The Past and the Punishments

by Yu Hua

  the air and landed on his head, covering half of his face. The people in dunce caps and sandwich boards walked past the postbox. They glanced toward the dead man, but he saw no surprise register on their faces. They looked blank, pitiless, as if they were staring at themselves in the bathroom mirror.

  He began to recognize a few of his colleagues from school in their midst. He thought maybe it’s my turn next.

  He saw himself washing his feet. The water in the basin had already grown cold, but he didn’t notice. He was thinking maybe it’s my turn next. He was wondering how it was that he had taken to crying out at odd times without even knowing why. These cries were always met by a wooden stare from his wife.

  He saw them come in. After they came in the room was full of noise, full of voices. His wife was still sitting on the edge of the bed, staring woodenly toward him. His daughter had awoken, and the sound of her sobs seemed terribly far away, as if he were walking down the street, listening from outside a tightly shuttered window. It was then that he realized that the water in the basin was cold. The noise began to settle, and someone holding a piece of paper walked toward him. He didn’t know what the paper said.

  They made him read it aloud. He recognized his own hand-writing, remembered something of what he had written.

  Then they dragged him away, his bare feet clad only in a pair of thongs. The northwest wind blew across the surface of the road, toweling his feet dry.

  He shivered when he saw the neat stack of writing paper sitting atop his desk. He gazed at the paper for a moment, fumbled in his pocket for a fountain pen, and discovered that he hadn’t brought one. So he stood and looked to see if there was a pen on one of the other teachers’ desks. But there were no pens on any of the other teachers’ desks. He sat down helplessly and saw two hands imprinted on the desktop. He realized that he hadn’t been to the office for over three months. His desk was coated with dust, as were 1986 135

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  the others. He figured that none of the other teachers had been to the office either.

  He saw crowds of people filing through the gate onto campus and knots of people filing out. He saw himself leaf-ing through an old, heavy history book. He had been fasci-nated by the punishments. Sooner or later, he planned to leave his teaching post and devote himself to their study. In his student days, he had pored through volumes of historical material, taking meticulous notes as he went along. He had also fallen in love for the first time. But the affair did not work out, and his research had come to a premature halt as a result. Just after graduation, he had come across a single page from his notes as he packed to leave. He had intended to throw it away but had somehow forgotten the whole thing in the months that followed. Now he knew that he hadn’t thrown it away after all.

  He saw that he was washing his feet. He saw himself walking through the teachers college. And he saw himself sitting at his desk. He saw a huge shadow on the wall across from him. The shadow’s head was as big as a basketball. He stared at his own shadow. And after he had stared for a long time, he began to think that the shadow was a hole in the wall.

  He felt the northwest wind steal into the room and begin to shriek. The wind fastened itself to his clothes and shrieked, slipped into his hair and howled. The sound rubbed against his face, stroked his cheeks, cried out to him. He began to tremble. He began to feel cold. The wind was louder and louder. He turned to look at the door. The door was shut.

  He turned to look at the windows. The windows were shut.

  He discovered that the windows had been washed so

  spotlessly clean that they were transparent. He didn’t understand. How could the windows be so clean if the desk was coated with dust? He noticed that one of the windows was cracked. The sight somehow seemed terribly desolate. He 136 yu hua

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  moved toward the cracked pane and its desolation mirrored his own.

  But when he reached the sill, he realized with a shock that the broken pane was the only piece of glass left in the frame. All the other panes were empty. He absently

  extended his hand to caress the broken pane. The edge was coarse and sharp under his fingers. He absently rubbed his fingers against it, feeling something warm seep from the tip of his finger. Bits of glass fell from the window to the floor with his motion, shattering crisply on the floor like a broken heart. Soon, only a small triangle of glass remained.

  Suddenly, he saw a pair of leather shoes swaying back and forth just in front of him. He lifted his hand to touch them, recoiled, heard his heart pounding and leaping in his chest.

  He stood motionless, watching the shoes swing slowly back and forth. Then he discovered the cuffs of a pair of pants.

  They were fluttering just above the shoes. He slammed open the window frame. There was a corpse hanging from the eaves. He heard someone scream. The sound came from his left. Through the darkness he saw a tree and, under its branches, a shadow. The shadow’s feet dangled above the ground. Sharp gasps drifted through the air, reaching his ears as feeble whimpers. He stood for a long time, until he seemed to hear the shadow mumble “it’s you” and extend its arms to grab hold of some kind of loop. The shadow’s head slipped through the loop. After a second or two of silence, he heard a little stool being kicked over onto the ground followed by a suffocated whisper. He slumped to the floor, hands gripping the window sill.

  It was only much later that he gradually became aware of the sound of shouting echoing in the distance. The shouts moved closer, dispersing through the night, surrounding the office. They grew steadily louder as they approached, until they seemed to him like a terrible wave of sound well-ing in his ears.

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  He leaped from the floor to listen. The school had

  erupted into a ghostly chorus of wails and brutish howls. It was as if a pack of wild animals had surrounded the office.

  The noise excited him. He began to pounce around the room, hands waving in the air, drunk with the hoarse bellows escaping from his own throat. He wanted to escape, to merge with the clamor outside, but he didn’t know how.

  As the shouts rang out louder and louder, his own excitement and anxiety only increased. He continued to leap around the room, bellowing. There was nothing else for him to do. Soon, though, he slumped down onto the seat at his desk, exhausted and agitatedly panting for air.

  It was at this very moment that he caught sight of his own shadow. He had suddenly stumbled on a way to escape.

  There was a hole in the wall. He stood and ran toward the hole, but the realization that the hole had suddenly shrunk to a fraction of its size just a second before stopped him short. Suspiciously eyeing the wall, he retreated to his original position at the desk, hesitated, and charged once more toward the hole. Just as before, the hole began to shrink just as he approached. This time, he held his ground. The hole, he discovered, was precisely the same size as his own body.

  He stared suspiciously for a few moments. He decided that it hadn’t shrunk so much that he couldn’t squeeze his way out. He threw himself into the darkness and landed on the floor.

  Blown open by a gust of wind, the door began to shimmy against the wall with a series of bone-cracking reports. The wind pounded through the open door and circled the office.

  Dazed, he rose and stood for a moment facing the door.

  He saw a black rectangle cut in the wall, but as he walked stealthily toward it, he was once again assailed by suspicion.

  This time, the hole stayed the same no matter how close he stood. Instead of catapulting himself into the darkness, he carefully extended a finger toward it. When his finger disappeared into the hole, he extended his arm. He began, 138 yu hua

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  slowly and with the utmost caution, to slide through the hole. And when he found himself surrounded by a broad, emp
ty expanse of darkness, he knew that he had escaped.

  The shouts that filled the schoolyard were even louder and more stirring than before, and he began to bellow even louder and with even more zeal, leaping off the ground as he ran. And though innumerable shadows – some big, some small, and no two alike – tried to prevent his escape, he managed to evade them all. In a moment, he had reached the street. He paused, trying to determine just where the shouts were coming from, but it seemed as if they pervaded the air, as if they were racing toward him from every possible direction. He stood, at a loss as to where to go. A moment passed. He saw something burning to the southeast, glowing orange like clouds just before dusk. He ran toward the flames, and as he ran the shouts grew louder.

  A huge building was aflame. He saw countless people swaying and twisting amid the flames. Countless others tumbled from the top of the building to the ground. He stood on the bridge, bellowing, leaping up and down, laughing at how they tumbled and sliced through the air. Flurries of bodies, one after another, rained down from the building until the structure itself vanished, leaving only a glowing tower of flame in its wake. The tower brought his frenzy to an even higher pitch. Watching from the bridge, he shouted and jumped as if his life depended on it. Soon afterward, he heard a string of explosions. The flames crumpled to the ground but continued to burn across the expanse. He discovered that the flames were flooding toward him across the ground at a breakneck clip. Breathless, he sat on the railing of the bridge, eyes trained on the flames. Gradually, the burning expanse began to break up into isolated piles of flame. The pockets of flame grew smaller and smaller until the fire burned itself out.

  When the fire was gone, he slid off the railing and began to walk along the bridge. After a few steps, he turned and 1986 139

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  walked back to the railing. After a moment, he retraced his steps. He paced back and forth across the bridge for a long time.

  It was only much later that the dark sky to the east began to glow. Just before the sun rose, the clouds began to soar into the air, shining red. He saw something burning somewhere in the distance. He began to shout. He ran toward the flames.

  When they got home from the recycling station, she

  started to feel strangely distracted. That night, she heard someone pacing outside the house. There was no moonlight, and the streets were dark and quiet. She heard footsteps approach the house, scraping the ground with an oddly irregu-lar rhythm, as if they were simultaneously slapping the pavement and gliding above the ground. Finally, the footsteps stopped a good distance away from the house without coming any closer. By that time, she had already realized whose footsteps they were.

  She heard the footsteps for several nights in a row. The footsteps terrified her. The footsteps made her cry aloud with fright.

  Her husband had been taken away on just such a black, moonless night. The Red Guards crashing through the front door, the scrape of her husband’s thongs as he left the house for the last time – all of this would always be associated for her with the dark of night. After more than ten years, she still couldn’t help being frightened by the dark. With the visit to the recycling station, the darkness she had assidu-ously tried to bury since that night enveloped her once again.

  That day, walking home with her daughter at her side, she had suddenly seen her own shadow lying on the pavement under the sun. The shadow made her cry out. For she now knew that the darkness could pursue her by day as well as by night.

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  1

  The man limped into the small town. It was early

  spring. One week earlier, a fierce storm had buried the town in spring snow. After a week of sparkling sunshine, however, the snow had almost entirely melted away. A few patches of slush lingered in dark, shady places, but the rest of the town had begun to flower. Soon, the town was enveloped by the sound of dripping water like a harmony plucked from the rays of the sun. The melting sound lightened the hearts of the townspeople. And with each passing night, the stars burned bright in the sky, promising them another brilliant day to come when they awoke the next morning.

  Windows that had been shut all winter were thrown open one by one, and in them appeared the expectant faces of young girls above pots of sprouting flowers sitting on the sill. The wind no longer blew cold and bone piercing from the northwest. Instead, the warm, humid breezes of the southeast stroked their faces. They left their rooms, left their bulky overcoats behind them. They walked into the streets, into springtime. If they still wore scarves around their necks, it was because they looked nice, not because they helped ward off the wind. They felt their skin, dry and taut in winter, begin to stretch. Their hands, stuck into pockets or enveloped in gloves, began to sweat. They took their hands out of their pockets, felt the sun moving across their skin, felt the spring breeze sliding flirtatiously between their fingers. And at the same time, the slate-gray willows along the river grew tender with green shoots. All of these changes occurred within a week, and on the streets, bicycle bells sparkled as brightly as sunlight, and the sound of footsteps and conversation rose and fell and murmured like waves.

  It was around that same time that the man came to town.

  His hair tumbled from his head like a waterfall and dangled about his waist. His beard cascaded down to his chest, 1986 141

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  obscuring most of his face. His eyes were swollen and cloudy. That was how he limped into town. His pants were tattered, and from the knees down, all that remained were some dangling strips of torn cloth. His upper body was naked save for a piece of burlap thrown over his shoulders.

  His unshod feet were crisscrossed with deep, callused cracks.

  The cracks were filled with black grit, and the feet were unusually large, so that each footstep rang out like a hand clap against the pavement.

  He walked into spring along with the residents of the town. And though they saw him, they paid him little heed, for as soon as he had been noted his image had already been cast aside and forgotten. They were walking wholeheartedly into spring, walking happily through the streets.

  The girls stuffed their pretty handbags with makeup and romance novels by Qiong Yao. In the quiet hour before dusk, they sat in front of their mirrors making themselves up for an evening out. And only when they had succeeded in making themselves as pretty as could be did they leave the house in search of the hero of the novel, enveloped in the aroma of their own perfume.

  The boy’s pockets were full of Marlboros and Good

  Friends cigarettes. They went out into the streets before it got dark and stayed out late. They too were fond of Qiong Yao’s novels. They moved through the streets in search of someone who would remind them of a Qiong Yao heroine.

  The girls who hadn’t stayed home and the boys who

  weren’t wandering the streets had surged into the movie house, crowded into the worker’s club, poured into the night school classrooms. Of those who spent their evening behind a school desk, most came in search not of knowledge but of love, for their eyes were more frequently directed toward the opposite sex than the blackboard.

  The old men were still sitting at the teahouse. They had sat there for the whole day, for the last ten years, for the last few decades. And still they kept on sitting. Their time for 142 yu hua

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  evening strolls had come and gone, and they were in their own way as content as they had been in the days when they too had promenaded through town.

  The old ladies sat at home in front of their color television sets. It mattered very little whether they followed the thread of the drama. To sit in comfort and watch as the various characters floated on and off the screen was happiness enough.

  Look behind the open windows. Walk along the main

  streets until you get to the narrow reside
ntial lanes lined by courtyard homes. What will you see? What will you hear?

  What will you be reminded of when you get there?

  The disastrous years of the Cultural Revolution have faded into the mists of time. The political slogans pasted again and again on the walls have all been painted over, obscured from the view of pedestrians strolling through the spring night, invisible to those for whom only the present can be seen. Crowds surge excitedly down the streets. Bicycle bells sound out across the avenues. Cars leave clouds of dust in their wake. A minivan with loudspeakers mounted on its roof drives slowly by, broadcasting information about family planning and contraception. Another minivan moves slowly through the streets warning of the suffering inflicted on the people by traffic accidents. The sidewalks are festooned with billboards. The residents of the town are attracted by the words and the pictures on the signs. They know full well the perils posed by overpopulation. Many among them have mastered the use of several types of contraceptive devices. Now they understand the dangers posed by traffic accidents. They know that even though overpopulation is perilous, the living must do their best to have a good time and avoid being killed in a traffic accident. They note appreciatively that students from the middle school have volunteered to spend their Sunday directing the traffic that pours across the bridge.

  It was just around then that the man limped into town.

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  He saw a person lying somewhere around his feet. The man’s foot somehow seemed connected to his own. He tried to kick it away, but the foot recoiled almost before he had even lifted his leg to strike. When he put his foot down, the other foot shifted back to its original position next to his own. Excited, he stealthily lifted his own foot once more, discovering at the same time that the foot on the ground had once again evaded his own. Sensing his opponent’s vigilance, he held his foot motionless in the air until he saw that his opponent’s foot was also poised motionless in the air.

  Then he pounced, landing full force on his opponent’s torso.