Boy in the Twilight (20 page)

I was a boy of eleven then, on my way to the refinery. After lunch I had dumped my textbooks onto my bed, stuffed some clean clothes into my satchel along with a towel and soap, and asked my mother for ten fen. “I’m going to take a bath,” I told her.

With the satchel on my back I headed off, but not toward the public bathhouse in town. One had to pay for admission there, and I wanted to keep those ten fen for myself, so I headed for the refinery bathhouse instead. It was April, and the parasol trees were laden with broad leaves. The sun shone brightly, catching the dust thrown up from the street.

I left the house at eleven forty-five, having calculated the time carefully. I knew I should arrive at the main entrance to the refinery at twelve noon precisely, for that was when the old gatekeeper would be sitting in the reception office eating
his lunch. He wore a pair of glasses with heavy prescription lenses, and I was confident that the steam rising from his bowl would completely obscure his vision. Besides, he liked to bury his head in his food. I regularly slipped in at this time, bending double as I crept underneath his window. At twelve thirty, I would be steeping naked in the refinery’s cozy little bathhouse. I would have the place to myself then, and the water would be so hot it would practically scald my bottom and the steam would be so thick it would hang motionless, as though painted on the wall. I would need to be out of there by one o’clock, rinsing off the soap before those greasy workers stepped into the water: when they marched in with their towels over their shoulders, I would have already dried myself, knowing it wouldn’t take long for them to fill the water with frothy white bubbles and turn it into bean milk.

But, this particular lunchtime, I stopped when I got to the bridge and lost all sense of time, forgetting that the old gatekeeper at the refinery would soon finish his lunch and then start pacing back and forth in front of the gate with his hands behind his back. It would be ages before he would stump back to his room and sit down, by which point the water in the bathhouse would be getting cold.

I stood on the bridge, squeezed between the midriffs of the adults there, watching Kunshan as he leaned against the parapet, smoking and spitting out large gobs of phlegm. He fascinated me, the way his mustache grew above his thick mouth, the way the muscles on his face shook like a flag in the wind when he talked. I was amazed by all the muscle this man had just on his cheeks, and after I’d inspected his chest—a thick chest that even a bayonet would not be able to pierce—and
studied his arms and legs, I told myself this Shi Gang character was a goner.

I didn’t know Kunshan’s last name—nor did many of the locals—but we all knew perfectly well who he was. He was the man who would borrow money from people and not bother to pay them back. When he ran out of smokes, he would stop passersby in the street and cheerfully pat their pockets with his broad palms, and once he had located a pack of cigarettes he would slip a hand into the pocket and extract the cigarettes, offering one to their owner and depositing the remainder in his own pocket. There was nobody in our town who didn’t know about Kunshan, and even babies could sense the tingle of fear that his name evoked. But we admired him too, and when we ran into him in the street we would call out his name at the top of our lungs. I was already doing that by the time I was five, and the habit had stuck with me ever since. Was this why, when Kunshan was walking along the street, he was always beaming with satisfaction? He liked it when people greeted him and would always give a gracious response. He found it pleasing that everyone in town showed him proper respect.

Kunshan now tossed the cigarette butt into the river and gave a regretful shake of his head. “Shi Gang doesn’t show me proper respect.”

“Why do you say that?”

Kunshan fixed his gaze on the thin-faced man with the glasses. Slowly his hand rose to the level of the man’s head and he made the motion of a box on the ear. “He slapped my wife.”

I heard a collective intake of breath and I myself was thrown for a loop, wondering how on earth someone could
dare do that. Then somebody asked the question uppermost in my mind. “He had the gall to slap your wife? Who does this Shi Gang think he is?”

“I don’t know him.” Kunshan’s finger stabbed the air. “But now I’m eager to meet him.”

“Maybe he didn’t realize it was your wife he was beating,” the thin-faced man said.

Kunshan shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

Someone else spoke up. “Whether he knew or not, if he beat her, then Kunshan’s going to make him pay for it. How could you even dream of beating Kunshan’s wife?”

“You’re wrong there,” Kunshan said. “My wife deserves a beating.”

He looked at his dumbfounded audience. “Other people may not know my wife, but I sure do. She really deserves a good beating. With her wicked tongue, she’s always going around making a nuisance of herself. If she wasn’t married to me, I don’t know how many times she would have had her ears boxed …”

Kunshan paused for a moment. “But in spite of all that, she’s still my wife. If she’s done something wrong or spoken out of turn, you can come and see me about it, and if she needs a box on the ears then I’ll do it myself. That Shi Gang never breathed a word about it to me, but just went ahead and gave my wife a box on the ears.”

Kunshan picked up the cleaver from the parapet and smiled thinly. “If he doesn’t show me proper respect, he can’t be too surprised if I don’t take it kindly.”

Kunshan took a step in our direction. We cleared a path for him, and when his massive figure began to move down the
street it was as though there was a powerful ship steaming up the river, and we people clustered around him were like the waves thrown up by its screw. Together we marched forward, myself in an excellent position on Kunshan’s right. His glinting cleaver swayed back and forth by my shoulder like a swing. This was proving to be an exhilarating lunch break, the first time I had walked among so many grown-ups. By escorting Kunshan, they had become my escorts too. We made a good deal of noise as we advanced and pedestrians came to a halt, watching us curiously and quizzing us. Each time I made sure I was first to answer their inquiries, telling them Kunshan was going to make Shi Gang pay in blood. I drew out the word “blood” especially loud and long, not minding if I made myself hoarse in the process. This attracted Kunshan’s attention, and he would occasionally glance down at me, his eyes glowing with amusement. It was my heartfelt hope at this moment that the street leading to the refinery could be as long as night, because as we went I kept running into classmates and their eyes were round with envy. I realized I was making a name for myself. The sunlight shone down directly in our faces, making my eyes narrow to a crack, and when I looked up at Kunshan, his eyes had narrowed too.

We were now approaching the main entrance to the refinery and from a distance I could see the old man from the reception office standing outside. This time he wasn’t pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back, but craning his head in our direction like a bird. We walked right up to him and, now that it was obvious he saw me, I suddenly felt frightened, thinking he would very likely come over and grab me by the scruff of the neck, just as my father, my teacher, and my older
brother often did. A shiver ran down my spine. I looked up at Kunshan, his face flushed red by the sun, and timidly I cried to the old man, “It’s Kunshan!”

To my ears, my voice sounded faint and thin, seeming to quiver like a leaf. But the old man had already retreated to one side, where he watched us with the same curiosity as the other bystanders. Just like that we swaggered in, the old man not making the slightest effort to stand in our way. What a piece of cake, I thought to myself.

We marched along the concrete road, flanked by open workshop doors wider even than the main gate we had just come through. Oil-stained men stood watching us and somebody asked, “Is Shi Gang in the bathhouse?”

“Yes,” I heard.

“He’s in the bathhouse,” somebody said.

“Right, then,” said Kunshan.

Past the workshops we turned a corner and there ahead of us was the cafeteria, and off to one side was the tall chimney of the boiler room, spewing thick smoke that swirled up in billowing clouds before dispersing in the clear sky. Two boiler workers stood watching us, leaning on their iron shovels as though they were walking sticks. We strode past them and on to the bathhouse. Some people had just emerged from the building in plastic flip-flops and clutching their work clothes, their hair still dripping, their faces and feet as pink as if they had been cooked. Kunshan came to a halt. We all came to a halt. Kunshan said to the thin face with the glasses, “Go and check whether Shi Gang is inside.”

The man went inside, while we waited. More people crowded around us and the two boiler workers came over,
dragging their shovels behind them. “Kunshan, who are you looking for?” one of them asked. “Who offended you?”

Kunshan said nothing, so someone answered for him. “Shi Gang.”

“What did Shi Gang do?”

This time Kunshan himself replied. “He didn’t show me proper respect.”

His hand slipped into his pocket, felt about a bit, and brought out a cigarette and a box of matches. He stuck the cigarette in his mouth, sandwiched the cleaver under his armpit, and lit the cigarette. The thin-faced man emerged. “Shi Gang is inside,” he said. “He’s soaping himself.”

“Tell him Kunshan has come for him,” Kunshan instructed.

“I told him that already,” the thin-faced man said. “He said he would be out shortly.”

“Shi Gang must be scared shitless,” someone said.

The thin-faced man shook his head. “No, he’s just soaping himself.”

A look of regret appeared on Kunshan’s face. I’d seen that look before, on the bridge, when he said he hadn’t been shown proper respect. This time he was disappointed because Shi Gang was not as panic-stricken as he had anticipated. “Kunshan, go in and carve him up,” someone said. “With his clothes off, he’ll be like a plucked chicken.”

Kunshan shook his head. “Tell him I’ll give him five minutes. Any more than that and I’ll go in and fetch him out.”

The thin-faced man went inside again. There was a buzz of conversation around me, but Kunshan stood silent. His cigarette was clamped tightly between his lips, and its smoke made his right eye squint.

The thin-faced man came out. “Shi Gang says not to worry. He says five minutes is plenty.”

People were smiling, looking forward to the moment when Shi Gang would come out and trade blows with his adversary. Kunshan’s face darkened and his cheek muscles tightened. He nodded. “Okay, I’ll wait.”

It was then I left him, abandoning the vantage point I had been steadfastly defending for so long. Many times someone or other had tried to elbow me away from my place next to Kunshan, and only with the utmost effort had I been able to retain my position. But Shi Gang so intrigued me I just had to take a look in the bathhouse. There, amid the hot steam, I saw a dozen or so people soaking in the bath and a few others standing around the edge with their clothes on. I could hear them talking about the impending showdown. I studied them carefully, unsure which was Shi Gang. I remembered the thin-faced man had said he was soaping himself, so I had a look at the wiry, broad-shouldered man who was standing in the middle of the bath, wiping soap from his hair with a towel. After brushing away the soap, he sat down on the edge of the bath and rubbed his face. The soap had run into his eyes and he rubbed them a bit, then twisted his towel dry and gave them another gentle rub. I heard someone call Shi Gang’s name. “Do you want us to help you?” he asked.

“No need.”

It was the man rubbing his eyes who answered, so I knew I’d identified him correctly. I watched with excitement as he got up and walked toward me, still toweling his hair. I made no effort to step aside, and when he bumped into me he put out a supporting hand, as though concerned I might fall over.
Then he went into the changing room. I followed him, and so did the people who were already dressed. I watched as Shi Gang dried himself and unhurriedly put on a shirt and trousers. Then he sat down on a bench, slipped his feet into his shoes, and began to tie his shoelaces. “Do you really not want us to help?” somebody asked.

“No need.” He shook his head.

He got to his feet, and took down a canvas boiler suit that was hanging on the wall. He rolled it up and wrapped it around his left arm as though it was a bandage, and with his left hand he took a tight grip of the two loose ends. Then, picking up his towel, he went over to a tap, turned on the water, and thoroughly soaked the towel.

It was afternoon by this time, and the shadows had begun to lengthen, so now the spot where Kunshan and the others stood was in the shade. They watched as Shi Gang emerged into the bright sunlight. With the rolled-up boiler suit wrapped around his elbow it looked almost as though he had a basketball tucked under his arm. His right hand gripped the sodden towel, which dripped water like a leaky tap and made a damp patch on the ground.

I had been standing next to Shi Gang, and when I noticed that the people next to Kunshan were beginning to withdraw, I retreated a couple of steps and took shelter underneath a tree. Kunshan marched two steps forward, leaving the shadows for the sunlight. He squinted at Shi Gang, and I looked at him too. The sunshine illuminated him from behind, making his hair gleam. But no light fell on his face and he did not squint, but looked at Kunshan with a frown.

Kunshan took the cigarette from his mouth and tossed it
on the ground. “So you’re Shi Gang,” he said. The other man nodded. “Is Shi Lan your sister?”

Shi Gang nodded again. “That’s right.”

Kunshan smiled. He transferred the cleaver from his right hand to his left and took another step forward. “You’re a big boy now,” he said. “Quite a nerve you’ve got, too.” As he said this, he swung a fist at Shi Gang, who ducked the blow. Kunshan looked at him in surprise. “Playing hard to get, are we?” he said.

He aimed a kick at Shi Gang’s knee with his right foot, but Shi Gang jumped out of the way, once again neutralizing the threat. A look of astonishment appeared on Kunshan’s face. He chuckled, then glanced at us spectators. “He’s good.”