by Yunte Huang
“It’s some disease, ” I heard them snickering in the dark.
When my eyes became adapted to the darkness inside, they’d hidden themselves—laughing in their hiding places. I discovered they had made a mess of my desk drawers while I was out. A few dead moths and dragonflies were scattered on the floor—they knew only too well that these were treasures to me.
“They sorted the things in the drawers for you,” little sister told me, “when you were out.” She stared at me, her left eye turning green.
“I hear wolves howling.” I deliberately tried to scare her. “They keep running around the house. Sometimes they poke their heads in through the cracks in the door. These things always happen after dusk. You get so scared in your dreams that cold sweat drips from the soles of your feet. Everyone in this house sweats this way in his sleep. You have only to see how damp the quilts are.”
I felt upset because some of the things in my desk drawers were missing. Keeping her eyes on the floor, Mother pretended she knew nothing about it. But I had a feeling she was glaring ferociously at the back of my head, since the spot would become numb and swollen whenever she did that. I also knew they had buried a box with my chess set by the well behind the house. They had done it many times, but each time I would dig the chess set out. When I dug for it, they would turn on the light and poke their heads out the window. In the face of my defiance they always tried to remain calm.
“Up there on the mountain,” I told them at mealtime, “there is a hut.”
They all lowered their heads, drinking soup noisily. Probably no one heard me.
“Lots of big rats were running wildly in the wind.” I raised my voice and put down the chopsticks. “Rocks were rolling down the mountain and crashing into the back of our house. And you were so scared cold sweat dripped from your soles. Don’t you remember? You only have to look at your quilts. Whenever the weather’s fine, you’re airing the quilts; the clothesline out there is always strung with them.”
Father stole a glance at me with one eye, which, I noticed, was the all-too-familiar eye of a wolf. So that was it! At night he became one of the wolves running around the house, howling and wailing mournfully.
“White lights are swaying back and forth everywhere.” I clutched Mother’s shoulder with one hand. “Everything is so glaring that my eyes blear from the pain. You simply can’t see a thing. But as soon as I return to my room, sit down in my armchair, and put my hands on my knees, I can see the fir-bark roof clearly. The image seems very close. In fact, every one of us must have seen it. Really, there’s somebody squatting inside. He’s got two big purple pouches under his eyes too, because he stays up all night.”
Father said, “Every time you dig by the well and hit stone with a screeching sound, you make Mother and me feel as if we were hanging in midair. We shudder at the sound and kick with bare feet but can’t reach the ground.” To avoid my eyes, he turned his face toward the window, the panes of which were thickly specked with fly droppings.
“At the bottom of the well,” he went on, “there’s a pair of scissors which I dropped some time ago. In my dreams I always make up my mind to fish them out. But as soon as I wake, I realize I’ve made a mistake. In fact, no scissors have ever fallen into the well. Your mother says positively that I’ve made a mistake. But I will not give up. It always steals into my mind again. Sometimes while I’m in bed, I am suddenly seized with regret: the scissors lie rusting at the bottom of the well, why shouldn’t I go fish them out? I’ve been troubled by this for dozens of years. See my wrinkles? My face seems to have become furrowed. Once I actually went to the well and tried to lower a bucket into it. But the rope was thick and slippery. Suddenly my hands lost their grip and the bucket flopped with a loud boom, breaking into pieces in the well. I rushed back to the house, looked into the mirror, and saw the hair on my left temple had turned completely white.”
“How that north wind pierces!” I hunched my shoulders. My face turned black and blue with cold. “Bits of ice are forming in my stomach. When I sit down in my armchair I can hear them clinking away.”
I had been intending to give my desk drawers a cleaning, but Mother was always stealthily making trouble. She’d walk to and fro in the next room, stamping, stamping, to my great distraction. I tried to ignore it, so I got a pack of cards and played, murmuring, “One, two, three, four, five . . .”
The pacing stopped all of a sudden and Mother poked her small dark green face into the room and mumbled, “I had a very obscene dream. Even now my back is dripping cold sweat.”
“And your soles too,” I added. “Everyone’s soles drip cold sweat. You aired your quilt again yesterday. It’s usual enough.”
Little sister sneaked in and told me that Mother had been thinking of breaking my arms because I was driving her crazy by opening and shutting the drawers. She was so tortured by the sound that every time she heard it, she’d soak her head in cold water until she caught a bad cold.
“This didn’t happen by chance.” Sister’s stares were always so pointed that tiny pink measles broke out on my neck. “For example, I’ve heard Father talking about the scissors for perhaps twenty years. Everything has its own cause from way back. Everything.”
So I oiled the sides of the drawers. And by opening and shutting them carefully, I managed to make no noise at all. I repeated this experiment for many days and the pacing in the next room ceased. She was fooled. This proves you can get away with anything as long as you take a little precaution. I was very excited over my success and worked hard all night. I was about to finish tidying my drawers when the light suddenly went out. I heard Mother’s sneering laugh in the next room.
“That light from your room glares so that it makes all my blood vessels throb and throb, as though some drums were beating inside. Look,” she said, pointing to her temple, where the blood vessels bulged like fat earthworms. “I’d rather get scurvy. There are throbbings throughout my body day and night. You have no idea how I’m suffering. Because of this ailment, your father once thought of committing suicide.” She put her fat hand on my shoulder, an icy hand dripping with water.
Someone was making trouble by the well. I heard him letting the bucket down and drawing it up, again and again; the bucket hit against the wall of the well—boom, boom, boom. At dawn, he dropped the bucket with a loud bang and ran away. I opened the door of the next room and saw Father sleeping with his vein-ridged hand clutching the bedside, groaning in agony. Mother was beating the floor here and there with a broom; her hair was disheveled. At the moment of daybreak, she told me, a huge swarm of hideous beetles flew in through the window. They bumped against the walls and flopped onto the floor, which now was scattered with their remains. She got up to tidy the room, and as she was putting her feet into her slippers, a hidden bug bit her toe. Now her whole leg was swollen like a thick lead pipe.
“He”—Mother pointed to Father, who was sleeping stuporously—“is dreaming it is he who is bitten.”
“In the little hut on the mountain, someone is groaning too. The black wind is blowing, carrying grape leaves along with it.”
“Do you hear?” In the faint light of morning, Mother put her ear against the floor, listening with attention. “These bugs hurt themselves in their fall and passed out. They charged into the room earlier, at the moment of daybreak.”
I did go up to the mountain that day, I remember. At first I was sitting in the cane chair, my hands on my knees. Then I opened the door and walked into the white light. I climbed up the mountain, seeing nothing but the white pebbles glowing with flames.
There were no grapevines, nor any hut.
(Translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang)
WANG ANYI
(1954– )
Born in Nanjing and brought up in Shanghai, Wang Anyi is the daughter of two writers who were labeled “Rightists” in Mao’s era. At the age of sixteen, she was sent to the countryside in Anhui, a remote region plagued by famine. Two years later, she joined a l
ocal troupe as a cellist. Returning to Shanghai in 1978, she began writing fiction. Her love trilogy, Love on a Barren Mountain (1986), Love in a Small Town (1986), and Love in a Beauteous Valley (1987), all novels of daring exploration of a once-taboo topic—sexual awakening—propelled her into the national limelight. Currently the vice chairperson of China’s Writers Association, she teaches creative writing at Fudan University.
Love in a Small Town (excerpt)
They had been together since they were very young, dancing in the same ballet troupe. They both danced in “The Red Detachment of Women”; she was in the “Dance of the Little Soldiers” and he the “Dance of the Children Brigade.” She excelled on pointe because of the amount of training she had in the propaganda team at school; she had worn through several pairs of ordinary cloth shoes practicing her pointe work, and when she finally switched over to flat-topped ballet shoes, she felt ever so light and sure-footed, as if she had been doing weight-training and had just discarded the sandbags tied to her feet. His waist and legs were particularly pliant and strong because he used to study with a teacher who was also knowledgeable in the martial arts; he could do tours jetés, somersaults, anything required of him. Bending backward, he could stretch till his head touched his feet; in his balancé to the back, the tip of his foot would touch the back of his head. He was really good. She was then only twelve, and he a few years older, just sixteen.
Two years have passed. The excitement over “The Red Detachment of Women” has subsided, and the troupe is rehearsing “On the Yimeng Mountains.” A teacher from the Dance Department of the Provincial Performing Arts School has come to conduct a day’s class with the troupe, and in just one day’s time has found out that they have destroyed their physiques through incorrect training. They don’t have muscles, just flesh with neither flexibility nor strength. The teacher even pulls her to the middle of the studio, and turning her around, points out to everyone her typically deformed legs, hips, and shoulders. And the problems are indeed serious; she has thick legs, thick arms, a thick waist, and very broad hips. Her breasts are twice the normal size, protruding like small hills, hardly like a fourteen-year-old’s. The whole troupe, under the prompting of the Provincial School dance teacher, scrutinizes her body, and it makes her feel awful. Naturally she is ashamed, and to overcome this sense of shame she puts on a proud and disdainful look, holding her head high, throwing her chest out, and looking at others out of the corners of her eyes as though they were beneath her.
At this time she is half a head taller than him. Something must have gone wrong with his body; he has just stopped growing, and though he is eighteen, he still looks very much a child. He can only perform children’s roles, and yet when he is in costume as a child, his face is obviously that of a grown-up. In fact he looks much older than his real age. If he weren’t such a good dancer, the leaders of the troupe would probably have to think twice about retaining him.
Though neither of them is a principal dancer, they both work hard. In the early mornings and late evenings they are the only people in the studio. Even in cold weather they strip down to flimsy practice clothes, and they don’t have to come near to smell each other’s sweat and odor, at once sweet and repellent. His odor is strong, hers no less so. Her roommates, young girls with limited knowledge of such matters, all say she has B.O. and refuse to sleep in the bed next to hers. She doesn’t care, and even thinks: “Well, even if it is B.O., you haven’t got it. It’s the things few people have that are really precious!” But this is just a thought. She nevertheless feels a little sad, and a little inferior. What she doesn’t know is it has nothing to do with B.O., just a strong natural odor. Sometimes when they take a break during practice to catch their breath, they will look at each other and, breathing deeply, she will say out of curiosity: “Oh, you smell like watermelon.” Then he will lower his head to one side, raise his arm and sniff at his armpit, and reply with a laugh: “My sweat is sweet; that’s why in summer all the mosquitoes come after me.” And sure enough, there are tiny brown scars all over his fair skin; traces of summer left there, never to go away. And then he will exclaim in a surprised tone: “You smell like steamed dough!” She too will raise her arm and sniff at her armpit, and reply: “My sweat is sour; mosquitoes don’t like me.” And her dark skin really is smooth, without even the tiniest mark. They will both laugh, a little short of breath, and then resume their practice.
They mostly practice on their own, but sometimes they also help each other out. Her legs are not very turned out, and he helps her loosen up. She lies on her back on the floor, draws her feet up toward her buttocks, and he pushes her knees down until they touch the floor on either side. When she finally gets up, a damp human shape is left on the red-painted floor, its legs bent outward exactly like a frog’s. It takes a while for this silhouette to evaporate. He practices pirouettes around and around the silhouette, as if encircled by an invisible wall, stopping only when the silhouette disappears into the floorboards.
He wishes that he could grow a few centimeters taller, and has the notion that the elasticity of the tendons is crucial to this, so he tries hard to loosen up. He stands on one leg with his back against the wall and, stiffening the other leg, asks her to push it toward his head. She pushes hard, her face against the curve of his calf. He always stands against the wall at one end of the bar as they do this, and with time there appears on the whitewashed wall a yellowish human form standing on one leg, never to go away. When she stands at that end with one leg on the bar to loosen up, she is face-to-face with this one-legged man, and she thinks it’s fun to trace a line from one foot mark to the other.
They practice diligently, he no taller for it, and she much rounder and fleshier. She’s tall, all right, yet far from slim. Time passes, and they are one year older.
THIS IS A SMALL TOWN bounded by three or four rivers, with a very narrow road leading to the railway. The best things about it are its trees—elms, willows, poplars, cedars, peach, plum, apricot, date, and persimmon—all fresh and green. If you travel on a ferry coming downriver, you’ll see this green delta with its luxuriant vegetation a long way off; as you come closer, you will see the houses of gray and red bricks; and coming still closer, you will hear the watermen singing their work songs in a quite unaffected manner. People in this town are used to drinking river water, and get diarrhea every time they drink well water. The watermen’s business is to deliver river water to the town folks. The water is transported in oil drums on large carts, and spills over now and then as the carts jolt along the bumpy paths. Ruts left by the cartwheels, some shallow, some deep, crisscross the paths along the banks. As the carts rumble from one rut to another, the wheels hit against the sides of the ruts and the waterman’s voice lingers on one trembling note very rhythmically. Just as one cart trembles off into the distance, another announces itself as it comes along, and so it continues, as much a part of the town as the luxuriant woods. And then the ferry resumes its journey, leaving behind several dozen passengers and a dozen or so peddlers carrying baskets on shoulder poles. They cross the wobbly gangway to the bank, and then follow the earthen path to the main street.
Most streets in town are paved with stone slabs, polished by the feet of pedestrians, baked warm in the sun. It’s really comfortable walking on them wearing cloth-soled shoes and feeling the heat under your feet. The shoulder poles bob up and down as the peddlers’ feet flap on the stone slabs, each step evoking an echo. When the peddlers reach the main street, they put down their baskets, filled with chives, the first harvest of the year, so fresh that the morning dew is still shining on them. That day, nine out of ten households in town eat dumplings stuffed with chives, and the fragrance fills the streets. The baskets, emptied of chives, are filled up with fried snacks, and leisurely the peddlers carry them away.
A horse cart rattles along the street, heading south to buy hay. On the cart a bedsheet is hoisted as a sail. The old horse labors on, head down, while an unbridled pony gallops alongside, joyfully s
haking its head and flicking its tail, lifting its slim legs ever so high. At times it runs ahead, at times it lags behind, and at times it heads off in all directions. It knocks over an old lady’s black-jelly stall, but nobody minds. They all make way for it and let it get on with its antics.
On some walls the whitewash has peeled off, leaving bare the gray bricks underneath. Big posters are pasted on these walls, billing films shown in the cinema and plays put on in the theater. A cinema ticket costs ten cents, a theater ticket thirty cents. In the cinema things are just projected onto the screen, though the actors are really good; in the theater you see real people performing, but they are less accomplished, so the pricing is fair. In the evenings both play to a full house, just the right number of people to fill up both places, so it’s quite perfect.
At night, when all the peddlers are gone and all the shops are shut, the street is pitch-black; only the stones shine in the crystal-clear moonlight. Doors are shut, then windows are shut, and then even the lights are extinguished. Children begin to dream about the days when they will be grown-ups; old-timers sit thinking, or relive the memories of their younger days. Those who are neither old nor young have another kind of pleasure, moving in the dark, planting the seeds of life. This time next year, the town will hear the wailing of new inhabitants.
Now, there is nothing but pitch-black silence.
In the cinema, only the screen is lit up, and human images move on it, enacting the joys and sorrows of life. In the theater, the stage glitters and dazzles, and real people take on fictional roles.
THEY NEVER STOP practicing; they can’t even if they want to. If they stopped, she would get even fatter and thicker, and he, because his body has refused to grow even one centimeter taller, cannot afford to gain the slightest weight, as that would make him look even shorter. And so they continue to practice relentlessly.
