Brothers (97 page)

Blacksmith Tong now had each holiday and festival etched in his memory and therefore became Liu Town's own living calendar. When the women of Liu wanted their husbands to let them buy some new outfit, they would call out to Blacksmith Tong, "Are there any holidays coming up?"

When the men of Liu wanted to find an excuse for their wives to let them spend the night out playing mahjong, they too would ask Blacksmith Tong, "What holiday is it today?"

When children were harassing their parents to purchase them a toy, if Blacksmith Tong happened to walk by, they would ask him, "Blacksmith Tong, is there a kid's holiday today?"

After Tong became Liu Town's famous King of Holidays, he attacked his work with increased vigor, and not only did business at his supermarkets continue to improve but he expanded into a wholesale business in household products. Many of the shops in Liu Town bought their goods through Blacksmith Tongs company, and therefore his profits increased each quarter. His wife decided that this was due to her brilliant tactics, because ever since she made her timely intervention to resolve Blacksmith Tongs libido crisis, his vigor increased dramatically and his company's fortunes rose day by day. Compared with the rise in his profits, the money they spent on girls didn't amount to much. Blacksmith Tongs wife felt that their rewards already far outweighed her investment, and occasionally she would splurge and hire her husband a pretty, high-class call girl even when it wasn't a holiday or a festival.

Twice each week this sixty-something couple would climb up the stairs of Madam Lin's bordello—Blacksmith Tong glowing and his wife panting heavily, the two speaking to each other heedless of who might be listening. After the first time Tong was allowed to hire a pretty call girl even though it wasn't a holiday, he wanted to do so every time. He would stand in front of the building entreating his wife like a child begging his parents to buy him a toy, saying pathetically, "Darling, please find me a high-class call girl."

His wife would say firmly, like the chairman of the board, "No, today is not a holiday, and neither is it a festival."

Like one of the chairman's subordinates, he would reply, "Today an account receivable was deposited to our account."

When his board-chairman wife heard this, she would smile and nod and say, "Okay, I'll find you a high-class call girl."

None of the girls working there liked Blacksmith Tong, and in fact they all agreed they couldn't stand him, because once he got started, there was no stopping him. Tong already had gray hair and a gray beard, but when he got into bed, he was like a man in his twenties, though afterward he would leave a smaller tip than anyone else. Furthermore, his invalid wife would always accompany him and insist on receiving a discount, leading to an exhausting, teeth-grinding negotiation that could last up to an hour. After his wife had spoken for a few minutes, she would have to take a drink of water and catch her breath for a few minutes, and only after resting for a while would she be able to continue to bargain down the girl's asking price. The girls all felt that servicing Blacksmith Tong was more exhausting than servicing any four other men combined, but with him they received payment for only a single customer and even had to grant him a discount. Therefore, they were all unwilling to service Blacksmith Tong, but since he was an important figure in Liu and furthermore was one of Madam Lin's VIPs, they couldn't refuse. Whenever Tong and his wife picked out a girl, she would laugh bitterly and sigh, saying, "That's it. I will need to imitate the revolutionary martyr, Lei Feng."

S
UCCESS LIU —a.k.a. Writer Liu, a.k.a. PR Liu, a.k.a. Deputy Liu—was now CEO Liu and also one of Madam Lin's VIPs. After Song Gang's death, Baldy Li gave Liu the position of company president, and after Executive Deputy Liu became President Liu, he decided he didn't like people calling him President Liu and instead asked them to call him CEO Liu. The people of Liu Town decided that pronouncing four syllables was altogether too much trouble and furthermore said that it sounded more like a Japanese name than a Chinese one; therefore they shortened it to C Liu. In this way, Success Liu was transformed from the poor bachelor Writer Liu to the tycoon C Liu. He wore Italian name-brand suits, rode in the white BMW sedan Baldy Li had given him, and spent a million yuan buying his way out of his marriage, saying that this was compensation for his wife's loss of her youthful innocence. In this way he was finally able to rid himself of the woman he had tried to abandon twenty years earlier, and then proceeded to find one, two, three, four, even five pretty girls to be his girlfriends. As he put it, these girlfriends were sunshine girls. His house was already filled with spring beauty, but often he still couldn't resist coming over to Madam Lin's to roam. He said that after eating in most nights, he needed to drop by Madam Lin's and tickle his palate with some exotic flavors.

By this point C Liu had become more disdainful than ever toward Poet Zhao. Zhao still boasted about his constant toiling at his craft, while C Liu said that Zhao's playing around with words was a form of suicide, and that he might as well tie a noose around his neck and hang himself. C Liu held up four fingers and enumerated Poet Zhao's failings: "He has been writing for almost thirty years, starting with that early mimeographed magazine in which he published those four lines of poetry. But after all these years he hasn't published even a single punctuation mark. And he still calls himself Poet Zhao! Wouldn't it be more appropriate if he called himself Mimeographed Magazine Poet Zhao?"

Poet Zhao, who had been laid off and unemployed for several years, was equally disdainful toward C Liu. When he heard that Liu was enumerating his failings and calling him a mimeographed magazine poet, he initially became furious but then laughed disdainfully and said that he didn't even need to hold up four fingers in appraising an opportunist like C Liu, since even one finger would be more than he deserved. Poet Zhao held up one finger and said simply, "He has sold his soul."

After Poet Zhao moved out of his house in Liu Town s red-light district, he rented a cheap room next to the railroad tracks on the west side of town. Every day more than a hundred trains would rumble by, making his room tremble as though it had been hit by an earthquake. His table, chairs, and bed would also tremble, as would his cabinet, dishes, and chopsticks and even his ceiling and floor. Zhao would compare the trembling of his cheap room to contractions from an electrical shock, and this metaphor pleased him to no end. At night, when the trains passing by made his room go into tremors, he would frequently dream that he was sitting in an electric chair and, his face full of tears, bidding farewell to the mortal world.

The abjectly poor Poet Zhao depended for his survival on the rent Madam Lin paid him every month, and although he continued to wear a suit every day, it was now all wrinkled and dirty. The people of Liu had been watching color television for more than twenty years and now were beginning to switch over to high-definition rear-projection and plasma units, while Poet Zhao was still watching his fourteen-inch black-and-white television, which frequently would go blank. Zhao would carry it around throughout the towns streets and alleys but couldn't find anyone able to fix a black-and-white television, so in the end he had no choice but to fix it himself. Therefore, the next time the picture went out, he hit it as if he were slapping someone across the face, and sure enough the picture reappeared. Sometimes, however, the picture wouldn't reappear even after he had hit it several times, and he would have to resort to the leg-sweeping kick of his youth and sweep-kick the picture back on.

The formerly polite and refined Poet Zhao had become angry and cynical, always cursing up a storm. While C Liu was living amid a bevy of beauties, Zhao didn't have a single woman in his life and had to settle for hanging an old pinup poster on the crumbling wall of his dilapidated apartment and staring at it ravenously, like a man who paints a cake to assuage his hunger. There was not a living woman who was willing to look him in the eye, and even when he once tried to chat up some old widows, they saw through his ruse and told him straight up that he should first figure out how to provide for himself before entertaining thoughts of finding a companion. Zhao became extremely depressed. Many years earlier he had had an elegant and attractive girlfriend, and the two had enjoyed a yearlong loving relationship, but then he tried to straddle two boats simultaneously as he pursued Lin Hong, and as a result, not only did he not secure Lin Hong but his girlfriend ran off with someone else.

Meanwhile, after C Liu's former wife was cast off, although she was very satisfied with the million yuan she had in her bank account, she would nevertheless stand in the street crying woefully, complaining that C Liu was heartless and cruel. She would again hold up all ten fingers, though now of course what she was counting was not the number of times they had slept together but, rather, the matrimonial bliss they had shared over twenty years of marriage. She said that over the past twenty years she had cooked for C Liu and washed his clothes and looked after him through good times and bad. After C Liu was laid off and became unemployed, she didn't leave him but, rather, cared for him even more considerately. She said that her body was like a stove in winter, warming him up, and like an ice cube in the summer, cooling him down. She tearfully complained that his entire being was obsessed with money, just as his mind was obsessed with sex. She said that, in the past, he had been a high-minded writer, walking elegantly and speaking with refinement. She had fallen in love with him and married him because he was Writer Liu, but now that Writer Liu no longer existed, her husband no longer existed either.

At that point, one of her listeners remembered Poet Zhao and, in an attempt to play the role of a pimp, said, "Although it's true that Writer Liu doesn't exist anymore, there is still Poet Zhao, who has not yet married. He's a bachelor about to approach his diamond anniversary— a rare gem."

"Poet Zhao? A rare gem?" She snorted a couple of times. "He wouldn't even stand out in a bachelor remainder sale."

Liu's wife considered herself one of Liu Town's rich maidens, and for someone to mention her and that poor bachelor Zhao in the same breath was profoundly humiliating for her. She angrily added, "Even an old hen wouldn't deign to give him a second glance."

Poet Zhao, to whom even an old hen wouldn't give a second glance, would often come in and out of Popsicle Wangs five-star reception booth and sit on Wangs Italian sofa, caress his French cabinet, and lie down in the German bed, and if he happened to have a chance to wash and dry his butt in the TOTO toilet, he naturally wouldn't pass that up either. Zhao was very complimentary of the giant high-definition plasma television Wang had hung on the wall. He said that it was several millimeters thinner than the poetry collection he was preparing to publish and that the number of television programs it played was even greater than the number of poems in that forthcoming collection. When Popsicle Wang heard Poet Zhao speaking of his forthcoming publication, he sent Zhao a congratulatory card and asked where it would be published. "You wouldn't be publishing it in Liu Town, would you?"

"Of course not," Zhao replied. He recalled how, at the Virgin Beauty Competition, Wandering Zhou had mentioned a place-name and, impulsively borrowing it, he said, "It's being published in the British Virgin Islands."

P
OPSICLE WANG led a luxurious and boring life. Day after day he used his television channels to pursue traces of Yanker Yu's political activities, continuously regaling people with tales of them. The people of Liu eventually grew tired of hearing these tales and began calling Popsicle Wang Brother Xianglin, after Sister Xianglin, the compulsively repetitive protagonist of that Lu Xun story. In the end, Poet Zhao was the only one who did not grow weary of Wang's stories; each time he would listen attentively, looking completely entranced and making Popsicle Wang believe that it was enough to have just one true friend in life. In fact, what Poet Zhao did not tire of was all the drinks in Wang's giant refrigerator, the empty bottles from which would pile into a mountain that scraped the sky.

At this point, a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment swept through the nation, and the anti-Japanese parades in Shanghai and Beijing could be seen on television, in the newspapers, and all over the Web. Seeing Japanese stores in Shanghai being destroyed and Japanese cars in Shanghai being burned, a crowd of townspeople from Liu didn't want to miss out on the action, so they also went marching with big banners, looking for something to destroy or burn. When they came upon Baldy Li's sushi shop, they spiritedly walked up and smashed the windows, then brought the chairs out and burned them for two hours, though they refrained from destroying the other installations. Blacksmith Tong saw them and decided that things were not looking good, so he immediately threw out all the Japanese goods in his supermarkets and hung a huge banner in the entranceway saying: WE REFUSE TO SELL JAPANESE PRODUCTS!

After Yanker Yu returned from his globe-trotting pursuit of political hotspots, Popsicle Wang promptly lost interest in Poet Zhao now that his
real
best friend had returned. Wang closed the door to the luxurious reception booth, shutting out Poet Zhao, who gazed through the window at Popsicle Wangs giant refrigerator, swallowing his saliva and sighing as he thought of the refreshments inside it.

Wang devoutly followed Yanker Yu everywhere he went, leaving early each morning and not returning until late each evening; each night he would even yearn to share a bed with Yu. Liu Towns anti-Japanese demonstrations had in fact run their course, but after Yanker Yu returned, they again picked up steam. Whenever he spoke, political slogans in ten different languages would stream out of his mouth, which the people of Liu then learned by heart, and within ten days or so they too could utter this string of foreign slogans as needed. Yanker Yu was no longer the best tooth-yanker within one hundred
li;
now, having experienced political disturbances around the world, he returned to Liu Town looking and sounding like a true political leader. As he put it, "I have weathered countless political storms."