by Yu Hua
The truck driver heard his mother ask: How can he pull it back?
He can’t, the fortune-teller said. But he can prevent the other foot from slipping past the brink.
The fortune-teller said: Whenever he meets a woman in gray on the road, he must immediately stop his truck.
The truck driver saw his mother stick her right hand into her pocket, extract a one-yuan note, and place it in the fortune-teller’s outstretched hand. He saw that the fortune-teller’s hand looked like white bone after skin and muscle have all been pared away.
4
The woman in gray reappeared two days after the
truck driver saw her at the fortune-teller’s residence.
The truck driver was driving his blue truck down a winding mountain road as dusk approached. He was looking World Like Mist 67
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through the open window of the truck at the town in the valley below. It looked like a heap of broken roof tiles strewn across the ground.
It was then that the woman in gray made her appearance.
She was walking down the road, her clothes shapeless and billowing in the wind.
It was a cloudy day, and the truck driver failed at first to notice the color of her clothes, for although he had caught sight of her from quite a distance away, he somehow assumed that she was wearing dark blue. It was only as he was bearing down on her that the truck driver realized his mistake. By the time he had stepped on the brakes, it was already too late. He had passed her.
As the truck driver jumped down from the cab, he saw the woman in gray moving past the right flank of the truck.
While it seemed that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he quickly realized that this was the same woman in gray he had seen two days earlier at the fortune-teller’s place. The wind had blown her clothes into disarray, but a dark cloud obstinately hovered around her features. As she walked toward the truck driver, he felt as if he were standing once more at the door to the fortune-teller’s apartment.
The truck driver put out a hand to block her forward movement and told her that he was willing to pay twenty yuan for her jacket. She stared, bewildered by the offer. The jacket was worth five yuan at most. He held out two ten yuan notes. She peeled off the gray jacket, revealing a black sweater underneath.
The truck driver took hold of the shirt. It felt cold and clammy to the touch, as if it had been peeled from a corpse.
The feel of the cloth under his fingers seemed like a premonitory confirmation of his fears. He spread the shirt out underneath the front tire of the truck, climbed back in the cab, and started the engine. He glanced at the woman standing by the roadside, who gazed perplexedly back at him. The tires rolled across the jacket, grinding it into the 68 yu hua
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asphalt. The woman disappeared behind him. The truck driver located her in his rearview mirror. At first, she almost filled the glass, but, as he continued to drive, her image gradually receded into the distance. But, even after he had returned home to town, his thoughts hovered around the way she had seemed to float down the highway, gray jacket fluttering in the wind. At least there was comfort in the fact that the jacket had met an ugly fate on his behalf.
chapter two
1
On that rainy and overcast morning, 6 got up early
and went to the riverbank to fish. He had been in the habit of going fishing in the morning ever since his first daughter was born. Over the years, his wife had given him seven daughters. Soon after the seventh daughter was born, his wife had died and made her way to the Yellow Springs in the West. He would never forget the expression on her face just before she died. She had gazed at him with a look of unmitigated envy. Now, many years later, his seven daughters were no longer a burden to him. They had become, on the contrary, the source of his wealth. Now, whenever he had occasion to recall his wife’s last look, he fancied that he understood exactly what she had meant. He had sold each of his first six daughters for three thousand yuan to buyers scattered all across the country. And, of the six daughters he had sold, only the third had written him a letter after she had been taken away. She had told him how bitter her new life was. She had told him how much she longed to come home. At the end of the letter, she concluded: It looks like I won’t live for very much longer.
6 had managed to read that far only with the greatest of effort. Having finished, he had tossed the letter on top of his desk with a casual flick of his wrist. Sometime later, the letter World Like Mist 69
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had disappeared. He never even noticed that it was gone, because he had forgotten what it said almost as soon as he had read it. But the letter wasn’t lost. Instead, 6’s seventh daughter had discovered it sitting on the desk and hidden it away.
When 6 got out of bed, his daughter woke with a start.
Not yet sixteen, she was already afflicted with a recurrent nightmare. A man wearing a sheepskin jacket advanced slowly toward her, teeth bared and hands outstretched. And each time he clasped her hands in his, she was powerless to resist. In her waking life, she had seen this man in a sheepskin jacket six times. Each time he had come, he had taken one of her older sisters away with him. His presence enveloped her like a bad omen. It was clear to her that she had read her own fate in the words of her third sister’s letter and even clearer still that this fate was drawing closer with each passing day. Soon, she knew, she would be dragged away into the distance by the man in the sheepskin jacket.
She heard her father kick over a little stool. She heard the slap of his rubber boots as he emerged from his room. She knew he was moving toward the front door. He kept his fishing rod by the door. He left the house, coughing. Each cough sounded like a gust of hard rain. The sound gradually faded into the distance but continued to echo in her ears long after he had left.
6 walked out of the house into the lacquered darkness of the hour before dawn. Pale greenish light shone from the street lamps. Drizzle slanted through the beams like tiny green fireflies cascading onto the ground. Little sparkles played over the dark surface of the water by the riverbank.
The dense drizzle made him feel as though he were walking in a damp, foggy bubble. He discovered that there were already two fishermen sitting by the bank, dimly illuminated by the glow of the street lamps. They were perched next to each other, huddled so close that they appeared to be connected. He found it odd that anyone would have come to the river even earlier than himself. Sitting down in his cus-70 yu hua
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tomary position on a rock that jutted above the water, he felt a cold breeze play across his body. He glanced toward the two newcomers as he lowered his hook into the water.
Both of them caught a fish at the very same time. A moment later, they caught two more. And over the next few minutes, at regular intervals, the strange pair continued to lift pairs of fish from the river simultaneously. Stranger still, all of this was accomplished without so much as a whisper of sound. He heard neither the flap of the fish struggling on the hook nor the splash of their bodies breaking the water’s surface. After another moment of observation, he discovered that the newcomers ate the fish as soon as they had been caught, taking hold of each pair, depositing them in their mouths, and quickly swallowing up the soft, reflected glimmer of their scales. This motion, too, was soundless. He sat for a long time as they fished and ate. When the sky began to lighten, he noticed for the first time that their fishing rods were equipped with neither hook, bait, nor fishing line. Instead, two long, bare bamboo stalks dangled over the water. At the same time, he realized that they had no legs.
And try as he might, he couldn’t see their faces. It was at that moment that he heard a rooster crow in the distance.
He watched as they plunged noiselessly into the river and disappeared.
2
The woman in gray had
gone to see the fortune-
teller that morning because her daughter had failed to bear a child after five years of marriage. She had long harbored suspicions that her daughter’s natal coordinates clashed with those of her husband, but it was only now that she had decided to ask the fortune-teller’s advice. She left the house at the crack of dawn. As she walked along the lane, she saw 6 on his way back from the riverbank. 6’s eyes looked pink, World Like Mist 71
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and when he passed by, her clothes rustled. She could not help but turn and glance at 6’s figure retreating down the lane. The sight produced a feeling of heaviness in her limbs, a feeling that only grew more pronounced as she continued to walk. In the drizzly morning gloom, her breath seemed to come as slowly as the water dripping from the eaves of the houses along the lane.
A moment later, she caught sight of the blind man sitting by the corner near the fortune-teller’s building. A group of girls passed by on their way to school, twittering like magpies, voices brilliantly colorful in the dull drizzle.
The woman in gray watched as the blind man’s face clouded over with some sort of unfathomable feeling. It seemed to her that the blind man had been sitting in the same place for a long time, but for just how long she didn’t know.
As she stood at the narrow front door of the fortune-teller’s building, a tall, thin man squeezed effortlessly by her before she could even move aside to let him pass. She recognized him immediately. He was the fortune-teller’s fifty-year-old son. She glanced back at his emaciated body flitting down the sidewalk like a shadow.
Arriving at the fortune-teller’s apartment, she discovered that the old man already knew why she had come. She could tell from the insinuating smile that lit his pallid face. The five fierce-looking roosters began to crow. As she listened to their piercing cries, she began to think of the strange stories she had heard bandied around town concerning the fortune-teller and his son.
The woman in gray told the fortune-teller why she had come. Her voice echoed dully through the room.
As soon as the fortune-teller had examined the eight natal coordinates of her daughter and her daughter’s husband, he told her that they were made for each other. There was no conflict at all.
But it’s been five years, the woman in gray pointed out.
The fortune-teller expressed his regret. He was unable to 72 yu hua
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help. At the same time, he might recommend that she visit the fertility goddess at the temple outside of town. Perhaps the goddess would send her a dream in which the circumstances surrounding her daughter’s childlessness would be explained.
The woman in gray stood to leave just as the truck driver and his mother arrived. She hardly noticed their arrival and for this reason failed to see that the truck driver was almost painfully aware of her presence in the hallway.
At the fortune-teller’s recommendation, the woman in gray proceeded directly to the temple in the foothills outside of town. She prostrated herself before the huge, gilded fertility goddess, burned incense, and returned home. She felt worried and uneasy for the rest of the day, until she finally got into bed and fell asleep. On waking the next morning before dawn, she hazily remembered a dream. She had been at the temple. The gilded goddess was drained of color and the temple empty. The goddess’ smiling lips were immobile, but she heard a voice float toward her: If you wish to know whether there will be a child, ask the man in the street. She rose and, without so much as touching a comb to her hair, rushed out of the lane and into the street.
The sun had yet to rise. A crescent of red cloud lingered above the hills to the east like a huge lip. The empty street echoed with the distant sound of footsteps. After a few moments, three men with carrying poles slung over their shoulders walked toward her through the haze. She moved forward to intercept them. Their shoulder poles, laden with fruit, squeaked as they walked. The first man was carrying apples, the second bananas, and the third oranges. Oranges have seeds, she thought to herself. She approached the third man. He was a sturdy man in his thirties with beads of sweat rolling down his face.
The woman in gray asked: Are you selling these oranges?
The man responded: Yes.
Do they have seeds or not? she asked.
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They’re seedless, the man said.
The woman in gray froze. A moment passed. Now she
understood. Her daughter was barren. The family line would be broken, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it.
3
For two days after the omen of the seedless oranges, the woman in gray was plunged into despair. On the second night, however, new hope stirred among the ashes of her disappointment. She traveled once more to the temple outside the city to propitiate the goddess. It was as she walked back to town along the mountain road that she encountered the truck driver and his utterly mystifying request. She gave him her jacket and accepted his twenty yuan, but the notes somehow felt wrong, so wrong that she checked to see whether they were real. She watched as the truck driver bent down, set the jacket down under the front tires, hopped in the cab, and started the engine. The truck driver gave her a final, piercing look, and with a dull thud of its engine, the truck started to roll down the dusty road. Strangely, the truck was very clean. She bent over to examine her jacket, which lay on the road, embossed by tire treads. There was something pitiful about it. It looked like it was dead. She took a few steps forward, picked it up. It was still the same jacket as before, the same jacket she had picked up from the stool next to her bed when she woke up in the morning. She put it on and continued down the road. The truck had already reached the bottom of the hill on its way into town.
Seen from afar, it reminded her of a little brown bug that had crawled onto her leg a few days before.
Soon, she too made her way into town. The sidewalks were nearly empty, and she felt cool and clear, her body as light and insubstantial as the little streams of smoke float-74 yu hua
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ing out of the chimneys atop the houses. The drizzle had stopped the day before, but the overcast sky seemed to hint at rain.
The last person she saw before she got home was 6’s daughter. She was standing at the window, fixedly gazing at the wall across the lane. A few weeds that had sprung up from between the bricks were swaying in the wind. As she caught sight of the girl in the window, the woman in gray could not suppress a shiver, for it seemed that a kind of death was slowly spreading across the girl’s face. The woman in gray’s surprise quickly grew into outright alarm. The look was actually a curse. And for someone who has just come back from a consultation with a goddess, such a curse would be especially danger-ous, for it could only mean that all her efforts at the temple had been in vain. The woman in gray turned these thoughts over in her mind as she approached home. She was greeted at the door by the crisp, sweet sound of her daughter chewing on a stick of sugarcane.
4
6’s strange experience by the riverbank repeated
itself twice in the next two days. At first, 6 tried not to take the presence of the two footless fishermen to heart. He continued to sit in his customary place a stone’s throw away from them. He tried to speak with them many times and in the end didn’t know what to make of their obstinate silence.
They continued to catch fish and pop them in their mouths just as before. But he couldn’t catch a single one. On the second morning, he tried to walk toward them, but as soon as he approached, they plunged silently into the water. Just when he began to wonder where they had gone, he turned to see that they were sitting a few yards further down the bank. He returned to his own perch and sat down. He began to feel terribly drowsy. He stared at the water, over-World Like Mist 75
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&n
bsp; come by its glimmering, mesmeric motion. He felt his body list backward and slide down the rock. And then he felt nothing.
That same morning, 6’s daughter heard someone calling her name as she lay in bed in the darkness before dawn. The voice was soft and quiet, like a draught whispering into the room from underneath the door. She got up, put on her clothes, and went to answer the door. The voice was gone, but when she opened the door, she found her father prone on the ground in front of the house. The street was empty. Her father was snoring. So she dragged him inside, and before she had managed to prop him up on his bed, he came to with a start.
6 looked bewilderedly at his daughter. He quite clearly recollected having left the house to go fishing by the river.
She told him that she had indeed heard him leave the house.
And her account of finding him by the front door confirmed his suspicion that something very strange was happening.
The early morning sun found him walking toward the
fortune-teller’s place.
Before he had even finished his story, the fortune-teller’s expression underwent a dramatic change. Even 6 noticed the difference. Watching the fortune-teller’s countenance darken to a bluish pallor, he began to have an inkling of what had happened.
The fortune-teller asked 6 to confirm that the two fishermen seemed not to have any legs. Then he traced a character in the dust coating the table. Almost as soon as it had taken shape, he erased it.
In the split second between the two motions, 6 recognized just what character it was that the fortune-teller had written. He shivered.
The fortune-teller told him never to go to the river when it was still dark outside.
Terrified, 6 returned home to find his daughter standing by the window, her face obscured by shadow. Her face spoke 76 yu hua
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of the fact that the man in the sheepskin jacket had come for a visit, but her back was mute. The man in the sheepskin jacket had rapped on the door with his fingers. She could tell by the way the sound carried through the room. 6’s daughter opened the front door to the man who represented her own demise. The man in the sheepskin jacket fixed his eyes on her, and she felt her own eyes would be dug from their sockets by his appraising gaze. She told him 6 was out and slammed the door shut. The door locked into place with a resounding crack that failed to drown out the ringing in her ears. She knew he would be back.