with dried blood. A strange stench filled his nose.
Clearly, this was not the first person who had been slaughtered here.
Inside the room, Willow saw a woman prone on the floor, her hair in disarray. The leg that had been left intact was held bent slightly to the side. The other leg was gone. Blood and flesh blurred together into an indistinct mass where the leg had been chopped away. Willow went to her side, kneeled down, and delicately brushed a lock of hair away from her face. The woman’s almond-shaped eyes were
opened very wide, but they were dull and lusterless. Willow carefully probed her face. This, he soon ascertained, was indeed the maiden Hui. The room began to spin around him. How could he have known that, after three years, he would find the maiden here, only after she had become fodder for a merchant’s meal? Willow’s tears welled up like water from a spring.
The maiden had yet to breathe her last. She continued to moan. The terrible pain was clearly evident from the way in which her face twisted. As her moans began to subside, they became delicate and drawn out, like the purling of flowing water. Although her almond-shaped eyes were opened very wide, she failed to recognize Willow. She saw instead a stranger, a man she entreated with her last moans to finish her off with one stroke of a knife.
Despite Willow’s cries, she could not recognize him for who he was. In his helplessness and pain, Willow suddenly thought of the lock of hair the maiden had given him on the occasion of their last parting. He pulled the lock out of his bundle and placed it in her field of vision. After a moment, the maiden’s eyes blinked, and her moans came to a sudden halt. Willow watched her eyes grow soft and luminous with 42 yu hua
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tears, as her hands groped toward him unnoticed, stroking the air.
With her last words, the maiden entreated Willow to buy back her leg, so that she could die whole. And she begged Willow to kill her with one stroke of a knife. Finally, she gazed at Willow with great serenity, as if she were now completely content, as if she could ask for no more than to have encountered Willow once more before her death.
Willow stood up, left the room, and went into the
kitchen. A servant was in the process of paring the meat from the maiden’s leg. The leg
had already been hacked to pieces. Willow pushed the servant aside, pulled all of his silver from his bundle, and flung it down on the stove top.
This was what was left of the silver the maiden had given him three years ago in the brocade tower. As he gathered up the leg, Willow noticed a sharp knife lying on the kitchen table. The image of the woman at the market stabbing her little girl appeared in his mind. He hesitated for a moment before picking up the knife.
By the time Willow had arrived once again by the
maiden’s side, she had stopped moaning. Her gaze was tranquil, remote, just as he had imagined it might be as she stood gazing down at him through the window of the tower.
Seeing that Willow had brought her leg, she opened her mouth, but no sound emerged. Her voice had already died.
Willow set the leg next to where it had been severed from her body. He watched the maiden’s lips curl into a smile.
She glanced at the knife in his hand and looked up at him.
Willow knew what it was she wanted.
Although the maiden would never moan again, her face had become increasingly distorted by the unbearable pain.
Willow lacked the strength to go on gazing at the misery inscribed on her face. He closed his eyes. He groped for her chest, felt the faint pulse of her heart under his trembling fingers. A moment later, he shifted his hand away from her heart and, with his other hand, brandished the knife. The Classical Love 43
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blade bore swiftly down. The body underneath him recoiled violently. As he held her fast, he felt her body gradually relax. When her body stopped moving, Willow began to shake uncontrollably.
After a long pause, Willow opened his eyes. The maiden’s eyes had closed, and her face was no longer distorted. Instead, it had become inexpressibly serene.
Willow knelt by the maiden’s side, entranced. Countless memories enveloped him like dense mist, descending suddenly, and just as suddenly dispersing into the air. He saw the dazzling spectacle of the pleasure garden, the colorful splendor of the brocade tower. Then, nothingness, a vast empty sky.
Willow picked up the maiden’s body and cradled it in arms, oblivious to the way the severed leg lay unsteadily perched over his arm. He walked out of the room and into the tavern, without noticing the elation of the merchant as he gnawed on meat cut from the maiden’s leg. He walked out of the wine shop and stepped onto the yellow highway.
The fields were enveloped by yellow as far as the eyes could see. It was the height of spring, and not a patch of green could be seen, let alone a field of brilliant flowers.
Willow walked slowly forward, glancing now and again at the maiden’s face. She looked content, fulfilled, but Willow’s soul had been cut off from his body, accompanied in its wanderings only by a dream.
After traveling a short distance, Willow came to a desolate little stream, flanked by a few withered willow trees. A little water remained in the streambed, and although the water was muddy and turbid, it still flowed, emitting a purling murmur. Willow set the maiden’s body down by the bank and sat down.
He began to examine the maiden. She was splattered
with dried blood and mud. With the sound of tearing cloth, Willow began to remove her tattered garments. Soon, her body emerged from beneath the cloth, pure and white.
Willow carefully wiped away the blood and mud from her 44 yu hua
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body with water from the stream. When he arrived at the severed leg, he was forced once again to shut his eyes, for it was riddled with holes. In his mind’s eye, the scenes he had witnessed at the market in town came once again to mind.
He placed the leg outside his field of vision.
Opening his eyes, he was dazzled by the place from
which the leg had been severed. He could still discern where the ax had cut messily and repeatedly into the flesh, like the stump of a felled tree that has been hastily hacked to the ground. Random strands of skin and flesh hung from the stump in a pulpy mass. Extending his fingers toward this mass, he found it incomparably soft, but his fingers were flustered by the sharp edge of shattered bone that lay within. Willow stared for a long time, until an image of crumbling ruins came vaguely to mind.
He soon came to a stream of dried blood on her chest.
Willow carefully wiped away the stain. The skin and flesh that had been displaced by the knife as it had stabbed into the chest had curled out around the puncture, deep red, like a peach flower in bloom. Recalling that it was he himself who had done the stabbing, Willow’s body trembled. Three years of longing had culminated in a stroke of a knife. Willow didn’t dare believe that such a thing had come to pass.
Having removed all of the blood and dirt, Willow re-examined the body. The maiden was laid out on the ground, her skin as clear as ice, as lustrous as jade. In death, the maiden lived on. And Willow sat by her side, insensible, uncomprehending, desolate. Willow survived, but he was half dead.
Willow removed his only change of clothing from the bundle and dressed the maiden. She looked terribly frail clad in Willow’s overly large robe. The sight reduced him to tears.
Willow dug a trench with his bare hands, gathered dry twigs and branches to cover the bottom and line the sides, and lowered the maiden inside. He proceeded to cover her Classical Love 45
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with a layer of twigs. Willow could still glimpse patches of her skin from between the twigs. He covered her with a layer of earth, built a burial mound on top of the grave, and sprinkled it with water from the stream.
Finally he sat down next to the grave, his mind utterly vacant. It was only after the moon rose that Willow came to his senses. He saw the light of the moon gleaming as it shone on top of the burial mound. He heard the murmur of the stream, and he thought perhaps the maiden could hear it too. If she could, this place would not be quite as unbearably lonely for her.
Thus reflecting, Willow stood, stepped onto the broad, moonlit highway, and began to move through the silent colors of the night. As he gradually left the maiden behind, his heart hollowed. With every step he heard the lone sound of the writing brush in his bundle tapping against the inkstone.
5
Several years later, Willow stepped onto the yellow highway for the third time.
He still wore a bundle on his back, but he was not on his way to the examinations in the capital. After he had buried the maiden, he had continued on to the capital, but any desire for worldly success he might once have possessed had by then already disappeared. So it was that he had failed the exam once more. Rather than shame, he had felt a kind of tranquillity as he had stepped onto the highway that brought him home.
When Willow had returned to the stream beside which he had buried the maiden on his way home from the capital, ten or twenty other equally desolate grave mounds had been dug in the same spot, so that Willow had no longer been able to tell which grave belonged to the maiden. Willow 46 yu hua
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stood by the river for a long time, transfixed by the realization that his was not the only heart that had been broken.
And this thought was strangely comforting. Willow plucked the weeds growing out of each of the untended mounds and finally covered each grave with a fresh layer of soil. He gazed on his handiwork, and, failing once again to distinguish which of the graves belonged to the maiden, he sighed and left.
Willow traveled home, relying on alms for sustenance along the way. When he arrived, though, he found that the thatched cottage had vanished without a trace. Empty space stood where his house had once been. Even his mother’s cloth loom was gone. Willow – having had an inkling that this was to transpire when he had left home several months earlier – was not surprised. He was occupied instead by the question of how to keep body and soul together. He became a beggar, spent his days asking for food and alms. It was onl
y much later, when the times took a turn for the better, that Willow secured a position watching over the graveyard of an aristocratic clan. Willow took up residence in a thatched hut by the graveyard. His duties were light –
weeding, piling fresh soil on the mounds – so he had ample time in which to recite poetry and paint pictures. He was poor, but these activities imparted a touch of elegance to his life. Every so often he would start to dwell on the past, and vivid recollections of the dead maiden’s face would resurface in his mind for a spell. Each time this happened, Willow’s thoughts clouded over until his reveries were finally dis-pelled with a deep sigh. Several years passed in this manner.
One year, the master of the estate sent the family out to the graveyard to sweep their ancestors’ graves and make offerings to their spirits for the Qingming Festival.3 With a great deal of pomp and ceremony, a dozen handsome young 3Literally, the “clear and bright” festival, an April holiday during which Chinese families honor the dead.
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men and women, accompanied by their maids, nannies, and servants, poured into the graveyard. In a twinkling of the eye, piles of baubles had been spread before the graves as offerings, fragrant incense burned brightly, and the sound of weeping rose into the air. Standing in their midst, Willow began to cry. He shed tears not for his master’s ancestors but rather because it was Qingming and he was unable to fulfill his own filial duty by sweeping his parents’ graves. He thought of the maiden’s lonely burial mound and was rocked by another wave of feeling, for while his parents could accompany each other on their nether journey to the Nine Springs, the maiden would be miserably alone.
The next morning, Willow left the clan without even saying good-bye. Stopping only to sweep his mother and father’s graves, he stepped directly onto the yellow highway and hastened toward the banks of the stream where the maiden lay in eternal repose. Willow traveled for several days through a lovely spring landscape full of happy and colorful scenes. He gazed at stands of peaches and willows flourishing between the mulberry and hemp fields. He saw thatched cottages sitting amid groves of verdant trees and clusters of jade-green bamboo. Water coursed through the irrigation channels. The desolation of the past was nowhere in evidence, and Willow found himself thinking of the prosperity he had seen on the occasion of his first journey down the yellow highway. Images of desolation and prosperity cycled in turns through his mind, shuttling back and forth so that the yellow highway under his feet came to seem real one minute and entirely insubstantial the next. Even as these delightful spring visions leapt before his eyes, the desolation of the past lingered like a shadow cast on the roadside by the bright sun overhead. Willow wondered how long the prosperity could last.