by Yu Hua
As he stood there, the commonplace sights around him gradually took on an unfamiliar cast, the pedestrians and traffic circulating in the street grew indistinct, and he became aware that the place where he stood was becoming vague and dim. But the shop itself remained clearly recognizable and he continued to stand outside, looking forward to the door opening and me emerging from inside. Finally the door did open, but it was a woman who came out; she turned around and exchanged words with a man inside—a man who was clearly not me. My father bowed his head in disappointment and shuffled off.
“Yang Fei sold the shop and went to look for you,” Li Yuezhen told him.
He nodded. “When I saw someone else come out, I knew Yang Fei must have sold the place.”
Later, he kept on walking, kept on getting lost, and it was as he puzzled over his location that he heard a nightingale-like song. As he headed toward the source of the music, he saw skeletal people walking this way and that, and as he shuttled among them he entered a wood where the leaves grew bigger and bigger, where swaying babies lay on the broad tree leaves. The nightingale song was emanating from them. A woman in white approached—he recognized her as Li Yuezhen. She recognized him too, for at this point their looks were unaltered. They stood among the babies that were crooning like nightingales and exchanged accounts of their last moments in that departed world. He asked Li Yuezhen for news of me, and she told him of my visit to his old village—that was all she knew.
Very tired, he lay for several days in the grass beneath the trees, amid the warblings of the twenty-seven babies. Then he stood up, telling Li Yuezhen that he missed me and longed to see my face—even just a glimpse of me in the distance would content him. He resumed his endless journey, continually getting lost on unfamiliar roads, but this time he was unable to return to the city, because he had left that world for too long a time. He could only get as far as the funeral parlor, the interface between the two worlds.
Like me on my first visit there, he entered the waiting room and listened to the crematees as they discussed their burial clothes, cinerary urns, and burial sites, and he watched as one by one they entered the oven room. He stood rather than sat, and soon he came to feel that the waiting room should have a staff member in attendance, for he was someone who loved to work. When a late-arriving crematee entered, he instinctively went to usher him in and get him a number, then led him to a seat. This made him feel a lot like a regular assistant, and he went on walking back and forth in the central aisle. One day he found a pair of old white gloves in the pocket of the tattered blue jacket the vagrant had given him, and after putting them on he felt all the more like a full-time usher. Day after day he showed the utmost courtesy to those awaiting cremation, and day after day he felt an exquisite anticipation, knowing that so long as he kept on doing this, then eventually—in thirty or forty or fifty years—he would be able to see me.
Li Yuezhen paused at this point. I knew now where my father was—he was the man with the blue jacket and the white gloves in the waiting room of the funeral parlor, the man whose face had no flesh but only bone, the man with the weary and grieving voice.
My father had made a point of coming back from the funeral parlor to tell her about his new job, Li Yuezhen added. But he’d left as soon he’d shared this news with her, left in a great hurry, as though he never really should have taken a break.
The sound of Li Yuezhen’s voice was like a trickle of water, every word a little water droplet falling to the ground.
After many hesitant twists and turns, a young man made his way here, bringing to Mouse Girl news of her boyfriend in that other world.
Looking in dazed confusion at the green grass and the dense trees and the people walking about—many skeletal, some still fleshed—he said to himself, “How did I end up here?”
“It seems like five days now,” he went on. “I have been walking around all this time, and I don’t know how I ended up here.”
A voice piped up. “Some come here just a day after they die, but some take several days.”
“I died?” he said perplexedly.
“You didn’t go to the funeral parlor?” that same voice asked.
“The funeral parlor?” he asked. “Why would I go there?”
“Everyone has to go to the funeral parlor for cremation after they die.”
“You’ve all been cremated?” He looked at us in wonder. “You don’t look like ashes to me.”
“We haven’t been cremated.”
“Did you not go to the funeral parlor, then?”
“No, we’ve been there.”
“If you went, why weren’t you cremated?”
“We have no burial grounds.”
“I have no burial ground, either,” he muttered to himself. “How could I have died?”
“The people who come over after you will tell you,” another voice broke in.
He shook his head. “Just now I ran into someone who said he had just got here. He didn’t know me and didn’t know how I got here, and didn’t know how he got here, either.”
I was about to go over to the cremation waiting room to see my father, but the arrival of this young man made me stop in my tracks. His body looked somehow flattened, with an odd stain on the breast of his jacket. After studying it carefully, I detected the marks left by a car tire.
“Can you remember the final scene?” I asked.
“What final scene?”
“Think about it,” I said. “What happened at the end?”
From his expression I could tell he was trying hard to remember. “All I recall was very thick fog as I waited in the street for a bus—I don’t remember anything else,” he said eventually.
I thought back to that scene in the thick fog when I left my rental room on the first day—how as I passed a bus stop I heard the roar of cars colliding and how one car sped out of the thick fog and then there was a clamor of screams.
“Were you standing next to a bus stop?” I asked.
He thought for a moment. “That’s right, I was.”
“Did the sign list the 203 bus?”
He nodded. “Yes, it did. The 203 bus was the one I was waiting for.”
“It was a car accident that brought you here,” I told him. “There’s the mark of a car tire on your jacket.”
“I died in a car crash?” He lowered his head to look down at his chest and seemed to understand. “I do seem to remember something knocking me down and running over me.”
He looked at me and then at the skeletons close by. “You’re different from them,” he said.
“I just arrived a few days ago,” I said. “They’ve been here a long time.”
“Soon you’ll be just like us,” one skeleton said.
“Once spring is over—and the summer too,” I said. “We’ll be just like them.”
An uneasy expression appeared on his face. “Does it hurt a lot?” he asked.
“Not at all,” the skeleton said. “It’s just like tree leaves falling one by one in the autumn wind.”
“But a tree will always sprout more leaves,” he said.
“We’re not going to sprout again,” the skeleton said.
He nodded thoughtfully. “I understand.”
At this point a woman’s voice could be heard. “Xiao Qing!”
“I think someone is calling me,” he said.
“Xiao Qing!” the voice called again.
“That’s strange. There’s someone here who knows me.” He looked about in puzzlement.
“Xiao Qing, I’m here.”
Mouse Girl was approaching, dressed in a pair of pants so long she was treading on their cuffs. This young man looked at her in astonishment. He had heard her before he saw her.
“Hi, Xiao Qing! I’m Mouse Girl.”
“You don’t sound like her, but you do look like her.”
“I really am Mouse Girl.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Mouse Girl came up to us. “How come
you’re here too?” she asked Xiao Qing.
He pointed at his chest. “Car accident.”
Mouse Girl looked at the mark on his jacket. “What’s that?”
“A car ran me over,” Xiao Qing said.
“Did it hurt a lot?” Mouse Girl asked.
Xiao Qing thought this over. “I don’t remember. I may have cried out.”
Mouse Girl nodded. “Have you seen Wu Chao?” she asked.
“Yes, I have,” he said.
“When was that?”
“The day before I came here.”
Mouse Girl turned around and told us that in the world over there Xiao Qing had been another member of the mouse tribe. She and her boyfriend, Wu Chao, had known Xiao Qing for over a year. They were below-ground neighbors.
“Does Wu Chao know what happened to me?”
“Yes, he does,” Xiao Qing said. “He bought a burial plot for you.”
“He bought a burial plot for me?”
“Yes. He gave me the money and asked me to buy you a burial plot.”
“Where did he get the money?”
When Mouse Girl fell to her death, Wu Chao was back home with his father. Later, the old man’s condition stabilized, but it was late at night when Wu Chao made it back to the underground rental in the city. He didn’t see Mouse Girl and he softly called her name a few times, but there was no answer. Their neighbors were all asleep, so he made his way along the narrow passageway, listening for the sound of human voices, thinking that Mouse Girl perhaps was chatting with someone behind a curtain. He heard nothing but snores and dreamy murmurs and the occasional baby wailing. It occurred to him that Mouse Girl might be in an Internet bar chatting with someone online. As he headed toward the bomb shelter exit he ran into Xiao Qing, just returning from his night shift. Xiao Qing told him of Mouse Girl’s death three days earlier.
Wu Chao at first did not seem to react when he heard that Mouse Girl had thrown herself off the Pengfei Tower, but a moment later his whole body started trembling and he kept shaking his head. “That’s impossible! Impossible!” he cried, and he dashed toward the exit.
Wu Chao ran into the Internet bar that was closest to the shelter, sat down in front of a computer, and read Mouse Girl’s log on QQ space. He also read a news report about her suicide. Now he knew for sure that Mouse Girl had left him forever.
Frozen in shock, he sat in front of the glaring monitor for many minutes, until the screen went black; only then did he get up and leave the Internet bar. When a stranger walked past in the late-night silence, Wu Chao turned to him and said, in a shaky voice, “Mouse Girl is dead.”
The stranger gave a start, as though he had run into a lunatic, and quickly crossed to the other side of the street, looking back at him warily.
Wu Chao roamed like a wraith through the night-bound city, in a piercing cold wind. He walked aimlessly, impervious to how far he had gone or where he was, and even when passing the Pengfei Tower he did not raise his head to look. As day broke he still had not emerged from his daze. Among the crowds of jostling people on their way to work, he kept saying over and over again, “Mouse Girl is dead.”
His words were greeted with indifference. Only one pedestrian took note of his emotional state and asked him curiously, “Who is Mouse Girl?”
He thought about this blankly for a moment before answering, “Liu Mei.” The man shook his head and said he didn’t know her, then disappeared around a corner. “She’s my girlfriend,” Wu Chao muttered.
It was not until the end of the day that Wu Chao returned to his underground home. He lay down distractedly on the bed that he and Mouse Girl used to share. Eventually he fell asleep, but he kept waking up, tears in his eyes.
The next day he neither wept nor sobbed but simply lay in bed, unable to sleep and with no appetite for meals, listening blankly to the sounds of his neighbors stir-frying and chatting and the noise of children running around and shouting. He didn’t know what they were doing or what they were saying, and was conscious only of their ebb and flow.
He sank into a deep crevasse of memory, haunted by sudden visions of Mouse Girl, sometimes buoyant, sometimes fretful. Eventually he came to the realization that his most pressing task now was to ensure that she could enjoy proper rest. During her short life she had had many dreams, but practically none of these had he enabled her to fulfill. She had often griped about that, but just as often she had forgotten to gripe, looking forward instead to new prospects. He now felt sure that having a grave of her own must have been her final wish, but this was yet another area in which he seemed likely to fail her.
At this point, amid all the background din, somebody’s words carried to him clearly. The man was talking about an acquaintance who had made over thirty thousand yuan from selling a kidney.
Wu Chao sat up in bed, thinking that with that kind of money he could buy a burial plot for Mouse Girl.
He left the bomb shelter and entered the Internet bar. He searched online until he found a phone number. He borrowed a pen and wrote the number on the palm of his hand, then went out to a pay phone and called the number. The person who picked up the phone peppered him with questions until he was sure that Wu Chao was serious, then set up an appointment for them to meet at the Pengfei Tower. Wu Chao couldn’t help giving a shiver when he heard the name.
He arrived at the appointed spot to find the street filled with a clamor of cars and people; he and his shadow huddled together at the foot of the Pengfei Tower. One car after another drove into or emerged from the underground parking lot next to him. Several times he looked up at the piercing sunlight reflected from the tower’s glass windows, but he had no idea where Mouse Girl had stood that day.
A man in a black down jacket came up to him. “You’re Wu Chao?” he muttered.
Wu Chao nodded.
“Follow me,” the man said quietly.
They boarded a crowded bus. A few stops later they disembarked, then boarded another bus. After taking six different buses, they seemed to have reached the outskirts of town. Wu Chao accompanied the man to the entrance gate of a housing development. The man told Wu Chao to go on inside, while he stood by the gate and placed a call on his cell phone. As Wu Chao entered this drab development, he noticed a man emerging from a building not far away. The man tossed his cigarette on the ground and stamped it out as Wu Chao approached. “Selling a kidney?” he asked.
Wu Chao nodded. The man beckoned with his hand, indicating he should follow him into the building. They went down a stained concrete staircase to the basement. The man opened a door, and the air was suddenly rank with the odor of stale cigarette smoke. By a dim light Wu Chao could make out seven people inside, sitting on beds, smoking and chatting. Wu Chao headed for the one unoccupied bed.
Wu Chao handed over his ID and signed an agreement to sell a kidney. He was given a medical examination and a blood sample was taken, then he was told to await the result. He began another underground life, sleeping under a greasy quilt, a quilt that looked as though it had never been washed, and that exuded foul smells accumulated from its many previous users. The man who had brought him to the basement visited twice a day, issuing to the men inside packs of cheap cigarettes and two meals—cabbage and potato for lunch, potato and cabbage for dinner. The room had neither tables nor chairs, so they all sat on their beds to eat, apart from two who squatted on their haunches. The fetid odor that wafted through the basement was held in check only when the men were smoking. When they slept, Wu Chao would wake up sometimes, oppressed by such a powerful stench he felt as though his chest were being squeezed.
The other men, all young, chatted idly as they smoked, exchanging notes about conditions at construction sites and factories and moving companies—it seemed they had worked in lots of different places. Making a pot of money quickly was now their goal: even if they were to slave away as coolies for years and years, they said, they would still not be able to make as much money as if they were to sell a kidney. They were looking forward
eagerly to life afterward, when they could buy a smart set of clothes, an Apple phone, stay a few nights in a swank hotel, and eat some meals in an upscale restaurant. After indulging in these expectations, they lapsed back into anxiety, for none of the seven had yet received word that he had been successfully matched with an organ recipient, despite waiting here for over a month. One of them had already visited similar outfits in five other cities, and each time had been sent packing within a matter of weeks, on the grounds that nobody wanted his kidney. The kidney vendors would give him only forty-five yuan for traveling expenses, money he would use to buy his way to another kidney-selling operation. He said that he had not a penny to his name, so all he could do was try like a beggar to keep life and limb together, in one kidney-selling den after another.
This man had seen a lot of the world, and when someone complained how tedious the diet was here—just cabbage and potato—he said it couldn’t be considered bad, for here you at least got tofu once a week and chicken-bone soup once a week as well. He said he’d stayed in a kidney-selling den where for two months straight he ate disgusting food every day of the week.
Somebody raised a question about the safety of kidney surgery. There was, the kidney-racket veteran announced in a tone of authority, no simple answer to that—it was very much a matter of luck. Kidney vendors, he informed them, were an unscrupulous bunch—people with a conscience wouldn’t get involved in this kind of business—and to save money they didn’t hire professional surgeons, who would demand a high price for their services; kidney vendors would bring in veterinary surgeons instead.
When they heard it was going to be vets removing their kidneys, the other men were outraged, cursing the damn vendors for jeopardizing their health just so they could maximize profits.
This man took it all in stride, however, saying, “These days there’s no shortage of wicked people and outrageous behavior, is there? And besides, a vet still counts as a surgeon, and if he makes a habit of cutting out people’s kidneys, he will soon become an old hand and his technique might even be superior to that of a surgeon in a proper hospital.”
