Cries in the Drizzle (35 page)

Later we sat down by the bridge. He studied me and said worriedly, “You're a little devil, aren't you?” Then he changed his tone. “You're a smart boy, that's for sure.”

That autumn when I was twelve, Liu Xiaoqing's big brother—the musician I so admired—died of hepatitis.

By then he was no longer an idle teenager, for after graduation from high school he had been sent off to labor in the countryside. But he still wore his peaked cap and carried his flute in his jacket pocket. I heard that two boatmen's daughters had been assigned to work in the same village, and these two sturdy girls both fell in love with him. He played the flute so beautifully, it was no surprise they fell under its spell on those lonely nights in the countryside. But he found life there a trial and often sneaked back into town, playing the flute by his window, conjuring up the pear-syrup candy tune on our way home from school. He got a kick out of our silly faces and was loath to return to the village, even if there were two girls awaiting him there, poised with the love nets they had woven.

The last time he came back, he must have stayed a little too long. His father was on his case the whole day through, badgering
him to hurry back to the village. Several times I heard him sobbing as I passed his window. He had no energy at all, he told his father pitifully—he could hardly eat, much less work.

None of them knew he had hepatitis. In the end his mother talked him into going back and boiled him a couple of eggs for the journey, but just two days after his return to the village he collapsed and lost consciousness. His admirers took turns carrying him home on their backs. After school I saw two sunburnt girls with mud on their legs and stricken looks on their faces come out of Liu Xiaoqing's house. His brother died that same evening.

I still remember his dismal expression when he left home that last time. He shuffled toward the steamboat jetty with a bedroll over his left shoulder and the eggs in his right hand. At this point almost all the life had been squeezed out of him, and he walked with the tottering steps of an old man not long for this world. Only the flute, jutting out of his jacket pocket, swung back and forth and projected a certain air of vitality.

Though death was lurking just around the corner, he still tried to tease me when he ran into me in the street. He asked me to see if there was a hole in the seat of his pants. Having fallen for that trick once already, I shouted back, “No way! You want me to smell your stinky farts.”

With a chuckle he released a tepid fart, then shambled off toward extinction.

In those days people had an exaggerated idea of how contagious hepatitis can be, and when Liu Xiaoqing came to school with a black armband the other children shunned him like the plague. With an ingratiating smile on his face the bereaved boy walked toward a bunch of classmates who were playing underneath a basketball hoop, but they instantly swarmed to another hoop, cursing
him for all they were worth, while he kept smiling stiffly. I was sitting on the steps outside the classrooms and watched as he stood beneath the hoop, a lonely figure, his hands dangling by his sides.

Then he slowly walked toward me. He came to a halt not far away and pretended to be looking in another direction. After a moment, seeing that I had made no effort to put more distance between us, he sat down next to me. We had not spoken to each other since the graffiti episode—or even sat close to each other. His sudden isolation had brought him back to me, and he was first to break our long silence. “Why aren't you running away?” he asked.

“I'm
not afraid.” I replied.

We were both a little embarrassed. We buried our heads between our knees and snickered. We had been ignoring each other for quite some time, after all.

I was to suffer two losses in as many days, for the death of Liu Xiaoqing's big brother was immediately followed by the death of Wang Liqiang. It's hard to judge just how much this combination of events was to affect my future, but my life undoubtedly took a new turn with the passing of Wang Liqiang. I had only just repaired my friendship with Liu Xiaoqing and still had not had time to make up with Guoqing when, that very night, Wang Liqiang was gone forever.

He and the young woman were doomed. With their hearts in their mouths they made it through two happy years, only to be caught in the act that evening.

The wife of one of Wang Liqiang's fellow-officers was a staunch guardian of the morals of the age. This mother of two made herself responsible for monitoring other people's love affairs, and according to her Wang Liqiang and his mistress had
long been on her list of suspects. When the wife's husband was out of town on business, Wang Liqiang would take his young lover at night to the office that the two men shared. They cleared the desk and then used it as a bed, savoring their bittersweet happiness.

The officer's wife quickly unlocked the door with her husband's key and with equal speed turned on the light. Exposed, the couple stared at her in openmouthed horror. As she began to launch into a denunciation of their misconduct, Wang Liqiang and his desk partner did not bother to dress but threw themselves on their knees before her, pleading desperately for leniency. Wang Liqiang, so awesome and forbidding in my eyes, was reduced to tears and moans.

But after keeping them under observation for so long and now at last with such splendid results to show for it, how could their nemesis let them off so easily? She made it clear to them they were wasting their time begging for mercy. “It wasn't easy catching you,” she said.

Then she went over to the window and threw it open, clucking like a hen that has just laid an egg.

Wang Liqiang knew that the damage was done. He and his lover got dressed and seated themselves. When his colleagues from the security section arrived, he spotted the political commissar and said to him shamefacedly, “Sir, I've committed a lifestyle error.”

The commissar instructed several soldiers to keep Wang Liqiang under guard and told the young woman to go home. She was sobbing too much to speak, and when she got up to leave she shielded her face with her hands. The snoop was reveling in the moment. “Put your hands down!” she barked. “I didn't see you blushing when you were doing it with him.”

Wang Liqiang walked up to her and slapped her across the face.

I do not know much more about what happened then, but one can imagine how it must have made her blood boil to be struck by Wang Liqiang just when she was giddy with success. She lunged at him with fingers spread but stumbled over a chair and fell to the floor. Her fury gave way to humiliation, and she burst into tears. The commissar had the soldiers hustle Wang Liqiang away and told a few others to stay with the woman, who was now sitting on the floor and refusing to get up. The commissar himself went back to bed.

Wang Liqiang sat in a pitch-dark room until late in the night. Then he stood up and told the soldier guarding him that he needed to get something from his office. The bleary-eyed guard felt awkward in front of his superior; as he hesitated, Wang Liqiang said he would be back shortly and left without further ado. The soldier did not follow, but stood by the door and watched Wang Liqiang walk across in the moonlight toward the offices, until his sprawling shadow melded with the larger shadow of the office block.

Wang Liqiang did not go to his office: instead he unlocked the door to the armory. He picked up two hand grenades and went down the stairs. Sticking close to the wall, he walked quietly over to the dependent housing, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and came to a stop outside a window on the west side. He had visited this apartment on a number of occasions and knew where his colleague's wife slept. He pulled the pin on one of the grenades and then smashed the window and tossed the grenade inside. As he dashed toward the staircase, the grenade detonated, and a huge roar shook the old building so that it swayed back and forth,
throwing up clouds of dust that settled on Wang Liqiang as he ran. He fled all the way to the perimeter wall and squatted in the shadow there.

The security department was thrown into such uproar it was almost as though war had broken out. He heard the commissar, now awake for the second time, heaping curses on the negligent soldier, and he heard someone crying for a stretcher. To Wang Liqiang, straining his eyes to see, the chaotic scene might as well have been a churning mass of locusts. Later he saw three stretchers being carried out of the building and heard someone shout, “Still breathing, still alive!”

He gave a start. When the stretchers were carried into an ambulance and driven out of the compound, he clambered over the wall and jumped down the other side. He knew he had no time to waste.

In the early hours a man with a grenade in his hand and a look of raw menace on his face appeared at the town hospital. The surgeon on duty when Wang Liqiang entered was a northerner with a beard. As soon as he saw the visitor, he knew that he must have something to do with the three patients who had just been carried in, and he fled down the corridor in panic, crying, “Help! The killer!”

The doctor was too flustered to express himself clearly, and it was a good half hour before he had calmed down. Now he stood next to a trembling nurse, and they watched as Wang Liqiang moved from room to room, grenade in hand. A sudden spark of courage led the doctor to propose that the two of them jump him from behind, and part of this idea certainly registered with the nurse, for as Wang Liqiang came ever closer she turned to him fearfully and implored, “Quick, you grab him now!”

The doctor thought for a moment and said, “Maybe I should report to the leadership first.” So saying, he opened a window, jumped out, and made his escape.

Wang Liqiang moved along the corridor, searching room by room. The shouts of panic grated on his nerves. When he pushed open the door to the nurses’ station, it snapped back and dealt his left wrist a stinging blow, pinning it against the jamb so painfully that he grimaced. By throwing all his weight against the door, he succeeded in knocking it open, to find four nurses weeping and wailing inside, but no sign of his quarry. He tried to calm the nurses, promising not to harm them, but they just continued to shriek, oblivious to everything he said. Wang Liqiang shook his head helplessly and withdrew. Then he went into the operating theater, abandoned long before by the terrified staff. He saw two boys lying on gurneys and recognized them as the woman's sons. They were dead, their bodies mangled. Wang Liqiang gaped in shocked disbelief that this could have happened. He retreated from the operating theater; with the deaths of the two boys, he had lost interest in searching for their mother. He slowly made his way outside and lingered momentarily by the hospital entrance, thinking that he ought to go back home, but then he said to himself, “Forget it.”

Soon he found himself surrounded. As he leaned back against a power pole, he heard the commissar yell, “Wang Liqiang, drop your weapon! Otherwise, you're a dead man.”

Wang Liqiang called back, “Sir, when Lin gets back, please tell him for me, I know I did him wrong. I didn't mean to kill his sons.”

The commissar thought this beside the point. Again he shouted, “Put down your weapon. You're a dead man if you don't.”

A wry answer came back. “Sir, I'm a dead man already.”

Wang Liqiang, who had shared his house with me for five years, who had loved me and disciplined me like a true father, suddenly found the pain in his injured wrist almost too much to bear, and in the moments before his death he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and meticulously dressed his wound. No sooner had he finished than he realized this made no sense and muttered to himself, “Why bother?”

As he looked at his neatly strapped wrist he forced a smile, and then he detonated the grenade. The force of the blast snapped the power pole behind him, and the brightly lit hospital was plunged into darkness.

The woman whom Wang Liqiang had been so determined to blow to pieces had emerged from the explosion with just some cuts and bruises. On the afternoon following Wang Liqiang's suicide, she left the hospital weeping and sobbing, still badly shaken. But before long she recovered her former self-confidence, and six months later, when she left the hospital once more, she was positively jubilant. The gynecologist's examination had confirmed that she was pregnant again, with twins to boot. During the next few days her standard greeting was, “He thought he'd got rid of my sons, but now their replacements are on the way!”

Li Xiuying was left to cope with the calamity of Wang Liqiang's death. Frail though she was, at first she seemed untouched by the enormous strain this placed on her. When one of Wang Liqiang's colleagues came to break the news on behalf of the security section, she managed to weather the initial blow. Keeping her composure, she simply scrutinized her visitor, so he was the one who was thrown off balance. Then she gave a piercing shout: “You people killed Wang Liqiang!”

The man had not anticipated this, and he began to repeat the story of how Wang Liqiang had taken his own life. Li Xiuying waved her slender arm dismissively and came out with an even more awful accusation. “You people—all of you—killed Wang Liqiang, and that's a fact. But it's me you really want to see dead.”

Her bizarre logic made the visitor realize to his dismay that it was going to be impossible to conduct a normal conversation with her. But there was a practical matter he needed to attend to. He asked her when she would like to collect Wang Liqiang's body.

Li Xiuying took her time to answer this. Then she said, “I don't want it. If he'd committed another kind of error, I'd say yes, but since he committed this kind of mistake, I'm not interested.”

That was the only thing she said that one could imagine an ordinary person saying.

After the man had left, Li Xiuying turned to me—I was still dumbstruck—and said resentfully, “They took a live man away from me, and now they're trying to fob off a dead one on me!”

She tilted her head up and said defiantly, “I refused.”

What a trying day this was—a Sunday, too—when I could only stay at home, whirled around in a jumble of emotions: bewilderment, anguish, and fear. I found it hard to accept that Wang Liqiang was dead; the whole episode had the unreal quality of a secondhand report.