Cries in the Drizzle (15 page)

By now Su Yu could not distinguish among the different sounds in the kitchen. When his father came back, the sunlight from outside briefly shone in through the door and his body was momentarily uplifted. His parents’ conversation and the clatter of bowls and chopsticks caused him to linger in a field of gray. My friend lay becalmed in the quiet, just before the point of no return.

After they had finished breakfast Su Yu's parents passed by his bed, but they didn't give him another glance before going off to work. When they opened the front door, my friend once more was boosted by the sun's rays, only for the door to close again immediately.

Su Yu lay forever in the gloom, feeling his body slowly sinking as his life wearily approached its end. His brother slept right through till ten o'clock. When he got up, he went over to Su Yu's bed and asked him in surprise, “So you're sleeping in late today too, are you?”

Su Yu's eyes were already dim. To Su Hang, his expression was baffling. “What are you playing at?” he asked.

He turned and went into the kitchen, where he began a lengthy process of brushing his teeth and washing his face. Then he ate his breakfast. Like his parents, he crossed the room without giving his brother a second glance and opened the front door.

That was the last flood of light to enter the room, and it triggered a fleeting recovery of consciousness. Su Yu sent his brother a mental cry for help, but all that happened was that Su Hang closed the door behind him.

Su Yu's body finally found itself in an unstoppable fall that accelerated and turned into a tailspin. A stifling sensation held him in its grip for what seemed like an eternity, and then all of a
sudden he attained the tranquility of utter nothingness. It was as though a refreshing breeze was blowing him gently into tiny pieces, as though he was melting into countless drops of water that disappeared crisply sweetly into thin air.

Su Yu was dead by the time I arrived. Noticing that the door and the windows were shut, I stood outside and called, “Su Yu. Su Yu!”

No sound came from within. I assumed that he must have gone out and I went away, crestfallen.

THE LITTLE COMPANION

In my last year at home, walking back to Southgate from school one afternoon, I came across three boys fighting outside a pastry shop. A small boy with blood dripping from his nose clung tightly to the waist of an older boy who was trying his best to pull the other's hands away, while the third boy stood to one side and shouted threateningly, “Are you going to let go now?”

Although little Lulu saw me approaching his jet black eyes gave no sign that he was appealing for help, and instead conveyed a total indifference to the prospect of impending punishment.

The boy who was being held said to his friend, “Hurry up and get him off me!”

“I can't pull him off. You need to shake him off.”

So the other boy swiveled around in an effort to dislodge
Lulu. Lulu's feet left the ground but his hands maintained a tight grip on his adversary. He closed his eyes to avoid feeling dizzy. Despite spinning around several times, the boy failed to get rid of Lulu and succeeded only in tiring himself out. Panting, he cried to his buddy, “Get… him … off!”

“How?” The other boy was just as powerless.

At this moment a middle-aged woman emerged from the pastry shop and shouted at the children, “What, you're still at it?”

She turned to me and said, “They've been fighting for two hours already, can you believe it?”

The captive boy said in his own defense, “He won't let go of me.”

She began to reproach them. “You two shouldn't gang up on a smaller boy.”

“He hit us first,” the other boy replied.

“Who are you trying to kid? I could see perfectly well that you two were bullying him.”

“Well, he was the first to start hitting.”

Lulu looked at me again with his dark eyes. It seemed never to have occurred to him that he needed to tell his side of the story, as though what the other boys said was of absolutely no interest to him. All he did was look at me.

The middle-aged woman gave them a push. “I don't want you fighting in front of my shop. Clear off, the lot of you.”

The pinioned boy began, with great difficulty, to edge forward; Lulu hung to him grimly, his feet scraping along the ground. The other boy brought up the rear, with their two satchels in his hand. Lulu was no longer looking at me but was craning his neck around to look at his own satchel, which lay in the pastry shop doorway. When they'd gone some ten yards or so, the pinioned
boy came to a halt, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and said to his buddy in annoyance, “Come on, get him off me, will you?”

“There's no way. Try biting his hand.”

The boy bent down and bit Lulu's hand. Lulu's dark eyes closed and I knew he had to be in a lot of pain because he pressed his head tightly against his adversary's back.

After a few moments the pinioned boy raised his head and continued to threaten him feebly with some unnamed reprisal. “Are you going to let go or not?”

Lulu opened his eyes and twisted his head to check on his satchel.

“Shit, this kid is too much!” The other boy raised his foot and gave Lulu a fierce kick in the buttocks.

The pinioned boy said, “Squeeze his balls. That should do it.”

His buddy looked around and, noticing me, he muttered, “No, I can't do that.”

Lulu was still looking back and when a man approached the pastry shop, he shouted, “Don't step on my satchel!”

This was the first time I heard Lulu speak. His piping voice made me think of the gaily colored butterfly bows in a young girl's hair. The pinioned boy said to his buddy, “Throw his satchel into the river.”

The other boy went over to the shop doorway, picked up the satchel, and crossed the street to the concrete balustrade next to the river. Lulu watched him anxiously. The boy laid the satchel on the balustrade and said, “Are you going to let go or not? If you don't, I'm going to toss it in.”

Lulu released his hands at last, and then he stood there with his eyes fixed on his satchel, unsure what to do. The freed boy
picked up their two satchels from the ground and said to his friend, “Give his back to him.”

The boy flung the satchel on the ground and gave it a kick for good measure before running to join his friend.

Lulu shouted at them, “I'm going to tell my big brother! He'll settle accounts with you.”

Then he went to fetch his satchel. I could see that he had fine, delicate features, but the blood dripping from his nose left a trail of red spots down the front of his white T-shirt. He squatted down next to his bag, took out his textbooks and pencil case, and placed them back in proper order. As he squatted there in the twilight, his small figure made a touching sight. After rearranging things to his satisfaction, he stood up, clutching his satchel to his chest, and with a corner of his shirt rubbed away the dust that had settled on it. I heard him muttering to himself, “My big brother's going to settle accounts with you.”

He raised his hand to wipe away his tears and then went off, sobbing quietly.

After Su Yu's death, I once more was alone. Sometimes when I ran into Zheng Liang we would stand about and exchange a few words. But I knew that the sole connection between him and me— Su Yu—had disappeared, and so our relationship was expendable. When I saw Zheng Liang walking around in high spirits with his new pals from the factory, this only confirmed my assessment.

I often recalled how Su Yu would wait for me by the riverside, his head bowed, lost in thought. His death had transformed friendship from a wonderful anticipation of what would soon be to something fixed in place by what had been. I started to cultivate a stoop, slouching along the riverbank just as Su Yu did when he was alive, and I began to enjoy the action of walking, a love he had
bequeathed to me. As I strolled along, I could reach back into the past and exchange a knowing smile with the Su Yu who once was.

That was how I spent my last year at home, and that was my inner life as I approached adulthood. It was the year that I met Lulu.

It was three days after that fight that I found his name. I was walking down a street in town when I saw him dashing across the sidewalk, his satchel clasped to his chest, with five or six boys about the same age in hot pursuit, crying, “Lulu, Lulu” and “You stupid idiot!”

Lulu turned around and yelled, “I hate you!”

After that, he ignored their shouts and stalked off. His rage was so out of proportion to his size that his body seemed to teeter under its weight, and his little bottom swayed as he disappeared among the pedestrians.

At the time I did not realize that a close friendship could develop between Lulu and me, despite the impression he had made. But that changed when I witnessed Lulu's next face-off. This time Lulu was up against seven or eight boys his age who were shouting madly, like a bunch of excited flies, as they rained blows down on him. The result once again was Lulu's defeat, but this did not stop him from shouting at them with a victors confidence: “Be careful my big brother doesn't beat you all up!”

The boy's antagonism to everybody and his friendless isolation struck a chord within me. From that time on I began to pay real attention to him. As I watched his boyish gait, a warm feeling coursed through my veins. It was as though I was seeing my own childhood self unrolling before me.

One day as Lulu came out of the school gate and headed off down the sidewalk, I couldn't help but call him back. “Lulu.”

He stopped, turned around, and studied me carefully, then asked, “Did you call me?”

Smiling, I nodded.

“Who are you?” he asked.

This abrupt inquiry took me by surprise; my being older did me no good at all. He walked away and I heard him muttering, “Why are you calling me, if you don't know me?”

The failure of this first approach was discouraging, and after this I began to be more circumspect when I watched Lulu leaving the school. At the same time I sensed with pleasure that I had provoked his interest, and he would often turn around and throw me a glance as he walked.

This impasse before we became friends seemed like a replay of the situation between Su Yu and me a couple of years earlier. We would both be surreptitiously watching each other, but neither of us would say a word. But one afternoon Lulu walked straight up to me, his dark eyes glowing with a winsome sparkle, and hailed me. “Uncle.”

The sudden greeting startled me. He went on, “Do you have anything for a kid to eat?”

Before this, it had seemed so difficult for us to have any kind of genuine interaction, but Lulu's question made this become a reality in no time at all. Hunger, you could say, was what initiated our friendship. But I was embarrassed, because although now almost eighteen years old—old enough to count in his eyes as an “uncle ”—I had not a penny in my pocket. I could only ruffle his hair with my hand and ask, “You haven't had lunch?”

The boy saw that I could not help him stave off his hunger pangs, and he bowed his head and said softly, “No.”

“Why haven't you eaten?”

“My mom wouldn't let me.”

He said this with no tone of reproaching his mother, just as a dispassionate fact.

Without realizing it, we had begun to walk, I with my hand on his shoulder. I thought of Su Yu, now so far away, and how he would put his hand on my shoulder as we started one of our intimate rambles. Now I was treating Lulu with the same affection that Su Yu had extended to me. We strolled down the street, next to people who had no interest in us.

Later Lulu raised his head and asked me, “Where are you going?”

“Where are
you
going?” I asked him.

“I'm going home.”

“I'll walk you there,” I said.

He put up no objection. My eyes began to mist, for I glimpsed the phantom of Su Yu standing on the wooden bridge that led to Southgate, waving his hand in farewell. What I experienced at that moment must have been the feeling that Su Yu had when he saw me home.

We entered a long, narrow alley. When we reached a rundown two-story house, Lulu's shoulder slipped from my grasp, and he climbed the staircase, his whole body swaying. Halfway up he looked back at me and waved just as an adult would do, saying, “Thanks, see you.”

I waved back as I watched him go up the stairs. Soon after he disappeared from view, I heard a female voice raised in anger, and there was the sound of something hitting the floor. Lulu reemerged on the landing and ran back down the stairwell, pursued by a woman who hurled a shoe at his retreating back. It missed him and rolled down by my feet instead. On seeing me, the
woman adjusted her hair, which had worked itself loose in all the uproar, and stormed back inside.

I was taken aback by the sight of the woman upstairs, because I had seen her before. Her features, though cruelly altered by the passage of years, were unmistakably those of Feng Yuqing. The shy young girl was now a mother, self-assured and unconstrained.

Lulu, who just a minute ago had been fleeing his mother's onslaught, to my surprise came over to retrieve the shoe and then went upstairs again to return it. He clutched it tightly against his chest, the same way he would hold his satchel, and walked toward his punishment, his little body swaying. Feng Yuqing could be heard yelling, “Get out of my sight!”

He came downstairs with head bowed, looking hard done by. I went over and ruffled his hair, but he brushed aside my gesture of sympathy. With tears in his eyes he stomped off toward a clump of bamboo.

Our friendship quickly blossomed. Two years earlier, I had experienced the warmth of friendship thanks to Su Yu, my senior in years, and now when I was with little Lulu I often felt as though I were Su Yu, gazing at me as I once was.

I enjoyed my talks with Lulu, and even if he didn't fully understand a lot of what I said, the way he looked at me so attentively, his dark eyes gleaming with admiration, made me feel that I enjoyed the complete, unconditional trust of another human being. After I had finished saying something and shot him a smile, Lulu would open a mouth yet to accumulate a full set of teeth and beam at me with equal pleasure, no matter whether he had really taken in what I told him.