Cries in the Drizzle (14 page)

Immediately I felt blood surging to my cheeks. With everyone's eyes on me all of a sudden, I felt terribly self-conscious. This time Su Yu turned his head and gave us a relaxed smile.

We were bewildered by that smile of his, and it was not until later that I understood what lay behind it. Despite Su Yu's seemingly terrible plight he himself felt that pressure had been lifted from his shoulders. Afterward he was to tell me, “I understood how it was my father came to do what he did.”

In the wake of Su Yu's disgrace, the conduct of Zheng Liang and me—particularly our final farewell—was excoriated by our teachers, who ordered us to write self-criticisms. As they saw it, since we not only were not indignant about Su Yu's hooligan act but actually offered him our sympathy, this proved that we were ourselves would-be hooligans. On the way home from school once, I heard some girls behind me commenting, “He's even worse than Su Yu.”

We refused to write self-criticisms, no matter how the teachers threatened us, and when Zheng Liang and I met we would proudly say to each other, “Better to die!”

But not long afterward, Zheng Liang came to me looking dejected. I was shocked by his bruised and swollen face. “My dad did it,” he told me. Then he said, “I have written a self-criticism.”

I was appalled. “You have let Su Yu down,” I told him.

“I had no choice,” Zheng Liang replied.

I spun on my heel and as I walked away I said, “I will
never
write one!”

Looking back on it, I see that if I was brave then, it was
because I was under no pressure at home. Sun Kwangtsai was absorbed by his aerobic exercises in the widow's carved bed, while my mother was quietly nurturing her animosity toward her rival. Only Sun Guangping knew what I was going through. But by then he was saying little; the day that Su Yu came to grief was the very day that the carpenter's daughter threw the melon seeds in his face. That time the older boys taunted me, I noticed my brother in the distance, watching me in a preoccupied way.

During this period, I was gripped by unquenchable rage. In the wake of Su Yu's departure, everything around me became hateful, infuriating. Sometimes, sitting in the classroom, I would look at the window glass and wish that it would shatter. Once, an older boy yelled to me in a provocative tone, “Hey, how come you still haven't made that prison visit?”

His big grin struck me as so despicable that, trembling with anger, I raised my fist and slammed it into his face.

His body swayed, and then I received a stinging blow to the head and slumped to the ground. As I tried to get to my feet, he kicked me in the chest, inflicting a sharp pain that made me want to vomit. Then somebody else flung himself at my tormentor, only to be knocked down too. It was Su Hang. I was startled to see Su Hang intervene in a fight that wasn't his. He got back on his feet and lunged out, grabbing the other boy by his waist. The two fell to the ground in a tussle. Su Hang's entry into the fray raised my fighting spirit and I seized hold of our opponent's flailing feet while Su Hang gripped his arms. I bit his leg and Su Hang planted his teeth in the boy's shoulder. He squealed with pain. Su Hang and I looked at each other and—perhaps through sheer excitement—we both burst into tears. How loudly we wept that afternoon
, at the same time butting our heads against the older boy's pinioned body.

Because of Su Yu, a bond was formed between Su Hang and me, if only fleetingly Su Hang sported a little switchblade, and he and I would roam the school with ferocious looks on our faces. He vowed to me: The next person who dares to say anything bad about Su Yu is going to have a taste of this.

As time went on maybe attitudes changed. At any rate, nobody seemed to think about Su Yu for very long and we were never provoked again, so we had no further opportunity to develop our friendship. Just when we viewed the world with unrelieved hostility, the world suddenly grew more civil. Hatred united Su Hang and me, and as hatred dissipated our friendship withered on the vine.

Not long after this, Cao Li's affair with the music teacher became public knowledge. Cao Li's weakness for mature men had led her straight into his arms. When I first heard the news, I was dumbfounded. Although my own sense of inferiority had forced me to accept that I could never be the right match for Cao Li, she was, after all, a girl whom I had fancied and of whom I was still fond.

Urged to make a clean breast of it, Cao Li wrote a long confession. The math teacher was among the first to read it, and when he ran into the Chinese teacher on the staircase, he handed it on to him with a leer. The Chinese teacher, who was having a smoke, seemed unwilling to endure even a moment's delay, for he took the document out of its envelope and started reading right there on the stairs. His eyes bulged, and he forgot all about the cigarette in his hand; when it burned down to his fingers he simply gave a
shiver and dropped it on the floor. But when Su Hang quietly slipped behind him, he somehow sensed his intrusion and emitted a series of disapproving grunts and snorts designed to drive the boy away.

Su Hang had managed to read only a single sentence, but it was enough to keep him in ecstasies the whole afternoon. He glibly reported the fruits of his spying to every single person he met, including me.

“I couldn't sit down afterward.'” He went on exultantly to explain. “That's what Cao Li wrote. Do you know what that means? Cao Li has had that thing of hers well and truly unsealed.”

For a full two days, “I couldn't sit down afterward” was constantly on the lips of the boys in school, and the girls greeted this incantation with hearty laughter. At the same time, in the staff room, the chemistry teacher—a woman—voiced strenuous disapproval of Cao Li's graphic confession. Shaking the hefty manuscript till it rustled and flapped, she cried indignantly, “Isn't this just going to give people ideas?”

Her male colleagues, who by now all knew stem to stern the details of Cao Li's trysts with the music teacher, sat very properly in their chairs, gazed poker-faced at the chemistry teacher, and said nothing.

At the end of the school day, Cao Li had finished answering the teachers’ questions, and she looked calm and composed as she went out the school gate. I noticed that she was wearing a black scarf around her neck that fluttered in the breeze along with her hair. Her face, slightly upturned, took on a rosy, diaphanous quality in the cold air.

A mob of schoolboys led by Su Hang had gathered at the
gate to await her appearance, and as she approached they shouted in unison, “I couldn't sit down afterward!”

I was standing not too far away. I watched as she was swallowed up by their laughter, and then I observed the sharp edge of her personality. She came to a halt among them and turned her head ever so slightly as she said with loathing, “A bunch of hooligans, that's what you are!”

My classmates were reduced to a shocked silence, never having expected that Cao Li would have the spirit to fire back. She was quite far off in the distance before Su Hang finally pulled himself together, directing a string of insults at her receding back: “Fuck! You're the hooligan. A hooligan and a harpy too.”

Then I saw Su Hang turn to his pals, amazement all over his face. “And she says
that we
are hooligans!”

The music teacher went to prison, and when he regained his freedom five years later was banished to a school out in the countryside. Cao Li, like the other girls, went on to marry and have a child. But the music teacher has remained single. He lives in a tumbledown cottage and walks a muddy path to teach the local youngsters how to sing and dance.

I went home a few years ago and caught a glimpse of him when my bus pulled over at a little village stop. The elegant music teacher of yesteryear had aged, and his gray hair blew about every which way in the cold wind. He wore an old black padded overcoat streaked with mud, and as he stood next to a crowd of country folk only his scarf gave a hint of the poise he once possessed and made him look different from the other people. He was standing outside a steaming-hot shop that sold stuffed buns, waiting politely in line. Actually, he was the only one standing in line, for
everyone else was trying to push their way to the front as he stood stiffly in his place. I could hear him saying in his mellow voice, “Stand in line, please.”

After Su Yu came back from reeducation, I was not able to see him as much. Zheng Liang had already graduated by that time and the two of them were often together. I could see Su Yu only if I went into town in the evening. As before, we did not say much when we were together, but I felt that Su Yu had gradually become more distant toward me. He still had that rather shy manner of speaking, but he was no longer so discreet in his choice of conversational topics. He told me quite bluntly what his sensation was when he put his arms around the young woman. A shadow of disappointment passed across his face as he told me that in that instant he realized that a real female body was quite different from what he had imagined. He said, “It felt pretty much the same as when I put my arm on Zheng Liang's shoulder.”

As he said this, Su Yu gave me a piercing look and I turned away in shame. I was stung by his remark, which sparked in me a jealousy toward Zheng Liang.

Later I realized that I was really at fault. When Su Yu came back from the camp, I never once asked him about his experience there, fearful that this would upset him. But it was precisely my caution that aroused his distrust. More than once he guided the conversation in that direction, but I would hastily change the subject. One evening when we had been walking along the riverbank for some time, Su Yu suddenly came to a halt and asked me, “Why do you never ask me about my time in the camp?”

In the moonlight Su Yu looked stern, and with him staring at me so intensely I was too taken aback to respond immediately.
Then he smiled desolately and said, “As soon as I got back, Zheng Liang asked me about it, but you never have.”

“It didn't occur to me to ask,” I said awkwardly.

“In your heart you look down on me,” Su Yu said in a sharp tone of voice.

Although I denied this, Su Yu turned around resolutely, saying, “Good-bye.”

As Su Yu walked away along the bank, his back stooped, I was grief stricken at the thought that he was terminating our friendship. To me this was unbearable. I rushed to catch up and shared with him the story of how I pinched the girl at the film show. “I always meant to tell you about it,” I said, “but I didn't dare.”

Su Yu's hand rested on my shoulder as I so much hoped it would, and I heard him say gently, “In the camp, I was always so worried that I had lost your respect.”

Later we sat on the stone steps leading down to the river, and the water lapped around our feet. We sat there in silence for a long time before Su Yu said, “There's something I want to tell you.”

I glanced at him in the moonlight. He paused, and looked up at the sky. I too tilted my head back and gazed at the starry night. The moon was gliding toward a cloud, and we watched quietly as it drifted across the void. The moon drew nearer to the cloud, illuminating its dark borders, and disappeared inside. Su Yu went on, “You remember what I told you a few days ago—the feeling I had when I put my arms around that woman?”

In the darkness, Su Yu's face was indistinct but his voice was clear. When the moon pierced the cloud its light suddenly exposed his face, and he broke off to look up at the sky once more.

Then the moon sidled up to another cloud and slipped out of sight again. “It wasn't like putting my arm on Zheng Liang's shoulder,” Su Yu said. “It was like putting my arm on
your
shoulder. That was what I thought.”

Su Yu's face suddenly brightened and in the returning moonlight I saw him smile. His smile and bashful voice warmed me and sustained me that evening when the moonlight came and went.

THE DEATH OF SU YU

Su Yu, who always woke so early, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage one morning and fell into a coma. His mind, though weakening, forced his eyes partially open, sending out to the world through their feeble glance a final cry for help.

My friend used his life's fading light to gaze at the room in which he had lived so many years. It was a narrow and confining space in which to catch one's ultimate glimpse of the world. He was vaguely conscious of Su Hang's figure, still sleeping soundly in his bed, like a boulder blocking his exit. He was falling into a bottomless crevasse, but it seemed as though a luminous glow somehow held him loosely in its grip, slowing the pace of his descent. The brilliant sunshine outside was drawn to the blue curtains, making them glimmer with light.

After Su Yu's mother woke, she came tramping down the
stairs. The sound of her footsteps triggered in Su Yu's failing life a fleeting throb, a longing for normality. When she picked up the empty thermos and discovered that Su Yu had not gone to the teahouse as usual to fetch hot water, she lost no time in registering her dissatisfaction with him. “Oh, for heaven's sake!”

She didn't even look at my friend as he struggled for survival.

The second person up was Su Yu's father. He had not yet washed his face or brushed his teeth when his wife told him to fetch the hot water. He gave a yell. “Su Yu, Su Yu!”

Su Yu heard a powerful noise coming to him from somewhere far away. His sinking body rose rapidly, as though a breeze propelled him up toward the surface. But he was unable to respond to the rescue call. His father strode over to his bed and fixed his gaze on him. Seeing that Su Yu's eyes were slightly ajar, he chided him. “Hurry up! Get out of bed and go fetch the water.”

Su Yu was incapable of answering and all he could do was look at his father in silence. The doctor had always been irked by Su Yu's uncommunicativeness and now he found his demeanor exasperating. He went into the kitchen, picked up the thermos, and said heatedly, “Where did this kid learn his manners, huh?”

“Oh, he got them from you, no?”

Everything disappeared, and Su Yu's body started sinking once more, like a pebble tumbling down through the air. Suddenly a beam of light shone in and stopped him in his tracks, but the brightness was instantly extinguished and Su Yu had a feeling of being hurled beyond its reach. When his father left, thermos in hand, it was as though the room had plunged into a fog. The noise his mother made in the kitchen was like a boat's sail far off in the distance, and Su Yu felt that his body was floating on some watery substance.