by Yu Hua
What outraged him was that nobody wanted his kidney. He said he’d had rotten luck the whole time, never once matched with a transplant recipient. Every year, he said, there were a million people suffering from kidney disease who depended on dialysis for survival, but there were only about four thousand legal kidney transplants. How was it possible that nobody wanted his kidney? There should be a million people who need it! The only explanation was that those sons of bitches responsible for matching patient and donor were failing to apply themselves properly to their work, with the result that his perfectly good kidney had gone neglected for almost a year now. If this time, too, he was given his marching orders, he said, he was going first to burn some incense in a temple and beg the bodhisattva to help him sell his kidney in double-quick time, and then get another train ticket and head off to the next kidney-selling den.
Wu Chao said nothing after arriving in the basement, but simply listened indifferently as the men gossiped about this and that, and even when he heard how veterinary surgeons performed the operations, he remained unmoved; it was only when he thought of Mouse Girl that his heart would ache. He prayed that he would be matched successfully as soon as possible, so that he could purchase a burial plot for Mouse Girl with minimum delay. But the seven men in the basement had already been waiting so long, and one had yet to be matched successfully even after almost a year, and this made him deeply anxious. He was stricken with insomnia; on his soiled and smelly bed he tossed and turned, unable to fall asleep.
On Wu Chao’s sixth day in the basement, the meal-delivery man appeared at a different time than usual. He opened the door and called, “Wu Chao!”
Before Wu Chao had time to react, the other seven men in the basement looked at each other and realized that none of them had this name—Wu Chao had to be the one who had said not a word since his arrival. “So soon!” they exclaimed.
“Wu Chao, you’ve got a match,” the man at the doorway said.
Wu Chao flung aside the greasy quilt and put on his clothes and shoes under the envious gaze of the other seven. As he walked toward the door, the man who had visited kidney-selling dens in five cities spoke up. “You’re a sly one,” he said.
Wu Chao followed the meal-delivery man up the stained cement staircase to the fourth floor. The man knocked on a door, and when it was opened, Wu Chao found a middle-aged man sitting on a sofa inside the room. This person greeted Wu Chao warmly and had him sit down next to him, then began to explain that the human body actually requires just one kidney, so the other is redundant—like an appendix, which you can keep or remove as you wish.
Wu Chao was not interested in these issues. “How much will I get for my kidney?” he asked the middle-aged man.
“Thirty-five thousand,” the man replied.
Wu Chao thought this sufficient for his purposes, so he nodded.
“We pay top price here,” the man said. “Other places pay only thirty.”
No need to worry about the surgery, he assured Wu Chao, for the doctors they used were all from big hospitals and were just taking on these jobs for extra income.
“They say that it’s vets who do the operation,” Wu Chao responded.
“That’s bullshit!” the middle-aged man said, looking displeased. “Our doctors are all fully trained surgeons, and we pay them five thousand for every kidney removal.”
Wu Chao moved into a room on the fifth floor. It had four beds, only one of which was occupied. The person there was a man who had already had a kidney removed, and he gave his new roommate a friendly smile, which Wu Chao returned.
This man’s operation had been successful, and he was able to prop himself up against the bedstead to talk with Wu Chao. He said he no longer had a fever and would be able to leave in another few days. He asked Wu Chao why he was selling his kidney.
Wu Chao lowered his head in thought. “For my girlfriend,” he said.
“Same as me,” the other man said.
He had a steady girlfriend back in the countryside, he told Wu Chao. He wanted to marry her, but her parents insisted he needed to have a house first. So he took a job in the city, but the money he made was pitiful—he would need to work nine or ten years before he’d have enough to build a house, and his girlfriend would have married someone else long before that. Selling his kidney was the quickest way to finance the house construction.
“This money comes easy,” he said.
He gave a laugh. That’s just the way it was back home, he said—if you don’t have a house, you can forget about marriage. “Is it the same where you’re from?” he asked.
Wu Chao nodded. His eyes suddenly got wet, for he thought of Mouse Girl and how she had stuck with him through thick and thin despite his poverty and failures in life. He bowed his head, not wanting his tears to be seen.
After a moment he raised his head. “Didn’t your girlfriend want to leave and get a job in the city as well?”
“She wanted to,” the man said, “but her father was bedridden and her mother was in poor health too. She’s their only daughter—they have no sons—so she can’t get away.”
Wu Chao thought of Mouse Girl’s fate. “Maybe it’s better that way.”
Life on the fifth floor was a complete contrast to life in the basement. There was no foul air and the quilt was clean. There was natural light. In the morning Wu Chao could eat an egg, a meat bun, and a bowl of congee; at midday and in the evening he ate boxed meals with either meat or fish.
Wu Chao woke up in sunlight and fell asleep by moonlight—sensations long denied him, since for a year or more he had woken and slept in an underground world with neither sun nor moon. Now he appreciated their beauty, and even when he closed his eyes he could feel how they brightened the room. Outside his window was a tree that had turned dry and yellow in the winter cold, but even so, birds would fly over and rest on its limbs, sometimes chirping away, then flapping their wings and soaring over the rooftops. He thought of Mouse Girl and how she too had never experienced this kind of life during their time together. He couldn’t help but feel sad.
Three days later, Wu Chao followed the middle-aged man into a windowless room. A man wearing glasses who looked like he might be a doctor asked him to lie down on a crude operating table. A powerful light shone in his face, and even after he closed his eyes they still felt sore. With the anesthetic, he lost consciousness, and when he came around he found himself lying on his bed on the fifth floor once more. The room was completely silent, for the man who had been there was now gone and Wu Chao was the only occupant. Next to his pillow lay a bag of antibiotics and a bottle of mineral water. At the slightest movement he felt an acute stab of pain in his left side, and he knew he’d lost his left kidney.
The middle-aged man came by twice a day to make sure he took the antibiotics at the proper time. The man told him that he would be able to go back home in a week. Wu Chao lay alone in the room; his only other visitors were the birds. Some would flit past his window, while others would linger briefly on the branches outside, their raucous jabber sounding to his ears like idle chatter.
After a week the middle-aged man gave him thirty-five thousand yuan in cash, summoned a taxi, and sent two of his underlings to see him back to his home in the bomb shelter.
Wu Chao’s neighbors, seeing two strangers carry him in and lay him on his bed, knew he must have sold a kidney so that Mouse Girl could get a proper burial.
Wu Chao lay in bed. After a few more days he had finished all the antibiotics, but his high fever had not abated and on several occasions he lapsed into unconsciousness; when he came to, he felt that his body was on the point of leaving him. His underground neighbors came to visit him and bring him snacks, but he was able only to swallow a very little bit of congee or soup. Several neighbors said they should take him to the hospital, but he shook his head emphatically, for he knew that if he was admitted to the hospital he could say goodbye to all the money he made from selling his kidney. He believed he could get through this, but his co
nfidence weakened with every passing day, and as the frequency of his fainting spells increased he knew he wouldn’t be fit enough to make the selection of Mouse Girl’s burial plot. For this he cried tears of frustration.
Once, Wu Chao woke from unconsciousness and asked in a feeble voice of the neighbors who sat by his side, “Was that a bird?”
“There’s no birds,” the neighbors said.
“I heard a bird calling,” Wu Chao continued weakly.
“I saw a bat on my way here,” one of the neighbors said.
“Not a bat,” Wu Chao said, “a bird.”
Xiao Qing said that the last time he went to see him, Wu Chao found it hard even to open his eyes. It was then that he begged Xiao Qing to help. He told him that there was thirty-five thousand yuan hidden under his pillow and asked him to use thirty-three thousand to buy a burial plot for Mouse Girl, a good-quality tombstone, and an urn for her ashes. The remaining two thousand he said he needed to keep for himself, so that he could come out of this alive and sweep Mouse Girl’s grave at the Qingming Festival in future years.
After saying all this, he turned with a moan and had Xiao Qing take the money out from underneath the pillow. The words “The grave of the Mouse Girl I love” were to be carved on the tombstone, he instructed Xiao Qing, with his own name below. Just as Xiao Qing was leaving, money in hand, Wu Chao called him back in a whisper and told him to change “Mouse Girl” to “Liu Mei.”
Mouse Girl was weeping. The sound of her sobs spilled over every face and body here, like the patter of rain on plantain leaves. With the twenty-seven babies warbling in the background, her sobs seemed all the more wrenching.
Many of the skeletal people listened raptly and asked each other who was singing, singing so sadly. Others said it wasn’t singing but sobbing, it was the pretty girl—the new arrival—who was sobbing, the pretty girl in the man’s pants, pants that were long and wide. Every day she’d been walking back and forth and tramping on her pant legs, but now she was sitting on the ground and crying.
Mouse Girl sat amid the riverside greenery, her back against a tree, her legs screened by grass and blossoming wildflowers, the river gurgling close by. As she hummed her song of lamentation, the teardrops on her face looked like morning dew clinging to tree leaves. She was making a dress out of the pair of pants.
Xiao Qing stood close to Mouse Girl. As stationary as a street sign, he watched as skeletal people—and a dozen or more fleshed people—approached from all directions, forming an ever-denser throng. They stood close, listening attentively to Xiao Qing’s story. From his expression one could sense that Xiao Qing was on the road to forgetting, for his account was muddled, like an effort to piece together disjointed, incomplete dream sequences.
Everybody came over, excited by the knowledge that Mouse Girl could proceed to her resting place. They talked in hushed voices about how nobody so far had ever left this place and how Mouse Girl was the first, and how, moreover, her body and her beauty were fully intact.
Everyone in this huge crowd was eager to take a closer look at Mouse Girl as she sat sewing her dress among the grasses and beneath the trees, and so they circulated around her, interweaving in an orderly fashion, some pressing forward, others hanging back, like banks of waves forming in the ocean, every one of them blessing with a silent glance this lovely young woman who was about to proceed to her resting place.
An old voice emerged from the crowd that was circling Mouse Girl. “My child, you should bathe,” the voice said, as Mouse Girl bowed her head and wept and sewed her dress.
Mouse Girl raised her tear-stained face and looked in astonishment at this skeleton with the old voice.
“Soon you’ll be interred,” the old voice continued. “So you should bathe now.”
“I haven’t finished the dress,” Mouse Girl said.
“We’ll do it for you,” many women’s voices said.
Dozens of female skeletons came up to Mouse Girl and dozens of pairs of hands reached out to her. Mouse Girl lifted the unfinished dress, unsure into which pair of hands she should place it. “We used to work in a clothing factory,” two voices said to her.
Mouse Girl passed them the unfinished dress, then looked up at the old skeleton standing in front of her and asked with some embarrassment, “Can I keep my clothes on?”
The old skeleton shook his head. “You can’t bathe if you’re dressed.”
Mouse Girl lowered her head and in a slow movement let her outer clothes leave her body, then her underwear. When her legs emerged among the grasses and the blossoming wildflowers, she was completely unclothed. Lovely Mouse Girl lay on her back among the grasses and wildflowers, and after putting her legs together she folded her hands across her chest, then closed her eyes, as though entering a dreamlike serenity. The grasses and wildflowers growing so profusely around her lowered their heads and bent at the waist as though lost in admiration, their gaze concealing her body from onlookers. Thus she was hidden from view, and we saw only the grasses spreading and the wildflowers blooming.
“People over there make distinctions between family and strangers,” the hoary old skeleton continued, “but there are no such demarcations here. With interments over there one needs to be bathed by one’s kith and kin, but here we are all her family and we all need to bathe her. People there use bowls of water to bathe a body; here we cup our hands to make a bowl.”
Saying this, the old skeleton picked off a tree leaf, cupped it in his hand, and walked over to the stream. The crowd circling Mouse Girl made an orderly line, each one picking a leaf and cupping it in his or her hands, creating a long, long line of cups made of tree leaves, following the old skeleton to the riverside. Like a strand pulled from a ball of thread, they stretched out in a longer and longer arc. The old skeleton was the first to squat down, and after scooping up water in the bowl made by the tree leaf cupped in his hand, he got up and came walking back, and the people who followed him did the same. The old skeleton went up to where Mouse Girl lay, and after opening his hands sprinkled the water from his leaf bowl on top of the grass and wildflowers that covered Mouse Girl’s body. The grass and the flowers, sprinkled with the river water, trembled and shook, moistening Mouse Girl.
The old skeleton now began to walk off, holding the wet leaf in his left hand and wiping his eyes with his right, as though wiping away tears when parting from a loved one. Those behind followed suit, walking over to Mouse Girl with their leaf cups and sprinkling her with the cleansing water. They trailed behind the old skeleton, the line of them stretching away into the distance like a serpentine path. Some carried a leaf in their left hand, some in their right, and the leaves dripped their final droplets in the gentle breeze.
The thirty-eight victims of the department store fire had been walking back and forth in a group, but now they separated, each squatting down to scoop up water, then one by one walking over to Mouse Girl and sprinkling the grass and flowers so that her body was washed from head to toe. The little girl began to sob, and so did the little boy, and the other thirty-six gave sympathetic sobs of their own. Although they moved separately, their sobs reminded us that they were a tight-knit group.
Tan Jiaxin and his family were also in this long procession. They too gathered river water in their cupped hands and slowly approached the spot where Mouse Girl lay, and they sprinkled their benediction as Mouse Girl prepared to go to her resting place. As Tan Jiaxin’s daughter moved on, she wiped her tears with both hands and her body gave a little tremor; the leaf in her hand drifted to the ground. Where was her resting place going to be? she wondered. Tan Jiaxin stretched out an arm and patted her on the shoulder, saying, “So long as everyone is together, one place is as good as another.”
Zhang Gang and Li, the two board game enthusiasts and inveterate arguers, also arrived. They piously filled their leaf cups and sprinkled the contents over Mouse Girl’s grass-and-flower blanket. Noting a wistful look on Li’s face, Zhang Gang patted his skeletal shoulder with his own skeletal h
and. “Don’t feel you have to wait for me—you can go on ahead, you know,” he said.
Li shook his head. “We haven’t finished our game.”
The crowd of people who had left after bathing Mouse Girl’s body now formed several long lines stretching into the distance, while people in other long lines continued to queue up to bathe Mouse Girl—it seemed that this ceremony had a long way to go. Zheng Xiaomin’s parents also arrived, her mother still ill at ease, huddling herself up, her hands on her thighs, her father sticking close to his wife, hugging her as though eager to cover her. They separated, however, to pick leaves and scoop up water, and then the man, closely followed by his wife, led the way, as they moved along in the queue.
Again the nightingale song burst forth, but only in brief snatches. Li Yuezhen walked over slowly in her white clothes, with the twenty-seven babies forming a line and singing as they followed behind her. Perhaps the grass was tickling the babies’ necks, for giggles often interrupted their beautiful song. Li Yuezhen carried the babies one by one to the broad tree leaves beside the river. As the babies lay on the leaves that swayed in the breeze, their song was no longer intermittent, but flowed freely like the river water itself.
Mouse Girl, surrounded by grass and flowers, heard the nightingale chorus rising and falling on all sides, and without conscious effort she began to sing the babies’ song. Mouse Girl became the lead member of the choir. She would sing a line and the babies would follow; she would sing another line and they would follow that; and the lead and the chorus would repeat themselves over and over, as though they had rehearsed this in advance, and Mouse Girl’s and the babies’ songs rose and fell, rose and fell.
My footsteps, originally heading on a path toward the funeral parlor, toward my father, still lingered here.
“I have never been so clean as I am now,” Mouse Girl said. “I feel almost transparent.”
