Freeman's

by John Freeman

  “But how would she know?”

  “People don’t trust me, and I’m the unluckiest man in the world.”

  “I don’t believe you. There’s no way she’d find out.”

  “I know what I’m talking about.”

  Together, we looked at the underpants in my hands. It occurred to me that my parents might be finished by now.

  “But it’s my birthday,” I said.

  And maybe I did it on purpose. At the time I felt I did: my eyes filled up with tears. Then he hugged me. It was a very fast movement; he crossed his arms behind my back and squeezed me so tight my face pressed into his chest. Then he let me go, took out his magazine and pen, and wrote something on the right margin of the cover. Then he tore it off and folded it three times before handing it to me.

  “Don’t read it,” he said, and he stood up and pushed me gently toward the dressing room.

  I passed four empty cubicles and kept going. Before gathering my courage and entering the fifth, I put the paper into the pocket of my jumper and turned to look at him, and we smiled at each other.

  I tried on the underpants. They were perfect. I lifted up my jumper so I could see just how good they looked. They were so, so very perfect. They fit incredibly well, and because they were black, Dad would never ask me for them so he could wave them out the window behind the ambulance. And even if he did, I wouldn’t be so embarrassed if my classmates saw. “Just look at the underpants that girl has,” they’d all think. “Now those are some perfect underpants.”

  I realized I couldn’t take them off now. And I realized something else: they didn’t have a security tag. They had a little mark where the tag would usually go, but there was no alarm. I stood a moment longer looking at myself in the mirror, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer and I took out the little paper, opened it, and read it.

  I came out of the dressing room and he wasn’t where I had left him, but he was a little farther down, beside the bathing suits. He looked at me, and when he saw I wasn’t carrying the underpants he winked, and I was the one who took his hand. This time he held onto me tighter; we walked together toward the exit.

  I trusted that he knew what he was doing. That a cursed man who had the world’s worst luck knew how to do these things. We passed the line of registers at the main entrance. One of the security guards looked at us and adjusted his belt. He would surely think the nameless man was my dad, and I felt proud.

  We passed the sensors at the exit and went into the mall, and we kept walking in silence all the way back to the avenue. That was when I saw Abi, alone, standing in the middle of the hospital parking lot. And I saw Mom, on our side of the street, looking around frantically. Dad was also coming from the parking lot and was headed toward us. He was following fast behind the policeman who’d been looking at his car before, and who was now pointing at us. Everything happened very quickly. Dad saw us, yelled my name, and a few seconds later that policeman and two others who came out of nowhere were already on top of us. The unlucky man let go of me, but I held my hand suspended toward him for a few seconds. They surrounded him and pushed him roughly. They asked him what he was doing, they asked him his name, but he didn’t answer. Mom hugged me and examined me head to toe. She had my white underpants dangling from her right hand. Then, patting me all over, she noticed I was wearing a different pair. She lifted my jumper in a single movement: it was such a rude and vulgar act, right there in front of everyone, that I jerked away and had to take a few steps backward to keep from falling down. The unlucky man looked at me and I looked at him. When Mom saw the black underpants she screamed, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch,” and Dad lunged at him and tried to punch him. The cops moved to separate them.

  I fished for the paper in my jumper pocket, put it in my mouth, and as I swallowed it I repeated his name in silence, several times, so I would never forget it.

  Xu Zechen is the author of the novels Midnight’s Door, Night Train, and Running Through Beijing. He was selected by People’s Literature as one of the best Chinese writers under forty-one. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, he lives in Beijing.

  Eric Abrahamsen is the recipient of translation grants from PEN, to translate Xu Zechen’s Running Through Beijing, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has written for the New York Times, among other publications. He also hosts the website Paper Republic, which features Chinese literature in translation.

  The Dog’s Been Barking All Day

  XU ZECHEN

  TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE BY ERIC ABRAHAMSEN

  Patching up the heavens was something only Chuan would think of trying. He stood on our roof—hammer in his left hand, nail in his right—banging at the sky. A cloud came over: “I nailed it.” A plane flew past: “I nailed that, too.” Zhang Dachuan and his wife Li Xiaohong said, “Look how clever our son is: he knows a needle and thread would never do it. You need a hammer and nail to patch up the heavens.” They stood in the courtyard, looking upward. Under a rare blue Beijing sky, their eight-year-old son Chuan held his hammer and his nail high, looking for all the world like a heroic giant. From their point of view I towered just as tall: I was on the roof next to him, hovering over Chuan to keep him safe.

  Chuan was wrong in the head. His parents were fruit sellers, and they spent all day every day in the cab of a motorized three-wheeled flatbed, selling piles of apples in apple season, oranges in orange season, watermelons in watermelon season. On occasion they had bananas, mandarin oranges, pineapples, or pears. Cherries were most expensive. Li Xiaohong couldn’t understand why city people were crazy for the tiny, overpriced things—they insisted on calling them by their English name, che-li-zi. Chuan was happy to follow me around. When I wasn’t out pasting advertisements, Zhang Dachuan and Li Xiaohong would lead him into our yard, bringing apples and oranges with them: “Chuan, you play with big brother Muyu.” They’d bring his lunch in a box, of course, and I’d warm it up for him at noon. If my roommates Xingjian and Miluo were around, there’d be extra apples and oranges. Then their three-wheeler would start its rattling roar, and they’d call to Chuan, who stood cocked-headed and drooling, with his hammer and his nail in a sack:

  “Be good! Say bye-bye to mommy and daddy.”

  This isn’t about Chuan, or Zhang Dachuan or Li Xiaohong, much less is it about that motorized three-wheeler that went trundling from dawn to dusk through the streets and alleys of Beijing, piled with fruit. This is about a dog, the one that Zhang Dachuan and Li Xiaohong kept to guard their courtyard. They rented the courtyard and two-room building next to ours. They lived in one room, and kept their fruit in the other. The dog was tied outside the fruit room to keep thieves and children away. We hated that dog. Every morning, as the three-wheeler started rattling, it started barking. As the three-wheeler pulled away, it was still barking. As the three-wheeler spent the day trundling through Beijing’s alleys, it never stopped barking.

  “Someday that fucking dog is going to get it,” my roommates said.

  The dog woke early, which meant no rest for us. All three of us made a living pasting advertisements around the city, which meant we were more or less nocturnal, and were usually crawling into bed around dawn, right as the little shit started up. Even if we weren’t out at night we might take a nap at noon, and that thing could have you awake and sweating at the ankles with a single yap. Someday that fucker was going to get it.

  We hadn’t gone out that day. After lunch I took Chuan up to the roof to fix the sky. Xingjian was poring over Prince Gong’s Interpretation of Dreams—he’d had a dream that a white hog with peach flowers on its face was knocking on the door, and when he opened it he’d woken up. Miluo was inserting line breaks into a paragraph he’d written the night before—he thought he might have the potential for poetry. They wanted to have an afternoon nap, but it was impossible: the dog kept barking. And barking, and barking. And barking. Who knew how its wires had gotten crossed. From the roof I could hear the two of them cussing and bitching. Th
e earth-shattering rattle of the three-wheeler became audible, approaching from a distance, and Chuan raised that same damn hammer and the same damn nail and said:

  “My dad! My mom! Look, my mom and dad!”

  His parents were back.

  Xingjian and Miluo came out of the room and called up to me, “Tell them to take their rug rat back!”

  “I’m playing with him,” I said. “No skin off your nose.”

  “Hell with that,” Xingjian said. “That dog is driving me nuts!”

  “Not only do we have to listen to the dog,” added Miluo, “we have to help them raise their retard. It’s not right! Send him home.”

  The three-wheeler stopped outside the courtyard, and Chuan’s parents got out, all smiles. They’d sold a whole load of oranges that morning, and were planning on restocking and doing it again.

  “Are you having fun playing, son?” asked Zhang Dachuan.

  Li Xiaohong added, “Remember to call Muyu ‘brother.’”

  I had to lie and say I was going to my uncle’s place to pick up a fresh batch of advertisements. Chen Xingduo was keeping up with the times, I said; had they ever heard of a fake-ID peddler with business cards? Soon we’d be handing those out instead of advertisements. Anyway, I’d have to return Chuan to them.

  They seemed a little unhappy, but made sure to keep their smiles on. The kid was theirs, after all. The dog was still barking. I passed Chuan down to Li Xiaohong, who pursed her lips and asked for the lunch box, too. “Did you do something to annoy them?” she asked Chuan under her breath. Chuan twisted his head and body around to look at me, stuck out his tongue, and grinned.

  “Big brother likes me.”

  His eyes never seemed to be focused on the same spot. It drove me nuts, I always felt he was looking at someone else when he was talking to me. But he was right: I did like him. He always said what he was thinking, or what he wanted to do—he hadn’t learned hypocrisy. His dad could have taken a lesson from him. Zhang Dachuan was always going on about how much they loved their son, how they couldn’t bring themselves to have another—government policy allowed for a second child if the first was disabled. “But if we had another,” said Zhang Dachuan, all smiles, “little Chuan wouldn’t be happy.” He took Chuan from Li Xiaohong, holding him by the armpits, and heaved him into the three-wheeler’s cab. Chuan’s head smacked audibly against the cab’s back divider. Zhang Dachuan’s face twitched, and he hissed under his breath:

  “No crying!”

  The three-wheeler passed through the gate of the courtyard, piled with oranges, apples, and bananas, and rattled away. Chuan was next to his father, and Li Xiaohong was in the back, on top of a heap of apples. The dog barked with greater abandon.

  The two of them were from the countryside but they’d traveled all over, and their accents had followed them. You couldn’t tell, exactly, what kind of Chinese it was. Zhang Dachuan was always adding the Beijing arrr sound to the end of all his words: They wurrr lining up for the apprrrs and orangerrrs. It infuriated Xingjian: “Where the fuck does he get orrrf, with his ‘wurrrs’ and his ‘apprrrs’?”

  He transferred his irritation about Zhang Dachuan’s accent to their family dog.

  “It’s still fucking barking!” he said. “I’m going to kill the little mutt! It would be one thing if it were a German shepherd, but it’s not even a Pekingese, it’s just a filthy mutt. I’m going to kill the little shit!”

  No sooner said than he and Miluo were out the door, both of them in a rage. It wasn’t just the fact that their nap was interrupted. I suspected that Prince Gong’s interpretations were turning out bogus, and Miluo’s line-breaking career wasn’t panning out. But they couldn’t simply kill the animal, it would be obvious who’d done it, so they decided just to mess with it for a while. Miluo was holding a bowl of leftover pork-rib stew, the broth half congealed in the cold.

  “You stay up on the roof,” Xingjian directed me. “Tell us the second you hear them coming back.”

  I grabbed an old copy of The Arabian Nights I’d found in a book stall, and crawled back up on the roof.

  There’s no better place to read than on a roof. The buildings in the western suburbs were low to the ground; life there held low to the ground, too. From my elevated seat I felt I could see the whole world clearly. Even a book makes more sense, read up there, than it would in a classroom. I sat down near the edge bordering the alleyway. The dog barked even more wildly as the two of them climbed over the wall. Miluo fished a bone from his bowl of broth and tossed it to the dog, which snuffled at it and immediately stopped barking.

  Truly, there was nothing remarkable about the dog, it was just a mutt. It was black and white, but so filthy from rolling in the dirt and its own muck that there wasn’t much difference between the black and the white. It made its home outdoors, in a crude doghouse, and was so accustomed to being cold that it curled up into a ball anytime it sat down. I doubted whether it had ever eaten its fill: its curved ribs seemed about to poke through its hide. The dog’s name was “dog.” That’s how Zhang Dachuan and Li Xiaohong called it: “Come here, dog! Quit barking, dog! Fuck off and die, dog!” Now it lay with the bone between its front paws, almost too excited to gnaw it. Xingjian and Miluo dragged two folding stools from the corner of the yard and sat down to watch the dog trembling as it chewed. Xingjian looked back at me and snapped his fingers. The afternoon sunlight was weakening, and the dog’s shadow inched out into a blob.

  “We’re giving him a taste,” Miluo said to me.

  The Arabian Nights was a good book. Up on the roof, it was an even better book. It brought me instantly out of my low-to-the-ground life. I flipped through it randomly, reading bits here and there.

  The dog still hadn’t managed to crunch up and swallow the bone; in its frustration it was wheezing like an asthmatic. But it wouldn’t give up, and kept biting the bone, then spitting it out, then biting it again. Xingjian stuck his finger in the congealed broth then brought it to his nose, his eyes closing in pleasure as he smelled it. The dog had to have understood his expression: it suddenly went quiet, then came over and lay docilely at his feet. Xingjian raised his chin, and made a sign at Miluo, who came over and gave the dog a kick. The dog had no idea what was happening. It leaped up, gave a single bark, then went quiet and lay back down. Miluo gave it another kick, and it leaped up again, looking back at him, its bark becoming a drawn-out growl that trailed off strangely. It hesitated for a few seconds, then lay down again. Miluo looked at Xingjian, who grinned and nodded, and a third kick landed on the dog’s belly. This time it really did get angry; it jumped up and spun around several times, as Xingjian and Miluo instinctively scooted their stools back. They were in no danger, though: the dog was already at the limit of its chain. It barked, but they no longer found the barking annoying. They looked back at me and grinned.

  “Want to come down?” asked Miluo.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry, we’re just playing with the little fucker,” Miluo answered, landing another kick on the dog’s haunches.

  The dog was really going nuts, yanking at its chain so that it clanked and jangled. Xingjian hurriedly scooped out another blob of congealed broth and flicked it on the ground, and the dog went after it. It licked the whole patch of ground. It must have been delicious. Afterward it slowly lay down again, smacking its mouth, put its head on its front paws, and continued barking. There was a note of pleading and of sorrow in its barks. Xingjian passed the bowl to Miluo and moved his stool over next to the dog, then began petting it as if it was his own dog, working through its fur from its head, over its back, to its tail. The dog closed its eyes. From where I was sitting, it looked as though Xingjian had been planning to give it a punch in the head, but the moment he’d made a fist he relaxed his hand again—perhaps he’d seen the dog’s furiously wagging tail. He continued rubbing it, starting at the head and moving again over its emaciated back to its bony haunches, then he moved to its tail, smoothing the
fur from base to tip. He stood up.

  “Take a look if they’re coming back, will you?” he said to me.

  I stood up, my faint shadow stretching broad and long over the roof, all the way to the other side. On days like today the sun was as weak as a sick man, whose strength was exhausted by a few sneezes. In the distance were single-story buildings; in the greater distance were more single-story buildings, and a few trees with bare branches like pencil sketches on the horizon, and the occasional taller building. The sun seemed ready at any moment to drop on those buildings and those trees. I looked up the alleyway and saw nothing, not even a pedestrian, as if the western suburbs of Beijing had suddenly emptied. I waved a hand at them.

  “Quit reading that stupid book,” said Xingjian. “It won’t bring you any fairy tales, not in this life or the next. I’ve got something to show you.”

  He gestured to Miluo, and took the bowl back. It was Miluo’s job to do. He dipped his hand in the bowl and came up with a handful of congealed broth, then smeared it on the dog’s tail. The dog caught the scent and began barking excitedly.

  “Still fucking barking!” Xingjian gave it a kick.

  The dog stifled its barks, and began twisting around in search of the scent. The broth did smell good—I even caught a whiff of it from the rooftop. A plane passed overhead; one of Chuan’s patches. If you hadn’t seen Chuan’s perpetually unfocused eyes, his strangely cocked head, and his endless string of drool, you wouldn’t think anything was wrong with him at all. He had more imagination in him than most normal people, more than The Arabian Nights—who would have thought of patching the sky? Who could have understood that needle and thread wouldn’t do it, that you needed a hammer and nail?

  The dog was spinning in circles after its own tail. The chain slowly wrapped around its legs; it didn’t know to step over it. It managed a few times to lick the tip of its tail, which made it all the more frantic to get another taste.