Boy in the Twilight

by Yu Hua

  “What do you mean, ‘no matter what it takes’?” I asked.

  “Starting today,” he said, “I’m sleeping at the manager’s place.”

  Lü Qianjin was as good as his word. At nightfall he went off cheerfully to the manager’s house, holding a quilt in his arms. Lü Qianjin spent only three nights there before he came into possession of the key to a new apartment. He waved the key in my face. “See this? This is a key! This is the key to my new apartment.”

  I took Lü Qianjin’s key in my hand and inspected it. It was a new key, sure enough. “When you went to the manager’s house with a quilt in your arms, what did the manager say?” I asked.

  “What did the manager say?” Lü Qianjin thought for a moment and shook his head. “I forget what he said exactly. All I remember is what I said to him. I said that my apartment was too small, that there was no room for me to sleep, so I was moving to his house for the night …”

  I interrupted him. “Your apartment is bigger than everybody else’s. How could you say you have no room to sleep?”

  “That’s called tactics,” said Lü Qianjin. “I put it that way so the manager would be clear that if he didn’t give me a new apartment I would stay on at his place. Actually, he knows perfectly well I have a large apartment, but he gave me this key all the same.”

  After that, Lü Qianjin said to me, “Yang Gao, I’ll tell you what to do. Starting today, take all the trash you collect when sweeping the workshop floor and dump it outside the factory manager’s apartment. Within three days, the manager will put a new key in your hands.”

  Saying this, he dangled his key in front of my eyes. “A key just as new as this one.”

  I shook my head. “Although my apartment’s small, there’s plenty of space for my mother and me. I don’t need a new apartment.”

  When he heard me say that, Lü Qianjin clapped me on the shoulder and chuckled. “You’re still a sissy, just like your dad.”

  6

  They all said my father was a coward. They said he never got mad at anybody and never raised his voice, even when others stuck their fingers in his face. They could grab him by the lapels of his jacket and hurl abuse at him, but he would never say a word of protest. They said he would bow and scrape to everyone he met, that his face would be wreathed in smiles even if he ran into a beggar who wanted to cadge a meal off him. Anyone else, they said, would send the beggar packing with a kick up his ass, but my father would wine him and dine him, a smile glued on his face the whole time. They told all these stories about my father being a timid creature, rounding them off with commentary on how he didn’t smoke and didn’t drink.

  What they didn’t know was that my father looked really fine sitting in his truck. When my father walked toward his Liberation truck, his footsteps resounded with a louder ring than usual and his arms would swing in a wider arc. He would open the door, sit himself down in the cab, and slowly don a pair of white cotton gloves. He would lay his gloved hands on the steering wheel and his foot would press down on the accelerator, and off he would go in his Liberation truck.

  They said my father never dared to curse anyone, not even his own wife and child, and they were quite right there—my father never cursed my mother and he never cursed me. But when my father was speeding down the highway in his truck, he did stick his head out the window and shout at pedestrians, “Are you trying to get killed?”

  That’s when I was sitting in the cab next to him. I was watching the leaves and branches of trees as they flitted past the truck window, watching the road ahead as it glinted in the sunlight. I had a commanding view of the pedestrians who appeared on either side of the highway, and when one of them made a move as if about to cross the road, my father would shout, “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  My father would turn his head and glance at me. His eyes gleamed with the confidence of a man who was in complete control. “Yang Gao,” he would say, “keep a good look out and next time I’ll let you be the one to shout.”

  So then I kept my eyes peeled, watching people walk by the roadside. I saw somebody up ahead begin to cross, only to change his mind and return to the shoulder. I gripped the window frame with both hands and my mouth opened, but no words came out. I was too afraid.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” my father said. “There’s no way he can catch up with us.”

  I watched as our truck roared past. The man quickly became just a tiny figure receding in the distance, and I knew that my father was right—people on the road could not possibly catch up with us, and I could shout at them without the slightest scruple. I put my hands on the window jamb once again, and carefully surveyed the people walking by the side of the road. When another person tried to cross, I felt my body quivering all over and I gave a feeble shout: “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  “Not loud enough,” my father said. “You need to shout louder than that.”

  In the rearview mirror I could see how the truck quickly left the man behind, and I shouted with all my might, “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  Then I set back against the seat. I felt utterly drained. My father was laughing as he held the steering wheel, and after a moment or two I began to laugh myself.

  7

  I like being with Lü Qianjin, because he’s such a daredevil. He’s more fearless even than Zhao Qing, Song Hai, Fang Dawei, Hu Qiang, Liu Jisheng, or Xu Hao. Though he’s the smallest and skinniest of the lot, he’s much the most daring. I often wonder if Lü Qianjin has eyes like a goose, so everybody looks puny in his eyes, so he’s afraid of nobody. He has three stab wounds on his face, all from cuts he inflicted on himself with a kitchen cleaver. He ran home after losing a fight, picked up the kitchen cleaver, and then chased after his adversary. When he caught up with him, he cut himself on the face, then raised the cleaver and advanced on his enemy, who took to his heels in fear.

  Later, Song Hai and the others said, “Nobody would ever dream of cutting their own face with a cleaver, but Lü Qianjin will. That’s why everyone is afraid of him.”

  “Why did you have to cut your face?” I asked him.

  “That was to show the other guy I would stop at nothing,” said Lü Qianjin. “You know what they say: ‘The timid fear the bold, and the bold fear the reckless.’ ”

  That’s when I realized Lü Qianjin was even more daring than the bold—he was reckless. “And what are reckless people afraid of?” I asked him.

  “They’re not afraid of anything.”

  There he was wrong. Reckless people actually have moments when they’re scared too, and Lü Qianjin is a case in point. There was one night—and very late it was—one night when Lü Qianjin and I had both been working on the final shift of the day. I left the plant ahead of him, and walked as far as a street that had no lights. It began to rain, so I took shelter under the eaves of a house and stood there in the dark for some time. Then I heard footsteps approaching, but I couldn’t see who it was—all I could make out vaguely was a low silhouette. As the figure came closer I could see he had a coat draped over his shoulders and was walking toward me with his head down. As he passed he gave a cough, and right away I knew who it was. It was Lü Qianjin. Because he had a cold he had been coughing the whole day through. When he coughed it sounded even more disgusting than the sound of someone throwing up—it was as though his throat was clogged with sand. He gave a drawn-out, hacking cough as he walked past.

  By this time I must have been standing under the ink-black eaves for a good ten minutes. Although the rain didn’t get my face wet, it had soaked my shoes right through. I was so pleased to see Lü Qianjin come along that I darted out and put my arms around him. I felt his body contract and heard him scream out in panic, “I’m a man! I’m a man! I’m a man!”

  I’d never heard a scream like that—it was a bit like the crow a rooster makes, not at all like the kind of shout you’d expect to hear from Lü Qianjin. He had never spoken or shouted in that tone of voice before. He bur
st free from my grasp and started running for all he was worth, and in the blink of an eye he disappeared around the corner. He ran away so quickly, I didn’t even have time to tell him it was me. As soon as I put my arms around him, he screamed, and it startled me so much that by the time I had recovered from my surprise he had already vanished into the distance.

  That night I puzzled over it, but I just couldn’t figure out why he shouted “I’m a man.” I knew he was a man, obviously—what I didn’t understand was why he had to say so. He didn’t need to say that for me to know he was a man. It wasn’t until the next day, at Song Hai’s place, when I was sitting around with Lü Qianjin, Zhao Qing, Song Hai, Fang Dawei, Hu Qiang, Liu Jisheng, and Xu Hao, that I learned why Lü Qianjin had screamed the way he did.

  Lü Qianjin was sitting opposite me. With a cigarette in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, he said, “Somebody tried to rape me last night.”

  “A woman tried to rape you?” asked Song Hai.

  “A man,” said Lü Qianjin. “He took me for a woman …”

  “How could he mistake you for a woman?” they asked.

  “I had this bright-colored coat over my shoulders,” said Lü Qianjin. “It was raining when I got off work, so I grabbed the coat of one of the women in the workshop and threw it over my head. I went out the gate and got as far as Army Emulation Road. That fucking road hasn’t got a single streetlamp, and as soon as I started walking down the road, the rapist jumped on me from behind and put his arms around me …”

  “So that’s why you screamed ‘I’m a man!’ ” I cried out in delight. “It’s because you had a woman’s coat on your shoulders …”

  They interrupted me. “What did you do when he put his arms around you?” they asked Lü Qianjin.

  He gave me a look. “I grabbed his two hands, and with a quick flick of my waist I threw him like a sack to the ground …”

  “And then?”

  “Then …” Lü Qianjin gave me another look. “I stuck my foot in his mouth and said, ‘I’m a man.’ ”

  Having heard what Lü Qianjin had to say, Song Hai and the others turned and looked at me, as though they recalled what I had just said. Song Hai pointed at me. “What was it he said just now?”

  I laughed. So they went back to quizzing Lü Qianjin: “What then?”

  “Then,” Lü Qianjin continued, his eyes fixed on me, “I kicked him a couple of times, and then I picked him up and punched him in the face a couple of times, and then … and then …”

  When Lü Qianjin saw I was laughing all the more heartily, he glared at me. “Yang Gao, what’s so funny?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I had no idea you were wearing a woman’s coat. It was so dark, there was no way I could tell what you were wearing.”

  Lü Qianjin turned pale. Song Hai and the others looked at me. “What did you say?” they asked.

  I pointed at myself. “It was me who put my arms around him last night,” I said.

  They were stunned. I looked at Lü Qianjin. “Last night you ran so fast I didn’t have the chance to tell you it was me. You ran out of sight in a flash.”

  Lü Qianjin sprang to his feet, his face livid. He came up to me, raised his hand, and gave me two resounding slaps across the ears that left my head spinning. Then he picked me up by the lapels of my jacket and pulled me out of my chair. First he thrust his knee into my belly, so hard my stomach felt it had been hit by a sledgehammer, and then he planted a fist in my chest, so fiercely it knocked the breath out of me.

  8

  Afterward, I dragged myself up off the floor. I left Song Hai’s house and slowly followed Liberation Road until I reached Sunnyside Bridge. I stopped there for a while and leaned against the balustrade; the midday sun beat down so strongly I could hardly open my eyes. My body was still aching. I heard a boat pass under the bridge; it made a lapping sound as it cut its way through the water. I thought of my father, who died the year I turned twelve. I thought of the summer he died, of the Liberation truck he drove that summer and that battered old tractor.

  My father let me sit in the cab of his truck. He was going to take me to Shanghai, to the big city. My father’s truck sped along the summer highway. The wind, warmed by the sun, ruffled my hair as I sat there in the cab and made my shirt flap. “Why don’t you close your eyes?” I said to my father.

  “You can’t close your eyes when driving,” he said.

  “Why not?” I said. “Why can’t you?”

  “Do you see the tractor up ahead?” my father said.

  I saw a tractor creeping along, with a dozen or so farm workers sitting in the cart it was pulling. They were all stripped to the waist, and they looked black and shiny, like loaches. “I see it,” I said.

  “If I was to close my eyes,” said my father, “we would run right into the tractor, and the impact would kill us.”

  “All I want is for you to just close them for a moment,” I said. “If you can just do that, then I can tell Lü Qianjin and the others about it. I can tell them you have the nerve to drive with your eyes closed.”

  “Okay, I’ll just close them for a moment,” said my father. “Watch my eyes. I am going to close them on the count of three. One, two, three …”

  My father closed his eyes. I saw it for myself—his eyes, for that moment, were completely shut. When he opened them again, our truck was about to crash into the tractor and the tractor was veering off to the left in alarm. My father jerked the steering wheel as sharply as he could and our truck just managed to scrape past.

  I saw those dark, loachlike men in the cart shake their fists at us, and I knew they must be cursing. That’s when my father stuck out his head and shouted back, “Are you trying to get yourselves killed?”

  My father turned to me and gave a smile of satisfaction. I smiled too, as our truck raced on along the summer highway and leaves and branches flitted past. I saw fields full of crops, a patch of this and a patch of that, houses and winding rivers, and people making their way along the paths between the fields.

  But then my father’s truck broke down. He got out, opened the hood, and began to repair his Liberation. I stayed put in the cab. I wanted to watch my father as he worked, but the raised hood blocked my view and I had to content myself with listening to him making the repairs. He tapped away at things under the hood.

  Time passed; finally my father jumped down and slammed the hood shut. He came round and fished out a cloth from under my seat, rubbed the oil off his hands, and then walked round to the other side. Just as he opened his door and was about to climb in, the tractor we had passed earlier rolled up, disgorging the men as dark as loaches, who made a beeline for our truck.

  My father watched white-knuckled as they marched over. Hands grabbed his shirt collar—three hands, at the very least. “Who is trying to get killed?” I heard them ask. “Is it us, or is it you?”

  My father said nothing. They dragged him to the middle of the road, and I saw their hands reach into my father’s trousers, take out his cash, and transfer it to their own pockets. After that, their fists started landing on his face, and the twelve of them together beat him up and knocked him to the ground.

  In the truck, I was crying. I couldn’t see my father, because he was completely surrounded. I wept and wailed as they kicked him. Only when they drifted away did I see him curled up on the ground, as though hugging himself. I was crying fit to burst, because I saw four of the men had opened their flies and were pissing on my father as he lay there, on his face and his legs and his chest. I sobbed and moaned, and through a veil of tears I saw them walk toward the tractor and climb back onto the trailer. The tractor began to chug, and off they went.

  My father clambered to his feet and stood stock-still for a minute or two, his body stooped, as I wept and wailed. He turned around and came back to the truck, and when he opened the door I could see that his face was caked with blood and dirt and his hair and clothes were wet. He panted as he climbed into the cab. I was crying so much, my bod
y was trembling all over. He reached over and rubbed my face with his grimy hand, lightly rubbing my face until my tears were dry. He laid his hands on the steering wheel and gazed at the tractor as it drove off into the distance. After a moment, he drew out his tea mug from its place by his feet and handed it to me. “Yang Gao, I’m thirsty,” he said. “Go down to the river and fill this up with water.”

  Still sobbing, I took the mug from his hand, opened the door, climbed out, and walked down to the bank. I took a look back at my father. He was watching me with tears in his eyes. I went down to the river.

  When I stood up after filling the mug, my father’s truck had begun to roll forward. I ran up the bank as fast as I could, spilling the water on the ground, but the truck just kept on moving. I stood and wailed at the side of the road, shouting desperately at the departing truck, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”

  I ran after the truck, crying and screaming. I thought my father didn’t want me anymore, I thought he was deserting me. The truck was moving at full speed now, and I watched as it gained on the tractor. Then I heard a colossal roar and all I could see was a huge cloud of dust; black smoke was beginning to rise.

  I stood rooted to the spot for some minutes. Vehicles had pulled over by the crash site, and passengers got out and gathered round. I went on walking—it was a long way ahead—and it was almost dark by the time I reached my father’s truck. Its front end had caved in and the door on the driver’s side was twisted out of shape; he lay sprawled over the steering wheel and his head was covered with broken glass. The steering column had punctured his shirt, punctured his chest; blood had stained his body red. The men had been thrown from the tractor: some were groaning, while others lay motionless. Sparrows were strewn everywhere, carpeting the ground as thickly as the vegetables in the fields. I realized they must have been killed by the sheer impact of that tremendous roar. They had been perched on a tree as happy as can be, but my father’s truck collided with the tractor and suddenly that was the end of them.