A Private Life Page 19

  I started looking for Ho in the crowd. One after another the frightened, unsettled dark faces passed across my field of vision. This crowd of people that had fled from the thick smoke of death now stood numbly looking up at our building, trying to see where the fire was.

  When I couldn't find Ho, I started to get anxious, realizing that the fire might well have started on her floor. When I thought of her lying on her bed in those plain green pajamas, my mind erupted suddenly into flame.

  Then, the wavering bleat of their sirens adding new confusion to the scene, the fire engines raced up. The crowd, the trees, and the building were now all bathed in a brilliant orange glow. The sky flashed with the uncommon blue of diamonds, like the eyes of so many corpses floating in the darkness of heaven, their cold lips caressing the earth.

  We were immediately ordered to move back 200 meters to an empty place on the side of the street away from our building. I was in the middle of a group of men who wanted to go back into the building to look for family members, or particular things that they had left behind. They struggled to get to the building, but they were kept firmly back. We were so crowded together that we couldn't move.

  I looked up, praying fervently, Let her be safe, let her be safe, all the while shaking uncontrollably.

  By this time, two firemen were climbing up the wall with the aid of ropes to rescue whoever might be in the apartment where the fire had started. I focused all my attention on them. I watched those two small, flamelike, greenish shapes dart up the wall like a pair of salamanders. In no time at all, they were at the ninth floor. At last, at the place I was most afraid they might stop – Ho's balcony – half suspended in space, using metal hooks to secure themselves, they flipped over the railing into her apartment.

  My heart contracted violently, as if I had suffered a blow from some sharp weapon, and the blood in my veins congealed into silence.

  There was no denying it. The fire was in Ho's apartment.

  I stood there transfixed, until an uncontrollable wailing burst from me.

  Just as the valves on the fire hoses were opened, I gave way to a flood of tears.

  Eventually, they got the fire under control. Water from the upper floors poured down the stairwell and flooded out of the main entrance. Then two firemen bearing a stretcher emerged.

  That naked pink corpse, or better to say that vaguely human-shaped lump of flesh, moved slowly toward us.

  The crowd stirred.

  A fireman shouted, "Is there anyone here from apartment 905?"

  Ho's apartment.

  My head and feet felt distorted, my eyes burned, my hands were like ice. I kept trying to bring myself back to my senses. I was hallucinating. None of this was real. But Mother was with me, holding me, her hands gripped tight around my shoulders.

  All of it, everything before me, was real. I knew it.

  When the stretcher moved across the street toward us, a great roaring filled my head and then began to die away, as the people around me, the street lamps, and our building began to sway.

  Things started to blur; the noise around me faded. Then the world went black as I collapsed on the street.

  The roar of the demented wind screaming Ho's name blotted out the clamor of that scene. The crowd of people had fled the roar; only Ho was there, floating in a dazzling circle of light…

  Much later, long after that disastrous fire, I heard a silly but upsetting rumor that it was caused by Ho's faulty refrigerator…

  18 A Stray Bullet…

  Even until today, we still use silence to avoid our past.

  These have been days that I do not wish to remember. Everything has been changing too quickly. With every day, I become more substantial; with every day, this world is less so.

  I am at a doorway. If I pass through, perhaps I can be young again – yet I know I can never be young again…

  How that stray bullet came to find me, penetrating my left calf and exiting without my feeling it at all, remains an unsolved riddle.

  It was late one evening in early summer. I was on my way to see my mother, who had been confined to the hospital because of a partial malfunction of the left chamber of her heart.

  It was strange that this shady, cool street directly behind Tian'anmen Square, which for many days had been part of a boiling ferment of debate, was now suddenly deserted and quiet. I was rather puzzled. How could that tangle of traffic and press of crowds simply vanish into thin air?

  My senses sharpened. I could hear in the distance a strange, clanking sound, the rumble of wheels, and what sounded like exploding fire-rackers. At the corner two or three hundred meters in front of me, lying there like the carcass of a huge dead horse, was what appeared to be an overturned object blocking the road. All around it, I thought I could make out the wavering shapes of people, but I couldn't be sure. Farther away, a corner of the descending night sky suddenly darkened as if it were preoccupied with plotting some secret.

  Then I heard an angry sound like the snort of a wild boar hang briefly in the evening air at the same moment that I felt something hard strike the calf of my left leg. It felt hot, numb. I struggled to keep standing. It seemed as if suddenly my leg had been wrenched away from me, was no longer mine. Feeling no pain at all, I looked down curiously. A thick red liquid was running down the left leg of my trousers onto the street.

  Jerking up, I looked all around me. The dying echoes of that angry sound were followed by a dead silence. As the blue of twilight gradually thickened, the dying light clung like a tight mesh around my body. I stood there frightened and afraid to move. I couldn't see anything unusual, nor had any idea what had struck my leg.

  As I looked around in fear, I kept thinking that these were unusual times, everything was distorted, changed. Evil intentions lurked everywhere and anything could cause them to erupt.

  The muffled clanking sound in the distance became clearer and clearer, turning into a rumbling thunder. As I strained to listen, I heard once more that angry sound, like the snort of a wild boar, this time protracted and unbroken.

  I turned fearfully in its direction.

  What transpired was a miracle. Beyond the street corner in the distance, a wavering mirage suddenly appeared and began to rumble slowly toward me, cutting through everything within my field of vision…

  I was dumbstruck.

  Dropping to my knees, I scrambled to the side of the road, and grabbing hold of a spindly tree, hid there like a thief, holding my breath, pressed behind a huge block of stone. Only then did the pain in my leg start rising upward, to engulf me. The wound was like a dark red cave, the mouth of a living spring. Around the opening, the flesh, like the split cardboard casing of an exploded firecracker, was curling outward…

  Only after being taken by the people on the street to the nearby hospital where my mother was, not as a visitor but as a patient, did I finally find out that the hard object that had struck my leg was a wayward bullet. It had passed between the two bones in my calf and out the other side before it even registered that something had hit me.

  When Mother, all upset, came to the emergency room to see me, the whole thing struck me as totally absurd.

  ***

  The turmoil in Tian'anmen Square that summer, which was causing a sensation around the world, had become fanatical and violent, stirring the hungry winds of discontent into a fierce storm that left the city shedding silent tears. The fledgling trees and the grass along the roadway may be beaten and bent by the blazing sun or the slashing rain, but before too long they begin to sway, then slowly straighten up again.

  We had been keeping to the house for a number of days, but could still hear an unbroken chorus of fierce and rabid shouting coming from the streets. There was a forest of green uniforms rooted like trees in every street and alleyway. Like the leaden gray sky overhead, these stiff uniforms had been around from ancient times. Present in every age, every region, they penetrate all time and space. Perhaps this is the nature of things. Every time it rains, every
time the wind blows, the slight est movement is passed from one point to another until it is everywhere and every tree, every blade of grass becomes a soldier.

  I could sense that something was astir.

  The afternoon of the day prior to my being struck by that pointless bullet, I still wasn't aware how serious the situation had become. Standing looking out my window, I saw that the light of the sun that summer had changed, and now cast everywhere an air of destruction. Under that sun, down on the street, I saw a group of leather-booted young soldiers shouldering rifles, their belts cinched tight around their thin waists. Moving through the crowds like a neat little troupe of children, swinging their arms with drunken fanaticism, they were part of a chaotic scene that one couldn't, but had to, believe…

  I was both enveloped in this atmosphere and apart from it.

  That night of flames had not yet released me.

  Ho's death had left me feeling empty and almost paralyzed these past several months. I simply couldn't believe that a close and intimate friend could be taken from me without a word. I was immobilized by some kind of mental block or breakdown. It was as if I had walked into a distorted mirror where time ran backward…

  I kept seeing Ho's crimson body lying on that big bed, looking like a huge dissolvable colored medicine capsule. An empty rocking chair beside the bed creaked back and forth imploringly, as if longing for a trusted old friend to come and sit, still its vexation, and make life normal again. Ho was earnestly beckoning me to come and sit beside her, one hand covering her seared brow, the other extended toward me. Standing apart from her, my breath quickened with fear, I couldn't bring myself to go over to her. I looked down to see that my watch, its strap, and its case had all disappeared, but the hands were still going around. I said, "Ho, you're dead, dead. It isn't you that I see. What do you want from me? Please don't frighten me, I can't come to you." But when I stopped talking and looked up at her again, her face had already shrunk to a third of its normal size. Coughing up pink-colored spittle, she continued to shrink until all that was left of her was a little heap of her thoughts and a single arm still extended toward me. As I cried out a silent No, no, I found myself back in the world of reality.

  Sometimes she would suddenly appear from some totally unexpected direction, the front of her skirt dancing in defiance against the summer wind. She would come into view from around a distant corner or emerge from a subway station, threading her way through the crowd. I would follow her with my eyes to where she stopped and stood on the opposite side of the street in the shade of a ghostly looking scholar tree, watching me. She would be holding a bouquet of shimmering fresh flowers that sparkled with the dew of her tears. They would be so beautiful that the lawns, the chestnut trees, and the wedding-cake houses in the background would fade into obscurity. Such an enchanting bouquet of fresh flowers of grief, such an enchanting young widow! Were they perhaps for her own grave?

  Ho would be about to work her way over to me across the traffic-thronged street, but the endless flow of vehicles would block her way and also block my line of sight. I could do nothing but wait as they crept by like a line of snails. When at last there would be a break in traffic, I would not be able to see her. I would stand there, dumb as a wooden chicken in the middle of a cacophony of car horns and bicycle bells, blocking the traffic, Ho's image having vanished completely…

  On that stifling afternoon, I was standing there looking out the window because I knew that Yin Nan was out there somewhere in those seething crowds in Tian'anmen Square, although we hadn't seen each other for over a month and I didn't know exactly what he had been doing. Now he was my only friend and comfort, and I was worried about him.

  On top of this, my mother was now in a different hospital suffering ongoing respiratory problems because of her heart condition. All these things coming in concert left me crushed with a deep anxiety.

  Yin Nan had just called me from a public telephone booth, to say that something extremely urgent had come up and he had to see me. From the tone of his voice and the fact that I was to meet him in an abandoned warehouse we had chanced upon one night after seeing the movie The Unrequited Love of a Man and a Spirit, I knew that this was to be an unusual and secret meeting.

  Over the telephone, I could hear the clamor in the background and the wail of an ambulance as it went past.

  As soon as I put down the telephone, I rushed to the abandoned warehouse.

  Half an hour later, I was standing in front of its rust-encrusted, half-open door. Through it I could see straw, iron plate, used lumber, empty paint cans, and scraps of plastic, and everywhere everything was coated in dust. There were no windows, and the darkened interior opened before me like the gaping mouth of some huge monster about to devour me.

  I felt my way in warily. I shuddered as the dank air brushed my skin, imagining a sea of rats and insects overrunning my feet. But I couldn't see a thing. The biting odor of oxidizing metal invaded my nostrils, and I took out my handkerchief and covered my mouth and nose.

  My eyes eventually adjusted to the darkness, and I could see where I was going. I groped my way toward a long wooden bench sitting on top of a heap of straw at the far end of the warehouse. It was there that Yin Nan and I had kissed each other passionately.

  At last I heard something shuffle.

  I stopped and called softly, "Yin Nan, Yin Nan?"

  Out of the shadows, I caught the fleeting glint of a row of snow-white teeth, like a flash of lightning on a rainy night.

  I knew those two rows of lovely, regular teeth, as neat and stirring as an impeccable, white-uniformed guard of honor.

  If you took a group of men and women and covered them completely, leaving only their teeth showing, I would be able to pick out Yin Nan immediately.

  Those teeth suddenly flashed again, this time from out of a different shadow, in a different place.

  I said, "Yin Nan, it's me, it's me."

  It was silent again, then a dark form shot forward and I was caught in his embrace.

  I still couldn't see his face clearly, but I could hear the familiar pulse of his urgent, rough breathing at my ear and feel the warm fragrance of his country-fresh breath on my cheek. He was thin as a starved horse, every bone in his body thrumming with tension, like overtightened lute strings.

  I said, "Yin Nan, you're so thin. What's happened?"

  He didn't answer. His entire body was shaking as if he was out of breath from running in place. In fact, he hadn't moved a muscle and was still clinging to me desperately. Maybe it was his mind and his blood that were racing.

  I said, "What have you been doing lately? Why haven't you come to see me?"

  When at last he spoke, there were tears in his voice, tears I had never heard from him before. "Niuniu, I haven't been able to tell you…"

  "Tell me what?"

  "You've just had that fire in your building, your mother's back in the hospital again – it's enough. I'm afraid you can't take any more, that you'll worry… I've been down in the square…"

  "Involved…?"

  He didn't answer me.

  Finally, he said, "Niuniu, I'm going to… go away."

  "Where?"

  "I have to… go…"

  "No! No!" My voice was raised. He pressed his lips on mine, kissing me to still my words. I bent my head backward to escape his face, saying quietly, "You can't leave me, you can't say you're leaving and then just go."

  "Niuniu, I… love you, love you beyond all measure… but there's no other way, I have to leave." His tears fell on my cheeks, my lips – salty – sour.

  In all the time that we had known each other, this was the first time that Yin Nan had ever used the word "love."

  For the past several months, I had been feeling almost choked to death by the pressure of events in my home and outside. Now, hearing him manage to get this word out at last, I could no longer contain my feelings. The sluice gates were opened and a tumbling flood of tears gushed forth. I clung to him saying nothing, afraid
that in the midst of my sorrow over losing Ho, I was losing Yin Nan, the only close friend I had left, as well.

  He eased away from me slightly, and as his own tears fell, his lips and tongue brushed my cheeks, kissing away one by one my huge tears, as if he wished to drink down my sorrow.

  "I love your… tears," he whispered.

  We cried a long time, but our tears eventually subsided.

  Yin Nan said, "I have to leave in half an hour."

  I said, "Do you really have to go? Is there no other way?"

  He shook his head. "I can't wait any longer. I've got to get out of here."

  Again, we locked in a tight embrace. His heart was pounding like a war drum against my breast.

  Clinging to his shoulder, I said, "But – where will you go? When?"

  "Late tonight. Lufthansa, flight 721. Ten hours to Frankfurt, then a connecting flight, 2410, to Berlin."

  There was some kind of skylight or opening in the roof of the warehouse through which a desolate, eerie thread of sunlight angled its way. Up near the ceiling it was a turbid yellow in color, but as it penetrated into the darkened warehouse, it slowly deepened in tinge, to brush obliquely across Yin Nan's face, lending his cheeks the color of rice straw.

  In the half-darkness, the black lacquer glitter of his big eyes, filled with a heart-wrenching hopelessness, never left my face for a moment. I raised my hand to gently touch the lids of those eyes that made me think of the faint fragrance of ink-dark flower buds. He was leaning lightly against my shoulder, his head bent over me, so that I could feel the heat of his breath on my back, as if it were being gently massaged with warm milk. My arms were wrapped around his shoulders. I could feel his weight and his warmth as he pressed against me, his chest flattening my breasts. In the gloom, I could feel the heat of his groin tight against my thighs. I could see the shadow of his head inclining slowly toward my bosom.