Cries in the Drizzle (28 page)

How could I tell him to be quiet when he was in such a fix? We stood in the stone-paved street while the power lines above us maintained a steady hum. I still remember how pale Guoqing looked as he told me what had occurred—all in confused fragments, for he was still not really clear about it in his own mind. He presented his story as a series of random impressions, like flies that buzz around and abruptly change direction—from the enormous strength his father displayed when moving furniture to the look on his father's face when he went out the door holding the baskets. I had trouble sorting out which things happened first and which later. As he told me the story, Guoqing suddenly realized what it all meant, and his narrative petered out. Tears gushed from his eyes, and he said something that he and I both understood perfectly: “My dad doesn't want me anymore!”

We went to find Liu Xiaoqing and found him running toward
the river, a mop over his shoulder. He was shocked by the sight of Guoqing's tears. I told him Guoqing had been abandoned. At first Liu Xiaoqing was as baffled as I had been earlier, but my wordy explanation, accompanied by frequent nods from Guoqing, eventually got the facts through to him. Right away he said, “Lets find my big brother!”

To consult the older boy in his peaked cap seemed an excellent idea, and for Liu Xiaoqing to suggest this so proudly struck me as quite natural. Who wouldn't want a brother like that? We went over to the window where he was sitting, and now it was Liu Xiaoqings turn to tell the story. Toying with his flute his brother heard him out. He seemed very indignant. “This is outrageous!” he said.

He stuck the flute in his pocket, jumped out the window, and beckoned us. “Come on, let's go and sort him out!”

We three children walked along the damp street. A rain shower early that morning had drenched the trees. Leading the way was Liu Xiaoqings brother—an older boy, to be sure, but rather skinny. He could play a fine tune on the flute, but could he get the better of Guoqing's father? The three of us followed him quietly, buoyed by his outrage. Reaching a tree heavy with rain, he seemed lost in thought, but when we caught up with him he raised his foot and kicked the trunk with all his might, at the same time darting off. Droplets showered down on us, soaking us to the skin. He ran off home, chortling.

His action, obviously, was most inglorious, for otherwise Liu Xiaoqing would not have turned red. Mortified, he said to Guoqing, “Let's go talk to our teacher about it.”

Now sopping wet, Guoqing shook his head and said with a sob, “I don't want to talk to anyone about it!”

And he stalked off. This clever little boy could rattle off the names of all his maternal uncles and aunts, and when he got home he thought of them and sat down to write them letters—in pencil, on paper torn from his exercise book. At this point, when he was still struggling to find words to describe his plight to us, he must have found it even harder to write about it. When every one of his mother's siblings rushed to his side soon afterward, this showed how well he had put things.

Precise as he was, Guoqing recalled the workplaces of all his uncles and aunts and wrote their addresses on eight envelopes. But he wasn't sure just how to mail the letters. With his customary concern for order, he folded the eight sheets of paper into eight little squares. He clutched them to his chest and made his way to the forest green post office.

He found a young woman behind the counter. Guoqing timidly went up to her, asking in a pathetic tone, “Auntie, can you tell me how to post letters?”

Rather than answering, she asked him instead, “Do you have money?”

To her surprise Guoqing brought out a ten-yuan note. She did help him then, but she looked at him warily, the way one eyes a pickpocket.

Once the eight brothers and sisters of Guoqing's mother had assembled, they made an impressive party. Together they marched off toward his father's new house, Guoqing in the middle, the grown-ups surrounding him with determined looks on their faces. Guoqing had worn an expression of sheer misery the past several days, but now, pampered by his aunts and uncles, he walked among them with his confidence fully restored. At regular
intervals he would turn back toward Liu Xiaoqing and me and call: “Be sure to keep up with us!”

It was late in the afternoon by then. Walking with this group of adults, I felt very important, almost as important as Guoqing; Liu Xiaoqing was also looking cocky. Guoqing declared jubilantly that his father would soon be moving back home.

It was my first outing after dark since I had come to Little-marsh. When I asked Wang Liqiang's permission to leave the house I told him what had happened, and I was grateful to him for allowing me to go out so late in the day. While sympathizing with my desire to stand with Guoqing in his hour of need, he cautioned me not to open my mouth. In fact, however, Liu Xiaoqing and I would never have been allowed to enter Guoqing's father's new home; we had to wait outside. A squat little building stood before us, and we found it strange that Guoqing's father would leave the two-story house for such a modest dwelling.

“There's no view here at all!” Liu Xiaoqing and I agreed. We could hear the voices of the eight visitors from out of town. Their city accents evoked tall buildings and asphalt roads. At this moment two boys much younger than us came swaggering over and told us presumptuously to clear off. Only later did we realize that they were the darling sons of Guoqing's father's new wife. The idea that we could be driven away by two smaller boys was ridiculous, of course. We warned them that they'd better push off themselves. They spat at us then, and Liu Xiaoqing and I gave them each a punch in the face. These two little fellows were all bark and no bite, for they immediately burst out crying. But reinforcements arrived promptly, charging out of the house in the form of a woman as fat as a tub of lard. Guoqing's father's bride bore down
on us with spit spraying from her mouth and such a murderous gleam in her eye that we fled in terror. She followed close behind, cursing us fiercely in language we thought only men were accustomed to using. One minute she threatened to toss us into the cesspit; the next minute she vowed to hang us from a tree, describing to us as we ran a whole series of awful fates. As I tired, I turned my head to look back; my scalp went numb when I saw the way her flesh wobbled as she ran. All she needed to do was sit on us and she would crush the life out of us.

Only after we ran across a stone arched bridge did we see her stop and turn around, still hurling curses. She probably felt that it was more vital that she go to the aid of her husband. After establishing that she was not waiting in ambush at some point along the road, Liu Xiaoqing and I fearfully edged our way back, vigilant as scouts in a movie who venture deep into enemy territory. By then the sky was dark, and when we returned to our original spot under the lamplight we still heard only the impassioned voices of the eight uncles and aunts. We wondered why Guoqing's father was saying nothing. After a long time we finally heard a different voice, the voice that had pursued us. His wife was saying to them, “Did you come here for a fight or for a discussion? For a fight you need a lot of people, but for a discussion one is enough. I want all of you out right now. One of you can come back tomorrow.”

When this vulgar woman opened her mouth, somehow she projected power. She told them to leave just as arrogantly as her sons had told us to clear off. For just a moment the eight urbanites were silenced, and then they all burst into frantic protest. Liu Xiaoqing and I could not make any sense of what was said: with so many people talking at once, the hubbub that reached our ears
was just a wall of sound. Then Guoqing's father spoke up, just as we were becoming convinced he wasn't there. He yelled angrily at the eight uncles and aunts: “Why are you all shouting? How irresponsible can you be? With you all making so much noise, how am I going to live this down?”

“Who's being irresponsible?” A quarrel erupted, as loud as a house falling down, and it sounded as though several men wanted to beat Guoqing's father and several women were trying desperately to stop them. Guoqing's mother's brothers and sisters were reduced to a state of helpless indignation, for after they had exhausted themselves explaining the rights and wrongs of the case, the obstinacy of the newlyweds made them suddenly realize that it was impossible to have a serious discussion with them. The oldest brother, the most senior figure of the eight, decided against leaving Guoqing in the newlyweds’ care. He said to Guoqing's father, “Even if you wanted to raise him, we would absolutely refuse to let you. A man like you is just a beast!”

As the eight visitors came out the door, we heard a tumultuous expulsion of breaths. A traumatized Guoqing walked in the middle of the group, looking uncertainly at Liu Xiaoqing and me. I heard one of the men say, “How could Sis have married someone like that?” He was so exasperated that he had begun to think the fault lay with Guoqing's deceased mother.

The uncles and aunts assumed the responsibility of supporting Guoqing, and from then on they each sent Guoqing two yuan monthly. The forest green post office became the conduit for Guoqing's wealth. Several times each month he would announce to us proudly, “I have to go to the post office today.”

When Guoqing began to receive his sixteen yuan for living expenses, I was to enter the most extravagant phase of my whole
childhood, and the same was true for Liu Xiaoqing and a few other classmates. We stuck close to Guoqing, who often hankered for candy and olives. He was a generous boy, sharing with us the same pleasures that he allowed himself. He squandered his limited fortune as recklessly as a rich man's son, and on our way to school every morning we secretly looked forward to his big spending. The result was that by the second half of that month Guoqing was flat broke, and he was forced to depend on our charity to stave off hunger. But none of us could throw money around as freely as he, and we began to pilfer things from our homes: a handful of steamed rice, a piece of fish, a chunk of meat, some bits of vegetable, wrapped up in dirty paper and presented to him. Guoqing would open up the packages and spread them out on his knee, then eat their contents with gusto. He would smack his lips so loudly that even we who had already had a full meal found our mouths watering. This situation did not last very long, for soon our teacher, Zhang Qinghai the knitter, made himself responsible for managing Guoqing's living expenses and gave him only fifty cents a month as pocket money. That still left him the most affluent of any of us.

After his abandonment Guoqing gradually got used to handling his own affairs. But he never truly reconciled himself to his father's departure, and he did not follow his father's lead and repudiate him in turn. On the contrary, his father continued to exert control over his thinking. Our teacher tended to forget about the change in Guoqing's circumstances, and he would still sometimes threaten to inform Guoqing's father as a way of cowing him into submission whenever he did something out of line. It seemed never to occur to Guoqing that he was now free as a bird, that his anxiety was quite unnecessary. In his mind his father seemed still
to be always watching him, and he was naive enough to be unsettled by the possibility that the man might appear in front of him at any moment. In fact, if his father did show up, it was only in a chance encounter. The man's standoffish attitude demonstrated that he had no plans at all to drop in on Guoqing.

I remember that the three of us were once standing on the side of the road, throwing pebbles at the streetlamps. It was Guoqing's idea, but we were all gung-ho, each hoping we would be the one to smash a light. When an adult came over to intervene, Liu Xiaoqing and I took to our heels, but Guoqing didn't budge an inch. He stood his ground and said defiantly, “Hey, it's not
your
light.”

Just at that moment Guoqing's father appeared. Guoqing's nerve failed him; he went over, quaking, and called, “Hi, Dad.”

He tried to clear himself of any suspicion of wrongdoing, insisting that he wasn't involved, and he even went so far as to defect completely from our camp, pointing at Liu Xiaoqing and me and saying, “They're the ones doing it.”

But Guoqing's father said heatedly, “Who are you calling Dad?”

For him to forgo the right to punish his son was a much bigger blow to Guoqing than his refusal to look after him. How pitiful Guoqing now looked: when he crossed the street we saw that he had bitten his lip in a desperate effort to hold back the tears that were all ready to flow.

Even after this he still insisted that he would wake up one morning and find his father at his bedside. Once he told me with great conviction that when his father got ill he would “come and find me.” He asked me to confirm that his father sought his help whenever he was ill; again and again he would say, “You saw that,
right? You saw it.” He no longer dipped into his little cardboard box, and even if he had a bad cough he wouldn't open one of his vials. Somehow he believed that as long as there was medicine in the pillboxes sooner or later his father would return.

Now when he talked about his mother, the past, though still remote, no longer seemed so hazy. He often used the expression “in those days”: in those days, when his mother was alive, how good things were. He never gave us specifics of his happy life then, but heaved plenty of wistful sighs, making us wildly envious of “those days.” He began to conjure up images of his mother; the imagination of this boy of nine was not focused on the future, but was connected—unusually for someone so young—to the past.

When we were small, we were fascinated by the horse on packs of Flying Horse cigarettes. The flatlands where we lived were traversed only by cows; the few sheep we glimpsed were always shut up inside pens. There were pigs, of course, but they left us cold. It was the white flying horses that we adored, for none of us had ever seen a horse. Later an army detachment came to Littlemarsh, and a horse-drawn carriage cut through the town in the early hours and rolled onto the high school grounds.

At the end of school that morning the three of us dashed toward the high school, waving our satchels. Guoqing ran ahead, spreading his arms wide like a huge bird. But it soon became apparent that I had misinterpreted his gesture, for he cried, “Hey, I'm a flying horse!” As Liu Xiaoqing and I ran behind, we followed his lead excitedly.