Boy in the Twilight

by Yu Hua

  9

  I left Sunnyside Bridge and went home. My mother was not there. The clothes she had washed that morning had been hung out to dry on the bamboo rails by the window. I saw they were dry, so I collected and folded them and put them away. I swept one more time the floor my mother had swept that morning, wiped the table she had wiped, put in order the shoes she had straightened, and filled up her cup with water. Then I took the cleaver from the kitchen and went out the door.

  As I walked toward Lü Qianjin’s house, the cleaver in my hand, I passed Song Hai’s place. Song Hai stopped me. “Yang Gao, where are you off to? What are you doing with that cleaver in your hand?”

  “I’m going to Lü Qianjin’s house,” I said. “I’m going to carve him up.”

  Song Hai laughed. I heard his voice behind me. “Fang Dawei, do you see this? See the cleaver Yang Gao is holding? He says he’s going to carve up Lü Qianjin.”

  Fang Dawei was coming my way. Hearing this, he stopped. “Are you really going to carve him up?”

  I nodded. “I really am.”

  Fang Dawei laughed just as loud and long as Song Hai. “He says he’s really going to carve up Lü Qianjin.”

  “That’s right. That’s what he says.”

  They laughed, and fell in behind me. They said they wanted to see with their own eyes how I was going to carve up Lü Qianjin. So there I was walking on in front and they were walking behind. When we passed Liu Jisheng’s apartment, Song Hai and Fang Dawei shouted out, “Liu Jisheng! Liu Jisheng!”

  Liu Jisheng appeared in his doorway. He looked at us. “What’s up?” he said.

  “Yang Gao is going to carve up Lü Qianjin,” they told him. “Don’t you want to get a view of the action?”

  Liu Jisheng looked at me in amazement. “You’re going to carve up Lü Qianjin?”

  I nodded. “That’s right,” I said. “That’s just what I’m going to do.”

  Liu Jisheng laughed, just like Song Hai and Fang Dawei. “Are you planning to kill him? Or just do him some damage?”

  “Maybe not kill him,” I said, “but at least leave him in pretty bad shape.”

  Hearing this, they laughed so hard they had to put their hands on their bellies. It was a mystery to me why they found this so funny. “How come you guys are so pleased to hear that I’m going to carve up Lü Qianjin?” I said. “You’re his friends, after all.”

  They laughed so much they squatted down on their haunches, and their laughter gradually turned to titters, a bit like the sound crickets make. I ignored them and went on ahead by myself. When I passed Hu Qiang’s place, I heard Song Hai and the others shout, “Hu Qiang! Hu Qiang! Hu Qiang!”

  They were going to follow me the whole way, I realized. The result was that when I reached Lü Qianjin’s house, there were five people with me: Song Hao, Fang Dawei, Liu Jisheng, Hu Qiang, and Xu Hao. Laughing gaily, they pushed me inside.

  Lü Qianjin sat at the table clutching a big slice of watermelon; some seeds were stuck to his cheeks. When he raised his head to look at us, he saw what I had in my hand. “What are you doing with that cleaver?” he mumbled, his mouth full of melon.

  “Yang Gao is going to carve you up with it!” Song Hai and the others said gleefully.

  Lü Qianjin’s eyes widened. He looked at me, then at Song Hai and the others. “What did you say?”

  Song Hai and company burst out laughing. “Lü Qianjin,” they said, “death’s staring you in the face, and here you are eating watermelon. You’d better stop. The melon you’re eating won’t have time to turn into shit, because you’re about to die. Don’t you see the cleaver in Yang Gao’s hand?”

  Lü Qianjin put down the watermelon. He pointed at me, then at his nose. “You’re saying he wants to carve me up?”

  Song Hai and company nodded. “That’s right!” they said.

  Lü Qianjin wiped his mouth with his hand and pointed at me a second time. “You’re telling me Yang Gao wants to carve me up with that cleaver?”

  They nodded again. “You’ve got it!”

  Lü Qianjin looked at me and burst out laughing, along with Song Hai and company. That’s when I spoke up. “Lü Qianjin,” I said. “You beat me up. You slapped me in the face, you punched me in the chest, and you kicked me in the stomach and kicked me on the knees, and my face and my chest and my stomach and my knees are still sore. When you were hitting me, I never once hit back. That wasn’t because I was afraid of you, it was because I didn’t know what to do. Now I know what to do: I want a tooth for a tooth. I’m going to carve you up with this cleaver.”

  I raised the cleaver to show Lü Qianjin, and to show Song Hai and the others too.

  They looked at the cleaver in my upraised hand; their mouths opened and laughter came out. I thought to myself, What’s the matter with them? Why are they laughing so hard? So I asked them, I said, “What’s so funny? What are you so happy about? Lü Qianjin, why are you laughing too? I’ve got an idea why Song Hai and the rest of them are laughing, but I can’t understand why you think it’s so funny.”

  They just laughed all the harder. Lü Qianjin fell on the table, he was laughing so much. Song Hai and Fang Dawei stood next to him, one hand on their bellies and one hand on his shoulder. My ears were buzzing with the sound of their laughter. I stood there with the cleaver in my hand and didn’t know what to do. I watched as they laughed, watched as they gradually stopped laughing and wiped away their tears. Then Song Hai pressed Lü Qianjin’s head down on the table. “You need to offer Yang Gao your neck.”

  Lü Qianjin raised his head and shoved Song Hai’s hand aside. “No way! No way am I going to offer him my neck.”

  Song Hai persisted. “Come on, give him your neck. If you don’t do that, he won’t know what to do.”

  Fang Dawei and company added their comments. “Lü Qianjin, if you don’t give him your neck, it won’t be any fun.”

  “Fuck this,” said Lü Qianjin. Then with a laugh he laid his head on the table. Liu Jisheng and the rest pushed me over next to Lü Qianjin, and Song Hai took my hand and guided the cleaver to Lü Qianjin’s neck. When the cleaver made contact with his skin, his neck contracted, and he sniggered. “The cleaver’s making my neck all itchy,” he said.

  I noticed some pimples on Lü Qianjin’s sunburned neck. “You’ve got a lot of spots,” I said. “Your system is out of whack. You must not have been eating enough vegetables lately.”

  “I haven’t eaten any vegetables at all,” he said.

  “If you don’t fancy vegetables, then watermelon will do just as well,” I said.

  “Yang Gao, cut the crap,” Song Hai and the others said. “Weren’t you planning to carve up Lü Qianjin? Now you have his neck right underneath your cleaver and we want to watch how you do it.”

  It was true. Lü Qianjin’s neck was at the mercy of my cleaver. All I needed to do was to raise my arm, chop, and his neck would be severed. But when I saw Song Hai and the others again killing themselves laughing, I couldn’t help thinking that the prospect of seeing me cut his head off was what made them so happy, and I began to feel distressed on Lü Qianjin’s account. “They’re supposed to be your friends,” I said. “But if they were really your friends, they wouldn’t be so happy. They should be trying to talk me out of it. They should be pulling me away. But look at them—they’re looking forward to me cutting your head off.”

  Hearing this, they laughed all the louder. “See, there they go again,” I said to Lü Qianjin.

  He was laughing too, still with his head against the table. “You’re right,” he said. “They’re not true friends of mine. But then neither are you. If you were really my friend, you wouldn’t be about to cut my head off with a cleaver.”

  This made me uneasy. “The only reason I’m doing this,” I said, “is because you beat me up. I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise.”

  “I just hit you a couple of times, that’s all,” Lü Qianjin said, “but here you are cutting me up with a cleaver. You’re forgetting how good
I was to you in the past.”

  This made me think. I recalled things that had happened earlier, times when Lü Qianjin had helped me out, when he’d got into a fight or a row with someone on my account, and lots of other things, but now I was trying to cut him up. Although he had given me a beating, he was still my friend. I put the cleaver to one side. “Lü Qianjin,” I said, “I am not going to cut you up after all.”

  Lü Qianjin lifted his head off the table and gave his neck a rub. He looked at Song Hai and the others and laughed, and they looked at him and laughed.

  “Although I’m not going to cut you up,” I went on, “I can’t just leave it like this. You slapped me and kicked me all over the place. I’m going to give you a slap now, and we’ll call it quits.”

  I reached out and gave him a box on the ear. When people heard the whack of my hand hitting Lü Qianjin’s face, their laughter evaporated. I saw Lü Qianjin’s eyes widen. He pointed at me and cursed. “What the hell do you think you’re doing!”

  He knocked over the chair and delivered four slaps to my face, hitting me so hard that my head lolled and my eyes went blurry, and then he punched me fiercely in the chest, so hard my lungs wheezed. I fell to the ground, and he kicked me in the belly, so hard my stomach churned. His foot delivered a series of kicks to my legs, hard enough to break my bones. As I lay on the floor, I heard a buzz of conversation, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying. All I felt was waves of pain from head to toe, as though my body was being wrung out like a wet towel.

  THEIR SON

  At five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, several hundred workers crowded around the main entrance to the machine factory, waiting for the bell that would mark the end of their shift. The metal gate, still tightly shut, clanged as the people in front banged against it, while a buzz of conversation rose up from the people behind, punctuated by shouts here and there. As they awaited release, the workers were like livestock trapped behind bars, idly clustered in the dimming light of dusk, crowded together in the howling wind. The large windows in the factory behind them were already shrouded in darkness, and the desolate scene was enlivened only by the clouds of dust that swirled around the workshops.

  Shi Zhikang, a man of fifty-one, stood in the front row in his military overcoat, directly facing the crack between the two leaves of the steel gate. The icy wind blew in through the narrow gap and onto his face, making him feel as though his nose was shrinking.

  Next to him stood the old gatekeeper, his bald head flushed by the cold. Over a thick padded jacket he wore a faded boiler suit; the end of a large key projected from his chest pocket. People were yelling at him to open the gate, but he might as well have been deaf. He looked from side to side, and every time someone directed an impatient comment his way he would turn his head and look in the other direction. Only when the bell rang did the old man finally take the key from his pocket, while the people in the front row took a step back to give him room. As he moved forward, he made a point of thrusting his elbows behind him and put the key in the hole only when his arms met no resistance.

  Shi Zhikang was the first to make it out the gate. He set off rapidly along the road to his right, planning to walk to the stop before the factory and catch the trolleybus there, to avoid the scrum outside the gate. At least forty workers would try to push and shove their way onto the trolleybus, although it would already be full of passengers by the time it reached the factory.

  As he walked, Shi Zhikang thought about those forty workmates, imagining how they would cluster around the bus stop just as they had crammed in front of the gate. There would be a dozen hefty young men and at least a dozen women, three of whom had started work the same year as him. All three had medical conditions now: one had a ropy heart and the other two had kidney problems.

  As he was thinking about that, the bus stop came into view, and at the same time he saw a trolleybus coming his way, so he took his hands out of his pockets and ran, arriving at the stop just as the bus pulled in. People were already waiting there in three clusters and, as the bus slowed down, the clusters moved to position themselves in line with the bus’s three doors. When the bus stopped, the clusters became stationary. The doors opened and passengers squeezed out in a tight, solid stream like toothpaste from a tube, and then, in a dense mass of limbs, people piled on.

  By the time the trolley approached the entrance to Shi Zhikang’s factory, he had already pushed his way into the middle of the bus, and his arms were wedged vertically into the gaps left by bodies pressed up against him. The bus didn’t stop outside the factory but drove right on past. Of the forty workers who had been waiting there, only five or six were left, along with seven or eight people he didn’t recognize, so one or two other buses must have come along. The three women had evidently been unable to cram aboard, for they still were waiting at the stop, the one with the bad heart in the middle, the two with kidney disease on either side. They stood in a tight clump in their dumpy padded coats, each with a black woolen scarf around her neck. The chill wind blew their hair every which way, and the deepening darkness blurred their features, as though their faces had been charred by fire. As his trolley passed them, Shi Zhikang noticed how their heads turned to follow it. They watched as the bus he was on sailed away from them.

  After nine stops Shi Zhikang got off the trolleybus and walked back thirty yards to another stop, where he would board another bus. By this time the sky was completely dark; the streetlamps cast only a feeble glow and it was more the bright lights of the stores on either side of the street that illuminated the sidewalk and the area around the bus stop. Many people were already waiting, and those closest to the front were practically standing in the middle of the street. As Shi Zhikang made his way into the crowd, a minibus came along and, when the door opened, a young man with a canvas satchel hanging from his neck poked his head out and yelled: “Two yuan, two yuan …”

  Two men and a woman boarded the minibus, as the conductor continued to shout, “Two yuan …”

  At this point a bus turned a corner away in the distance and came into view. Seeing it, the conductor quickly ducked back inside and the minibus accelerated away from the waiting throng, as the bus rumbled toward them.

  Shi Zhikang swiftly pushed his way to the front and spread his arms a little, pressing backward as the bus approached, pushing the people behind him back onto the sidewalk. As the front door of the bus slipped past, he monitored the bus’s speed and calculated that he should be perfectly in line for the middle door. But what happened was that the bus came to an abrupt stop, leaving him a yard or two away from his target door. He’d lost his position in the front row, and now he found himself on the outer edge of the crowd.

  When the door opened, only three people got off. Shi Zhikang took a couple of steps into the crowd and thrust his arms into a tiny gap left by the people in front. As he pushed his way forward, he made good use of the upper-body strength acquired in his long years as a fitter. He steadily widened the gap, then squeezed into the space created, and began to work on opening a gap farther ahead.

  Shi Zhikang plowed his way through the line and launched himself into the space by the door, exploiting the impetus of the people pressing from behind. Just as he planted one foot on the step of the bus, someone grabbed the collar of his overcoat and dragged him backward. He landed heavily on the ground and his head hit a leg. The leg retaliated with a kick, and he looked up to find a young woman glaring at him.

  By the time Shi Zhikang was back on his feet, the doors had closed and the bus was beginning to move off. A woman’s handbag was trapped in the door, leaving a corner of the bag and part of the strap sticking outside, so that it swayed back and forth with the motion of the bus. He turned around, determined to find out who had pulled him back. Two youths about the same age as his son were watching him with a cold glint in their eyes. He looked at them and at others who had failed to squeeze onto the bus. Some returned his gaze, some did not. He was tempted to let off a swearword or t
wo, but thought better of it.

  Later, two buses arrived at the same time, and Shi Zhikang boarded the second. Today he did not get off at the stop closest to his home, but two stops earlier, where a man with a flatbed cart sold bean curd that tasted better than what you could buy in the shops. Shi Zhikang’s wife, who worked in a textile mill, had asked him to pick up a couple of pounds on his way home from work, because today was Saturday and their son, a junior in college, was coming home for the weekend.

  After buying the bean curd, Shi Zhikang did not try to catch another bus and simply walked the rest of the way home. It was almost seven o’clock, but there was no sign of his wife. This upset him. His wife should have got off work at four thirty, and she did not have such a long commute. Normally his wife would have dinner practically ready by this time, but today he had to set to on an empty stomach, washing vegetables and slicing meat.

  His wife, Li Xiulan, came in the door with a bag of fish. “Have you washed your hands?” was the first thing she said.

  Shi Zhikang was not in a good mood, so he answered curtly. “Can’t you see my hands are wet?”

  “Did you use soap?” she asked. “There’s flu going around, and pneumonia too. You need to wash your hands with soap as soon as you get home.”

  Shi Zhikang snorted dismissively. “Then shouldn’t you come home sooner?”

  Li Xiulan dumped the two fish in the sink. She told Shi Zhikang they cost her only three yuan. “They were the last two. He wanted five yuan, but I wouldn’t go higher than three.”

  “Does it take so long to buy a couple of dead fish?”

  “They haven’t been dead long.” She showed him the gills: “See, the cheeks are still red.”

  “It’s you I’m talking about.” He raised his voice as he pointed at his watch. “It’s after seven already!”