The woman was waiting for him.
He smoked; his heart rankled. He couldn't let this night pass, he couldn't knowingly let go of this final opportunity. After this evening, who knows how many years he'd have to go parched with thirst all over again? Lighting his deer-hoof pipe, he satisfied his craving for a smoke. He smoked bowl after bowl, and bowl by bowl he knocked out the ashes against the edge of the kang. A hopeless hope was shattered; a sham that had been a sham from the start was over. But the heart of this lonely rod, who had endured somehow for twenty years, was suffering endless torment from the whole affair. And the greater his torment, the more agitated and rancorous he became. He did not know how he was going to release that agitation and rancor; meanwhile, the woman who would be leaving tomorrow was waiting for him. Abruptly, he snatched up his splendid pipe and smashed it against the stove, whirled around, and ordered: "Sleep!"
The woman undid her buttons, and her dingy clothes revealed those two full breasts. Suddenly, a thought burned in his head. He demanded, "Did that fucker of a team leader touch you?"
The woman bowed her head bashfully and covered her exposed chest back up.
"Say it! Did he touch you or not?"
The woman hesitated a moment, then nodded reluctantly.
"That fucker. Make me eat his leftover noodles, will he? I'll fuck his ancestors!"
The wild wave in the man's chest plunged and split his head open. He lunged for the woman, brutal, rabid, giving vent to the bitterness of half a lifetime, which had turned even more bitter because of all of this. It was as if the net of this life and this world, which could never be thrown off, now lashed him even more tightly, and all because of this woman. With his savage spasms and gasps, the torment and suffocating bitterness he could never find words for and the body and soul he could neither tear nor break apart-all pulverized into fragments, into a foul slime of flesh and blood as it spurted into the woman.
She put up with it in silence; her warm and soft, broad and giving bosom, under the lashing of the driving waves, was as warm soft, and giving as always.
A flame of lamplight the size of a bean burned dimly on the oil lamp, struggling to sustain a faltering smear of light in the unyielding darkness.
It was after the driving wave had finally calmed that the man's thickly calloused palm brushed across the warmth of tears on the woman's face.
Translated By William Schaefer And Fenghua Wang
Duo Duo – The Day I Got to Xi'an
From a good distance away, I spotted the medical academy's sign, but then another sign leaped into view next to it-the business school's. I was about to stop one of the students to ask directions when I heard-no, saw her coming toward me with a "Hey!" Relieved now, I eased out of the big manic strides I had been taking. I walked along beside her. Suddenly, I felt as though someone had been added in between the two people here and that this other someone was me. Whatever this feeling was, it trapped inside me everything I had intended to say to her.
All I said as we walked through the medical academy was her name, Xiao Tong, in a flat, dry voice. Was I afraid of never being able to call her name again?
Inside the dormitory, clothes were hung up all over the place to dry. I had to push through at least three or four layers of laundry before I could make out the door to the inside room. Once inside, we stood there, facing each other, then sat down. A bed, a desk, two chairs (one for me, one for her), a radio-cassette deck, four bare walls, and a table, which would have been bare as well if it hadn't been for the dust. Just then I noticed I'd forgotten to bring cigarettes. I hardly asked anything about her. None of the usual "How's it going?"-a commonplace I'm sick of. What does that mean,
how?
How
could
it be going? But she wasn't exactly making me feel at home either, I noticed. I rested my arms on the table, rapped out a little beat with my knuckles, crossed my legs, recrossed my le»s and knew this visit was not going to be a pleasant one. In a year and a half (she'd been transferred to the medical academy a year and a half ago), she'd had maybe four visitors. She'd got fat, ugly, and she was telling her favorite stories about herself. My heart sank when she said she hardly drank any water except at the three meals in the cafeteria (Sundays she often didn't go at all). Now I had no choice but to ask her to please bring me a glass of water. I was waiting for that water.
So that was about it. Then from somewhere or other, out popped that little gem of a phrase,
nervous breakdown
. She perked right up, hearing that. She hadn't slept a wink last night ("You've just
got
to get sleep after sweating heavily"). Except for lectures (she was a teacher) twelve periods a week, she slept through everything, all through those two years she didn't have classes, and on Sundays, too.
"Oh really?… Is that right?" When did I start humoring her like this, I wondered. It probably got this way because she had no interest at all in anything I could have said to her but was perfectly content with the way her own life was going these days. Compared with someone like me, who is always criticizing himself, who tries hard to straighten himself out, she came across as being as neat and composed as could be. I had the feeling, though, that she treated everyone as if he or she were her doctor. That would explain why everything we talked about had to do with pathology and why I suddenly found myself playing psychiatrist, racking my brains to come up with the most pedestrian advice: "No, that won't do… No matter what, you can't go on like that… You've got to do something, anything, just do it… Do it along with other people…"
This was leading nowhere. For two hours, it was as though she were someone perpetually waiting at a bus stop, and I was the bus. No cigarettes, no water-just me trying to help an overweight, imperturbable woman try to figure out how to get her life together. I mean, I was trying to think it through for her: one way is to see that people are different, that they behave differently. She didn't make that derisory little sniff when I got on the subject of behavior, or at least I don't think I heard one, but even so the second I said the word
behave
, my confidence drained away. She was totally wrapped up in herself-her reactions had slowed, making her use-less to herself and to anyone else. "So… you should love…"
I told her how I had rescued myself-that is, how I had admitted to myself that I had a problem: lonely to the edge of madness, disgusted, hiding from everyone. I told her how I missed my cat so much after it ran away that I spent a month looking for it; how every night coming into the stairwell, I would stare ravenously at my mail slot, though I couldn't remember having written to anyone, not even a simple card; and how after work, I let myself pedal my bicycle on and on, oblivious to where I was headed; and then how I finally understood something. "You should…"
You should help others, abandon the idea of self-worth-or rather, making your own life more worthwhile is what it's all about. One day around noon at a greengrocer's stall, I saw a boy dragging his younger sister along the ground. I broke through the crowd of indifferent onlookers, shoved the little brat away, helped the girl to her feet, and ordered the boy to take her home. I told Xiao Tong about the throb of joy I felt at doing this good turn, how from then on, I kept on doing good turns, and how I felt happier than ever before. Then I couldn't take it any longer: "Can I-may I have a glass of water?"
She was a long time registering my request. First, she said she'd run out of tea; then she said there wasn't any water ready boiled and the fire in the stove had gone out. She talked on and on, sitting there in her chair. Finally, she said, "Love?"
For the seventy-second time, I thought to myself, I've got to go. But somehow I couldn't make myself get up. The sun, three hours of whose light I'd squandered while sitting in there, had sunk down past her kitchen. In that room in the fading light, I noticed her foot had gotten fatter, too, cocked up on her knee and squeezed into a sneaker. Still, there was no way I could bring myself to say, I've got to go. In the silence, I could almost see her after I'd gone, still sitting there.
I finally did get the drink of water. I was the one who lit the stove. When the water was just about to boil, I broke the silence: "How about a stroll over to Wild Goose Pagoda?" She said it was all the same to her whether she went or not. Then another half hour of silence before I suggested again that we go to the pagoda. In the meantime, she had turned on some music, let it play for about a minute, and turned it off again. At last, I found the strength to stand up and say, "I've got to be going." Her eyes (they looked fatter, too) seemed to say that she wouldn't oppose the wishes of anyone in the world. In other words, I was free to come and go as I pleased.
We went out, and she escorted me across the campus. Some students were playing volleyball. I said I had to use the rest room. She gave me directions on how to get there. It seemed so complex: I had to turn several corners and go all the way inside some building. When I came back, she had changed her mind. (I thought that it was fine for her to have made up her mind in the first place; if she changed it back again, all the better.) I told her what I had just been thinking, and she told me that we could take a shortcut to Wild Goose Pagoda, that there were a lot of vendors selling Xi'an-style snacks near the pagoda, and that we could have for dinner some things I couldn't find in Beijing. That interested me. I didn't remind her, though, what a terrific gourmand she used to be.
I practically had to force her to decide whether or not she was going to climb the tower, and then I had to tell her three times, "If you don't want to climb it, you can wait for me at the bottom." As far as I recall, this was all we said along the way. Walking together, riding the bus, stepping off the bus, and continuing to walk on, we were locked into an acute awkwardness. She said she may as well climb the pagoda, so I went to buy a couple of tickets. Going up (seven stories in all), I wasn't sure if I should give her a hand or if we should each make our own way. I figured I'd let my elbow bump hers on the way up-that way, she could decide what to do. I kept thinking that's what I was going to do, but I may not actually have done it. Through the four windows of the pagoda's top story, we gazed out at the city and suburbs of Xi'an, spreading out as far as the eye could see… If it had been just me going up the pagoda, that last phrase wouldn't have stuck in my mind.
We left Wild Goose Pagoda and walked along at a moderate pace. "Shall we get something to eat?" She seemed to have forgotten about the eating part. Neither of us was hungry at all, but we each had a deep-fried dried persimmon. All I could think about was rushing to the bus station and getting away from her as soon as possible. Then of all things, she started going on about how there used to be so many snack vendors around this place, but now there's hardly anything except for stuff like bean noodles. As for me, I was still thinking of the twenty cents I'd spent on those two dried persimmons. She said she knew of a good restaurant near Dachai Market but didn't say if she thought we should go or not. I said, "Let's head over there." We headed over.
Dachai was bustling and brightly lit. She led me into a food shop selling pastries. I asked her, "What's the point of coming in here?" So we went right out again and started on a search for that unfindable restaurant. Already it was seven-thirty, and most of the restaurants had shut down. Red faces of drinkers careened out of restaurant doors. We kept on, walking from street to street with no idea what we were after. All I could think of was hurrying to a bus stop so I could get away from her. But the city buses were so crammed full of people that we didn't feel like getting on any of them.
The stores all sold cassette players, leather jackets, shampoo- stuff like that. We walked into yet another restaurant, a dumpling place, where everybody was eating standing up. We walked right out again, but as we did, she kept looking over her shoulder, back inside. Then there was another place, which had run out of everything but pig organs. She said she just couldn't remember where that one good restaurant was. We slipped into a wonton place and had a bowl apiece; I paid, of course. Then I asked her if she was taking the number 3 bus or the number 1. I figured if she took the 3, I'd take the 1. She said either would do. I said I wanted to go to the long-distance bus station to order a ticket and asked her if she wanted to come along. Why I had to suggest that to her, I don't know. We went all the way through the night market again, through all the boiling and frying and clouds of steam, through all the people milling around and bumping into me. I had no idea, none, what the connection was between her and me or why we absolutely had to walk along here, getting shoved and elbowed, or if I really had to buy a long-distance bus ticket. When she saw me actually holding a bus ticket for early the next morning, she pointed to a shop next door selling southern-style foods and then pointed inside the place at some kind of soft, fluffy cake. I ignored her. Then we stood in a corner of this city where I didn't know a soul, waiting for the local bus to come. It came.
I managed to grab an empty seat for her. "Bye," I said when I got to my stop (which came before hers). She turned her face toward the window. I got off the bus but wasn't relieved at all. Nine-thirty in the Xi'an suburbs, walking through mud, suddenly I was hungry. As luck would have it, there ahead of me stood a place selling meat pastries and, incredibly, it was still open for business. I had a couple of the pastries (good ones, too) and washed them down with a bowl of hot sticky-dumpling soup. When I walked outside, I thought I saw the bus carrying Xiao Tong still coming toward me down the road, and I wondered whether I really
had
seen her.
"Next stop Xi'an -end of the line. One of our nation's renowned ancient cities, Xi'an has served as capital for more than ten dynasties over the long history of the Chinese people…"