Chapter 4

By the time Li Sanjiang carried Li Zhuiyuan home on his back, the first pale light of dawn was just showing at the horizon. Cui Guiying took the child from him, and Li Sanjiang talked a while longer with Li Weihan before leaving. Li Zhuiyuan was laid on the mat bed. He closed his eyes for a while, then opened them again. He couldn't sleep. The moment he shut his eyes he seemed to see Little Oriole dancing in the fish pond again. Cui Guiying and Li Weihan never went into the inner room to rest. They sat in the kitchen instead. The woman kept rubbing her fingers, rubbing them red; the man smoked his water pipe without stopping, one bowl after another. Glancing at the brightening sky, Cui Guiying stood and said, "I'll go make breakfast for the children first." Li Weihan blew out a mouthful of smoke. "A bit early for smoke to be rising yet." Cui Guiying sat back down and looked at her husband. "Then how long do we have to wait?" "Till someone comes to tell us." "Who's going to come tell us?" Li Weihan didn't answer, only went on sucking at the mouthpiece. They sat a while longer, and then came a knock at the door: "Guiying Hou, Guiying Hou." It was the neighbor next door, Zhao Simei. Li Weihan tapped the ash out of his water pipe. "There's our notice." Cui Guiying got up, yawning and rubbing her eyes as she opened the door. "What is it, Simei Hou?" Zhao Simei seized Cui Guiying's arm and shook it hard. "Someone's dead over at Big Beard's!" "What?" "Two of them! Big Beard and his youngest son. Someone just saw them floating in their fish pond. The whole crowd's gone to look — come on, let's go see!" "Coming!" Before going out, Cui Guiying called toward the inner room, "Ying Hou, the rice is washed. You can make breakfast in a bit." "Got it, Grandma." Once she had the answer, Cui Guiying went off with Zhao Simei. Li Weihan waited a while, felt the opened pack of cigarettes in his pocket, set the water pipe on the table, and went out too. Zhao Simei's knocking had already woken the children. Knowing something tremendous had happened, they got up and ran out to see the excitement, and no amount of Ying Zi shouting after them to brush their teeth and wash their faces could call them back. By now the fish pond at Big Beard's was ringed with people, and more villagers kept hurrying over along the village road, men and women, old and young, whole families together. Two bodies floated on the pond, and no one would deal with them, even though a small boat was moored at the bank. True, Big Beard's family had a bad name in the village, but the villagers were not so cold-hearted as all that. The reason no one helped haul the bodies ashore was that they looked like biscuits left soaking too long in a bowl, swollen out of all shape, their surface a translucent, gelatinous flesh tone, like two human-shaped blocks of pork-skin aspic. Everyone knew drowned bodies swelled after long soaking, but how could two men who had been alive and well yesterday, in broad daylight, turn overnight into something like dried wood-ear mushrooms left to steep? It was too uncanny. No one dared wade in and touch the bodies. Big Beard's wife knelt by the pond wailing, but all she could do was cry; she had no idea what ought to be done. People came to console her and she ignored them, only howling about her bitter fate. At last Big Beard's eldest son came hurrying back from town, and now there was someone to take charge. Only, when he saw his own father and younger brother in that state on the water, the eldest son's face twitched with fear. He didn't dare go in after them either, and could only beg someone to fetch Li Sanjiang. Li Sanjiang came pushing a flatbed cart loaded with his gear. When he got there, Li Sanjiang took a look at the pond, then backed away waving his hands in fright: "I'm not hauling those out, not for anything — it'd cost me years off my life, years off my life! Find someone else, go on, find someone else!" His outburst set the onlookers buzzing, and they began whispering to one another about what sin Big Beard's family had committed to draw down such a foul thing. Soon someone brought up yesterday's business with Little Oriole — after all, the funeral performance troupe really had nearly come to blows at Big Beard's house, and secrets were hard to keep in a village. Li Weihan spoke up then too, telling the people around him what had happened yesterday when he took his grandsons out on the river in the boat: how his grandson had fallen in, had nightmares about a woman walking in the water, and was so frightened he couldn't be woken, and how Zheng Datong had come and it had done no good, and luckily Blind Liu had come and dealt with it. At once quite a few people crowded over to hear Li Weihan's account, and kept putting in their own opinions. Cui Guiying stood beside Li Weihan looking very tense. On an ordinary day, if there were no cooking or washing to do, she could sit on the yard with the village women gossiping for three days and nights straight; today she was wooden and didn't dare open her mouth. Her heart felt hollow and panicky, like a thief crying "stop thief," or a cat coming specially to weep over a dead mouse. Pan Zi, Lei Zi, Hu Zi and Shi Tou started talking too, saying that yesterday they had seen a female water ghost who had nearly dragged their Little Yuan Hou down to be her substitute ghost — she'd come for revenge! For a while the place was like a big open-air tea party. Once the Little Oriole business had been talked dry, the villagers, still not satisfied, dug up all the old stale stories about Big Beard's family and kept stir-frying them. Before long Big Beard's second son arrived with his wife, and the two daughters with their husbands. The daughters threw their arms around their mother and wept with her, while the two sons and two sons-in-law stood together haggling with Li Sanjiang over the price. Li Sanjiang drove a hard bargain, using the excuse of a double retrieval and bodies this uncanny to demand ten times his usual rate for bringing one body ashore. Price agreed, Li Sanjiang set up his offering table, made offerings, lit candles and burned paper, and threw in an extra half hour of chanting to "summon friends and call companions," drawing every eye. The performance wasn't as flashy as the funeral performance troupe's, but everyone knew the troupe was all show; this man was the real professional. Meanwhile two Santanas drove up, each with a police light on the roof: the township police station had sent people. Ordinarily a drowning in some family was just that and no great matter; but two at once, and a father and son, and right at their own doorstep — that changed the nature of things. The police came over to look and couldn't help standing stunned for a moment. Swollen bodies were nothing new to them, but they had never seen any so finely steeped. Seeing this, they could only wait for the bodies to be brought up. They didn't interrupt Li Sanjiang's rites, but they didn't crowd in either; they went back to the cars by the road, smoked, and waited. At last Li Sanjiang finished his business, killed a rooster and sprinkled a bowl of what may or may not have been real black-dog blood, and only then went down into the pond, poling the boat out to the middle. First he used the "guiding hook" to draw the body to the side of the boat, then the "soul-returning basket" to secure it and haul it aboard, then the "homecoming net" to cover it. He poled to the bank, bent at the waist, lowered his head, and with a particular technique shifted the body onto his back before climbing ashore. This was an important rule of the corpse retriever's trade: the retriever's own feet must reach shore before the body is set down, for only that counts as "escorting" and "carrying" it home. Finally, the body could be set down only at the family's call. That made it a proper round trip, the job settled, letting the dead-flipper know it had truly come home and would not turn into a lone wandering ghost and follow him. Following the same pattern twice, Big Beard and his son finally ended their drifting and were laid out on two straw mats. With it all done, Li Sanjiang looked toward the middle of the pond with lingering dread. He had only retrieved the bodies by the book and hadn't dared probe deeper. Who knew whether she was still in there. The police came and screened off the bodies, but the villagers paid no heed, still craning their necks from a distance; now and then a child's frightened shriek cut through. Li Sanjiang collected his money, packed up his gear, and went off pushing his cart with a cigarette in his mouth. The villagers all cleared out of his way — no one wanted to get near a man who had just hauled corpses. The police began their formal investigation, setting up temporarily at Big Beard's house, with the village Party secretary helping out, calling people over, boiling water, handing round tea. Big Beard's wife could give no account of it. She had simply woken to find her old man gone from beside her; it was a passerby who saw the two of them floating on the pond and shouted for her. The deputy station chief leading the team asked the Party secretary who in the village had ever had a grudge against Big Beard's family. The secretary dug in his ear and answered flatly: "Oh, that'd be quite a few." After that, the grudge-holders lined up to give statements. Li Weihan, who had told the Little Oriole story, and Pan Zi, Lei Zi and the others were all called over for questioning. At first the police thought another body had been found, and sent an officer with Li Weihan to search that stretch of river, but they found nothing. And since Li Weihan's account was too far-fetched, they could only treat it as an old country man's superstitious tale spun for his grandsons. They hardly knew whether to take the statement down at all. Seeing that no one believed him, Li Weihan grew agitated, insisting over and over that what he'd seen was real, pestering the police and the bystanders to believe him, until the Party secretary finally "coaxed" him away. The funeral performance troupe that had raised a fuss the day before was later summoned and questioned, but they had gone to a neighboring township on business the day before the incident, and the whole troupe had alibis. As for Little Oriole's disappearance and the tangle behind it, one reason was that neither she nor a body had been found, and another was that those responsible, Big Beard and his son, were dead; so for now it could only be filed as a missing-person case. In the end the drowning of the father and son was handled as an accident: the gist being that the two had been drinking that night, got it into their heads to go act the fool in the fish pond, and both drowned. Big Beard's family didn't kick up a fuss for further investigation either, because after the funeral the two sons and two daughters started quarreling over dividing the estate, falling out so badly it was ugly to see, which gave the village one more thing to talk about. That day, by the time the statements were finished it was dusk. Li Weihan and Cui Guiying walked home with the children — the children in front, the old couple behind. Cui Guiying patted her chest, still frightened, and asked, "Why did you go up and volunteer to talk? You even got called in by the police to answer questions. Scared me to death." Li Weihan tossed the empty cigarette pack from his pocket onto the roadside, pursed his lips, and said: "Uncle taught me that. It has to be said out loud; you can't hold it in. And Zheng Datong and Liu Jinxia both know a fair bit about what happened to Little Yuan Hou." Cui Guiying grumbled, "Telling them and swearing them to secrecy would have been enough." Li Weihan shook his head. "Even if the grown-ups can keep a secret, can the children hold it in and not let it slip?" "That's..." Li Weihan let out a long breath and said: "Uncle says the best way to keep a secret is to tell it in front of everybody." … Nearly everyone in the village had gone to gawk at Big Beard's pond. Li Zhuiyuan hadn't. Lying in bed he truly couldn't sleep, so he carried out a little wooden stool and sat on the yard outside the house, gazing at the farmland in the distance. After a while his cousin Ying Zi came out too, having finished washing the dishes. First she carried out a square stool and set her stationery, books and homework on it, then sat down on a small stool: that made a makeshift desk, lit by today's bright sunshine. Ying Zi's parents had never paid much attention to her schooling, but they had also never said things like "no use sending girls to school," "better to marry her off early," or "pull some strings and get her into a textile mill to earn money." When tuition was due at the start of term, they paid it; for the usual fees for study materials, she didn't have to be shy or feel guilty — she just asked, as a matter of course. But everything is relative: compared with other girls' families in the village, her parents' pure hands-off indifference actually made them a model of valuing a daughter's education. Ying Zi knew this came from the influence of her aunt Li Lan. Aunt Li Lan had changed her own fate at a stroke through her schooling and become the pride of Grandpa and Grandma; even her father and uncles, whenever they mentioned her to outsiders, unconsciously puffed out their chests, proud by association. Ying Zi's grades, though, were only middling, even though she really did work hard and never slacked. Of course Grandpa and Grandma could never have deliberately sacrificed their sons to educate only their daughter; the truth was that her father and uncles simply couldn't get books into their heads. Which made her wonder: had all the brains in the Li family been given to Aunt Li Lan? At first the thought was just there, not strong — until the second day after Little Yuan Hou was sent here, when he sat beside her, a little shy, and as she stared at a math problem getting nowhere, a small voice came at her ear: "Square root of three." After that, whenever Ying Zi had a problem she couldn't do, she brought it to Li Zhuiyuan, and she discovered that Little Yuan Hou hardly needed to think — one glance at the question and he could give the answer. For him, probably the biggest nuisance was having to write out the steps, otherwise his slow-witted sister couldn't follow! And mind you, she was already in her first year of senior high. Ying Zi had asked what kind of school he attended in the capital. Li Zhuiyuan answered: a youth class. Ying Zi automatically took "youth class" to mean primary school, and sighed inwardly: as expected of a primary schooler from the capital — the curriculum is so far ahead. Li Zhuiyuan sat there dazed, and now and then came back to himself to help his sister with a problem, then drifted off again. Feeling a pen cap poking him lightly, Li Zhuiyuan turned to look at the problem, but saw his sister pointing toward the west side of the yard, where there were some steps, and at the bottom of the steps stood a little girl in a floral-print dress. It was Cuicui, Liu Jinxia's granddaughter, standing there timidly, not daring to come up. Ying Zi frowned at Li Zhuiyuan, signaling him to ignore her. In the past she would have said so outright — the village children were all agreed on not playing with her — but Liu Jinxia and her daughter had come to the house yesterday to "treat" her little cousin, so now she was embarrassed to say it. Li Zhuiyuan stood up and walked over to the edge of the yard on his own, came up to Cuicui and asked with a smile: "You're here — is something the matter?" Cuicui looked off in another direction, fingers pinching the hem of her dress. "Came to play with you." "Okay." Li Zhuiyuan turned and waved to Ying Zi. "Sis, I'm going to play with Cuicui." Ying Zi said nothing, sighed, and bent her head to her homework. Actually there wasn't much to play with; often it was simply that you didn't want to stay home, so you ran to a friend's house, called them out, and everyone wandered about with no particular aim. Cuicui looked at Li Zhuiyuan, who had come out to walk with her, a smile in her eyes. This was the first time she had ever copied the other village children and gone to someone's house to call them out. But she still didn't dare step up onto someone's yard uninvited. Children that age might not understand many things, but they were all the more sensitive; she didn't want to meet the grown-ups' rolled eyes. "Brother Yuan Hou, my ma says you were sick yesterday?" "Mm." Reminded of it, Li Zhuiyuan's mind conjured Little Oriole again, and his smile slowly faded. "Ah?" Cuicui apologized at once. "I won't talk about it, I won't. Being sick really is miserable." Li Zhuiyuan felt in his pocket and said apologetically, "Um, I forgot to bring you any snacks." Actually he hadn't forgotten. With Grandpa and Grandma away, the snack cupboard was locked and he couldn't open it; Sister Ying Zi seemed to know where the key was hidden, but Li Zhuiyuan knew that if he asked her to get them, she'd start bad-mouthing Cuicui indoors. "Snacks? We have some at home, lots. Come to my house and eat." "Go to your house?" "Mm. Come to my house to play." "Okay." With his yes in hand, Cuicui plucked up her courage and took Li Zhuiyuan's hand, and the two of them set off along the raised path between the fields. Right now she very much wished the grown-ups on the yards of the houses along the road would see her and ask, "Oh, Little Cui Hou, who are you playing with?" And she hoped to meet children her own age on the way, so they could see she had a playmate too. Unfortunately, most of the village had gone to Big Beard's pond to look at the pork aspic. Still, she was happy; the corners of her mouth wouldn't come down, and if she hadn't been holding his hand she thought she'd have spun in circles with delight. "Brother Yuan Hou, can you not really understand what we say?" "At first I couldn't understand at all. Then if people spoke slowly and in short bits, I could follow. Now I understand it all, and I can even say some myself — just not properly." When he had first been sent to this house, he truly couldn't understand a word the elders said to him; only the brothers and sisters who had been to school could talk with him in Mandarin. He remembered that every time he called Li Weihan and Cui Guiying "waigong" and "waipo" — the mother's-side words for grandparents — they were plainly a little unhappy, and corrected him over and over: Grandpa, Grandma. There really were no such terms in the local speech. Most of the time grandmothers were told apart by direction — the one who lived to the south was "South Grandma," the one to the north "North Grandma." "Oh, Brother Yuan Hou, have you been to the Forbidden City?" "Mm, I have." "I want to go someday too." "Sure. Call on me and I'll take you." "Really? You mustn't fib to me." "I won't. I know the Forbidden City very well." In Li Zhuiyuan's memory there was a period when Li Lan worked at the Forbidden City, and he was left inside to play on his own. Sometimes he would sit on the steps of a side gate with an orange cat in his arms, watching the endless stream of visitors coming in through the main gate, and watch away a whole afternoon. "Oh, Brother Yuan Hou, have you ever had douzhi — that sour bean drink?" "Um..." "Have you?" Cuicui blinked her big eyes and peered at him curiously. "I have." "Is it good? What does douzhi taste like?" What did it taste like? Li Zhuiyuan's mind conjured the picture from last week of Cui Guiying scrubbing out the family's pickle crock after the pickled cabbage had gone bad. "Some people like it. Some don't." "Really? Then when I go to Beijing I have to try it." "Mm." "Brother Yuan Hou, look — that's my house." Following Cuicui's pointing finger, Li Zhuiyuan saw a two-story building beyond a stretch of farmland. "Your family lives in a building." The village had houses of every style: most were single-story brick and tile, a few of the poorest families still had earthen houses, and likewise a few of the well-off had already put up two-story buildings. They walked up onto Cuicui's yard. In the ground-floor sitting room, Liu Jinxia sat playing bridge with a cigarette in her mouth. Her partners were two old women and one old man. If you came to play cards with Liu Jinxia, you could mooch a meal at her house, and the food was decent — meat and liquor — so she was never short of partners, and she was glad to spend a little to "buy" company for her own amusement. The card table was a wondrous place indeed: Liu Jinxia had cataracts and poor eyesight, yet it didn't slow her play in the least. "Grandma, I brought Brother Yuan Hou home to play." "Grandma Liu," Li Zhuiyuan greeted her. "Mm, go play." Liu Jinxia answered, then turned her attention back to her cards. "Pong!" Just now the players had been talking about what was happening over at Big Beard's, and Liu Jinxia had been answering offhandedly between smoke rings; hearing her granddaughter come in with Li Zhuiyuan, she paused slightly and narrowed her eyes through the smoke. The boy had been spirit-afflicted yesterday, and this morning Big Beard and his son were floating in the fish pond. If there wasn't something crooked in that, you could beat Liu Jinxia to death and she still wouldn't believe it. But she didn't say a word to stop her granddaughter from playing with Li Zhuiyuan. As if — they were both blasted jinx stars; who was scorning whom? Cuicui led Li Zhuiyuan through the sitting room to the inner room, where Li Juxiang sat on a stool trimming vegetables. She was surprised for a moment to see her daughter bring someone home, and when she saw it was Li Zhuiyuan, she couldn't keep a smile from her face. She was thinking of her own childhood, of playing with Li Lan. Li Juxiang stood up at once and wiped her hands on her apron. "Sit down, Little Yuan Hou." Then she went into a room and came back with a good deal of food to serve them. Liu Jinxia's household really was well off, and Cuicui was the only child at home, so she enjoyed snack privileges the other village children envied. Li Juxiang also opened two bottles of lemon soda, one for each of them. The fizzy drink came in bottles shaped like beer bottles, and it was cheap and popular; the children couldn't be bothered to pour it into bowls, drinking straight from the bottle in imitation of the bold way grown-ups drank. "Little Yuan Hou, is your mother well?" "She's well, Auntie." "I heard your mother got div—" Li Juxiang suddenly realized it wasn't proper to ask a child that, and changed tack at once. "Your mother and I used to play together all the time when we were little. We were very close." "Yeah. Mama has talked about you. Xiang Hou — Auntie Xiang Hou." Normally the "Hou" suffix was only used between elders and people of the same generation; a child wasn't supposed to use it. But of course Li Juxiang wasn't annoyed; she was delighted. She could picture Li Lan speaking to her son about her and using the name "Xiang Hou" — proof she hadn't forgotten her. "Your mother was so clever back then, and her grades were good too — not like me, my head aches at the sight of a book." Li Juxiang tucked a strand of hair back by her ear. "When is your mother coming home to visit?" "Mama's busy with work. She says when she's done she'll come get me." Cuicui spoke up: "Ma, I'm taking Brother Yuan Hou upstairs to play." "Mm, go on. Look after Little Yuan Hou." Cuicui took Li Zhuiyuan's hand. At the foot of the stairs she slipped off her shoes and changed into slippers with practiced ease, and seeing this Li Zhuiyuan started taking off his shoes too. "No, Brother Yuan Hou, you don't have to take yours off. Just come up." Li Zhuiyuan took his shoes off anyway and made to go up barefoot, so Cuicui handed him her mother's slippers. In the oversized slippers, Li Zhuiyuan followed Cuicui up to the second floor and into her room, where there was a black-and-white television. Liu Jinxia's family had bought a TV long ago but hadn't made a fuss about it; the villagers were cold to her family, and she couldn't be bothered to host people to watch it. Cuicui turned on the standing fan, but the blades didn't move. "Huh, is the power out?" "The plug isn't in," said Li Zhuiyuan. "Hey, you're right." Cuicui bent down, picked up the plug and pushed it into the socket on the wall. "Vmm... vmm... vmm-vmm... vmmm—" The heavy blades began slowly to turn, making a sound of heaven fit to blow away high summer. "Brother Yuan Hou, do you watch TV?" "Either way's fine." Cuicui turned it on and twisted the dial. All the way around there were only a few channels, and half of those were snow. "Brother Jing, are you all right?" "Rong'er, I'm fine." "Hmph, Ouyang Feng, you..." Every winter and summer vacation, the television always showed The Return of the Condor Heroes. The two of them sat on the edge of the bed and watched for a while, and then Li Zhuiyuan suddenly felt sleepy. He hadn't rested since the night before. Before, he had been wound up with emotion; now that it had drained away, exhaustion rushed in fast. Cuicui mistook it for Li Zhuiyuan not wanting to watch TV, so she got off the bed and began showing him the dolls, toys and picture books in her room. Sleepy as he was, Li Zhuiyuan still watched her and tried hard to respond to each thing she showed him. The little girl was absorbed in the joy of sharing, but soon she found she was getting no answers; turning to look at the bed, she saw that Li Zhuiyuan had slumped against its edge and fallen asleep. Cuicui stopped talking at once. She crept over, carefully helped him lie back flat, folded the thin summer quilt once and laid it over his stomach. Then she pushed the fan a little closer and pressed the small button at the back, and the fan began to oscillate. That done, she brought over a chair and sat by the bed, her chin propped on her hand, watching the sleeping Li Zhuiyuan. After watching a while she smiled secretly, her earlobes flushing; she turned her face away, and after a while couldn't resist looking at him again. And so time slipped by without her noticing. "Little Cui Hou, Little Cui Hou, bring Little Yuan Hou down to eat." Li Juxiang's voice came from downstairs. Cuicui hurried down. "Ma, Brother Yuan Hou fell asleep." "Then come eat first. We'll save him a portion." "No, I'm not hungry. I want to wait till Brother Yuan Hou wakes up and eat with him." In the village, most parents with any sense of propriety stopped their children from going off to find playmates around mealtime, lest they be invited to the table and look as though they had gone deliberately to freeload. Still, sometimes it couldn't be avoided, and onto the table they went. Cuicui had never had that experience, and she was willing to wait for Li Zhuiyuan to wake and eat with him. Li Juxiang smiled and nodded, and went to the sitting room to call her mother and the card players to lunch. Cuicui ran back upstairs, sat down in the same place and went on watching him. "Huh?" Puzzled, she leaned a little closer, because she saw that Brother Yuan Hou's brows had knitted. "Is he dreaming?" … "Grandma, I brought Brother Yuan Hou home to play." "Mm, go play. Pong!" Li Zhuiyuan looked at Cuicui standing before him, then at Liu Jinxia playing cards with her three partners in the sitting room. He knew he was dreaming. Because the scene around him was too far removed from reality: everything in view was black and white, every person and object as if traced in charcoal. Though they resembled the people and things they stood for, the lines were blurry and distorted, and through the coarse strokes ran a weird caprice. Li Zhuiyuan looked down at himself and found that he was still normal — it was the other people and things in the dream that were not. It made him think of the copying studies in his mother's study, the same charcoal on white. He was dreaming of the moment he and Cuicui had just arrived at her house and he greeted Liu Jinxia. Then the Cuicui before him took his hand and led him inside. The little girl's hand, once so smooth, was now rough in his grip, a little painful, like sandpaper. He couldn't help pulling free and stopping, but Cuicui walked on alone, her arm still held in the posture of leading someone by the hand. And behind him, the four card players in the sitting room had suddenly gone silent. Li Zhuiyuan turned and saw all four frozen, not moving at all. Even the smoke ring Liu Jinxia had blown out hung fixed in place, not spreading. The stillness gave Li Zhuiyuan a chance to look closely: the charcoal marks on the three card players were soft and fairly light, while Liu Jinxia's figure was drawn in coarse, deep, hard lines. He stood there a long while, puzzled. Before, whenever he had realized in a dream that he was dreaming, he woke at once; this time he was still in the dream. In the end Li Zhuiyuan chose to go further in, and found Li Juxiang sitting there trimming vegetables. Her lines were hard too, jarring against the fine pale strokes around her. Li Zhuiyuan walked up to her. The heavy charcoal strokes caught the details of her expression: she was smiling, her eyes full of reminiscence. "Auntie Juxiang? Auntie Juxiang?" He called a few times and waved a hand before her face, but Li Juxiang didn't stir and didn't blink. Leaving her, Li Zhuiyuan came to the stairs; before going up he took off his shoes and climbed barefoot. In the bedroom the standing fan stood still, no longer turning, and on the television Guo Jing and Huang Rong were only blurry sketches. Cuicui was pointing at one of her dolls, mouth open as if speaking, motionless. The lines of Cuicui's figure were clearer and harder than her grandmother's or her mother's — almost hard black lines. As if everyone and everything else had been drawn, while she had been carved. Li Zhuiyuan looked at the bed: he wasn't on it; it was empty. Not only things were still but sound as well. Li Zhuiyuan suddenly realized his ears hadn't heard the slightest noise for a long time — the whole world was terrifyingly quiet. He began to feel panicky, because he didn't know how much longer he would have to stay in this dream. He opened the bedroom door onto the balcony. The second-floor balcony ran the length of the building, tiled in red and white. Looking into the distance, apart from some scribbled doodles near the houses that could just be made out as farmland, most of the view was a bleak blankness. Looking up, where the sun had been there was only a white patch with a halo, very like an eraser that might drop at any moment and rub out everything here. "Hello — excuse me, is this Granny Liu's house?" A voice came from the yard below, so abrupt in that moment as to be grating. Li Zhuiyuan looked down from the second floor. It was a man of about fifty, carrying an old woman on his back. The old woman was very thin; what showed beyond her sleeves was a bit of bone wrapped in shriveled skin; her hair was long and tangled, hanging loose over his back. "Hello — is this Granny Liu's house?" the man asked again, a little anxiously, turning in a circle with the old mother on his back. Li Zhuiyuan didn't know whether he ought to answer. Just then, the old woman who had been lying on the man's back suddenly raised her head, her face pointing straight at Li Zhuiyuan standing on the second floor. All of them were charcoal-drawn figures, yet the old woman's eyes alone were rendered with a fineness beyond what that style could bear. In them were anger, malice, venomous hatred! The next moment everything around Li Zhuiyuan began to spin and warp, like a whirlpool conjured out of nothing, tearing and sucking in everything around it, himself included. … "Brother Yuan Hou?" Li Zhuiyuan opened his eyes and saw Cuicui's anxious face. "Brother Yuan Hou, were you dreaming?" "Mm." Li Zhuiyuan sat up. "How long did I sleep?" "Not long. About two hours. Brother Yuan Hou, let's go down and eat." "No, I'll go home and eat." "Oh, don't stand on ceremony, Brother Yuan Hou." Cuicui took his hand and led him downstairs. "Ma, Brother Yuan Hou's awake." By now Liu Jinxia and her three card partners had finished lunch and started the afternoon session. Li Juxiang smilingly lifted the red cover over the kitchen table, under which was the meal she had set aside. "Little Yuan Hou, come eat. I'll heat the soup for you." "Auntie, I'll go home and eat." "There's a good boy, do as you're told, don't stand on ceremony with me. I never stood on ceremony with your mother, and besides, Cuicui waited specially for you to wake up so you two could eat together." "Thank you, Auntie." "Brother Yuan Hou, sit here." Cuicui sat down first, while Li Zhuiyuan went to the counter on the other side to help fetch bowls and chopsticks. "Go on, go on, you sit down. I'll get them." "All right, Auntie." Li Zhuiyuan came back and sat down, and in no time Li Juxiang set chopsticks and a bowl of rice before him. The dishes were in small everyday bowls, not large portions, but more than enough for two children: two meat dishes and two vegetable dishes. Especially the bowl of braised pork with potato — only two chunks of potato for garnish, the rest all meat, plainly picked out and set aside on purpose. Li Juxiang brought over a bowl of fish soup, dotted with sesame oil and sharpened with a little vinegar, savory and appetizing. She also opened a can of mixed fruit and poured a bowl for each child. In village terms, it was a real feast. "Little Yuan Hou, stay and eat here tonight too. I'll cook you something good." Li Juxiang said with a smile. Li Zhuiyuan set down his chopsticks and said to her, "This is already so much. Thank you for the trouble, Auntie." "Ha, don't put your chopsticks down — eat." Li Juxiang stroked Li Zhuiyuan's head, privately envying Li Lan: how had she raised such a son? A sensible, polite child was easy to like anywhere. "Little Yuan Hou, does your mother cook for you at home?" Li Zhuiyuan shook his head, laid his chopsticks across the bowl, and answered, "Mama doesn't." "That's because your mother's busy with work, I suppose?" "Mm, she's very busy." "What about your grandparents' house there? Don't they cook for you?" "I don't go there often." "Then where do you usually eat?" "At the neighbors'." Usually after school, in the family compound, the grandmas and grandpas who had finished their classes or retired would come and take him to eat at their homes. "Ah, poor child." Li Juxiang stopped asking, told the children to eat, and took the thermos to refill the tea at the card table. Just then a shout came from outside: "Hello — excuse me, is this Granny Liu's house?" At the sound, the chopsticks Li Zhuiyuan had just picked up slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. "Clatter!" … In the sitting room, Liu Jinxia tossed her cards onto the table and clapped her hands once. "That's it. We're done." The three card partners nodded and rose to end the game; clearly they were used to this. But before leaving the sitting room, they went one by one to the washbasin in the corner and washed their hands. Banana leaves soaked in the basin; washing meant rubbing a leaf over your hands, shaking them out, and drying them on the towel from the rack. The point was to cleanse off bad luck. It was Liu Jinxia's own arrangement: she had long since stopped caring what the village thought of her family, and instead deliberately built in little rituals to add to her mystique. Li Zhuiyuan and Cuicui came into the sitting room as Liu Jinxia was getting up from her chair. "Have you eaten?" "We were eating. We came out to look," Cuicui said. "Nothing to look at. Never mind — Little Cui Hou, help Grandma put the cards away." "Yes, Grandma." That said, Liu Jinxia went off inward by herself; there was a room in the shade back there that served as her office. "Careful, there's a threshold here." Li Juxiang's voice came from outside; she had gone out to meet the caller when she heard the shout. "All right, all right, I'm fine, I'm fine." Li Zhuiyuan looked toward the sitting-room door and saw Li Juxiang helping an old man over the threshold. The old man leaned forward, hunched at the waist, hands clasped behind the small of his back: a hunchback. Or rather, as if... he were carrying someone who wasn't there. "Are these your family's little ones?" the old man asked with a smile, looking at the two children. "The girl is mine; the boy is my sister's. My mother's waiting for you — go in through the front door, turn right and go all the way to the end." "Good, good, I'll go right in. Mustn't keep Granny Liu waiting." The old man went on inward. Standing behind him, Li Zhuiyuan's eyes stayed fixed on his hunched back. The old man passed through the inner doorway of the sitting room and turned right. He ought to have kept going in, but suddenly stopped. Because he was a hunchback who leaned forward, everything above his shoulders was now hidden by the wall, leaving only that humped back in view. Then the hands clasped at the small of his back rose unconsciously a little. His left arm pressed down, his right arm swung up, his rear shifted inward, his shoulders tilted outward, and the side of his face was already pressed against the wall. Li Zhuiyuan looked at that empty back, and at that moment felt as though someone there had pushed themselves up on that back and was "looking" at him. Li Juxiang asked, "What's the matter?" Into the old man's rough voice there suddenly crept a thin hoarseness: "This little one here..." Li Zhuiyuan's hands clenched with nervousness. He suddenly remembered how his mother had once led him through a wall of paintings, and he had asked her why such a big stretch was left empty; she had answered: Xiaoyuan, that's blank space, for you to imagine it for yourself. The effect is actually better that way. Back then he had only half understood. Now he seemed to be beginning to. "Hurry along, my mother's waiting inside for you." Li Juxiang urged him again. She genuinely didn't know why the man had stopped there, but she didn't find his posture odd — after all, he was a hunchback; even standing still he looked strange. "Mm." The old man answered, then suddenly crouched, his body tipping slightly backward, both hands braced toward the floor behind him. "Hey, what's wrong?" Li Juxiang reached to help him, but for all that he was thin and bent, the weight of him going down was heavy, and she couldn't lift him at all. Luckily he kept his balance with his hands, only squatting backward instead of toppling. At the sight, Li Zhuiyuan staggered back a couple of steps. The posture looked very much like setting down the person on one's back. Sunlight fell into the sitting room; the old patterned floor tiles gave back little shine, at most some shift from light to shade. Li Zhuiyuan lowered his eyes. Near the inner doorway, two patches about the size of footprints seemed to have darkened slightly. Very faint — so faint that Li Zhuiyuan thought his eyes were playing tricks, that he was imagining it. But then another two patches dimmed and recovered — and the distance between them and him was shrinking. At last the two darkened patches appeared on the tiles right in front of him, and did not fade. A cold wind brushed past, and Li Zhuiyuan felt his face, his chest, his hands and feet begin to go cold. But he was facing into the room — where would wind come from inside a room? The rear halves of the two darkened patches faded, the front halves deepened, and the chill before him deepened. Li Zhuiyuan swallowed. His gaze began to flicker and shift aside; some instinct kept him from looking straight at it, as if there in front of him, unseen, a withered old woman was leaning forward, her face pressing toward his. Li Zhuiyuan bit his lip. Suddenly the chill on his left cheek deepened further, as if a piece of ice had been laid against it, and his scalp began to creep and tingle in little strokes. The old man squatting on the floor turned his head this way and finished what he had started to say: "This little one — he's a really pretty child."