by Yu Hua
“So, you’re here.”
I saw a skeleton dressed in bright white clothing sitting in the tall grass between the trees. She stood up slowly, gave a sigh, and said to me, “Son, how did you come to be here so soon?”
I knew who she was. “Mom,” I called softly.
Li Yuezhen walked up to me. Her empty eyes gazed at me and her voice sounded uncertain. “You look to be in your fifties, but you’re only forty-one.”
“You still remember my age,” I said.
“You’re the same age as Hao Xia,” she said.
By this time Hao Xia and Hao Qiangsheng were in America, in that other world, while Li Yuezhen and I were here in this one. When they left, I saw them off at the airport; they were flying to Shanghai and then taking a connecting flight from there. I asked Hao Qiangsheng to let me carry the urn of ashes, so that I could accompany this spiritual mother of mine for a small portion of her final journey.
“I saw you carrying the urn to the airport.” Li Yuezhen shook her head. “But they weren’t my ashes, they were someone else’s.”
Those ashes, I realized, must now be resting under her name, somewhere in America. “Hao Xia told she has already found a resting place for you,” I started to say, “and her dad will join you there in the future.”
I didn’t go on, because I realized now that when Hao Qiangsheng was buried his remains would not be interred with those of Li Yuezhen, but with those of one or more strangers.
Tears streamed from Li Yuezhen’s empty eyes, for this thought had occurred to her too. Tears flowed down her stonelike cheeks and fell onto the blades of grass below. Then her empty eyes lit up with a happier expression, and she raised her head to look at the warbling babies. “I used to have twenty-seven children. Now that you’re here, I’ve got twenty-eight.”
Her fingers, reduced simply to bones, began to stroke the black armband on my left arm. She knew that I was grieving for myself. “My poor boy,” she said.
In my ice-bound heart there appeared a warming glow. One of the infants, overreaching, tumbled down off a leaf and, sobbing pitifully, crawled over Li Yuezhen. She took the infant into her arms and gently rocked him back and forth, then set him back on top of another broad leaf, where he happily rejoined the warbling chorus.
“How did you get here?” Li Yuezhen asked.
I told her about my final moments, and also mentioned how Li Qing had come from so far away to say goodbye.
She gave a sigh. “Li Qing should never have left you.”
Perhaps she was right, I thought. If Li Qing had not left me at that point, we might still be living a peaceful life in that other world and our child would be in primary school—or maybe even middle school.
I recalled the disappearance of Li Yuezhen and the dead babies and how the funeral parlor had claimed that it had already cremated them all, though it was said that their ashes had actually been taken from the urns of other people altogether.
“I know about that,” she said. “People who came after me told me.”
I looked up at the babies singing away on the broad tree leaves. “Did you carry them all here?”
“No, I didn’t carry them,” she said. “I walked in front and they crawled along behind.”
Li Yuezhen said that late that night she did not hear the roar of the subsidence. She had been sleeping heavily, and at one stage she saw a vast chaos in which heaven and earth were inextricably mixed. A gleam of light appeared in the far distance, like a line on the horizon, and then light came rolling in like a tide. Heaven and earth separated, morning and night were uncoupled. Later, in her dreams she felt air whirling around rapidly and shuttling back and forth, and in the final stage of sleep she saw water spreading from the ground and rising inexorably until it was like an ocean.
Then she woke, to find she seemed to be falling vertically off a cliff. She slowly pushed aside the white cloth, the way she might sweep away snow in front of her door. Her feet began to move, taking her out of the morgue that now lay at the bottom of the sinkhole, bathed in a desolate moonlight. Her feet stepped on a broken wall as jagged as scattered dogs’ teeth, and she propelled herself out of the pit.
She walked into a city flooded with light, where pedestrians and cars jostled. Everything was the same as it had always been, but departure into another realm put her beyond the reach of this familiar world.
Out of habit she walked to the building where she used to live, as though returning home, but she could not enter it as she would have been able to before. No matter how she moved her legs, it was impossible to get closer. Three days after her departure from the human world, she saw a female figure appear briefly at a sixth-floor window and her heart skipped a beat, for it was Hao Xia—her daughter had returned.
In the two days and nights that followed, she never ceased in her efforts to approach the building, but she just seemed to move farther away. Hao Qiangsheng never appeared in that window and neither did I, and Hao Xia appeared just that once. She saw people moving tables and chairs and chests out of the building, then coffee tables and sofas and beds, until she knew that the furniture she had lived with for decades had been sold off and the apartment itself too, for her husband and daughter were about to fly to America.
Finally, one afternoon, she saw all three of us. Hao Qiangsheng, holding an urn in both hands, emerged from the building; he was supported by Hao Xia, who held in her right hand a large duffel bag, while I followed behind carrying a large suitcase in each hand. The three of us stood by the side of the road and a taxi pulled over. The driver and I together put the bag and suitcases into the trunk of the car. She saw me say a few words to Hao Qiangsheng, and he passed the urn to me. Holding it carefully in both hands, I sat down in the passenger seat, while Hao Xia and her father sat in the back. The taxi drove off.
She knew that this was a final parting, for her husband and daughter were leaving for far-off America. Tears came to her eyes and she dashed forward to deliver a greeting, but running simply put more distance between her and us. She came to a halt and watched as the the taxi disappeared in the flow of traffic.
She started sobbing then, and after much grieving she heard behind her a murmur, a murmur a bit like a sob, and when she turned around she saw the twenty-seven babies crawling along the ground in a line. At first they appeared to be just as upset as she was, but when her crying stopped, their susurrant sobs ceased too. She had not realized that they’d followed her out of the sinkhole and crawled all the way here. She gazed at the city that was gradually fading into the distance, then looked back at the twenty-seven babies, and realized what she had lost and what she had gained.
“Let’s go,” she said softly to the babies.
Li Yuezhen, dressed in white, walked forward slowly and the twenty-seven babies crawled after her all in a line. The sunlight was a grubby yellow as they threaded their way through the noisy city and entered a quiet space where they were greeted by silvery moonlight. They penetrated deeper and deeper into the silence.
After crossing the frontier between life and death, Li Yuezhen stepped onto a stretch of fragrant grass. The green grass rubbed the necks of the twenty-seven babies crawling along behind, and the ticklish sensation made them giggle. Where the grass ended, a gleaming river flowed. Li Yuezhen waded into the river, which slowly rose to the level of her chest, then slowly fell until it lay beneath her feet, as she arrived at the other bank. The babies paddled on the surface of the water, spluttering as they made the crossing, the sound of their little coughs carrying to her until they reached the bank. As they entered a forest, Li Yuezhen began to sing a song, and the babies behind sang along with her. She stopped, but they did not, and their nightingale-like refrain continued to waft among the trees.
“Your father was here,” Li Yuezhen said to me. “Yang Jinbiao was here.”
I looked at her in wonder.
“He had to travel a long road to get here, so he was very tired,” she said. “He lay down here for several days, thinkin
g of you the whole time.”
“Where did he go after leaving me?”
“He got on the train and went to the place where he once abandoned you.”
That last evening’s conversation with my father had always been imprinted on my mind. We squeezed onto the narrow little bed in the room behind the shop, and the streetlights outside seemed ready to drift off to sleep as the night breeze caressed our window. It was the first time my father had wept in front of me. He told me how, for a young woman’s sake, he had abandoned me on a rock in an unfamiliar town. He described the rough texture of the rock face and the smoothness of its upper surface. It was on that terrace that he had put me, although subsequently he would reproach himself for his heartlessness, over and over again. When my father left me after that conversation more than a year ago, it never crossed my mind that this was where he would go.
My father had put on his brand-new railroad uniform, the newest set of clothes in his possession, which he’d never been able to bring himself to wear before. Dragging a weak and failing body, he boarded the train and squeezed his way to his seat. No sooner had he sat down than the train started to move. Watching the platform slowly recede into the distance, he suddenly became aware that he did not have much time left and did not know if he would ever be able to see me again.
My father told Li Yuezhen that he had not slept a wink that last night we were together, but instead listened continuously to my rhythmic breathing and occasional snoring. In the middle of the night there was a spell when I made no sound at all and he got worried, so he stretched out a hand and patted my face and neck, waking me. I propped myself up and looked at him, and he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He said that in the darkness I patted him and carefully put his arm inside the quilt.
I shook my head. “I don’t remember any of that,” I told Li Yuezhen.
Li Yuezhen pointed at the grassy patch under the trees. “He was lying just there as he told me all this.”
My father had a fairly clear idea of where to go, but it wasn’t easy to find the copse of trees and the dark rock, and he never found the stone-slab bridge and the dry riverbed. He remembered that on the opposite side of the bridge there ought to be a building, a building with the sound of children singing, but he found neither the building nor the singing. Everything had changed, he told Li Yuezhen, even the train. The train that he and I took that year had pulled out of the platform at dawn and did not arrive at the town until midday. Now the train that he alone took still left at dawn, but reached that same place just over an hour later.
“Did you still remember the location?” Li Yuezhen asked him.
“I did,” he said. “Riverside Street.”
He left the train station in the morning sunlight, among travelers who carried bags over their shoulders or pulled suitcases behind them in such a rush it was as though their lives depended on it. He was carrying neither bag nor suitcase, but his laboring body felt heavier than any piece of luggage. As he plodded slowly toward the station exit, his two hands lacked the energy to swing loose and hung almost motionless by his side.
He stood in the square in front of the station and in a feeble voice asked directions from the healthy bodies rushing past him. Of the first twenty people he approached, only four said they were locals. He asked them how to get to Riverside Street. The three younger people had no idea where Riverside Street was. But the fourth, an old man, recognized the name and said my father needed to take a No. 3 bus. My father wearily boarded the bus, and in a town where he knew no one he went looking for the site of my abandonment.
“Why did you want to go there?” Li Yuezhen asked him.
“I just wanted to sit on that rock for a bit,” he replied.
It was afternoon by the time he found the spot. He was well-nigh exhausted by the trip on crowded public transport. After he got off the first bus, he had sat down by the side of the road for a good long time before he could summon the strength to board the second. The third bus dropped him off three hundred yards from Riverside Street. To him, that walk was so arduous, it could just as well have been three thousand yards. He could move forward only with difficulty, his steps ponderous, his feet as heavy and clumsy as two rocks. After walking five or six yards, he had to lean against a tree to rest for a little. He noticed a snack shop by the side of the road and felt he ought to eat something, so he sat down on one of the stools placed on the sidewalk outside the shop, propping himself up by putting both hands on the table. He ordered a bowl of dumpling soup, but after three mouthfuls he had to throw up—into a plastic bag he had brought along for the purpose. The people sitting next to him hurriedly carried their bowls into the shop, and he apologized to them in a weak voice, then went on eating, continuing to vomit at intervals. When he finished eating, he felt he’d eaten more than he’d vomited and his body now had some strength, so he lurched to his feet and tottered the rest of the way to Riverside Street.
“It was all tall buildings there,” he told Li Yuezhen.
The stream and the stone-slab bridge of yesteryear were no more. He did hear children, but they were no longer singing. They were yelling with excitement on a playground slide, as their watchful grandparents chatted. The area was now a housing complex, and the pathways between the high-rise buildings were like narrow cracks through which vehicles and people had to squeeze. He inquired as to the whereabouts of the river and the bridge, but the residents had all moved here from somewhere else, and according to them there was no river and no bridge, and there never had been. “Is this Riverside Street?” he asked, and they said it was. “Was that always its name?” he asked, and they said they thought it was.
“So it was called Riverside Street, even if there was no river?” Li Yuezhen asked.
“The place name hadn’t changed, but everything else had,” he replied.
In a feeble voice my father continued to ask about the little copse and the dark rock among the grasses. One person told him that there was no copse but there were grasses, in the park next to the housing development, and there were rocks among the grasses. My father asked how far it was to the park and the man said it was close by—just two hundred yards away—but those two hundred yards were for my father another strenuous journey.
It was dusk by the time he reached the park. The lingering rays of the setting sun illuminated a grassy lawn, and several rocks scattered across the lawn and jutting out of it caught the warm colors of the setting sun. He searched among these rocks for the one he carried in his memory and felt that the dark rock among them looked a lot like the one that I had sat on so many years earlier. He slowly walked over to it and wanted to sit on it, but his body would not obey instructions and kept slipping off, so he could only sit down on the grass and lean his back against the rock. At that moment he realized he lacked the strength to stand up again. His head flopped against the rock and he watched in a powerless daze as a vagrant wearing shabby old clothes rummaged around in a nearby garbage can. The man pulled out a Coke bottle, twisted off the cap, and emptied the remaining drops of soda into his mouth. The vagrant shook the bottle a few more times before tossing it back into the garbage can. Then he turned around and stared at my father like a hawk. My father turned his head away, and when he looked up he found the vagrant was sitting on a bench by the garbage can, his eyes still fixed on him—fixed on his brand-new railway uniform.
“I saw Yang Fei,” he told Li Yuezhen, “on that very rock.”
He was in his final moments now, and he sank into the darkness as though sinking into a well, with silence all around. The lights in the tall buildings were extinguished and the stars and moon in the sky were extinguished too. Then, all of a sudden, it was as though the scene of my abandonment appeared in a brilliant shaft of light. He saw me, the four-year-old, sitting on the rock in a blue-and-white sailor suit, the one he had bought for me when he decided to give me away. A little sailor boy sat on the dark rock; he was happily waving his legs. “I’m going to get you something to ea
t,” my father said to me sadly. “Dad, be sure to get plenty,” I said to him happily.
But this radiant picture vanished in the twinkling of an eye, as a pair of coarse hands forcibly removed his uniform, briefly calling him back from the brink of death. His body was feeling numb, but remaining shreds of consciousness enabled him to realize what the vagrant was doing. The vagrant stripped off the tattered blue clothes he was wearing and put on my father’s brand-new uniform.
“Please,” my father said weakly. The vagrant bent his head to hear more clearly. “Two hundred yuan,” he heard my father murmur. The vagrant groped around in my father’s shirt pocket and pulled out two hundred-yuan notes. He transferred them to the breast pocket of the railroad uniform that had been my father’s.
“Please,” my father said once more. The vagrant stood looking at him for a moment, then squatted down and put the tattered blue jacket on him.
The vagrant heard his last words:
“Thank you.”
The darkness was endless. My father sank into a nothingness in which everything was erased, in which he himself was erased. Then it was as though he heard someone calling “Yang Fei!” and his body stood up, and when he stood up he discovered he was walking on an empty and desolate plain, and the person calling “Yang Fei!” was himself. He went on walking and went on calling, “Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei…” It was just that the sound of his voice got smaller and smaller. He walked a long way across the plain and didn’t know if he had walked for a day or for several days, but his endless calling of my name brought him back to his own city, and his call of “Yang Fei!” seemed to lead him like a road sign to our little shop. He stood on the street outside for a long, long time—two days or two weeks, he could not tell. The doors and windows of the shop remained closed throughout, and I never appeared.
