by Yu Hua
In early 1949, Tang Enbo, commander of the Nationalist garrison in Shanghai, decided to abandon Suzhou and Hangzhou to the advancing Communist troops and concentrate his forces for the defense of Shanghai. Nationalist soldiers of a company stationed in the little town of Smoke withdrew from their positions overnight. But before they did so, an officer named Tan Liang directed sappers to bury ten time bombs. Tan Liang was a mathematics graduate of Tongji University. That night, under a sky strewn with stars, he buried the bombs in an intricate geometric pattern.
Tan Liang was the last Nationalist officer to evacuate from Smoke, and as he left the little town and gazed back to survey it one last time, it looked as quiet as a bamboo grove in the starlight. At that moment he perhaps already had a premonition that decades later he would stand once more in that spot, a premonition that would become reality on September 3, 1988.
Although Tan Liang joined his company in their deployment to Shanghai, he did not end up among the long columns of soldiers who surrendered to the Communist forces. He had left Shanghai prior to this time, along with his team of sappers, who had relocated to the offshore island of Zhoushan. With the fall of Zhoushan, Tan Liang disappeared from view. Among the multitude of Nationalist officers and soldiers who fled to Taiwan, three had been soldiers in Tan Liang’s sapper team. They thought it almost certain that he had drowned en route, because they had seen with their own eyes how the flimsy sailing boat in which he was attempting the passage was smashed to pieces in a storm.
On September 2, 1988, an old fisherman named Shen Liang arrived at Dinghai, Zhoushan’s main port, and at five o’clock that afternoon he boarded a ferry bound for Shanghai. That night he lay in an upper bunk and endured a night of incessant rocking and tossing that seemed to last for decades. Early the next morning the ferry docked at Pier 16, on the waterfront near the bund. Shen Liang came ashore amid a throng of passengers and took a city bus to the long-distance bus terminal in Xujiahui, where he bought a ticket for the 7:30 a.m. departure to the little town of Smoke.
On the morning of September 3, the seat next to him was occupied by a young man from a distant province. He had spent a month being treated for an eye condition in a Shanghai hospital, and after discharge he had chosen not to go home directly, but to make a detour to Smoke. During the journey, Shen Liang told him how, decades earlier, a Nationalist officer named Tan Liang had directed sappers to plant ten bombs in the town where they were now heading.
3
“Ten years ago,” the outlander said.
Although his voice remained steady, I felt a change, as though the water under the bridge had stopped flowing downriver and was now moving in the opposite direction. The outlander’s expression conveyed clearly that he had begun to tell a different story.
“Ten years ago,” he went on. “That’s to say, May eighth, 1988.”
I felt he must have made a mistake, because it was not yet May 8, 1988. So I corrected him: “You mean 1978.”
“No”—he waved his hand in disagreement—“1988. If it had been 1978,” he explained, “that would be twenty years ago.”
4
Ten years ago, that’s to say on May 8, 1988, something unexpected happened in the outlander’s personal life. It was this event that led to his arrival several months later in the little town of Smoke.
Not long after May 8, his eyes began to water constantly, and at the same time his vision gradually grew cloudy. He alone was aware of these changes, for he told nobody, not even closest family. He vaguely felt that the deterioration in his sight was related to what had happened on May 8, but it was such a private matter that he was disinclined to let others know. He simply felt things slipping out of his control, as the scenes around him grew more and more murky and indistinct.
His condition continued to worsen, to the point that one day, when his father was sitting out on the balcony reading a newspaper, the outlander grabbed him by the collar, mistaking him for a down blanket. Within a couple of days almost all his acquaintances were aware that his eyes were traveling down a road toward utter darkness. And so he was admitted to a local hospital.
From that day on, he no longer took responsibility for his own body and gave others license to exert authority over it. But constantly in his mind he was mulling over his private affairs; only he knew why his eyes were tending toward blurriness. He was vaguely aware of traveling on a bus, and then a train. The train arrived at a terminal, and he was wheeled into a Shanghai hospital.
Less than two weeks after his admission to the hospital, on August 14, 1988, a traffic accident occurred on a street in Hongkou district in north Shanghai: a young woman from out of town was hit by a speeding Liberation truck. She was rushed to the hospital where the outlander was being treated, but she died on the operating table four hours later. Shortly before her death, knowing there was no way to save her, the chief surgeon raised the issue of organ donation with her father, who was sitting helplessly on a bench outside. The man was utterly distraught because of the tragedy that so suddenly had befallen his daughter. Understanding nothing, he agreed to everything that was proposed.
After the extraction of the young woman’s eye tissue, three surgeons performed a corneal transplant. On the morning of September 1, 1988, the gauze was removed from the outlander’s eyes. He felt as though a folding fan waved for a moment in front of him, and then the darkness fell away. Now he could see that a man was standing by his bedside—or, to be more precise, he could see that his father was.
The outlander spent another two nights in the ward and was formally discharged on September 3. That morning he arrived in the long-haul bus station in Xujiahui and boarded a bus bound for Smoke. His father saw him off at the bus station, then left to take a train back home.
The outlander had only just learned about the town called Smoke. He wanted to visit the family home of Willow Yang, who had died in a traffic accident at the age of seventeen. According to a nurse, it was her corneas that had been donated to him. He had obtained Willow Yang’s address from the hospital cashier: she lived in Smoke, at 26 Carpenter Square Alley.
Shanghai is connected to Smoke by an asphalt highway, and on that overcast autumn morning the outlander, now in the third day since he regained his sight, gazed out the window at the drab scenery. His neighbor was an old man; though neatly dressed, he exuded a somewhat fishy odor. His eyes were closed for much of the journey, and he opened them only when the bus reached Jinshan. It was in the last few kilometers that the old man began to talk. He told the outlander that his name was Shen Liang and he was a native of Zhoushan, emphasizing particularly this latter point: “It’s the first time in my life I’ve left Zhoushan.”
The conversation did not stop there, but involved a war of decades earlier. In fact, the whole conversation consisted simply of the old man talking and the outlander listening as he looked out the window.
As though reminiscing about old times in the comfort of his own home, the old man related the story of a Nationalist officer named Tan Liang and the ten time bombs. As they neared their destination, the old man had reached the point in early 1949 when Tan Liang took one last look at Smoke and found the little town as quiet as a bamboo grove.
As the bus entered the town, the overcast skies turned dark and chaotic and the old man’s speech came to a sudden halt; his eyes were like those of a dead fish. He said nothing more. The matter of Tan Liang coming to grief in a shipwreck emerged several days later, when the old man and the outlander met and conversed a second time, on the concrete bridge. It was then that the outlander learned of Tan Liang’s death at sea.
The bus drove into Smoke’s bus station. The outlander and Shen Liang were the last two passengers to leave the station. Several people were waiting outside to meet travelers coming off the bus. Two men stood smoking, and a woman greeted a man on a bicycle. The outlander and Shen Liang walked side by side for so
me twenty meters, and then Shen Liang came to a stop and surveyed the town that now lay before him in the midday light. The outlander kept on going, and as he walked, something prompted him to recall the last scene that Shen Liang had described to him on the bus—how, when leaving Smoke in early 1949, Tan Liang had looked back in the moonlight and found the little town as quiet as a bamboo grove.
The outlander continued on. Noticing a young woman by the side of the road who seemed to be waiting for someone, he asked for directions to a hotel. She pointed off into the distance.
As he walked farther, the trees lining the two sides of the concrete road looked lifeless under the leaden sky, as though they’d been covered in dust. But the walls of the houses—even old walls with faded whitewash—were gleaming brightly.
Later he reached a concrete bridge and came to a stop. Several thousand laborers were dredging the river below. He strolled onto the bridge and stood to watch, and so he came to witness the unearthing of an explosive device. At that moment a story about time bombs filled his mind, while an address on Carpenter Square Alley and the name Willow Yang slipped from his memory like dead leaves.
1
On the evening of May 8, 1988, I left my riverside lodging as usual.
I closed the door carefully, doing my utmost to make no sound. I always made a point of differentiating myself from my ill-mannered neighbors, who shut their doors with a bang, as though they’re chopping firewood. Then I stepped into the narrow street and its tawdry atmosphere.
The moon shone serenely overhead, but it was not high enough in the sky to cast its light directly onto the street. Instead the moonlight hung on the eaves of the houses on both sides, like early morning rain. So I walked along a street that looked as though it had been daubed with black paint, a street that triggered the same sense of disquiet as all the other streets, for darkness never gives me a full sense of security. The humdrum noises that fill the town during daylight hours become less intrusive in the quiet of evening, but still, like garish wildflowers, they aimed at me their vicious blooms.
In the street I met no one, making this the happiest excursion I had experienced until then. So I did not immediately turn into the broadest avenue in town that lay horizontally in front of me, but gazed back at my little street, still shrouded in darkness. The uneasiness I felt when first stepping outside had now subsided. The reason I lingered at the junction and did not proceed was that I couldn’t be sure when I would next be walking along that street.
But I did not hesitate long. Someone—or, to be more exact, someone’s hazy shadow—appeared on the street, and the sounds of his footsteps were unusually loud. He was wearing the kind of shoes you can buy at any store, with metal toe taps nailed into them by some cobbler or other. I found the noise unbearable—someone might as well have been banging on my windows with a lump of scrap iron.
And thus my hesitation came to an abrupt end. I turned to my right, onto the broad avenue, and tried to quicken my pace, hoping that awful clatter would die a sudden death. But in front of me other dangers loomed: just as I was doing my best to shake off the footsteps behind, I had to dodge pedestrians in front of me, not to mention plane trees and trash cans and bicycles that appeared out of nowhere. Almost every evening outing involved me in this kind of arduous passage. Although the darkness gives me some cover, its protection is whittled away by the moonlight and the streetlamps. When a part of my body is exposed by the streetlamp, I feel a sudden pang of alarm. If I walk this street in daytime, when light is evenly distributed, I don’t feel so conspicuous—though exposed, I am also hidden. But at night it’s a different story. By this time I had passed the restaurant that had been redecorated multiple times and the shoe sounds behind had vanished, though I continued to be hemmed in by all kinds of noise. Given past experience, however, I knew that soon I would enter silence.
Before long I came to the street corner that would lead to the quiet part of town, and the issue facing me was how to cross the avenue in front of me so as to enter the little street opposite. Sometimes this crossing was an easy proposition, but at other times I would meet unexpected obstacles. Such was the case now, for two bicycles collided at the entrance to the very street I planned to enter. The two cyclists flew off their bicycles at different angles, but they were thrown to the ground in much the same way. Once they pulled themselves to their feet, each of them issued angry shouts of accusation, as loud as car engines starting up. Their clamor attracted people on all sides, and soon the intersection was so clogged you might have thought a sinkhole had just opened up. I was repelled by the crowd’s excitement; its raucous din sounded like a hand grenade exploding. But soon the mob began to move to one side, like a huge toad lumbering its way forward, and finally the intersection opened up and I was able to cross the street.
Now I was on the street that led to my neighborhood—a concrete road sloping downhill toward a narrow crossroads that looked idle and unoccupied under the light of the streetlamps, announcing the silence beyond.
In the moonlight the buildings looked awkward and silly, the lights in their windows hinting at countless lives and giving me a comforting sense that they were holding in captivity all the people I didn’t like. But their incarceration was not entirely assured: as I passed I could sometimes hear faint noises from the stairs inside, and I found this casual freedom of movement far from satisfactory. Entering the neighborhood, I could not avoid running into other pedestrians, or even bicycles and cars. But it was the pedestrians who worried me most, for whenever I thought of how their shoes were stepping on places where my feet had trod, I could not but feel a stab of pain.
I was now—as in the past—roaming free in the light projected through the curtains of my neighborhood. My fantasies darted around like bats, leading me into the unknown. I felt that I was leaving the neighborhood far behind and entering a place formed by innumerable strange rays of light.
But the situation at this moment on May 8, 1988, did not turn out as I would have liked. When my eyes lingered on a pair of curtains covered with arcs and circles, I didn’t realize I was spending a bit too much time looking at them—I simply sensed that my train of thought was leaving the track it normally followed and heading off in another direction, as a path might do. A frightful notion was springing up in my mind, as I became aware that I was seeking to bypass the curtains, that I was bent on betraying them. The idea that had come into my head was this: The curtains represented a room, and the room ought to be occupied by at least one or two people, so what were they doing at this moment? This banal speculation gave me such a start, I knew I had to exit the neighborhood as soon as possible, and I quickened my pace accordingly. I dared not look up again at any curtains, as I was fearful that the blunder I had just committed might snowball into a disaster. I was hardly conscious of crossing the intersection, aware only that my emotions were beginning to stabilize. I proceeded up the slight incline and before long was back on the broad avenue.
The street was now much quieter. The shops had all shut for the night and just a few scattered people could be seen. Only now did I feel I was out of danger. The street was bathed in moonlight, and I felt I was treading the surface of a river that was placid, almost still.
I had just gotten as far as the restaurant when I heard something sounding in my inner heart. It came toward me steadily from the far distance and at first seemed much like tree leaves rustling in the wind, but later I gradually felt it was a lot like footsteps, as though someone were approaching me in my inner heart. This took me by surprise. In the time it took me to walk another ten meters, I could already make out that the footsteps were those of a young woman. She seemed to be walking barefoot in my heart, with steps as soft as bolls of cotton. I seemed to see faintly a little pair of pink feet, and my heart felt as warm as if it were bathed in sunshine. I kept on walking, and she seemed to be heading for the same place as I was. As I came to the end of the avenue
and entered the narrow street, it felt as though we were strolling side by side.
It was in a blur of confusion that I reached my lodging. When I took out my key, I heard the sound of her taking out a key too. And then we inserted the keys into the locks at the same time, and simultaneously we released the latches and opened the doors. I went in, and so did she. What was different was that everything she did took place in my heart. When I closed the door, I heard the sound of her closing the door, and the sound of her closing the door was as gentle as the sound of her taking off her jacket. I stood in the room for a moment, and I felt her standing there too. The sound of her breathing was so minute, it called to mind the furrows formed by the wrinkles on my face. Then I went over to the window and opened it, and the breeze from the river blew into my room. I watched the river flowing and glimmering in the moonlight. I felt her standing by the window too, and together we watched the river in silence. Then I closed the window and went toward the bed. I sat on the bed for five minutes, then took off my coat and turned the light off. As I lay there, I watched how the moon shone in through the window and filled my bedroom with glistening light. She was lying in bed too, just as quietly as I was, but I could not determine exactly whether she was lying in my bed or another one. I felt that just like the moonlight I was immersed in the limitless quiet of night. Never before had I felt that everything was imbued with such an ineffable, wonderful atmosphere as it was now.
2
My uncanny experience on the evening of May 8 did not end with the passing of that night. As soon as I woke the following morning, I was conscious of an unfamiliarity in my surroundings, as though something had been added, or something taken away. This made me realize I was no longer on my own: another person had brought part of her life into mine. I felt no alarm on this account, nor was I carried away with joy. I accepted her coming just as I accepted the river that flowed past my lodging.
