Great-Grandmother said, "They've all left us." I knew she was referring to our neighbors of old. "Your great-grandfather told me that our days as neighbors were limited," she said. When Great-Grandmother spoke, her perfect mouthful of teeth shone like fossils. "When this house was built, the Chong Zhen emperor had not yet ascended the throne." When she finished speaking, she heaved a long sigh and said nothing more for the rest of the night. Piercing my ears and her silence, that long sigh was like the light of a comet falling back across the ages to the Ming dynasty.
I saw our house moving in the fluid of time, and the shore upon which the arcing waves broke was Great-Grandmother's teeth. That's really weird.
After seeing Great-Grandmother back to her garret, Father said, "You've been on the road all day, better go to bed early If there is anything to do, it can wait till tomorrow. You two sleep in your mother's and my bed." When he finished speaking, Father opened the lattice door to the east wing. I remembered that Great-Grandmother's coffin had always been stored there and that every year Father applied another coat of black lacquer tinged with red For decades, the coffin had calmly followed the revolutions of the earth around the sun with Great-Grandmother, both exchanging positions of responsibility, looking forward to each other. They had a mutual understanding that each would give the other its or her significance and eternal ending.
"Where are you going to sleep?" I asked Father.
"In your great-grandmother's coffin," said Father.
My wife gave me a nervous look. Unsure, she refrained from talking. Father quietly closed the door, and the east wing quickly became black as the giant pupil of an eye.
Once in bed, my wife said, "Why does he sleep in a coffin?"
"It doesn't matter, we're all one family. Dead or alive, we're all together."
"The living can't live with the dead, no matter what," said my wife.
To comfort her, I said, "That's the way our family does things. There's nothing unusual about sleeping in a coffin; sometimes we even fight over who gets to sleep in it. I had an older brother and an older sister who died young. Great-Grandmother wouldn't permit them to be buried outside, so we buried them under the bed."
My wife sat up immediately. "Where?"
"Under the bed." I tapped on the wooden planks of the bed with my foot, making a hollow sound. "Right under this board."
My wife's eyes shone with fear. She clutched my arm and said, "Why did your family do that?"
"It's not just our family," I said. "Every family is the same."
My wife held me tightly by the waist. "I'm scared," she said. "I'm scared to death."
* * *
I called you home for Great-Grandmother's sake."
"Is she going to die soon?" I asked.
Silently, Father shook his head. "If only that were the case," said Father. "I don't care what anyone says, all I wish is for the old lady to die."
I asked him what was the matter and how he could say such a thing.
Father lowered his head and said nothing. Father's silence reminded me of Great-Grandmother at another time.
"In another ten days or so, your great-grandmother will be one hundred years old," said Father. It looked as though Great-Grandmother had become a wooden cangue on him. Father lifted his head, looked at me, and asked, "Did you see her mouthful of teeth?"
I didn't understand Father. I couldn't figure out what he was driving at.
Father tugged at the cuff of my Western-style suit and, lowering his voice, said, "If a person lives to a hundred and still has all her teeth, she'll become a demon after she dies."
"How can that be?" I asked.
"Why shouldn't it?" asked my father.
"Who ever saw anyone become a demon?"
"Did anyone ever
not
see a person become a demon?"
How could that be possible? I asked myself. My back seemed to go numb and felt all prickly. I saw in Father's eyes the same look I had seen in my wife's. She was afraid of death, but my father was afraid of life.
Explosions were heard all around our house. Several dynasties were reduced to rubble and dust in the strong smell of dynamite. The state of relative rest between buildings and debris is what the history books call a dynasty. The workers had done their utmost to ensure that a building would last. Later, people would complain, "What's the point of making it so solid? Dynasties are like buildings and teeth-they grow, and they crumble." The smell of dynamite is like incense in a Buddhist country-it alters the mystery present in the redeemer's posture.
My son walked haltingly around the courtyard. Holding on to the same small redwood stool that I had held on to when I was a child, he played by himself in a corner of the courtyard. He was absorbed in playing with a bamboo chopstick. After two hours, he was drooling and humming a hymn only God could understand. Great-Grandmother stood in another corner of the courtyard, eyeing my son and listening to him sing. It must have been because of him that she hadn't gone upstairs. Great-Grandmother approached my son, and they conversed with a natural affinity in a language not understood by other human beings. On their faces played an essential correspondence given to man by Nature, echoing each other like sunrise and sunset, relying on each other's heartbeats to transmit spring, summer, fall, and winter, making of humanity the most wonderful quintessence of the universe. They talked. There was no interpreter. It was the way the wind understood the sound of the leaves, or the way water guessed the direction of the waves, or the way light saw the mirror, or the way one pupil could contain another.
"They seem to be having fun. What are they playing?" my wife asked.
Great-Grandmother turned and said to me, "When I die, take a piece of cloth from your son, wrap some of his hair in it, and sew it into the cuff of my sleeve."
"What is all this talk about death? You're still young."
"Don't forget," said Great-Grandmother.
"All right," I replied.
"It doesn't matter how long you live-as soon as you open your eyes, it's time to close them," Great-Grandmother said, smiling. "If you talk about long life, then it will be among the shadows. Remember-a piece of cloth. Don't forget."
Great-Grandmother's hundredth birthday was slowly drawing nearer. My house was shrouded in fear like the dust that silently covered the table and porcelain.
That night, Father's twelve brothers gathered at our house. I sat to one side. In my imagination, Great-Grandmother's teeth emitted a sound like breaking ice. The men smoked quietly. In their preoccupation was the solemn atmosphere of having arrived at a juncture in history. No one spoke. At a silent juncture in history, the first conclusion is the direct equivalent to the outcome of history. This is our accustomed way of doing things. At that moment, a rumble was heard outside. The sound reminded me that the road home had sent me back to the Ming dynasty, which caused me to tremble even more.
Finally, Father lifted his head in the smoke and said firmly, "Pull them." He turned to look at me. His look made me feel that I couldn't bear the weight of history. I smiled. But even I didn't know what I was smiling about. On many important occasions, I wore a foolish smile, my heart empty as the wind. I suspect that many of those present saw my foolish smile.
After things had quieted down, my wife complained, "Why are things such a mess? Why is your family such a mess? The boy's hands are always twitching."
"He'll be fine soon," I said. "He'll be fine in a couple of days. He'll calm down soon."
"I can't find the boy's shoes," my wife said.
"How could they disappear? Who'd want such little shoes?" I asked.
My wife said she couldn't find his red shoes. I looked everywhere. A little impatiently, I said, "If they're gone, they're gone. Just buy another pair tomorrow."
"That's ridiculous," said my wife. "Yesterday you lost a pair of Nikes, and today the boy's are gone. Ridiculous."
"Why make such a fuss over it?" I asked. "If Mother heard you, there'd really be trouble."
* * *
Pulling Great-Grandmother's teeth constituted a unique page in the history of my life. A drizzle was blowing that morning. You really couldn't call it rain-it was like rain and like mist but also like wind. The sky secreted a viscous historical atmosphere. The plot in our house got quickly under way. Only Great-Grandmother, who was the object of the plot, was left in the dark. We were prepared, nobody said a word. There was a sense of taking fate in our hands and of participating in the excitement of a historical mission, and there was the exhilaration of committing a crime. This is the way humanity commonly approaches history. Great-Grandmother was sitting at her window, easy as a dream, like an uneventful period in a historical record. All around her, we were motionless and silent, waiting for the signal to stand up and cast the shadow of ambush onto the ground.
Around noon, Fifth Uncle came to the house. He looked nervous and worried. Fifth Uncle called for Father. Standing under the eaves and facing Father, he said, "We can't get any anesthetic; it's too tightly controlled by the hospital."
Father's face darkened, looking like the moss on an ancient brick.
"Are we going to pull them or not?" asked Fifth Uncle.
Father said nothing. Facing Great-Grandmother's little garret, Father lowered his head and said, "Grandmother, you will just have to suffer."
It was damp everywhere. The accumulated dust swelled. For a long time, I was unable to wipe away the gray streaks from this part of my memory. All afternoon, my uncles sat in the central room, drinking. The table full of wine had been prepared for Great-Grandmother, so the old lady came downstairs especially early. She was all smiles. She couldn't see well, her eyes hidden behind an inauspicious shroud. Normally, her face wore a somewhat confused expression. As soon as Great-Grandmother sat down, my uncles toasted her. My father said, "Grandmother, you will be one hundred soon. May you outlast South Mountain and be more prosperous than the Eastern Sea."
Great-Grandmother laughed. "I can't live much longer," she said happily, holding her glass. "If I live much longer, I'll become a demon." Then she drank down the wine.
The faces of my uncles darkened, looking perplexed and alarmed. The wine glasses in their hands appeared heavy; they hesitated. Fortunately, Great-Grandmother couldn't see.
I have no recollection about the moment of silence that followed. Perhaps it was just a few minutes, or perhaps another layer of dust had settled on Great-Grandmother's shoulders-it has never been clear to me. At the end of that moment of silence, Father and his twelve brothers got up from their seats and knelt before Great-Grandmother. Her lips were slightly parted, and every tooth seemed to smile. Great-Grandmother said, "Get up, get up, my darlings, we haven't observed that custom in ages." The dark shapes of her darlings stood up. Fifth Uncle held a rope, Ninth Uncle gripped a pair of pliers, and Seventh Uncle held a redwood tray. They pounced on her and held her fast. In a few minutes, Great-Grandmother's teeth were all lying on the tray; the roots of her teeth were covered with bloody shreds of flesh. I stared at Great-Grandmother's teeth; in them, I saw humanity's direct intuition of time. It is our fear of time that makes us draw a link between teeth and their loss. Seventh Uncle handed the redwood tray to me. The thought vanished, and I can't remember much. Later, I was unable to recall what I was thinking at that time. All I remember is the swift, violent, harsh, and painful psychological experience. Later, I smelled the dynamite-the odor of the dynamite burned like ice. I was bitten by the odor.
Tenth Uncle said, "Elder Brother, I can't stop the bleeding. Should we take her to the hospital?"
Father said, "We can't. The doctor will know what happened as soon as he sees her."
Great-Grandmother had collapsed on the brick floor, her lips deeply sunken. Teeth are funny things. When they are there, they can't be seen, but as soon as they are gone, the face changes beyond recognition. Great-Grandmother's hundred-year-old blood spread around her lips and flowed more disorderedly than time. Great-Grandmother lay on the floor, breathing heavily. Her throat gurgled and creaked like oars. Her skin was slowly losing color and resembled traditional rice paper.
Ninth Uncle said, "She's fading fast."
Fifth Uncle said, "Get her some water. What are you doing standing around?"
Seventh Uncle tried several times; he lifted her head and shook it several times. It was no good, the water wouldn't go down.
At that moment, my son started crying in the west wing. I ran over and asked my wife, "What's going on? Can't you even take care of the child?"
My wife said, "If he wants to cry, what can I do? What's all that racket in there?"
I said, "It's none of your business. You are not to come out unless I call you."
While coaxing our son, my wife said, "Being in your house is like being in the eighteenth level of hell. One can barely breathe here."
I frowned and asked, "Are you finished?"
Father said, "Take down a door; the floor is too cold."
A bunch of old men scrambled to lay the very old lady on the door. I walked over and lifted her eyelids. The world of Great-Grandmother's life lay shrouded in darkness behind her cataracts. Softly, I called, "Old Ancestor, Old Ancestor." Her head slid from my elbows to my hands.
Her thirteen grandchildren all knelt at the same time. Their bowed backs made their kneeling look pious.
Great-Grandmother was laid out on the lid of her coffin. The coffin was at least thirty years old. Many familiar and unfamiliar people came to offer their condolences. They walked down the dark, dank passageway to bring funeral money and to eat a mouthful of the noodles prepared to celebrate Great-Grandmother's birthday. My father and his twelve brothers as well as the thirty-seven male members of my generation took turns burning funeral money. The ashes floated all around my house, and the smell of death from the money swirled around the people who walked through the house. The smell of death was so alive. Even the rats came out of their holes and skittered away, seeing that no one was paying attention.