Cries in the Drizzle (7 page)

A grin on his face, my father dumped the bag of rice at her feet, then made as if to enfold her in a bear hug.

She stuck out an arm to repel his advances. “Hang on a minute there! I'm not so easily bought,” she said. She reached out a hand and felt around in his crotch.

“Well?” said my father with a leer.

“It'll do,” she responded.

After leading a respectable life for so long, my father found that his inhibitions had been weakened by the shattering of illusions and the tricks that life had played on him. From now on Sun Kwangtsai would often go about sharing his newfound wisdom with the village youths, saying in the smug tones of a man of experience, “While you're still young, you should make the most of it and sleep around as much as you can. Everything else is a scam.”

When he clambered so confidently onto the widow's ornate antique bed, this did not go unnoticed by Sun Guangping. Father's brazen visits to the widow's home provoked great chagrin on his part. One day, after my father had wined and dined to his satisfaction and was preparing to set off for the widow's house to digest his meal, my brother spoke up. “You should have had enough by now, surely.”

My father didn't let this faze him in the slightest. “You can never have enough of
that,”
he said.

So day after day Sun Kwangtsai would march briskly into the widow's house, emerging some time later a good deal worse for wear. Moved by a morbid curiosity, I stealthily observed my mother and tried to gauge her reaction to events. My mother, who
said little but whose hands and feet were perpetually in motion, bore the humiliation in silence, as though it was a matter of complete indifference to her. I wondered what went through her mind late at night, when Sun Kwangtsai would leave the widow's side and clamber into her bed. Here my thoughts would linger, and though my speculations were fueled in part by malice, I felt sorry for her at the same time.

What happened later made me realize that Mother's nonchalance was simply a cover for her burning indignation. Her hostility to the widow, to my mind, demonstrated the narrow-mindedness of women. Inwardly I admonished my mother over and over again: it should be Father you resent, not the widow. When he climbs out of the widow's bed and makes his way over to you, you should refuse him. No matter what happened, she would never reject him, but always let him have what he wanted.

Mother's rage finally exploded one day when she was fertilizing the vegetable patch. The widow was walking along the path between the fields, looking very pleased with herself, and her manner instantly made Mother tremble all over with long-suppressed rage. She swung the dung ladle in her hand, and filthy water splattered over the widow's smug figure. The widow's voice rang out like a trumpet. “Are you blind?”

Beside herself with anger, Mother cried out in a voice shaking with emotion: “The town's the place for you! You can lie down on the sports ground there and have the men line up to fuck you.”

“Hah!” The widow gave as good as she got. “What makes you think you have the right to say that? Shouldn't you go on home and give yourself a good wash? Your man says that thing of yours stinks to high heaven!”

When these two sharp-tongued women laid into each other
with such crude obscenities, quacking like two noisy clucks, the village—usually rather quiet at lunchtime—was thrown into disarray After some further exchanges, my mother, forgetting how thin and frail she was, charged fearlessly toward the widow and attempted a head butt.

Just at this moment Sun Kwangtsai happened to arrive back from town, a bottle of spirits swinging behind his back. All he saw at first, off in the distance in the vegetable patch, were two women wrestling with each other, hair all over the place, and this spectacle tickled him no end. After advancing a few steps and recognizing the combatants, my father, flustered, climbed onto a path between the fields and tried to beat a retreat. One of the villagers blocked his escape route, saying, “You'd better go and sort it out.”

“No way!” My father shook his head vigorously. “One's my wife and the other's my mistress, and I can't afford to get on the wrong side of either of them.”

By this time my mother had already been knocked off her feet and her adversary's large bottom had pinned her to the ground. When I saw this from my distant vantage point I was stricken with heartache. After all the humiliation Mother had suffered she had finally blown her top, only to suffer further ignominy.

Several of the village women, who perhaps found this onesided contest too embarrassing to watch any longer, ran over and dragged the widow off. She swaggered home victoriously, nose in the air, saying as she went, “What a nerve! That'll teach you to provoke me.”

Back at the vegetable patch my mother burst into tears and wailed: “If Sun Guangming were still alive, he wouldn't let you get away with this!”

My older brother, who had at one time brandished the cleaver so gallantly, was nowhere to be seen. Sun Guangping had shut himself in his room. He was perfectly aware of what was happening outside, but refused to get involved in what was to him a pointless squabble. Mother's weeping only intensified the shame that he felt for his family and did not stir him to indignation on her behalf.

In her defeat, the only champion Mother could imagine was my little brother, now no longer with us. It was the one straw that she could clutch at in her moment of despair.

My older brother's unresponsiveness I first interpreted as a reluctance to show his face when our family scandal was gaining such wide publicity. After all he was no longer the Sun Guangping of the private plot fracas. He had sunk into a deep gloom and his dissatisfaction with our home life was more and more evident in everything he did. Although he and I were still at odds with each other, our shared discontent made it possible for us to feel a subtle empathy at times.

Not long afterward—shortly before I left Southgate—I watched as late one evening a figure emerged from the widow's window and sneaked into our house. I recognized the arrival right away as Sun Guangping. Then I realized there was another reason he had been so passive during the altercation between Mother and the widow.

The day that my brother saw me off to the bus station, he carried my bedroll on his back, and Mother accompanied us as far as the entrance to the village. She stood there in the morning breeze and watched us walk away—a little lost, it seemed, as though still unsure what to make of the hand that fate had dealt
her. When I looked at my mother for the last time I realized that her hair was streaked with gray. “Good-bye,” I said.

She showed no reaction, and her gaze seemed to be directed elsewhere. In that moment a warm feeling surged over me, for this image of my mother tugged at the heartstrings. But as I walked on, her fate seemed to change into a breath of wind and dissipate at once, leaving no trace behind. My feeling at the time was that I was never coming back. But, like Sun Guangming, I forsook her in a less callous fashion than my father and Sun Guang-ping, who not only deserted her but went to bed with her archrival, the widow. Unaware of that second betrayal, Mother was still devoting herself heart and soul to the family.

After I left, my father went full speed ahead in his campaign to be an utter scoundrel. At the same time he began to perform a deliveryman's duties, transferring a number of items from our house to the sturdy widow's, thereby lubricating their relationship and keeping things ticking over nicely. His show of loyalty was rewarded by a comparable demonstration on her part, for around this time her omnivorous tendencies moderated and she became quite abstemious. Now rounding on fifty, she was no longer inspired by the same lust that once used to sweep all before it.

Having lost the courage that he had at fourteen, Sun Guang-ping took his cue from Mother and swallowed his rage, watching in silence as my father did as he pleased. When Mother, much distressed, told him about this or that item that had been removed from our home, he would say consolingly, “We can always buy another one.”

As a matter of fact, Sun Guangping never harbored much resentment against the widow, and actually felt some gratitude.
Those nights he made his way in and out of her rear window left him on tenterhooks for a long time afterward, and it was his nervousness on this score that explains why he could be no more than a spectator to my father's misdeeds and never once interfered. The widow, as it turned out, told no one about their affair, but this may simply be because she had no idea which young man it was who was sneaking in to see her. She was not in the habit of questioning the men who had designs on her body and could identify her visitors only in cases like that of Sun Kwangtsai, who bedded her in full daylight.

By the time Sun Guangping graduated from high school and returned home to work the land, his self-confidence had sunk to a new low. In the first few days he often just lay in bed, staring into space. His dazed look told all. Given my own mood at the time, I had no trouble figuring out that his most ardent wish was to leave Southgate and start a new life. More than once I saw him stand at the edge of a field, gazing as though in a trance as an enfeebled old man, his face lined with wrinkles, his body caked in mud, trudged across the farmland. I noted the misery in my brother's eyes. This grim sight struck a chord in him, making him wonder about the latter stages of his own life.

Once he had come to terms with reality, Sun Guangping soon became aware of a vague but persistent craving for a woman. It was a need quite distinct from that which the widow had satisfied. What he needed now was a woman who would stand by him and take care of him, a woman who could put an end to those nights of restless agitation and bring him contentment and peace of mind. So he got engaged.

The girl was quite average in looks. She lived in a two-story house in a village nearby; below the rear window of her house
flowed the river that had claimed my little brothers life. As her family had been the first in the area to put up a house of more than one story, reports of their wealth had spread far and wide. Sun Guangping did not have his eye on their money for it was just a year after the house went up, and he knew that they still had loans to pay off and would not be in a position to offer an impressive dowry. Rather, this match was a gift presented by the village matchmaker, a woman who despite her bound feet hopped about as briskly as a flea. That afternoon when the matchmaker came walking over, her face wreathed in smiles, Sun Guangping knew what was about to happen, and knew too that he would agree to whatever was proposed.

My father was excluded from the negotiations preceding the engagement, and it was the widow, not Mother, who informed him of the outcome. On hearing the news, he realized at once that it was his responsibility to conduct an inspection. “What does she look like, this girl who's going to be sleeping with my son?” he asked.

Sun Kwangtsai set off at a brisk pace that morning, beaming happily as he walked, leaning forward with his hands clasped behind his back. He could see the fiancee's imposing home from quite some distance away, and the first thing he said to her father was, “He's a lucky bastard, that Sun Guangping.”

My father sat down in the girl's house as relaxed and at ease as if he was sitting on the widow's bed. Coarse language flowed from his lips as he conversed with her father. Her brother slipped out, bottle in hand, and brought it back full to the brim with spirits. Her mother set to work in the kitchen, and the noise of her preparations made my father's juices flow. He had already forgotten that the purpose of his visit was to inspect my future sister-in-law. Her father, however, had not.

He raised his head and called a name that Sun Kwangtsai forgot as soon as he heard it. The daughter, my might-have-been sister-in-law, called back from the second floor, but she was clearly reluctant to show herself. Her big brother ran up the flight of stairs and returned a few moments later with a smile on his face. He told Sun Kwangtsai, “She won't come down.”

My father showed himself to be a broad-minded man, saying airily, “That's all right, no big deal. If she won't come down, I'll go up.”

He poked his head into the kitchen for a moment and then went up to view the young lady. I think I can say with certainty that he tore himself away from the kitchen only with great reluctance. Not long after he had gone upstairs, the family down below heard a bloodcurdling shriek. Father and son remained glued to their seats in astonishment while the lady of the house rushed out of the kitchen in alarm. As they puzzled over what could possibly have precipitated that scream, Sun Kwangtsai came down the stairs with a big grin on his face, muttering, “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

From upstairs could be heard sobs so muffled it was as though they had been buried under a deep layer of cotton.

My father sat down unconcernedly by the table and as the girl's brother dashed upstairs Sun Kwangtsai said to her father, “Your daughter is really well put together.”

His host nodded uneasily, at the same time scanning Sun Kwangtsai's face with suspicion. “Sun Guangping is so damn lucky!” my father went on.

No sooner did he say that than the girl's brother careened down the stairs and with one enormous blow knocked Sun Kwangtsai to the ground, along with the chair he was sitting on.

That afternoon Sun Kwangtsai returned to the village with his face all black and blue, and the first thing he said to Sun Guangping was, “I canceled that match for you.” My father was outraged. “Those people are so unreasonable!” he cried. “I was just trying to look out for my son and make sure the girl was in good health. Can you believe how bad they beat me up?”

The reports that came from the neighboring village offered a different interpretation of the incident, according to which my father's first gift to his future daughter-in-law had been a breast massage.

My mother spent the whole day after the visit sitting by the kitchen stove, wiping away tears with the hem of her apron. Sun Guangping did not, as the locals were expecting, come to blows with Sun Kwangtsai, and his reaction was simply not to speak to anybody in the village for several days in a row.