Cries in the Drizzle (29 page)

We were now a trio of flying horses, neighing with spirit and flying over the department store, the theater, and the hospital. But after sailing over this last building Guoqing let his arms drop to his sides, as though he had been shot; his ride was cut short. Looking
miserable, he headed back in the direction from which we had come, hugging the wall. He did not say a word to us, and as we had no clue what had happened we chased after him seeking an explanation. But he just kept going, and when we tried to stop him he angrily pushed us aside and said with a sob, “Leave me alone.”

Liu Xiaoqing and I looked at each other and watched in astonishment as he walked off into the distance. Then we put him out of our minds altogether. Liu Xiaoqing and I flapped our arms and set off at a gallop once more, intent on seeing the flying horses.

What we found in the little grove next to the high school were two chestnut horses. One was drinking water from a wooden trough while the other kept rubbing its behind on the trunk of a tree. They had no wings whatsoever and their coats were filthy. Their rank, horsey smell made us grimace. I whispered to Liu Xiaoqing, “Are those horses?”

Liu Xiaoqing went up to a young soldier and asked him timidly, “How come they don't have wings?”

“What? Wings?” The soldier waved us away impatiently. “Get out of here! Off you go.”

We hurried away while the people around us tittered. I said to Liu Xiaoqing, “There's no way these can be horses! Horses should be white, surely.”

An older boy said to us, “You're right, they're not horses.”

“What are they, then?” Liu Xiaoqing asked.

“Rats.”

Could rats be as big as that? We were shocked.

Guoqing had seen his father at the entrance to the hospital. This was why he was so upset: his final hope had come to nothing, so he was in no fit state to enjoy the flying horses.

It was the next day that Guoqing told us why he had turned around and left so suddenly. He said in anguish, “My dad is not going to come looking for me again!” Then he cried, “I saw him go into the hospital! If he doesn't come to see me when he's ill, then he'll never come at all!” Guoqing stood there under the basketball hoop, weeping loudly. Liu Xiaoqing and I angrily drove away the classmates who had begun to gather around.

Guoqing, deserted by the living, began to develop a close relationship with the old lady downstairs who had been deserted by the dead. In her black silk clothes, with wrinkles in her face as deep as waves, she gave me the willies, but Guoqing was unafraid. He spent more and more time with the lonely old lady. Sometimes I would see them walking hand in hand down the street, and Guo-qing's features, normally so animated, seemed a little glum next to her. She was depleting Guoqing of his energy, and now when I think back on my childhood friend what I see in his young face are the dim shadows of decline.

I shuddered at the thought of them sitting together in that room, the doors and windows tightly closed, and felt convinced that they were headed for a collision with the spirit world. When the old lady talked about the dead, she spoke of them with a familiarity that I found chilling, but Guoqing was clearly intrigued, and now he often spoke of his mother with Liu Xiaoqing and me, of how she would come in silently before dawn to say a few words to him and then leave without a sound. When we asked him what she said, he told us gravely that this had to remain a secret. On one occasion his mother forgot that it was time for her to go back, and the cock's crow alarmed her. In her rush she did not leave through the door but went out through the window, taking off like a bird.
This final detail enhanced the authenticity of Guoqing's account, but it also left me bewildered: Guoqing's mother's jumping out the window made me anxious on her behalf, for they lived on the second floor, after all. I asked Liu Xiaoqing in a low voice, “Couldn't the fall kill her?”

His answer was, “She's dead already, so she's got no reason to worry about being killed in a fall.” This sounded right to me.

When he talked about his reunions with his mother Guoqing was so earnest, so happy even, that we could hardly discount his reports. But I found his tone of voice disturbing, for the intimacy of his encounters with the dead reminded me so much of the old lady in the black clothes.

Another thing: Guoqing claimed often to have seen a bodhi-sattva as big as a house, as golden as the sun, who would appear suddenly in the sky above, then vanish like a flash of lightning.

Late one afternoon as we sat by the riverside I challenged him on this. I rejected the notion that such things existed, and to underscore my disbelief I heaped profanities on the bodhisattva's head. Guoqing sat there quite unmoved and after a moment he said, “It must be really scary to curse the bodhisattva.”

If he hadn't said that, I wouldn't have worried, but as soon as he did all of a sudden I felt frightened. Dusk was falling, and I saw darkness spreading across the sky; so unsettled was I that my breathing became ragged.

“People who have no respect for the bodhisattva,” Guoqing went on, “get punished.”

In a quaking voice I asked, “How are they punished?”

Guoqing thought for a moment and said, “Grannie would know.”

I did not find this reassuring.

Guoqing said softly, “When people are scared, that's when they can see the bodhisattva.”

I opened my eyes as wide as I could and gazed intently at the ash gray sky, but saw nothing. I was practically in tears by now. I said to Guoqing, “You're not trying to pull my leg, are you?”

Guoqing then showed me what a good friend he was, with gentle words of encouragement: “Take another look.”

I opened my eyes wide once more. By now the sky was completely dark. Through a combination of fear and zeal, I finally did see the bodhisattva, but I'm not sure if I really saw him or just imagined it. At any rate I did glimpse a bodhisattva as big as a house and as golden as the sun, though he disappeared in a flash.

The old lady, so close to the dead and so unconstrained in relaying their affairs, at the same time could not avoid contact with reality (for which she felt little affinity), because her life, much to her annoyance, showed no signs of ending. While she pacified Guoqing by means that I found unnerving, he for his part shielded her from the real world.

Her greatest source of anxiety was the brown dog that liked to sprawl in the middle of the alley. When she had no choice but to go out to buy rice or salt or pick up some soy sauce, the dog struck much greater terror into her heart than she had ever managed to instill in mine. Actually this ugly, unloved old dog barked at absolutely everyone, but she somehow got it into her head that she was its only enemy. As soon as the dog saw her it would put on a show of great ferocity, barking madly and threatening to leap at her, when in fact it was just jumping about in place. At moments like this the dead people on her wall were powerless to help her, and I saw her reduced to a quivering wreck. As she retreated
headlong, her bound feet acquired an unexpected flexibility and her body swung from side to side like a fan in motion. This was before Guoqing's father moved out, and the three of us burst out laughing at the sight of her overreaction. As I walked to Guoqing's house that day, I had no need to fear her half face behind the door, for she was too busy crying to monitor our arrival. We glued our eyes to the door, admiring through the crack how she dried her tears with the hem of her jacket.

Later, through their common interest in the dead, she developed a special understanding with Guoqing and ended up benefiting from his protection. By having him accompany her every time she left the house, she relieved herself of a great deal of stress. When the brown dog barked and tried to block their passage, Guoqing would bend down and pretend to pick up a stone, and the dog would turn tail and dash off. As they proceeded on their way, the old lady would look at Guoqing adoringly and he would say to her with pride, “Even a dog meaner than that one would be afraid of me.”

So acute was her phobia that she would kneel down daily in front of her clay Guanyin, piously begging the bodhisattva to bless the dog with a good long life. Every time Guoqing came home from school, the first question she would ask would be whether the dog was still outside. If he said yes, she would smile with pleasure, for her biggest fear was that the brown dog might die before her. She told Guoqing that it was a very long way to the underworld, and dark and cold to boot; she would need to wear a padded jacket and carry an oil lamp. If the dog died before she did it would wait for her on the way to the underworld. When she got to this point, she would tense up and shake all over. With tears welling up in her eyes, she would say, “You won't be able to help me then!”

This lonely old woman possessed the earnestness and obduracy that were hallmarks of the era. She had been using the same oil bottle for decades, its capacity marked with a line on the outside of the glass. She did not trust the shop assistants, for she said they were always looking somewhere else when they were refilling the bottle. If the clerk overfilled the bottle, she would not be the slightest bit pleased, but would pour some oil out with annoyance. If the clerk failed to fill the bottle all the way up to the mark, then she would not leave until they did. She would stand there for ages, not saying a word, just staring obstinately at the bottle.

It seemed that her husband had gone to his last resting place many years earlier. He had been a strong man, with a strange fondness for snails. He liked to sit in the courtyard in the summer, waving his fan and feasting merrily on snails. During her long widowhood her finest tribute to his memory was not the maintenance of her chastity but rather her punctilious tribute to this predilection of his. When he was alive he claimed all the flesh in the shell, and she happily consumed the unappetizing little muscle at the base. In the several decades since her husband's death she had never once helped herself to snail meat, but contentedly ate the remainders, leaving the flesh to the husband hanging on the wall. For her, habit and remembrance were fused into one.

Guoqing did not like snails, but the old lady would suck them out of their shells with a slurp and lick the juice off her lips afterward, and the more this carried on the more trouble Guoqing had keeping his mouth from watering. His appetite stirring, he tried picking up a piece of snail meat from the table, but the old lady was shocked. She quickly slapped it out of his hand and said menacingly into his ear, “He saw that.”

It was true, in a sense: the dead man on the wall
was
watching them.

In the spring of the year that I turned twelve, the old lady at last was granted an unbroken slumber. She died in the street outside her house. She and Guoqing had gone out to buy soy sauce, and on her way home her legs seized up. She said she needed to rest a minute, and put her hand against the wall and sat down limply in the sun, clutching the soy sauce bottle to her chest. Guoqing stood next to her, and when she closed her eyes he thought she had fallen asleep. Bored, he looked around for distraction and noticed that grass was sprouting up next to the wall. The bright sun made him squint. At one point the old lady opened her eyes and in a faint voice inquired as to the dog's whereabouts. He saw it lying prone in the middle of the lane, observing them, so he said, “It's right over there.” She gave a deep sigh and closed her eyes again. Guoqing stood for awhile longer, watching with enjoyment as the sunlight played over the wrinkles on her face.

Guoqing told us later that she had lost her way and froze to death. According to him, she had been in too much of a hurry when going to the underworld, and had forgotten the padded jacket and oil lamp. She kept walking and walking along a road so dark you could not see the fingers of your hand, so she lost her way. A cold wind howled in her face, chilling her till she was shivering all over, and when she could not go another inch farther she sat down. That was how she froze.

When he was thirteen, Guoqing finally achieved a degree of personal liberation. He did not want to have to carry his satchel to school and put up with the teacher's endless dronings. When Liu Xiaoqing and the other classmates entered high school, he began to make a living.

By that time I was back in Southgate. As my wretched life at home began, Guoqing was fending for himself, working as a coal deliveryman. Like a real coolie, with a dirty towel hanging from his shoulder pole, his shirt open, grunting with effort, he would carry coal to the doors of his customers. Of his former habits, only the handkerchief in his pocket survived. When he set down a heavy load of coal, the first thing he did was to pull out the handkerchief and swab his lips. Even if sweat was pouring down his face, he just wiped his mouth. A little notebook and a pencil also took up space in his pocket. In his crisp voice, with naive courtesy, he would go from door to door asking if they needed coal. At first his age did not inspire confidence, and scanning his puny frame people would ask, “Can you carry coal?”

A canny smile would appear on Guoqing's face, and he would say, “If you don't let me try, how will you know?”

With his honesty and his careful arithmetic, it did not take long for Guoqing to win the trust of his customers. So vigilant was Guoqing that the shipper at the coal depot found it impossible to take advantage of him when weighing his consignment. In the end, Guoqing's innocent-looking appearance and his tragic circumstances (common knowledge to everyone) led the shipper to develop a soft spot for him, so he always slipped him a few extra pounds of coal. Of course it was the customers who reaped the greatest benefits, and their satisfaction in turn made Guoqing's career blossom. He practically put that rival of his out of business, despite his twenty years of experience in the trade.

I vividly recall Guoqing's fellow professional, for the simple reason that this little man was practically an idiot. Nobody knew what his name was, and he would answer to any name he was called. If he was walking by briskly with a load of coal on his back,
he would not respond to our shouts; it was only when he was walking just as quickly, but with empty baskets hanging from his pole, that he would register our greetings earnestly, his head bowed, as we called him by any name we chose. I would call him “Guoqing” or “Liu Xiaoqing,” while they would address him by my name. Off he would go, giving a grunt of acknowledgment, and he never raised his head to look at us. He was always rushing down the street as though he had a train to catch. Once we called him “Toilet” and he answered to that too, reducing us to paroxysms of laughter. Though cavalier about his name, he was meticulous where money was concerned. And his speed in making calculations was astounding: as his customers were just beginning laboriously to compute how much money they owed him, the total was already on his lips. Those figures were the only words that Little-marsh residents ever heard him speak.