The Past and the Punishments

by Yu Hua

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  woman’s voice. That in itself was reassuring. Even so, he moved toward the door with the utmost vigilance and silently bent to look under the crack between the door and the floor. He saw two stubby legs dimly illuminated by the street lamps outside the front door. The legs set his mind completely at ease. This was no ghost. He opened the door.

  3 appeared in front of him. He was familiar with 3. That she had come in the middle of night led the fortune-teller to believe that she was in some kind of trouble.

  As soon as 3 had sat down in a chair across from the fortune-teller, she let out an embarrassed laugh and told him that she was pregnant.

  The fortune-teller’s face did not betray a trace of surprise at the fact that he was sitting across from a pregnant woman nearly seventy years of age. With a good-natured twinkle in his eyes, he asked who had sown the seed.

  3’s face flushed with embarrassment. She hesitated for a moment before telling the fortune-teller that it was her grandson.

  The fortune-teller seemed nonplussed. 3 protested that she had no choice in the matter. She had to do it with him.

  She couldn’t stand to see him disappointed.

  3 had come to ask the fortune-teller whether she should actually go through with it.

  The fortune-teller told her to go ahead and have the child.

  But 3 was anxious on account of the confusing question of whether the baby would be her child or her great-grandchild.

  The fortune-teller told her it didn’t matter. He would adopt the child as his own. That way the problem would never even arise at all.

  chapter five

  1

  Although the blind man couldn’t have known that

  the fortune-teller’s son had died, he was aware of the fact 96 yu hua

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  that he hadn’t heard the thin man pass by his place next to the school for nearly a month. Whenever he passed, he felt just the slightest whisper of a breeze, like a current of air wafting under a door. The way he passed was different from the way other people did, and that was how the blind man had come to recognize him. His absence made the blind man feel much lonelier.

  It had been a long time since he had heard 4’s voice. The same roar of countless voices – boys’ and girls’, raised in orderly unison or broken into chaotic chunks of sound – still poured out into the area directly adjacent to the school. But try as he might, he was unable to pick out 4’s voice from among the general clamor. A few times, as the children walked to and from school, filing past him in groups of two and three, he had heard her laugh. But that had been a long time ago. 4’s laughter had made shimmering circles of light burn for a few seconds across the blind man’s darkened field of vision. The first time he had ever heard 4’s voice, drops of sweet water purled into his ears. The last time he had heard it, her voice had been sad and lonely. And though a long time had passed between the two, the blind man felt that it had passed him by in an instant.

  Now 4 was walking toward the blind man with her

  father at her side. The blind man heard the sound of two people walking past. One set of footsteps was coarse and the other extremely delicate. As 4 passed by him unseen, she saw his withered eye sockets glimmer with moist light.

  This sight somehow made her feel even more perplexed as to where exactly it was that her father was leading her.

  Moments after they had passed the blind man, they arrived at the fortune-teller’s door.

  Later, a few trucks rolled by the blind man’s place on the road by the school. The first truck filled his ears with a turbid roar. He heard the sound of people walking and talking on the sidewalk, and a flurry of dust began to settle on his clothes. The voices coming from the street were male.

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  Their voices made him feel as if he were holding a sharp, heavy rock in his hands. Then a woman called out another woman’s name. The second woman began to speak, and her voice was bright with laughter. These voices were glossy and smooth. He thought of cradling his hands around a rice bowl. A few seconds later, he heard 4’s voice.

  2

  4 appeared in the fortune-teller’s field of vision just as she stepped into a beam of light slanting down from a skylight. The sunlight frothed across her body as she stared woodenly toward the fortune-teller.

  Having listened to 4’s father’s account of the circumstances, the fortune-teller shut his eyes and began to mumble to himself. His voice, reverberating through the little room, sounded like an old, tattered wall poster rustling in the breeze.

  4 watched as a new expression began to steal across the fortune-teller’s face. The fortune-teller opened his dull, expressionless eyes. He told 4’s father: She talks in her sleep because a ghost has taken possession of her nether regions.

  4’s father, startled, gazed quietly into the fortune-teller’s unfathomable eyes. Finally, he asked if there were any way he might be able to help relieve his daughter of her affliction.

  The fortune-teller’s face creased with a faint suggestion of a smile. 4’s father had the distinct sensation that the smile was a blade slicing toward him. The fortune-teller said: Yes, of course. But I’m not sure whether you’ll agree to go ahead with the procedure.

  4 tried to listen to the ensuing dialogue between the two men, but all she could hear were sounds that somehow refused to become words. The fortune-teller looked like a skeleton draped with clothes, and the room was terribly humid. She saw five roosters skulking fiercely in the corner.

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  After the fortune-teller had assured himself that 4’s father wouldn’t object to the treatment he had proposed, he told him: I’m going to pull the ghost out from inside her nether parts.

  4’s father was shocked, but, after a moment’s consider-ation, he gave the fortune-teller his silent consent.

  This sudden turn of events left 4 helpless. Terrified, she gazed imploringly toward her father. But instead of returning her gaze, he took up a position behind her. She heard him say something, but before she had made out just what it had been, his hands were latched around her body, and she was overwhelmed by a feeling of utter powerlessness.

  The fortune-teller bent over and unbuttoned her shirt.

  Underneath the shirt, he discovered a little sky-blue leather belt. The sight of the belt sent warm currents circulating through the fortune-teller’s exhausted body. Underneath the belt was a flat stomach. As the fortune-teller unbuckled 4’s belt, his fingers felt a little numb. But then he felt the warmth of 4’s body against them. The warmth rolled across his fingers like fog, and his hands began to feel moist. The fortune-teller’s hands peeled away several layers of fabric before they finally came in contact with 4’s skin. 4’s skin, he noticed, was very hot. With a quick downward yank, her body was completely exposed. The fortune-teller saw a ball of cotton trembling beneath him.

  4 began to struggle, but all her efforts to escape proved futile. She felt the incomparable shame of having her own body exposed to the view of two grown men.

  3

  The blind man heard 4’s first scream. The scream

  seemed to have burst through the girl’s chest because he could hear what sounded like something tearing mixed up in the sound. The scream was very sharp, but it fell to pieces World Like Mist 99

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  as soon as it emerged into the air outside the building. The scream itself never made it to the blind man’s ears. He heard only a fragment of the sound. The sudden reappearance of her voice threw the blind man into a state of turmoil and confusion. When a second scream came, the blind man was unable to analyze the sound into its various components.

  The sound was like a flurry of dust settling over the blind man’s ears. The sound continued to ring out fo
r several moments, and the blind man was able to home in on its source just as easily as he would have found his way back to the sanatorium across town. As he moved, the blind man tried to sort out just what it was that made the sound so strange, and, without knowing exactly why, he began to feel a sort of terror rising in his chest. In the dark place behind his eyes, he began to picture the scene at the source of the sound. The sound that was coming toward him was neither tranquil nor particularly excited. It was the sound of someone patiently enduring a brutal beating.

  The blind man groped his way toward the sound that

  frightened him. The drops of sound were like a hard rain lashing against his face. As he moved, the sounds grew increasingly loud, until they were less like raindrops than little blades pricking through his skin. Then he felt a hail of bricks. A whole building of sound collapsed against him.

  And between the bricks, he heard the incomparably gentle sound of breathing reach his ears like a caress. Tears began to trickle down the blind man’s face.

  By the time the blind man had walked up to the fortune-teller’s front door, the screams had already faded into a kind of wail that continued for a very long time, like a wind blowing slowly away into the distance. Then 4’s voice disappeared. The blind man stood by the door for a long time until he finally heard the sound of two people’s footsteps moving toward the door. One sound was very coarse, and the other was leaden.

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  4

  Two days after 4 got home, 7’s wife carried her ailing husband over to the fortune-teller’s house. This was their first visit to the fortune-teller’s apartment, but the room in which they found themselves didn’t seem at all un-familiar because they had pictured it in their minds so many times before.

  As 7 sat down in a chair opposite the fortune-teller, the old man’s eerie presence was somehow rather reassuring. For 7, ashen and frail as he was, the fortune-teller’s pallid complexion seemed to offer him a peculiar sense of comfort.

  Standing between her husband and the fortune-teller, 7’s wife was keenly aware of her own good health. But this awareness only served to heighten her sense of distance from each of the two men.

  It took only a few seconds for the fortune-teller to determine the cause of 7’s illness. He told 7’s wife that 7’s vital forces were in direct conflict with those of his five-year-old son. It was, he added, entirely a matter of their natal coordinates.

  He explained: 7 was born in the Year of the Lamb, while his son was born in the Year of the Tiger. This was quite clearly a case of the tiger devouring the lamb.

  There was very little 7 could do to escape his fate. His spirit was already traveling down the road to the netherworld.

  His words left 7 and his wife speechless. Instead of gazing expectantly at the fortune-teller as before, 7 bowed his head and looked down at the floor. He felt as if his own frailty were lying prone on the ground beneath his feet.

  After a long pause, 7’s wife asked the fortune-teller whether there was any hope at all for her husband.

  The fortune-teller told her that the only way to save him would be to eliminate their son.

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  She fell silent. The fortune-teller’s face began to blur. He looked less like a man than a rock. She heard the sound of her husband’s laborious gasps for air and began to feel as if she herself were suffocating.

  The fortune-teller added that it wasn’t necessary to kill the boy in order to eliminate him. If she would simply deliver the five-year-old boy into someone else’s care, severing any and all family ties between them, 7 would be cured without so much as a single drop of medicine.

  The fortune-teller’s face began to come into focus, but she turned instead to glance at her husband slumped in the chair beside her. Finally, she squinted up into the beams of sunlight pouring down from the skylight.

  The fortune-teller told them he was of the opinion that, rather than giving their son up to a complete stranger, they would do better to give the child to him.

  If the fortune-teller adopted the child, they could kill two birds with one stone. 7 would regain his health, and the fortune-teller would have a son to see him through to a ripe old age. Although the boy wasn’t his own flesh and blood, he would be better than nothing. And, although the boy’s natal coordinates were in conflict with his own, the fortune-teller was convinced that his yang energy had recently grown even stronger than ever, so that there was no risk of his falling ill in the same manner as 7 had.

  Gesturing at the five roosters striding back and forth across the room, he told 7’s wife: If you agree to the plan, then pick one of these roosters to take home with you. As long as the rooster crows every morning, 7’s condition will continue to improve.

  5

  After 4 came home that day, she refused to go out-

  side again. 4’s father, standing in the courtyard some days 102 yu hua

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  later, felt a chill run through his body. Soon after the truck driver’s death, the midwife had disappeared without a trace.

  Dust drifted down from the eaves, covering her door with a thick layer of grime. 4’s father couldn’t help but sense an air of dereliction about the place. It had also been several days since 3 had left. Before she had gone, she muttered something about going to visit some relatives in the country. She hadn’t bothered to tell them when she would be coming home. Since then, her grandson would come out every so often and sit by his doorstep, staring dejectedly at the front door of 4’s house. 7’s wife had brought her husband to see the fortune-teller. He didn’t ask them what had happened there, and they didn’t ask him what had happened to 4. All he knew was that their tow-headed child had been replaced by a doddering old rooster who paced all day across the same ground where the child used to play.

  7’s health seemed to have taken a turn for the better. Every once in a while he would come out and lean against the door, gazing at the rooster in the yard. The strange turmoil in his eyes as he watched the rooster strut across the courtyard filled 4’s father with a kind of startled wonder. Although 7 was on the mend, 4 had the vague impression that both he and his wife had somehow come down with some new disease. He soon discovered a similar phenomenon in his daughter. Although she had stopped talking in her sleep, she seemed to spend her waking hours immersed in a kind of trance. She was constantly mumbling to herself. The mumbling was often accompanied by a strange smile. Her smile, though, was like a withered blossom.

  The courtyard just wasn’t the same. A deathly silence had grown up around the place, and, in the dust cascading down from the midwife’s eaves, he seemed to be able to read an omen of the courtyard’s eventual fate. One day, he even began to sense that there was some kind of decay concealed somewhere within the courtyard. After a few days, the smell grew more distinct. After a few more days, he was able to World Like Mist 103

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  determine exactly where the stench was coming from. It was coming, he realized, from the midwife’s locked and shuttered room.

  Around the same time, he heard talk that a girl had died.

  People were saying that she had died under the peach tree by the river. There weren’t any signs of a struggle. Her body was unmarked, and her clothes were clean. Rumors as to the cause of her death flurried through the streets. The girl had been a classmate of his daughter’s, and he knew the girl’s father, 6. 6 liked to go fishing by the river. He remembered she had come over to their house once. She had stood bashfully in the courtyard before being invited in. She had stood there for a long time. She had stood just where he was standing now.

  chapter six

  1

  After the midwife had vomited a tangle of hemp

  and two hemp balls, she felt her body begin to float. By the time she had reached h
er bed, she felt almost weightless, as if her body was an overcoat that she could throw off with a shrug. And when she lay down on her bed, she felt like a piece of cloth that had been tossed carelessly across the bed-spread. Then she saw a river, but the river was solid, and the water didn’t flow. A few people floated on the surface, followed by a few rubber tires bobbing in the current. She also saw a street, but its asphalt paving was flowing like a river.

  A few boats navigated down the street, sails streaming in the wind like broken feathers.

  Since his death, the truck driver had often come to visit the midwife as she slept, but he didn’t come that night. The light in the midwife’s eyes was snuffed out just as the sun set and a pall of cooking smoke rose above the town. Her death blocked the truck driver’s only route home.

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  That night, the truck driver visited 2 instead. 2 dreamed he was standing on the little path that led to his door, the same path that had been blocked by a pool of glimmering water the night of the wedding. 2 saw the truck driver approach. He looked nervous and depressed. His hands were buried deep in his pants pockets. Maybe he’s looking for something, 2 thought. The truck driver walked up beside him. His brow was creased, and a sad light glowed in his eyes. He told him that he wanted a wife.

  2 discovered that there was a long slender wound on the right side of the truck driver’s neck. Blood churned in the wound but didn’t bleed.

  2 asked: Is it that you don’t have enough money for the dowry?

  The truck driver shook his head no. 2 watched the blood roll back and forth across the gash in his neck.

  The truck driver told him: I just haven’t found the right woman.

  2 asked the truck driver: And you need my help?

  The truck driver nodded: That’s exactly it.

  From that night on, the truck driver and 2 would inevitably repeat the same conversation sometime before dawn every morning. These spectral appearances effectively put an end to the carefree life 2 had led before the truck driver’s death. In his waking hours, he often imagined himself surrounded by a quivering spiderweb. It was only when 2 heard the news of the death of 6’s daughter by the river that he began to understand how he might escape from the web that the truck driver had set in place around him.