Old Town
Page 18
Their battered and travel-worn bus came to a stop. The doctor and Young Li followed along in the flow of people to the city gate. Many people were holding aloft small cards that had faded yellow. Young Li asked a man beside him what these were. The man was astonished that these two fellows didn’t know about “Loyal Citizen” identity cards and said in a lowered voice, “Get out of here fast! Even people with cards are searched and questioned. Without cards you’ll be taken for communists from up north of the river.” Young Li had no time to relate this to the doctor for Japanese soldiers with rifles locked and loaded were already standing in front of them. He quickly made a show of searching through his pockets for the document, turning not only his own pockets inside out, but also the doctor’s. He shook open their bundle from which fell two pieces of old clothing and several dried buns. Then, smacking his chest and stamping his feet, he cried out, “The cards are gone! Someone’s stolen them!”
Young Li reached the very acme of the acting profession with this performance but it couldn’t change reality. They were pulled out of line by the Japanese and thrust into the clump of people who had been searched and were considered suspicious. All around was face after fear-contorted face. The women were crying loudly. The men were heaving deep sighs and groans. The doctor finally realized that he was facing the worst calamity of all. Most probably here and now outside the city of Nanjing he would “meet his Waterloo.” Suddenly, he very much did not want to die and a strong will to survive that he had never before felt roused within him. He closed his eyes and prayed. Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus, I beseech you to help your child to pass through this danger and let him return home for just one look at Second Sister.
Several Japanese soldiers escorted the twenty or thirty “suspect elements” to the outskirts of the city. Young Li and the doctor dropped to the very back. A Japanese soldier holding a rifle was walking beside them. As they were making their way through a grove of trees, Young Li suddenly held up three gold pieces in both his hands in front of the soldier. The soldier took one of them and weighed it in his hand. His eyebrows gave a jump and immediately he grabbed the other two pieces. A deal! Greatly excited, Young Li dodged behind a tree, dragging the doctor with him.
The doctor hadn’t seen the transaction carried out between Young Li and the Japanese soldier. He thought that the soldiers would chase after them and mow them down with a volley of fire. The sounds of footsteps grew fainter and fainter and then disappeared. There were only a few birds singing a monotonous tune in the loneliness of this forest. Young Li kept shoving the doctor. “Sir, we’re safe and sound now!” The doctor gazed at him in a kind of a stupor. “Why did the Japanese let us go?”
“Division Commander Zhang’s gold bullion saved us! Aiyah! I’m so stupid, giving him three pieces. Actually, one would have been enough to do the deal!” When the doctor finally figured the whole thing out, he wept tears of gratitude. This clearly was God’s miracle. He deigned to hear my cry of desperation and fulfilled my wish to survive.
The fright they experienced below the city gate shattered their dream of returning home to Old Town. They had just now cried for joy over their narrow escape, but now they fell right back into pessimism and despair. There was no way into Nanjing, and originally they had planned to take the train from there to Shanghai. But this road was totally blocked. What other road could they take to go south?
From their experiences during the earlier part of their journey, they knew they would have to go into the countryside again. It was safe for them only in those areas of sparse population. Just as in the backcountry of Anhui where they had sought assistance from peasants and country folk, the rural districts here would minimize the dangers they were in. They decided first to find a peasant’s home to stay in, and then make a move as soon as they could. It was now a windy, moonless night. There were a few weakly flickering lights way off in the distance and they thought these must be a village. After walking for about five miles, they heard the sound of water slapping against a riverbank. The glow they had seen came from fishing lights on a river. By this time, the two men had neither eaten nor drunk anything for more than a day, and each felt so hungry it was as if the skin of his belly was stuck to his backbone. Young Li just sat down on the ground and declared, “I can’t take a step more.” Daybreak was almost on them and, once again, moving about recklessly held many disadvantages and few advantages for them. The doctor distractedly walked toward the river’s edge and, standing on the levee, saw fish breaking the surface of the water from time to time. He felt a real envy. If we could become fish, we could just follow the water downstream all the way to Old Town.
A small boat anchored next to the riverbank bobbed and swayed on the waves. The doctor was standing less than ten steps away from it. On the boat, a fisherman was just then building a fire and the doctor moved forward to greet him, “Good morning to you, countryman.”
Startled, the fisherman scrutinized this outlander. The doctor asked him where he lived and whether business was good. The fisherman answered these questions with an ambiguous shake of the head.
Hearing voices, Young Li ran up the side of the levee and, smelling the fragrance of the fish soup, straightway made mewing sounds like a cat begging to be fed. The fisherman beckoned them to come on board. Young Li took the doctor by the hand and waded in the waist-deep water to clamber aboard the boat. That pan of mushy, under-seasoned, and overcooked fish broth was as good as old Zhu Yuanzhang’s soup of pearls and jadeite.23 The taste of it was something the doctor would never forget as long as he lived.
The fisherman never asked his guests where they had come from or where they were going. As the two deserters sat under the boat’s shelter discussing new plans in the light of changing circumstances, they discovered that the boat had lifted anchor and was speeding toward the middle of the river. Young Li shouted, “Uncle, we don’t know how to swim!” The fisherman worked the scull and said with a smile that curled the sides of his mouth, “Could see that!”
“So may we trouble you to take us back on land in a bit?”
“You looking to die there? The Japanese kill people just like you.”
Young Li and the doctor glanced at each other, wondering what kind of people the fisherman supposed they were. The man had not asked anything about his visitors, but was quite willing to tell them all about himself. He had been born and raised on the little fishing boat. After his parents died, he had led this lonely and solitary life. Young Li had been calling him “Uncle” at every point, only to later find out that this fisherman—with a face filled with all the twists and turns of life and whom he had taken to be fifty or sixty years old—had been on this earth only a bit more than thirty years.
The fisherman’s two visitors stayed on this small boat. These two Old Town “land ducks” learned how to toss and retrieve the fishing net and to work the scull. Every time the fisherman went ashore to sell the fish, they would take the vessel far out in the stream for safety’s sake and wait for the fisherman’s return before sculling back to the riverbank to meet him.
The doctor’s skin darkened and he grew more robust. Calluses formed on his hands. Now the urge to return home gradually flagged and faded. He forgot that he was, as the poet said, “but a guest here.”24 Life on the water passed day by day. Only occasionally in a half-dreaming, half-awakened state did he realize he was floating on a river, and then dejection would take him.
One day, the fisherman came back from the riverbank and quietly said, “This evening there’s going to be a steamship carrying goods down to Shanghai. One of you can go first.”
The doctor was stunned. Young Li asked, “How do you know we want to go to Shanghai?”
The fisherman said evasively, “The first day I saw you I knew where you had come from.”
“And where was that?”
The fisherman raised his hand and jabbed it in the direction of the north. So all along he had taken these two men to be communists from “north of the river.”
Actually, he had been making discreet inquiries about the route for some time. It was only that these two men were much too fair and clean looking. He worried that they would never make it through all the checkpoints along the way.
What the fisherman said made the doctor feel ashamed of himself. Even though he had left Division Commander Hu totally out of a sense of justice, he was, after all, a deserter. He hadn’t even tried to find another army unit truly prepared to bathe in its own blood in order to fight the Japanese.
They both went at it long and hard about which one should go first. Young Li became quite agitated. He stood at the prow of the boat and said, “Sir, if you make me go first, I’m just going to jump into the water right here and feed the fish!”
The doctor said nothing. He just sat stock-still under the awning. The hope of returning home had kindled anew within him, but why wasn’t he feeling any joy? He couldn’t bear leaving Young Li. Though he had not yet been separated from this capable assistant who had been with him day and night, the doctor already felt unbearable pain. Nor could he bring himself to leave the fisherman. Once they parted, they probably would never have the chance to meet again. When he thought of the fisherman, floating all alone on the water, growing older and dying of some disease without a single person to ask about him, the doctor’s heart broke within him.
Sculling his boat late that night, the fisherman found the steamship and came up alongside the larger vessel. The doctor looked at Young Li and the fisherman, unwilling to leave. The master of the steamship reached out and hauled him straight up on board. Just as the vessels were separating, Young Li thrust two gold pieces into the doctor’s hand. By the time the doctor realized what had happened, Young Li was already out of reach.
The steamship’s engines throbbed to life. Young Li cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, “When I get to Old Town I’ll go to Officials Lane and look for you at the Lin residence. If I can’t make it back, please look after my ma! We live in Li Village, Tongpan District, out in the east!”
The doctor fought to hold back his tears but in the end shed a few furtive ones. He was so choked up he couldn’t open his mouth, and just stood there gazing at the little boat rapidly moving farther and farther away.
3.
ON A BLAZINGLY hot summer’s day, my grandfather was making his way through a mass of porters and climbing the steps of Sixteen Wharf Landing, a bulging hemp sack balanced on his shoulders. Shanghai had been a second home for him when he was a young student, and after returning to Old Town, he often longed for the day when he could take Second Sister and the three children to tour all those places of his earlier life. But never did he think that returning to his second home would be like this. The load on his shoulders weighed more than he did. Although over the past two months the fisherman had deliberately made him do heavy work, and made him bare his arms so they would be burned dark by the sunlight, he still had trouble bearing such a heavy weight. He was bent forward almost horizontally and both legs trembled with each step. From the way he looked, you might think he was some pathetic person who insisted on working in spite of being sick. Surprisingly, he wasn’t stopped for an identity card check as he passed through the inspection hatch. But he never made it with his sack to the nearby warehouse. Only a few steps past the hatch his legs gave way under him and he feebly collapsed to the ground, the big sack pressing down on him. He tried to push it away but couldn’t move. Some unknown carrier helped him get his load into the warehouse. There grandpa lingered until about evening and then followed the group of workers going off shift and returning to their homes in Shanghai.
The big buildings and mansions of Shanghai were just as before, but this was no longer the Shanghai he had known. The sight, as he remembered it, of Mr. and Mrs. Qiao standing on the dock to welcome his arrival more than ten years earlier came vividly back to him. The last time he had corresponded with them, they were in Beiping, but contact had been lost for quite a long time. Where were his two saviors now? They were getting on in years. If only they could safely return to their own hometown and live out their remaining days in peace and ease.
Looking up abruptly, Ninth Brother saw a ragged beggar right in front of him and automatically he quickly stepped aside to avoid him. The beggar did the same. Stopping to take a closer look, Ninth Brother realized he was in front of a shop’s display window and that beggar was him! He looked at the window for a long time. The free and easygoing young student in his long gown and mandarin jacket of those earlier days had become the figure in front of him now. This was just what people meant when they spoke of the transience and vicissitudes of human existence. He didn’t know if the sea lane from Shanghai to Old Town was open. What identity papers did he need? He might have to stay here four or five days. He thought he ought to buy a set of clothes and then go to Zhabei25 to see a former classmate, one of his best friends then. He also ought to buy some small gifts for the man’s children.
As Ninth Brother stepped into a small shop, the owner standing behind his counter shouted, “I’ve got no money for you!”
Oh, that so-familiar Shanghai speech! In a voice filled with an excitement he couldn’t restrain, Ninth Brother said to him in Shanghainese, “I’d like to buy something.”
“Buy what? You got money?”
“I’ve got silver dollars.”
Immediately a dazzling smile appeared on the shop owner’s face. Ninth Brother reached down to unbind his waistband. But looking down, he discovered that the long cloth strip around his waist wasn’t there. He stood there dumbstruck, just gripping the ends of his shirt. The shop owner put on a long face, thinking this yokel was playing a trick on him. “Go on home, and when you’ve got your money then come back!”
The two pieces of gold Young Li had given him had been wrapped in the waistband and when the steamship docked, he had specially tightened and retightened that cloth. Earlier on the wharf, his stumble and fall had dazed him and once inside the warehouse he had untied the band from his waist to brush off the dust that covered his entire face and body. Then he had dozed off against a stack of cargo. When he left, he had forgotten about his waistband. However, while there were still some silver dollars in his trouser leg, he wasn’t sure how much a silver dollar was worth. Enough to buy a boat ticket back home? He bent over and pinched at his trouser leg. The silver dollars were there, safe and sound. By this time, he had no desire to buy anything and he slunk away under the sarcasm and ridicule of the shop owner.
Ninth Brother remembered the address of his old classmate and found his home. Ten years before he had been invited to a dinner party there. This classmate, surnamed Yang, was slightly older than the others, and so they all called him “Old Yang.” By then Old Yang was already married and his wife had a fine hand at cooking.
Mrs. Yang did not recognize her husband’s good friend. She thought he was some beggar, and said with ill grace, “You’ve come to the wrong place. I’m starving to death here myself!”
“Mrs. Yang!” Ninth Brother called out. She took a closer look at him but still didn’t dare believe that he was her husband’s good friend Young Mr. Lin. “Mrs. Yang, your wine dumpling soup was really delicious.” When she was sure he was the refined and genteel Young Mr. Lin, her lips trembled and she began to cry. Old Yang was also an army doctor and had already been gone from Shanghai for five years. Three years ago, his last remittance home had come down from Shanxi Province. After that, there had been no word. Now, at the sound of the woman’s tragic sobbing, Ninth Brother thought of his long-separated Second Sister. Oh, Second Sister, useless and incompetent as I am, I overrated myself and thus I abandoned home and family. I thought I could share the cares and sorrows of our country, but have ended up as a vagabond bum. Second Sister, you’ve suffered so. I can’t face you from shame.
The Yang household consisted of all
ages. Old Mrs. Yang’s mind was confused and she mostly kept to her bed. Every day Mrs. Yang herself coughed incessantly. As an internist, Ninth Brother could tell there was something seriously wrong with her. What worried him even more was that because of the straitened circumstances of their family, the two children had stopped going to school. The thirteen-year-old son was hauling heavy sacks at the train station to make ends meet at home.
His face washed and teeth brushed, and wearing Old Yang’s clothes, Ninth Brother restored some measure of his graceful bearing of those earlier years. Two days had passed and he hadn’t mentioned the matter of his returning to Old Town. The few silver dollars might perhaps be just enough for travel expenses, including the cost of the necessary travel permit. But the circumstances of the Yang household were right there in clear view. Since God has let me see the difficulties they are in and he even wants me to stretch forth my hand to help them, how could I just pack up and walk away? Ninth Brother struggled with this problem. He had already given Mrs. Yang two silver dollars and that very evening she sent the money to the landlord’s home. There was more than half a year’s rental in arrears and the landlord had given his ultimatum: if she couldn’t hand over the rent he would put them on the street with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
At this moment, Ninth Brother was sitting in a cramped little room. Mrs. Yang and the two children were away. Only Old Mrs. Yang was there, lying on her bed, babbling endlessly. On the wall, there was a printed picture of the cross. As Ninth Brother gazed at it, all sorts of feelings welled up inside him. He closed his eyes and prayed: O Heavenly Father, thank you for watching over me at all times, and letting me get through all the dangers in this perilous journey. Without your great love, my life wouldn’t be worth that of an ant. O Heavenly Father, it is from your blessings that all along the way I have met good people. Today my steps are resting awhile at the Yang family. You know better than I the difficult circumstances they face. I would really like to help them, but even if I did everything within my power, it would be just a cup of water poured out on a cart of burning firewood. Tell me what I should do.