Boy in the Twilight (17 page)

Lin Deshun thought for a moment. “Let’s say twenty fen.”

When the man’s hand laid twenty fen on the counter, Lin Deshun noticed several threads from his sweater protruding from his sleeve.

After buying the tangerine, the father turned around to find that mother and son were holding hands and playing a game on the sidewalk. The boy was trying to step on his mother’s foot and she kept skipping out of the way. “You can’t get me, you can’t get me …,” she would call.

“I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you …,” the boy cried.

The father stood to one side, tangerine in hand, watching
their boisterous game, until finally the son stepped on his mother’s foot and gave a triumphant cry: “I got you!”

That was when the father said, “Come and have some tangerine.”

Lin Deshun now got a clear view of the boy’s face. When he raised his head to take the fruit, Lin Deshun saw a pair of luminous dark eyes, but the boy’s face was frighteningly pale—even his lips were practically as white as chalk. Now the family was just as quiet as they had been when standing on the other side of the street. The boy peeled the tangerine and began to eat it as he walked away, parents on either side.

Lin Deshun knew they must have come to register their child as an in-patient, but today no bed was available, so now they were going back home.

Lin Deshun saw them again the following morning, standing outside the hospital just like the day before. What was different was that this time only the father was gazing in the direction of the hospital, while mother and son, hand in hand, were happily playing their skipping-and-stepping game. From his side of the street, Lin Deshun could hear them calling:

“You can’t get me, you can’t get me …”

“I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you …”

Their cries were full of delight, as if they were on a park lawn, not by the hospital gate. The boy’s voice rang clear, instantly recognizable amid the entrance hubbub and the clamor of vehicles in the street.

“I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you …”

Then there emerged the same plump nurse as the day before, and the skipping-and-stepping game came to an end. Parents and son followed the nurse into the hospital.

It was another morning, about a week later, that Lin Deshun saw the young couple emerge from the hospital. They were walking slowly; the husband had his arm around his wife, and her head rested on his shoulder. Slowly, quietly, they crossed the street and came toward Lin Deshun’s kiosk, then stopped. The husband disengaged his arm and walked over. He placed his unshaven face close up to the window and looked inside. “Do you want a tangerine?” Lin Deshun asked.

“Give me a bun,” the man said.

Lin Deshun gave him a bun, and after taking the money from him inquired: “Is the boy all right?”

The man had turned to leave, but on hearing this he swiveled round and looked at Lin Deshun. “The boy?”

His eyes rested on Lin Deshun’s face for a moment. “He died,” he said in a low voice.

He rejoined his wife and gave her the bun: “Have some of this.”

His wife’s head was bowed, as though she were looking at her feet. Her loose hair concealed her face, and she shook her head. “I don’t want it.”

“Have a little, at least,” her husband persisted.

“I don’t want it.” She shook her head again. “You have it.”

After a moment of hesitation, he clumsily bit off a mouthful of bun. He extended his arm toward his wife, and she compliantly laid her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her, and slowly and quietly the two of them walked off in a westerly direction.

Lin Deshun could no longer see them, for the merchandise blocked his view, so he went on looking across the street at the entrance to the hospital. He noticed the sky had darkened,
and looking up he knew it was about to rain. He didn’t like rain. On an evening many years ago, when it was pelting down, he had rushed up the stairs to close the windows, clutching his overcoat; halfway up he suddenly lost his footing, and from then on he was paralyzed. Now he sits in a wheelchair.

When I decided to visit those friends of mine, I was with my mother, arranging things in the kitchen of the new apartment, and my father was calling me again and again from his study, wanting me to help him organize his huge pile of musty books. I’m their only son. The kitchen needed me, the study needed me, both my parents needed me, but there was just one of me. “Better get a cleaver and chop me into two,” I said.

“Take this box of kitchenware we don’t use and put it up there out of the way,” my mother said.

“Come and help me move this bookcase,” my father called from the study.

“Better get a cleaver and chop me into two,” I kept on repeating, while I put the box of kitchenware away for my mother and helped my father shift the bookcase. After repositioning the furniture, I became Father’s property. He grabbed me by the arm, wanting me to take books that he’d sorted out and set them down row by row on the bookcase. My mother called to me from the kitchen, wanting me to bring down the box of unused kitchenware that I had just put away, because she was unable to find a spoon that she needed and she wondered whether it could be in the box. Just at this moment my father handed me another pile of books. “Better get a cleaver and chop me into two,” I said.

It was then I realized neither of them was listening to what I was saying. I had made this remark several times, but I was the
only person who seemed to have heard it. I made up my mind to leave, for I felt I just could not keep muddling through like this. A week had passed since we’d moved from our original home to this new apartment, and every day I was spending all my time getting things organized, and the whole place was full of the smell of paint and the dust was getting up my nose. I am just twenty-four, but here I was, busy the whole week through like someone in middle age. I can’t be parted too long from the youthful life, so I took up a position halfway between the kitchen and the study and announced to my parents, “I can’t help you any further. I have to go out and attend to some business.”

They heard this all right. My father came to the door of the study. “What business?” he asked.

“Something important, of course.”

For the moment I was unable to find a compelling justification for leaving, so I could only make this evasive response. My father stepped out of his study and persisted with his question. “What’s so important?”

I waved my hand and persisted with my vague excuse. “Whatever it is, it’s important.”

At this point my mother chipped in. “Are you trying to get out of things?”

“He’s trying to get out of it,” she told my father. “He’s always been like this. After dinner he wants to go to the bathroom, and it’ll be two hours before he comes out. Why? To avoid doing the dishes.”

“This time it has nothing to do with going to the bathroom,” I said.

My father smiled. “Tell me, what is it you have to do? Who are you going to see?”

At that moment I really didn’t know how to respond. Fortunately, my mother did something silly. She forgot what she had just been saying. “Who else could it be?” she blurted out. “Apart from those guys Shen Tianxiang, Wang Fei, Chen Liqing, and Lin Meng, who else could he be going to see?”

I took advantage of the possibility presented. “Lin Meng,” I said, “is precisely the person I need to go and see.”

“What do you need to see him about?” My father was not about to do anything silly. He was going to carry on grilling me.

I began to spin him a line. “Lin Meng got married. His wife’s name is Pingping …”

“They’ve been married three years already,” my father said.

“That’s right,” I said. “The thing is, they’ve been happy together all this time, but now there’s trouble …”

“What kind of trouble?”

“What kind of trouble?” I thought for a minute. “You know, the kind of trouble that happens in a marriage …”

“What kind of trouble in a marriage?” My father still wouldn’t let me off the hook.

It was my mother who spoke up then. “They’ve got to be quarreling over something.”

“That’s right, they’re quarreling,” I said.

“If the two of them are quarreling, what’s it got to do with you?” My father grabbed me by the sleeve and tried to pull me into the study.

I resisted. “They’ve started to fight,” I said.

My father loosened his grip, and he and my mother looked at me. At this point I was suddenly inspired and began to explain things with effortless fluency:

“It was Lin Meng who first slapped Pingping in the face. Then she fell on him and took a big bite out of his arm. She
bit a big hole in his shirt and must have done a lot of damage underneath, because her canine teeth are sharper than bayonets. She must have spent a full three minutes biting him, and Lin Meng was in such pain he was screaming like a stuck pig the whole time. When those three minutes were up, Lin Meng gave Pingping a taste of his fist and his foot. He punched her in the face and kicked her on the leg, and Pingping was in such pain she collapsed on the sofa and couldn’t say a word for ten minutes. After that, she really lost her marbles, picking up everything she could lay her hands on and throwing it at Lin Meng. She was so crazy, now it was his turn to be frightened. When she smashed a chair against his midriff, it didn’t actually hurt that much, but Lin Meng pretended to keel over in agony, collapsing on the sofa and clutching his belly. He thought Pingping would change her tune when she saw him in this state, that she would stop hitting him, that she would run over and hug him and burst into tears. But what happened was that Pingping, seeing his eyes were closed, picked up an ashtray and smashed it on his head. Now Lin Meng really did faint …”

Finally, I said to my stupefied parents, “As a friend of Lin Meng, I should go and see him, don’t you think?”

THEN I WAS WALKING
along the street, on my way to see these two old friends of mine. I had gotten to know one of them when I was five, the other when I was seven. They were both four years older than me. When they married three years ago, I gave them a blanket as a present, and they sleep under this blanket in the spring—and in the autumn too—so sometimes before they fall asleep they will suddenly think of me and say, “It’s almost a month since we last saw so-and-so …”

I hadn’t seen them for a month, and now as I walked toward
them I began to miss them. First of all, I thought of their little home with its cute decorations, the dozen or so balloons that they tied to the windows, from the ceiling, and beside the chest of drawers. I didn’t have a clue why these two loonies were so fond of balloons—and pink ones too. I remembered once, when I was sitting on their sofa, I happened to notice there were three pink panties hanging on the line on the balcony, practically the same color as the balloons, and I figured these had to be Pingping’s panties. My first impression had been that they were three balloons, and I was almost about to say that there were balloons hanging on the balcony too. Fortunately I didn’t say that, for I’d realized on closer inspection that they weren’t balloons at all.

I liked them both. Lin Meng is the kind of person who talks and laughs very loudly. Nine months of the year he wears a brown jacket, and the other three months, because it is so hot, he wears something else. Then his bones stick out and his arms dangle loosely as he walks along the street, so it always seems as though there’s empty space inside his clothes.

He is the kind of person who doesn’t know his own weaknesses. He has a tendency to stutter, for example, but he himself doesn’t realize this, or at least he has never acknowledged it. His wife, Pingping, is a good-looking woman. She has long hair, but most of the time she wears it up. Aware that her neck is slender and pretty, she sometimes wears clothes with high collars, and once her neck is concealed it is even more beautiful, for the high collar looks like a flower petal.

Four years ago, there was nothing going on between them, they were just acquaintances. None of us had any idea how they got together. It was me who made the discovery.

That particular evening I was really bored. First I went to
see Shen Tianxiang, but his mother said he had gone out at lunchtime and was still not back. Then I went to see Wang Fei, and found him lying in bed all flushed, burned to a frizzle by the soaring temperatures. Finally I went to Chen Liqing’s home, and he was pounding the table and having a big row with his father. My foot never crossed his threshold, because I didn’t want to get involved in other people’s quarrels, especially not one between a father and son.

I went back out onto the street again, and just as I was wondering where to go next, I caught sight of Lin Meng. He was walking along under the trees with a quilt under his arm. Although the leaves obscured the light from the streetlamps, I recognized him immediately and called his name. I was so pleased by our fortuitous meeting that my voice seemed unusually loud. “Lin Meng,” I said, “I was just about to go and see you.”

Lin Meng’s head swiveled in my direction, then turned away. I quickened my pace to catch up with him. “Lin Meng, it’s me,” I called once more.

This time his head kept looking straight ahead, and I had to run forward and clap him on the shoulder. He glanced at me and gave a bad-tempered grunt. It was only then I realized Pingping was walking by his side, a bottle of water in her hands. She gave me a little smile.

Later, they got married. Their married life was happy, so far as I could tell. In the early days we would often run into each other on the steps of the cinema, or sometimes at the entrance to a shop, when I was passing by and they were coming out.

In the first two years of their marriage, I visited their home a few times, and each time I would run into Shen Tianxiang
or Wang Fei or Chen Liqing, or all three of them at the same time. We felt very much at home at Lin Meng’s place. We could sit on the sofa, or sit on their bed with their quilt folded up behind us for comfort. Wang Fei would often go and open the door of their refrigerator to see what was inside—not, he said, because he was hungry, but simply to have a look.