 |
| Illustration by Chloe Scheffe |
As the North Wind Howlend
by Yu Hua
Sunlight had sneaked in through the window and was creeping toward the chair where my pants dangled. I was lying bare-chested in bed, rubbing some gunk from the corner of my right eye. It must have collected while I was sleeping, and to just let it stay there seemed inappropriate. Meanwhile, my left eye was idle, so I gave it the job of looking at my pants. I had taken them off the night before, and now I regretted tossing them so casually over the chair, where they lay wrinkled and crumpled beside my jacket. As my left eye inspected them, I began to wonder whether while sleeping I had shed, snakelike, a layer of skin, for that’s what my jacket and pants looked like. At this point, a drop of sunshine reached my pant leg; the little splotch of leaping light made me think of a golden flea. And so I felt itchy all over and had my idle left hand make itself useful by scratching.
Someone was knocking on the door.
But who could it be? I was the only person with a reason to come here, and I was already here. So I decided to ignore the knocking and continue with my scratching. Now the door was making a colossal noise, as though it were about to cave in. The person outside, I realized, was knocking not with his hand but with his foot, and, before I had time to think of a response, the door fell to the floor with such a crash that it sent shock waves through me.
A brawny fellow with whiskers on his face charged over to my bed. “Your friend’s dying, and you’re still not up?” he yelled.
I’d never seen this man before. “Have you come to the wrong address?” I asked.
“No chance of that,” he answered.
His blithe self-assurance made me wonder whether I had somehow gone to sleep in the wrong bed. I jumped up and ran out into the corridor to check the number on the door. But, of course, the door was now lying on the floor of my apartment. On it was written “26 Hongqiao New Village, Apt. 3.”
“Is this the door you just kicked down?” I asked.
“Yes, it is,” he said.
So this was my apartment. “You have definitely come to the wrong place,” I told him.
Now it was my confident manner that confused him. He stared at me for a moment. “Are you or are you not Yu Hua?”
“Yes, I am,” I said, “but I don’t know you.”
He gave a roar of rage. “Your friend’s dying!”
“But I don’t have any friends!” I was roaring, too.
“That’s nonsense, you little philistine!” He glared.
“I’m no philistine,” I said. “You can see the proof of that in the books that fill my room. If you’re trying to offload this guy on me, I absolutely refuse, because I have never had a single friend. However—” I softened my tone. “However, feel free to donate him to my neighbor in Apartment 4. He’s got a lot of pals and I don’t think he’ll mind if you toss in another.”
“You fickle little philistine!” He stretched out an arm as thick as my shin and tried to pull my hair.
I shrank back to the corner of the bed, shouting desperately, “I’m not a philistine—and I’ve got the books to prove it.”
With his firm, cold hand, he grabbed my feeble, warm foot. Then he hauled me out of bed and dumped me on the floor. “Hurry up and get dressed,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll drag you all the way there just as you are.”
I knew it was pointless to argue any further with this guy, because he was at least five times as strong as me. “Seeing as a dying man wants to see me,” I told him, “of course I’m happy to go.”
So that was how, on this lousy morning, a muscleman kicked down my door and lumbered me with a friend I had no interest in having—a friend who was about to die, no less. What’s more, the north wind was howling like a banshee outside. I had no overcoat or scarf, no gloves or hat—all I was wearing was a thin jacket as I went off to visit this friend I knew absolutely nothing about.
Once we were in the street, the north wind blew me and the big fellow to the friend’s house just as quickly as it would blow leaves off a tree. The doorway was piled high with wreaths. The big fellow turned to me and said dolefully, “Your friend is dead.”
Before I had time to consider whether this was a cause for rejoicing or for grief, I heard a loud chorus of weeping, toward which the big fellow proceeded to push me.
A crowd of tearful men and women surrounded me. “Don’t take things so hard,” they told me solicitously.
All I could do was nod and put on a show of being sad, because now there was no point in saying the things I really wanted to say. I gently patted their shoulders, showing my appreciation for their condolences.
Then an old lady tottered forward and grabbed my hand as tears poured down her face. “My son is dead,” she sobbed.
“I know,” I said. “I am very sad, because it all happened so suddenly.”
My comment loosened the floodgates still further, and her wails were now so piercing my hair stood on end.
“Please don’t take it so hard,” I said.
Her crying seemed to subside a little and she began to dry her tears with my hand. Then she raised her head and said, “You need to take it in stride, too.”
I nodded reassuringly. “Oh, I will do that. We must transform grief into strength.”
She nodded. “My son closed his eyes before you could get here. You don’t blame him, do you?”
“No, I’d never do that,” I said.
Again she fell into a fit of sobbing. After a while she recovered enough to say, “He was the only son I had, but he’s dead. You’re my son now.”
Tugging desperately, I was finally able to retrieve my hand, on the pretext that I needed it to wipe away my own tears, though I had none. Then I said, “Actually, I’ve thought of you as my mother for a long time now.” I had no choice but to say that.
She led me to another room, saying, “Go in and keep my son company for a bit.”
The room was empty, apart from a dead man lying in a bed under a white shroud. The chair next to the bed seemed to be meant for me, so I sat down.
I sat there for a good long time before lifting the shroud to see what the man looked like. I glimpsed a pale face that gave little indication of age, a face I had never seen before. I put the shroud back and thought, So that’s my friend.
There I sat, next to the corpse whose face I had just seen but instantly forgotten. Although the man’s death had delivered me from a friendship I refused to recognize, it had not relieved me of my burden, for his mother had simply taken his place: an old woman I did not know had become my mother. It was only too clear what I had to do next: I’d have to fork out twenty yuan to buy a big wreath; I’d have to don sackcloth and guard his coffin; I’d have to weep and wail and parade through the streets with one arm around the cremation urn and the other propping up his mother. And, after all that was over, I’d have to sweep his grave every April, not to mention carry on his unfinished labors and perform the duties of a filial son. But the first order of business—and the most important thing, as far as I was concerned—was to find a carpenter to rehang the door that the big fellow had kicked down. Right now, however, all I could do was stay with this confounded corpse.
(Translated, from the Chinese, by Allan H. Barr.)
No comments:
Post a Comment