by Yu Hua
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head against the ground for a long, long time, and when he finally lifted his head to look, the path leading up to his front door was clear.
chapter four
1
On a placid, moonlit night one week after his
death, the truck driver came to his mother as she slept in her rosewood bed. It was sometime before dawn. He seemed nervous and depressed as he stood by her bedside. She saw a long, slender gash on the right side of his neck. Blood churned in the wound but didn’t bleed. He told his mother that he wanted to get married. She asked him if he had set his sights on anyone in particular. He shook his head and said that he hadn’t. She said: So you want me to find you a wife. He nodded and said: That’s just it.
It was at that moment that the midwife was awakened by the sound of voices calling her name from outside the door.
The moonlight slanted in through the window, and in it she could see someone’s shadow standing outside. The sound of his knock at the door sounded strangely distant, but he was quite clearly standing right by the window. She climbed out of bed, put on some clothes, and went to answer the door. A man she had never seen before stood in front of her. It seemed to her that the man’s face was somehow blurred, because she couldn’t seem to focus her eyes on his features.
She asked: Who is it?
He replied: I live just to the west of town. One of my neighbors is about to have a baby. Can you come and help?
Where’s her husband? the midwife asked. She thought it odd that a neighbor had come to get her instead of the husband.
She doesn’t have one, he said.
Throughout this brief conversation, the midwife noticed World Like Mist 87
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once again that his voice seemed to be coming to her from some distance away. But she simply nodded, returned inside to get a pair of scissors, and walked with him into the night.
As they walked, another strange sensation took hold of her.
It seemed to her that his footsteps sounded different from other people’s footsteps, that they were somehow hollow.
She glanced down at his feet, but she couldn’t find them. It looked as if he didn’t even have legs, that he was gliding above the ground. It’s late, she thought. I must be seeing things.
A short while later, she caught sight of a group of little houses in a cypress grove. As they drew nearer to the houses, she suddenly tripped and fell without knowing exactly why.
And, without being aware of actually having stood back up, she continued to move along. They wound their way between the houses and the trees until they came to a halt in front of an open door. Inside, she saw a woman lying on a colorless bed. She approached the bed. The woman was already naked. Her skin was so pale that she looked like a fish stripped of its scales. She realized that the woman and the man looked strikingly alike, because her face was blurry, too, and it was hard to tell exactly where her legs were. She extended a hand and seemed to feel the woman’s leg underneath her fingers. Reassured, the midwife set to work. It was the most difficult childbirth of her entire career as a midwife. Yet, through it all, the woman lay silent and tranquil on the bed. Whenever the midwife’s hand made contact with the woman’s body, the sensation was less like touching skin than water. The woman felt like a ball of water in the midwife’s hands. And the sweat that had begun to seep out of her own pores was terribly cold. The child was slow in coming. It seemed like the birth had taken hours and hours.
And, throughout it all, the midwife had not seen one drop of blood. The newborn child did not cry. He was as tranquil as his mother. His skin, too, was as white as a fish without scales, and when the midwife took the child in her arms, it 88 yu hua
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was like holding a ball of water. She grasped the scissors to cut the umbilical cord, and before she felt any resistance between the blades, she saw the cord snap. Then the man brought her a bowl of noodles. Two eggs floated atop the broth. The midwife was terribly hungry, and the noodles were exceptionally good.
When she had finished eating, the man escorted her out of the house, mumbled something about having to stay and look after the newborn’s mother, and went back inside. The midwife retraced her steps through the grove, but the winding path seemed much longer than it had on the way to the little house. As she walked, she happened to run into the fortune-teller’s son. He was standing between two of the houses, gaunt as a sapling, gazing into the distance. The midwife approached him and asked what he was doing out so late. He said that he’d just arrived. She sensed a kind of distance in his voice. She asked him what he was looking for. He said he was looking for the place where he was going to stay. Then, with an air of having found whatever it was he was looking for, he turned to his right and strode quickly away. The midwife moved on. When she reached the place where she had tripped and fallen on the way there, she fell again and, without being aware of having righted herself, continued to move along.
2
After she had gotten home, the midwife was over-
whelmed by an exhaustion greater than any she had ever felt before. She fell dead asleep as soon as her body hit the bed and didn’t wake up until nearly noon the next day. She was roused by the sound of conversation in the courtyard. After a few moments, she climbed out of bed and walked out the door, feeling her legs sway beneath her like soft cotton.
7 was sitting in a rattan chair by his front door. His wife World Like Mist 89
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stood by his side. 7’s wife and 4’s father were discussing what to do about 4’s sleep talking. 7 seemed to be listening to their conversation, but his ashen face betrayed no hint of emotion as he watched his son play, oversized head lolling as he ran back and forth across the courtyard. The midwife stood just outside the door. Suddenly, 4 walked in through the courtyard gate.
Her father’s conversation with 7’s wife came to an abrupt halt.
4 walked toward them, her face grim and colorless. Her brilliantly red book bag trailed behind her. 4 walked by her father, head hanging, and went inside. At about the same time, 3’s grandson emerged into the courtyard. He seemed to have heard 4 come in, because he merely stood by the door, watching attentively as 4 unlatched her front door and went inside. The midwife asked 7 if he was feeling any better. Her voice seemed to hover thickly in the air. 7 glanced dully toward her and then lowered his eyes to the ground. His wife said: Nothing’s changed. The midwife suggested that he go see the fortune-teller. 7’s wife said she had been planning to take him to see the fortune-teller for a while now. She glanced at her husband.
7, however, didn’t seem to have heard. His head was dangling so low that it looked like it might snap from his neck. 4’s father nodded and said that he really should take his daughter to see the fortune-teller, too. The midwife nodded. Someone asked her who had come to see her so late. She looked up and realized that 3 was also standing in the courtyard. 3’s face, she noticed, had recently turned a waxen yellow. Seconds after 3
asked the question, she bent over, let out a series of revolting retching noises, and quickly straightened back up, tears streaming from her eyes.
The midwife told 3: A woman who lives to the west of town was having a baby.
Who was she? 3 asked.
The midwife froze. She simply didn’t know. All she could do was describe the man, the woman, and the house. When she was done, 3 was silent for a moment. When she finally spoke, it was to say that she didn’t know of any family like 90 yu hua
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that west of town. She asked the midwife: Where exactly did you say it was?
The midwife dutifully tried to recall the route she had taken to get there. She vaguely remembered that she had first caught sight of all those little houses after they had passed through a gap in the old b
roken-down city wall.
3 was terribly surprised. She told the midwife that there weren’t any houses there, just an empty field.
3’s reply brought the midwife to a sudden realization of where exactly it was that she had been the night before. At the same time, she noticed that 7’s wife was staring at her with startled eyes. 7 sat, head hanging, oblivious to the conversation. 4’s father had already gone inside. The way 7
looked made her uneasy. The midwife felt like she shouldn’t stand in the courtyard anymore. She wanted to go inside, but at the same time she didn’t want to sit quietly in her room, alone with the unsettling memories of all she had been through the night before. She hesitated for a moment, moved toward the gate, and finally walked out of the courtyard.
As she walked down the street, the man who had escorted her the night before appeared in her mind’s eye. As she remembered that blurry face, those legs that didn’t seem to be there, she began to have an inkling of what she would see when she had passed through the break in the old city wall.
What happened next only confirmed her suspicions. The cypress grove where she had seen countless little houses the night before was full of earthen tombs. She heard herself let out a little sob. It sounded like a frog’s croak. She stood for a moment, dazed. Finally, she began to follow the path she had taken the night before, winding back and forth through the tombs until she found herself in the middle of the grove.
Most of the tombs had long since been overgrown with weeds, but a few of the newer ones had been swept clean.
Suddenly, she stopped short in front of one of the newer tombs. This, she sensed, was where she had been the night World Like Mist 91
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before. The area had been swept free of weeds and clutter, and the earth on top of the burial mound was fresh. There was a tangled clump of uprooted hemp and a couple of balls of string lying next to the grave. A wooden plaque was stuck into the earth atop the burial mound. She bent to read a familiar name, a woman’s name. The midwife remembered that she had died about a month before, taking an unborn child with her to the grave.
As the midwife left the graveyard, she thought of her encounter with the fortune-teller’s son the night before.
Almost immediately, she was gripped by a strong desire to see him, so she began to walk toward the fortune-teller’s place. As she moved closer and closer to the fortune-teller’s place, her recollection of their meeting began to stand out more and more vividly in her mind. She walked past the blind man. A column of noise was ringing out from the schoolyard, and the blind man sat in his usual place, attempting with the utmost care and attention to break the column down into its hundred or so component voices in order to identify which one belonged to 4. The intensity of the blind man’s expression made the midwife begin to feel a certain unease, an unease that was only exacerbated when she arrived a moment later at the fortune-teller’s door.
The fortune-teller’s door was shut, and the building was enveloped in gloom. Two strips of white cloth suspended from the door frame fluttered weakly in the breeze. She knew it was the fortune-teller’s son who had died, not the fortune-teller himself.
The fortune-teller came to the door holding a walking stick when she knocked. He told the midwife that he would not be receiving visitors for a few days. Glancing at the fortune-teller’s retreating figure, the midwife realized that he looked as frail as a man on the brink of death. Then she remembered the rumors. And she began to wonder. His five sons and daughters had died so that he could continue to live. Now, there was no one left to die in his place. Maybe it 92 yu hua
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was his turn next. And when she thought back to their encounter, she remembered how his voice, gruff, distant, and somehow disjointed, had fallen like little bits of gravel into her ears.
When the midwife got home and began once more to
contemplate the events of the night before, an image of the two eggs that had floated atop the soup suddenly came to mind. The image made her feel sick to her stomach. She began to vomit. The heaves were unbearably violent. She felt like someone was digging into her sides. When she was finished, she looked down through teary eyes at a tangle of hemp and two balls of string lying on the ground in front of her.
3
The fortune-teller, who was almost ninety years of
age, had fathered five children in all. The first four had died one by one over the course of the past twenty years. Only his fifth and youngest son remained. From the successive deaths of his first four children, the fortune-teller had learned both the secret of longevity and why he himself would be able to live to an unnaturally ripe old age. Each of the first four children’s natal coordinates had been in conflict with his own. In the end, however, he had been able to force each of his first four children back into the netherworld. That was because he had discovered that his own life force was stronger than theirs. And, because none of his children had been able to enjoy their proper allotment in this mortal world, the surplus time had accrued to the fortune-teller’s own account. For twenty years now, the fortune-teller had never suffered any of the usual signs of decrepitude and age.
This happy fact was reconfirmed for him each time he
“extracted yin in order to bolster the yang.” This ancient practice, itself one of the principal means by which he World Like Mist 93
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hoped to prolong his life, involved drinking of the springs of vitality contained within the bodies of young girls. The five fierce roosters he kept in his room, in turn, were his way of fending off the approach of death. For if any little ghosts from the netherworld ever tried to come and settle his account, the roosters would immediately set to howling so fearfully that the ghosts would flee in terror.
The fifteenth of every month was the fortune-teller’s day for “extracting yin to bolster yang.” On this day, he would leave his house and, in one narrow residential lane or another, find an eleven- or twelve-year-old girl who happened to be playing outside and take her home with him. It was extremely easy to pacify the little girls with something nice to eat or fun to play with. He looked for girls who were especially thin because he found the sight of a fat, naked girl heaped across his bed very disagreeable.
But the fortune-teller’s son died quite suddenly on the night of the fifteenth. When he came home around dusk, the fortune-teller had noticed something strange about the expression on his face. Just one hour before, an eleven-year-old girl had left the house.
The little girl had been wonderfully thin. She had lain naked on the bed sucking on a milk candy, her legs splayed carelessly in front of her in a manner that the fortune-teller had found rather enchanting. When she had glanced up at him, her eyes had seemed uncommonly big because she was so thin. When he began to stroke her skin, an almost supernaturally pleasurable sensation had begun to course through him. It was just at this time every month that the blind man would hear a series of ear-splitting cries emanating from the direction of the fortune-teller’s building. Now the cries had come once again, but, because of the various obstacles that lay between him and the source of the sound, they arrived low and intermittent to his ears. Despite the distance, the blind man could tell almost immediately that this wasn’t the voice for which he spent his days in anticipation.
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After the girl had left, the fortune-teller sat down in a rattan chair. He had cooked himself a special soup concocted of yellow rice wine and eggs. Now he sat and slowly drank it.
He felt like he had just emerged from a hot bath – drained, but at the same time completely relaxed and at ease. And as he drank the soup, he sensed a warm current circulate through his body and slowly leak out through his pores.
When his son arrived home, the fortune-teller had just closed his eyes in quiet meditation. He only dis
covered that strange expression in his son’s eyes after he had opened his own to look at him. He had seen the same look in the eyes of his other children just before they died.
His son went out after dinner and didn’t come back until late at night. By then, the fortune-teller was already in bed.
He heard the sound of his son’s footsteps coming up the stairs. The footsteps were leaden. He watched his son un-dress and climb slowly into bed in the moonlight.
The death of his youngest son threatened to destroy all his previous efforts at maintaining his vital essence, for he suspected that the surplus he had sucked from the first four children was already used up. Now he would have to draw on his son’s vital energy. Once that was gone, the end would be in sight. He knew that his fifth son could provide him with a few years at most. The boy, after all, had already lived a full fifty-six years. He felt his body begin to wither. The very next day he discovered that the cries of the five roosters had also begun to lose much of their ferocity. He realized that they too were growing old.
4
One night two weeks later, the fortune-teller – who had by now recovered much of his energy – heard an unexpected knock on the door. The knock threw him into a panic. He heard someone calling his name. It sounded like a World Like Mist 95