Cries in the Drizzle (27 page)

How amazed I was to see things so far away, that first time I went up to the second story of Guoqing's house. It was as though distance had shrunk and I suddenly had the whole world at my feet. Like the hills in the distance, fields spread out as far as the
eye could see, and the tiny moving figures made me chuckle with delight. For the first time I truly understood the meaning of the word
limitless.

Guoqing was an organized child. His clothes were always clean, and the little handkerchief he kept in his pocket was folded into a perfect square. When we lined up for physical education, he would delicately remove his handkerchief and wipe his mouth. I was very struck by that well-practiced action of his, because if I had a runny nose I was more than likely to let my shirt get stained. What is more, he had his own medical kit, just like a doctor—a small cardboard box containing five vials in a neat row. When he took the bottles out and explained their various applications, this boy of eight was the embodiment of carefulness and gravity, and in my impressionable eyes he seemed more like a distinguished medical practitioner than a boy my own age. He took his vials everywhere, and sometimes, just as he was running across the school playground, he would come to an abrupt halt and gesture to me that it was time to take a pill. So I would go into the classroom with him and watch him take the medicine kit out of his satchel, extract a tablet from a vial, and put it in his mouth. He could swallow it dry.

Guoqing's father I found intimidating. If he wasn't feeling well, he would turn to his son for a consultation. My classmate was invigorated on such occasions: he spoke with eloquence, in his piping voice, quizzing his father on every aspect of his ailment. Only when his father interrupted him would he break off questioning and open his sacred box with an expert flick. His hand would hover above the five vials and select the medication required. As he handed the medicine over, he would lose no time in asking his father for five cents. On one such occasion, his father was about to go and get the money, but Guoqing quickly handed
him a glass of water, considerately letting his father take the medicine while he went over and stuck a hand into the pocket of the jacket that his father had thrown on the bed. Taking his hand out, he showed his father a five-cent coin, which he then deposited in his own pocket. But then, as we set off together for school, he dug out of his pocket two five-cent coins. Guoqing was a generous boy; he told me that he had taken the other five cents for me. Then he carried out his promise to buy us both an ice.

I never knew Guoqing's mother. Once the three of us were playing on top of the old town wall, waving willow branches and running on the yellow earth, enacting an imaginary battle, war whoops and all. Afterward we sat down in exhaustion, and Liu Xiaoqing suddenly asked about her. “She went to heaven,” Guoqing said.

Then, pointing at the sky, he said, “The Lord of Heaven is watching us.”

At that moment the sky was so blue it seemed unfathomably deep. Heaven was watching us. We three children were enveloped in a huge emptiness, and deep within me I gave a deferential shudder, for the endless sky left me no place to hide. I heard Guoqing go on, “Whatever we are doing, the Lord of Heaven can see it as clear as anything. Nobody can put one over on him.”

Xiaoqing's random inquiry about Guoqing's mother left me in awe of heaven—my earliest experience of a self-imposed constraint. Even now I sometimes have the sensation that I am being followed by a pair of eyes and have no safe haven, my secrets far from secure, but in danger of exposure at any moment.

In second grade Guoqing and I had a fierce argument triggered by the following question: if one tied together all the atom bombs on earth and detonated them, would the world be blown to
pieces? It was Liu Xiaoqing who got us going on this, because he was the one who had the idea of roping all the atom bombs together, an idea that makes me smile when I think about it now. I clearly remember how Liu Xiaoqing looked when he said this: he broached the issue just after sniffing up a thread of mucus that was threatening to dribble into his mouth. He sniffed so loudly I could practically feel the snot slithering smoothly back inside his nose.

Guoqing agreed with Liu Xiaoqing, arguing that the world, or at the very least a big chunk of it, would surely be blown to pieces. We would be whipped all over the place by incredible gale-force winds, amid a terrible howling noise. Just like our physical education instructor, who had a hole in his nose—when he talked there was a wheezing sound, like the roar of the north wind.

I didn't believe that the world would be destroyed by the explosion; in fact I didn't even think there would be such a big crater. My reasoning was: atom bombs are made from things found in the world, and the world is bigger than atom bombs. How could something that's so big possibly be blown up by something that's so small? Carried away by the force of my argument, I put it to Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing, “Can you beat your dads in a fight? No way! That's because you're their sons. You're small, and your dads are big.”

Neither side could persuade the other, so we went to see Zhang Qinghai, the schoolmaster who knitted, hoping that he would serve as an impartial judge. This was during lunch break in the winter, and our teacher was sitting against the wall, sunning himself. His knitting hands flitted back and forth, as nimble as a woman's. Squinting in the sun, he listened as we presented our cases and then admonished us, “That's impossible. The peoples of
the world are peace loving. How could they possibly tie atom bombs together and detonate them?”

We had been arguing about science, but he gave us an answer rooted in politics. So we had no choice but to continue our argument, which soon deteriorated into personal attacks. I said to them, “You don't know shit!”

“You
don't know shit!” they fired back.

I was so angry I didn't know what I was doing, and I issued a most impractical threat. I said, “I am not going to have anything to do with you two from now on!”

“Who the hell wants to have anything to do with you?” they said.

After this, I had to bear the consequences of my reckless declaration. Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing turned their backs on me as they said they would. But I found that I lacked the determination needed to carry through with my threat. There were two of them and only one of me: that was the problem. They could steadfastly ignore me, but I could give them the cold shoulder only at great expense to my nervous system. I was now a loner, standing at the doorway to the classroom, watching them running joyfully around the playground. I was green with envy. Every day I hoped that they would come over and propose reconciliation, for in that way I could both maintain my integrity and have my friends back. But when they walked past they would be rolling their eyes or laughing their heads off. It was clear that they were ready to carry on like this indefinitely, for it cost them nothing. But I was paying a heavy price: when I walked home alone after school, it was as though I had a chinaberry in my mouth, bitter and hard to swallow.

I was stubbornly resolved to preserve my self-respect, but at
the same time my wish to be with them intensified. These two contradictory impulses canceled each other out, until I hit upon an alternative form of intimidation.

I chose a spot on Guoqing's regular route home for delivery of this new threat; I ran ahead as fast as I could to wait for him there. As Guoqing approached my observation post, he—true to his proud nature—defiantly looked the other way. But I shouted with all the ferocity I could muster: “You stole your dads money!”

His confidence crumbled. He turned around and shouted at me, “No, I didn't! What a load of rubbish.”

“Oh yes you did,” I retorted. I reminded him of that time he asked for five cents from his father and took ten.

“I took those five cents for
you,”
he said.

I didn't care about that. Instead I shouted out my most potent line: “I'm going to tell your dad!”

My classmate went deathly pale. He bit his lip and did not know what to do. That's when I spun on my heel and left, striding along with my nose in the air like a rooster at daybreak. My heart filled with a sinful joy, stirred to elation by the look of despair on Guoqing's face.

Later on I was to threaten Wang Liqiang in much the same way. What I realized was that if there is something you really want you have to be prepared to stop at nothing to get it. My threat allowed me to reclaim our friendship and still keep my self-respect intact, so I felt that practical results were being achieved, however underhanded the methods.

The following morning, Guoqing sidled up to me and asked in a conciliatory tone if I wanted to go to his house and look at the scenery from the second floor. I said yes right away. This time he didn't invite Liu Xiaoqing; it was just the two of us. On the
way there, he begged me not to tell his father about that earlier act of deception. But by this time, of course, he and I were already friends again, and I no longer had any desire to reveal his secret.

ABANDONED

One morning when he was nine, Guoqing woke up to find that he held his destiny in his own hands. Though far from being an adult and still under his father's sway, all of a sudden he was independent. Premature freedom made him carry his fate on his shoulder the way he might carry a heavy suitcase, staggering along a busy street, not sure which way to go.

My poor classmate was wakened that morning by a chaotic din. It was early autumn, and when he went to the door, still in just his underpants, his eyes heavy with sleep, he found his father and a couple of other men busily packing up household effects.

Guoqing at first was thrilled, for he assumed they were moving to a brand-new house. His joy was much like mine when I was leaving Southgate, but the reality that he was about to encounter was far worse.

Guoqing asked his father, in a voice as fresh as the morning itself, if they would be moving to a place where he'd see white horses with wings. His father, always so stern, saw nothing charming about this flight of imagination; on the contrary, he thought his
son's question too ridiculous to deserve an answer. All he said was “Don't block the hallway.”

Guoqing returned to his room. He was the most worldly of the children in our class, but given his age at the time he could not possibly have anticipated what was about to happen. He set to work speedily organizing his possessions: his clothes, neither new nor old, as well as miscellaneous items like his screw nuts, his little scissors, and his plastic pistol. He was able to neatly pack them all into a cardboard box. He performed this task cheerfully against a background of bangs and thumps, often running out to the front door to watch with admiration as his father displayed his muscle power, shifting furniture. Then it was his turn. Although the box was about the same size as he was, he managed to lift it off the floor. He moved it slowly, edging along, brushing against the wall on the other side, for he knew the wall was a hand too, and a strong hand at that. Although he was fast running out of strength, there was a proud glint in his eye as his father came up the staircase. But his father said to him coldly, “Put that back where it came from.”

My friend had no choice but to make the reverse journey, straining with effort, having achieved nothing. His hair was dripping with sweat, and even after he patted it down it was still a disorderly clump. At this moment he really did not know what to do, and he sat down in a little chair to ponder the question. But it was impossible for him to envision his future in bleak terms, for life had not trained him to think along those lines. His thoughts bounced around like a ball on the playground and did not stay fixed on his father for very long. As his mind wandered, he looked happily through the window at the sky outside. Perhaps he was still imagining a white horse as it sailed through the air, its wings outstretched.

Grunts and thuds descended the stairs time and again. Guo-qing must have heard all this racket but he did not realize that the furniture had now been deposited on three flatbed carts, and he did not hear the wheels begin to turn. His thoughts had been whirring around like a bat, and when they finally stopped his father was in his room, and harsh reality faced him.

Guoqing did not give us a detailed account of what happened, and in any case Liu Xiaoqing and I were too young to understand. It was subsequent events that really drove home to me the fact of his abandonment. This was not the only reason I disliked his father. I had seen him on a number of occasions, and each time his manner was so severe as to give me the shivers. Now, as I try to recall him, I feel that there are some similarities between him and my grandmothers father. The first time I met him, he questioned me so closely about my background he might as well have been cross-examining me. When Guoqing tried to answer for me, he interrupted him, saying, “Let him speak for himself.”

His aggressive stare made me quake. When he entered Guo-qing's bedroom that day, I'm sure he fixed his son with the same stare. But his tone may have been calm, perhaps even gentle. He told Guoqing, “I'm going off to get married.”

Guoqing had to understand the change this entailed, which was very simple: his father could not possibly look after him anymore. Guoqing was too young to appreciate all the grim implications, and he just looked at his father in bewilderment. The heartless bridegroom-to-be left his son ten yuan in cash and twenty pounds’ worth of grain coupons, picked up a couple of baskets, and went downstairs. In the baskets he had put the last few items he was taking with him. My friend glued his face to the
window, squinting in the sunlight as he watched his father saunter off.

It was when he went into the two rooms that had been emptied of belongings that Guoqing first began to feel sad. Even then he did not think his father had abandoned him forever; the sight of the deserted rooms alone was enough to prompt his tears. The pristine environment of his own room—which I had visited so often, whose window I so adored—helped Guoqing calm down, and he sat down on his bed to think things over. Only when he found me later that afternoon did he fully realize his predicament. I was busy cleaning Li Xiuying's favorite window when I heard him calling me from outside. I dared not leave the window before I had finished the job, but Li Xiuying could not stand Guoqing's shouts, which pierced the air like the sound of breaking glass. Sitting in bed, she said to me in dismay, “Oh, do tell him to shut up.”