by Yu Hua
2
In retrospect, it was clear to 6 that there had been indications of his daughter’s imminent death. After the man in the sheepskin jacket had come to the house a few times, 6
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began to notice that his daughter had taken to sitting bunched up in the corner like a ball of shadow. But 6 never really took these signs to heart. He simply never realized that his daughter might well have been nursing a secret to which his other six daughters had never had access. It was only later that it occurred to 6 that his daughter may well have been eavesdropping on his conversations with the man in the sheepskin jacket. He remembered one day in particular. He had just seen the man in the sheepskin jacket off at the front door, and when he walked back into the house, he noticed her standing in a daze by the door.
If not for a few unexpected hitches that had come up in the course of their negotiations, the man in the sheepskin jacket would have taken her away right then and there. He told the man in the sheepskin jacket that, of all his seven daughters, she was by far the best. It would be impossible to accept a mere three thousand yuan, as he had for the previous six. He suggested that they raise the buyer’s fee by one thousand yuan. After a short round of haggling, the man in the sheepskin jacket quickly conceded the point. But he also proposed that he be allowed to take her away with him that very day in return. He would pay three thousand now and send the rest later. Naturally, 6 had refused to part with his daughter until the entire sum had been paid in full. The man in the sheepskin jacket said he couldn’t come up with the money immediately. He had the cash, but he also had to take care of his travel expenses. He would come back in a month or so with the money.
When the appointed date for the man in the sheepskin jacket’s return began to draw near, 6’s daughter laid herself out under the peach tree by the river. 6 was sitting in a teahouse on the southern edge of the town. Ever since his strange experience by the river, he had given up on fishing and taken to drinking tea instead. A neighbor on his way back from the river told him what had happened. He told 6
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he had looked for him everywhere. The teahouse went black, and scattered pieces of the man in the sheepskin jacket began to spin before his eyes. The men sitting at the table next to 6 seemed unperturbed by the news. They told 6 he’d better go to the river and see for himself whether it was true. But 6 wasn’t listening. 6 was gazing out the door at a concrete telephone pole. There was a poster plastered to the side of the pole advertising a cure for impotence. 6 couldn’t make out the rest, but the pieces of the man in the sheepskin jacket had begun to form a fragmented image in his mind. 6 remembered that the man in the sheepskin jacket was scheduled to arrive in just two days. 6 seemed to see his own pants pocket begin to bulge. With this last image came the deep realization that his insistence on ready cash had been a fatal mistake. He said to himself: This is retribution.
Although he was terrified by the very thought of the river, he decided that he really ought to have a look. As he walked toward the river, he sensed that her decision to die there had not been altogether accidental. As he drew closer, this sensation grew clearer and more distinct. When he saw a clump of people gathered around a peach tree in the distance, he began to picture what the corpse would look like laid out on the banks of the river.
Soon, he had pushed his way through the crowd. A foren-sics expert was examining the body. She lay prone on the ground, her face obscured by a tangle of hair. Her jacket was unbuttoned, and the sweater underneath shone provoca-tively red in the sun. He realized for he first time just how slender his daughter’s waist had been. He could almost have encircled it with his hands. Then he noticed his daughter’s feet. They were childlike feet. Her bare toes were pointed toward the sky.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to see a policeman’s bearded face.
The policeman asked: Is she your daughter?
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He slowly nodded.
The policeman said: It’ll be a few days until we’ll be able to determine the cause of your daughter’s death.
He wasn’t interested. He didn’t care whether they told him or not. He wanted to leave. He didn’t know what to do with himself, standing there. He turned and started to push past the crowd of onlookers. The policeman grabbed his shoulder: Wait a second. We need to ask you a few things before you go.
By the time 6 had extricated himself from both the police officers and the surrounding crowd, he sensed that several people were following closely at his heels. Instead of stopping to see who they were, he walked toward a lumberyard a short distance from the river. Suddenly, one of his pursuers overtook him. The man gestured toward the peach tree.
Then he held up a single finger, as if to say: I’m buying.
6 froze for an instant. Coming to a sudden understanding of just what it was that the man had implied, he whispered: How much are you willing to pay?
The man extended all five fingers of his right hand.
Five thousand? 6 asked.
He shook his head.
Taking this gesture to mean that the man was only offering five hundred, 6 shook his head no. The man looked as if he were ready to bargain, but at that point a second man surreptitiously slid one finger across 6’s palm. He was willing to pay a thousand yuan. 6 shook his head. When a third man appeared at his side, 6 quickly tapped two fingers across his palm to indicate that he wouldn’t part with her for less than two thousand yuan. The third man hesitated before signaling his willingness to pay fifteen hundred. 6
waved him away and turned to leave.
It was at that point that 2 caught up to the first three men. When 6 once again lifted two fingers in the air, 2
unhesitatingly took them in his hand and squeezed.
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6 sat tranquilly down on a pile of wood. 2 glanced at the other men and sat down beside him. Now all they had to do was wait for the gawkers to leave.
3
No one realized that the midwife had died until 2
presided over the funeral of 6’s daughter. The news of 6’s daughter’s death had spread throughout the city, and new rumors explaining her death made the rounds almost every day. Even so, no one seemed to have noticed her funeral. In fact, 2 was the only person who attended the wake. After 2
had brought her ashes home from the crematorium, his next move was a visit to the truck driver’s house. He would need the truck driver’s urn. That was how 2 discovered that the truck driver’s mother had already passed away.
Actually, most of the residents of the courtyard had already begun to suspect as much. The stench wafting through the courtyard had grown stronger and stronger with each passing day. And they hadn’t seen the midwife emerge from her house since that day many weeks before when they had seen her come home and shut the door behind her. But, until 2 came to the courtyard, none of them had dared to wonder aloud whether she was dead, despite the increasing difficulty of living under the pall of the stench.
As soon as 2 walked through the gate into the courtyard, he was unnerved by the smell. And as he moved toward the midwife’s door, he suddenly noticed that everyone who lived there was standing in the courtyard to watch. By that time, 2 had already come to the conclusion that the stench was emanating from the room he was about to enter. He
knocked on the door and heard the sound of his hand against the wood echoing through the silence inside. He gave a little push. The unlocked door fell open with a hair-World Like Mist 109
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raising squeal. The stench emerged so powerfully from behind the door that he thought he might faint. He pushed the door completely open and walked into the room. The int
erior of the house was bathed in gloom. The stench billowed through the air. Tears began to stream down his face.
He walked a few steps further into the room and found the midwife’s body lying inert on the bed. Her features had already gone blurry, and something shiny and wet was ooz-ing across what remained of her face. 2 looked hurriedly away from the corpse and began to move toward the other room. He found the truck driver’s funeral urn sitting atop a card table. As he left the house, eyes streaming, he noticed that the people who had been standing outside watching were drenched with sweat. He told them: She’s rotting.
When he got back to his apartment, he carefully laid the truck driver’s ashes besides 6’s daughter’s urn. Then he began to make preparations for the wedding. First, he com-missioned four craftsmen to fashion the couple’s dowry out of paper – complete with paper models of modern furniture, a paper refrigerator, a paper television set, and several other electrical appliances that might come in handy in the netherworld. The artisans set to their task with a vengeance and within three days had completed the set. Next, he hired a suona player and three three-wheeled bicycle carts. He piled the paper furniture on top of the first two carts. The truck driver and 6’s daughter rode on the back of the third cart. 2
and the suona player headed up the procession. The marriage of the truck driver and 6’s daughter began with a blast of wedding music from the suona player’s horn.
The procession passed through all of the town’s major thoroughfares. The paper furniture reeled in the breeze, slanting every which way like the lines of a child’s drawing.
And everywhere they passed, the streets overflowed with curious onlookers. 2 was satisfied. He had finally done right by the truck driver. In response to the constant hail of questions thrown at him by the people who had come to watch 110 yu hua
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the spectacle, he loudly and repeatedly announced who was getting married as they moved through the streets. Looking up, he saw heads hanging from practically every window of every building lining the street, and in some windows two, three, and even four spectators were visible. Soon, they passed the place where the blind man was sitting. The blind man, listening to the sharp bleats of the suona, knew that a wedding procession was passing by.
The procession wound its way past the broken-down city wall to the graveyard just west of town. A fresh burial mound had already been prepared for their arrival. 2 carefully placed the two urns into the grave. Then he began to fill the hole with earth. Clods of earth and stone hit the urns with a joyful metallic chime. Finally, the craftsmen’s handiwork was piled around the burial mound and set alight.
Flames galloped across the paper like horses. Black smoke hovered above the fire. A moment later, the flames and smoke began to die down. The blackened paper furniture slumped exhausted over the mound. Suddenly, the wind came up. Black flakes began to flurry above the burial site.
Within moments, the furniture had vanished into the air like the smoke.
The truck driver never appeared in 2’s dreams again.
4
Not long after the truck driver and 6’s daughter’s
wedding, 4 came out of her room and into the street. She walked down the right lane of the road, oblivious to oncom-ing traffic, humming a slow, unhurried tune. It wasn’t raining that morning. It wasn’t sunny either. In the dull gray light, 4 looked as if she were sculpted of ash. The thoughtful cast of her face seemed to suggest that she was remembering something. As 4 glided above the pale gray pavement, she looked very much like a memory.
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As 4 walked ahead, her right hand was in the process of carefully and gracefully unbuttoning her jacket. When the jacket had been completely unbuttoned, her body swayed backward like the branch of a tree until the jacket slid down her arms. Finally, she held a corner of the jacket in one hand, letting its tail drag along the pavement. After several more strides, she let go of the corner of the jacket. The jacket crumpled silently to the ground. A moment later, she began to peel off her dark blue sweater and, with fully as much grace and precision as before, let it fall to the pavement. As she continued to walk, 4 tranquilly unbuttoned her white undershirt. A breeze blew, and it billowed around her frame before fluttering to the ground as slowly and gently as a white sheet of paper.
4 stopped next to a wutong tree, reaching out her hand to caress its coarse trunk. She leaned against the tree, humming. She seemed to see clumps of people standing immobile in the distance. She remembered the ink that had splattered on the pavement once when she had shook her fountain pen too hard.
4 unbuckled her belt. Her black pants slid down her pale thighs and collapsed around her ankles. The motion of the pants produced a tickling sensation, and she smiled. Her pink underwear followed her pants down her legs. She carefully pulled her right foot out of the bunched fabric that encircled it. Her right foot was bare. Then she carefully pulled her left foot out from under the fabric. She wasn’t wearing a sock on her left foot either. After both bare feet were placed on the coarse, muddy ground, she started to walk.
In the gloomy morning light, 4’s naked body was a sickly white. Her skin was so pale and so tender that it looked as if it might be ruffled by the breeze. Her voice, humming as she walked, was as pale and tender as her skin. She saw the blind man. She stopped, smiled in his direction, and continued on her way.
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utes before she arrived. The blind man could hardly believe his ears. Something about the song made him doubt whether if it was really her. But, a moment later, her voice streamed into his ears like a draught of sweet water. And then the voice lingered by his side for a moment before it streamed off in another direction. The blind man stood and began to follow the sound.
4 walked all the way to the riverbank before finally coming to a halt. She gazed at the river, losing herself in its vast and hazy flow. She heard a kind of symphonic cadence emerge from within the stream. She moved toward it. The icy cold water rose above her ankles, rose until it had reached her neck. She felt as if she had put on a new suit of clothes. The river rose above her head.
The blind man heard the sound of water leaping into the air. 4’s song vanished into the sound of splashing water. He knelt to the ground, hands fumbling at the warm, moist mud beneath him. Finally, he sat down on the banks of the river. He sat by the river for three days. From time to time, he would hear 4’s lilting song emerge from the water. On the morning of the fourth day, the blind man stood and moved toward 4’s voice. When his feet hit the water, a cold wave engulfed his heart. He sensed that the wave was 4’s song. As he gradually immersed himself in 4’s song, its cadences grew more distinct. And at the very moment when the blind man himself was swallowed by the river, he heard a cascade of water drops leap into the air. That would have to be the sound of 4 smiling.
The blind man disappeared under the river. The river continued to flow hazily on its way. A few leaves floated by the place where the blind man had been covered by the water. Soon after, a few skiffs bobbed across the surface.
Three days later, on a morning with no sunshine and no rain, the bodies of 4 and the blind man floated to the surface. The peach tree on the riverbank was awash in brilliant pink blooms.
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The Past and the Punishments
On a summer night in 1990 in his humid apart-
ment, the stranger opened and read a telegram of unknown origins. Then he sank into deep reverie. The telegram consisted of just two words – “return quickly” – and indicated neither the name nor the address of the sender. The stranger, filing through the mists of several decades of memory, saw an intricate network of roads begin to unfold before him.
And of
this intricate network, only one road could bring the slightest of smiles to the stranger’s lips. Early the next morning, the lacquer-black shadow of the stranger began to slide down that serpentine road like an earthworm.
Clearly, in the intricacy of the network that constituted the stranger’s past, one memory, as fine as a strand of hair, had remained extraordinarily clear. March 5, 1965. A simple string of digits, arrayed in a specific and suggestive order, had determined the direction in which the stranger had begun to move. But in reality, at the same time that the stranger had decided on his course, he had also failed to discover that his forward motion was blocked by yet another group of recollections. And because he had been standing at a remove from the bright mirror on his wall, he had been unaware of the ambigu-ity that had plagued his faint smile in the moments after he had deciphered the telegram. Instead, he had felt only stubborn self-confidence. It was precisely because of this excessive faith in himself that the procedural error that was to occur later on became unavoidable.
Several days later, the stranger arrived at a small town called Mist. It was here that the procedural error became apparent. The error was revealed to him by the punishment expert.
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he walked through Mist. Besieged by several different strata of memories, he had been left virtually incapable of perceiv-ing his immediate surroundings with any sort of clarity or accuracy. When the punishment expert caught sight of the stranger for the first time, his heart cried out like a trumpet.
The stranger entered the punishment expert’s field of vision like a lost child.
When the stranger walked past a gray, two-story building, the punishment expert blocked his forward movement with an exaggerated grin.