The Seventh Day (8 page)

“How about this?” She turned toward me. “Let’s face each other.” I turned toward her. “Does that feel better now?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Her wet hand stroked my damaged face. “The day we broke up,” she said, “when you saw me into the taxi, I hugged you and said something to you—do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember,” I said. “You said you still loved me.”

“That’s right.” She nodded. “You said something to me too.”

“I said I’d always love you.”

She and the gown together climbed on top of me and I didn’t know quite what to do. I raised my hands but didn’t dare hug her. Her mouth said wetly into my ear: “My STD is cured.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Hug me.”

I hugged her.

“Caress me.”

My hands caressed her back, waist, and thighs—I caressed her everywhere. Her body was wet and my hands seemed to be caressing her in water.

“You’ve put on some weight,” I said.

She smiled faintly. “I’ve gotten a little thicker around the waist.”

My hands caressed her restlessly, and then it was my body caressing her body while her body caressed my body and it was as though our bodies developed cords that connected us….

I sat up in bed and saw her standing by the bed, tidying her hair with her hand.

“You woke up.”

“I never slept.”

“I heard you snoring.”

“I really didn’t sleep.”

“All right,” she said. “You didn’t.”

She fastened her belt. “I’ve got to go. Friends have prepared a big funeral for me, so I need to hurry back.”

I nodded.

She walked over to the door and looked back at me as she left. “Yang Fei, I’m off now,” she said disconsola
tely.

I
roamed on the borderline between life and death. The snow was bright and the rain was dark. I seemed to be walking in morning and evening, both at the same time.

More than once I walked toward my bedsit. Yesterday Li Qing and I had left traces there of our reunion, but today there was no way to get close to it. However much I walked, I seemed to be stationary and never got the least bit nearer to my building. I remembered how I had taken my father’s hand when I was small, thinking to walk until we stood right underneath the moon, but, though we walked a long way, the distance between us and the moon did not change in the slightest.

Just at this moment two shining rails grew up beneath my feet and swirled ahead of me. They appeared tentatively, like rays of light that had lost their way, but they led me to the scene of my birth.

I was delivered between two rails as a train sped off in the night, and I gave my earliest wail not amid howling wind and pounding rain, but under a sky full of stars. A young switchman heard my feeble sobs and came to rescue me, while another train made the adjacent track quiver as it rushed toward me from the far distance. No sooner did the switchman clutch me to his chest than that train raced past with a deafening roar, and that is how, between the time it took for the first train to go one way and the second train to go the other, I acquired a father. A few days later, I had acquired a name as well—Yang Fei. This father of mine was called Yang Jinbiao.

I entered the world through the strangest of channels, for my delivery was effected not in a hospital’s obstetric unit or at my mother’s home, but in the cramped toilet of a train in motion.

Forty-one years ago, my birth mother boarded a train in the ninth month of a pregnancy. I was to be her third child, and she was heading back to her parental home to visit my ailing grandmother. As the train slowly approached a station ten hours into its journey, she felt a faint ache in her midriff. I was still three weeks away from my scheduled first appearance, and my older brother and sister had both been born strictly in keeping with the usual timetable, so my mother assumed I would follow a similar course. She simply felt that she needed to go to the toilet, and had no inkling that I was impatient to come out.

She rose from her sleeping berth and waddled down the aisle toward the toilet at the end of the railroad car. The train had just pulled into a station, and her passage to the toilet was made all the more difficult by the travelers who had crammed their way onto the train with bags over their shoulders. She carefully squeezed her way past the passengers and their big and small bags. As she entered the toilet, the train slowly began to move. Trains in those days had primitive facilities and squat-toilets only; if you looked down through the spacious round hole you saw an endless succession of railroad sleepers flash past below. With me in her belly hampering her movements, my mother was unable to squat down and had to kneel, trying to ignore the filth on the toilet floor. Pulling down her pants, she gave an effort and out I popped—and down into the round hole in the toilet floor. It took only a second for the speed of my slide and the speed of the train’s forward motion to break the cord that linked me to my mother, and immediately we were lost to each other.

My mother lay slumped on the floor in acute pain; it took a few moments for her to realize that her womb was now empty. After looking around for me in panic, she realized that I must have fallen out through the hole. With great effort she managed to prop herself up, and after opening the toilet door she cried out to a passenger waiting outside, “My baby, my baby—”

With that she collapsed in a heap, and there was a shout of “Somebody has fainted!”

First a female attendant rushed up, and then the conductor. The female attendant was the first to see blood between my mother’s legs, and she prompted the conductor to broadcast an appeal for medical personnel to proceed at once to carriage 11. Two doctors and a nurse rushed to the scene, to find my mother lying sprawled in the passageway, sobbing and begging for help in incoherent fragments of speech. Soon she fainted again and had to be lifted onto her sleeping berth. The three medical workers attended to her while the train trundled on.

By this time I was already in the cabin where the switchman lived. This young man—at twenty-one, now suddenly a father—looked at me in consternation. I was covered in purple-red blotches and crying fit to burst, my umbilical cord quivering in time with my crying and making him wonder if I had grown a tail. As my sobs grew weaker, it dawned on him that I must be hungry. It was late at night then and all the shops were shut, so he could find no infant formula for me. In his anxiety he remembered that the wife of a coworker of his named Hao Qiangsheng had given birth to a daughter three days earlier, so he wrapped me up in his cotton-padded overcoat and dashed toward Hao’s apartment.

Hao Qiangsheng was woken from sleep by a pounding on his door, and, opening up, he saw Yang was carrying something in his arms and crying desperately, “Milk! Milk!”

Still not fully awake, Hao rubbed his eyes. “What milk?” he asked.

Yang opened his coat to show him the wailing infant inside, then immediately passed me on to our host. Hao gave a start, accepting me as gingerly as he might a piping-hot roast sweet potato, and with a face of utter amazement carried me into the inner room. “It’s Yang Jinbiao’s,” he said to his wife, Li Yuezhen, who had also just woken up. From one look at me Li Yuezhen could tell that I was newborn, so she took me into her arms, and after she pulled up her shirt I quieted down and began to gulp down my first milk.

Yang sat with Hao in the outer room, mopping his brow, and explained what had happened. Only now did Hao get the full picture. He told my father how flabbergasted he had been to see he had suddenly acquired a child, when he didn’t even have a girlfriend. My father chuckled loudly at this, but soon shared with Hao his concern that I might be a freak, given that I had a tail—and one attached to the front of me.

Inside, Li Yuezhen overheard this exchange between the two new fathers, and after I had drunk my fill and dropped off to sleep she dressed me in a set of her daughter’s homemade baby clothes and went into the outer room with a wad of used fabric in her hand.

Li Yuezhen returned me to my father’s arms and instructed him on how to change diapers, showing him how to cut up old clothes to make diapers—the older the clothes the better, because the older the softer. Finally she pointed at the thing protruding from my navel. “That’s the umbilical cord,” she said. “Tomorrow you need to go to the station clinic and have the doctor cut it off. Don’t try to do it yourself—the baby might pick up an infection.”

I walked on, following the rails that looked like light beams, looking for that rickety cabin next to the railroad line that harbored so many stories from my early years. In front of me was rain and snow, and in front of the rain and snow were row upon row of tall buildings dotted with dark windows. They retreated as I walked toward them, and I realized that that world was gradually leaving me.

Faintly I could hear the sound of my father lamenting the ways of the world, a sound so far away and yet so intimate. In my ears his complaints began to stack up high, just like those tall buildings in the far distance, and they brought a smile to my lips.