Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (78 page)

Kaifang returned to 1 Tianhua Lane, his face still swathed in bandages, which threw a scare into Lan Jiefang and Huang Huzhu, who had had all the surprises they could take. Kaifang ignored their questions about his face and said passionately, in obvious high spirits:

“Papa, Aunty, I’m going to marry Fenghuang!”

With a pained furrowing of his brow, my friend Jiefang said decisively:

“No, you’re not!”

“Why?”

“Because I say so!”

“You don’t believe all those scurrilous rumors, do you? You have my word, she’s absolutely chaste ... a virgin. . . .”

“My god!” my friend exclaimed plaintively. “You can’t do it, son. . . .”

“Where love and marriage are concerned, Papa,” Kaifang said, his anger rising, “it’s my life and you have nothing to say about it.”

“Maybe I don’t, son, but listen to what your aunt has to say” Jiefang went into his room and shut the door.

“Kaifang, poor Kaifang,” Huang Huzhu said to him tearfully. “Fenghuang is your uncle’s daughter. You and she have the same grandmother.”

At that point Kaifang reached up and ripped the bandages off of his face, taking the new skin off with it and leaving a bloody wound. He ran out of the house and jumped on his motorcycle, speeding away in such a hurry that his wheel banged against the door of a beauty salon, scaring the wits out of the people inside. He lifted the front wheel and sped like a crazed horse straight to the train station square. He never heard the words of the beautician whose shop was next door to the house:

“Everyone in that family is mad!”

Kaifang staggered down the steps of the hotel and crashed through the door. Fenghuang was in bed waiting for him. The monkey attacked him, but this time he forgot all about police procedures, forgot just about everything. He drew his pistol and shot the monkey dead, bringing an end to the reincarnation cycle for a soul that had spun on the wheel of life for half a century.

Fenghuang was struck dumb by what he’d done. He raised his pistol and pointed it at her. Don’t do it, my young friend — he gazed at Fenghuang’s beautiful face, like a precious jade carving — the prettiest face in the world — the pistol drooped of its own weight. He raised it again and ran out the door to the steps leading upstairs — like a ladder leading from hell up to heaven — our young friend’s legs turned rubbery and he fell to his knees. Then he pressed the muzzle of his pistol up against a heart that was already broken — Don’t do it, don’t be foolish — he pulled the trigger. A muffled explosion sent our Kaifang sprawling on the steps, dead.

Dear reader, our tale is drawing to a close. Bear with me a while longer, that’s all, just a while longer.

Lan Jiefang and Huang Huzhu took Kaifang’s ashes back to the plot of land that was now dotted with graves and buried them alongside Huang Hezuo. While they were cremating and burying their son, Fenghuang followed them, carrying the body of her monkey and weeping uncontrollably She was so haggard everyone who saw her took pity on her. As sensible people, now that Kaifang was dead, Jiefang and Huzhu spoke no more of what had brought them to that point. Since the monkey was beginning to smell, Fenghuang took their advice to let him go, but asked that he be buried along with the people there. My friend unhesitatingly said yes. And so, now there was a monkey lying alongside a donkey, an ox, a pig, and a dog. Stuck for how to console Fenghuang, my friend brought together the surviving members of the two families. Chang Tianhong had nothing to offer, nor did Huang Huzhu. In the end it was Baofeng:

“Gaige, ask her to come here and we’ll see what she plans to do. She started life here on our
kang,
and we have a duty to give her what she wants, whatever it takes.”

Gaige returned with news that she was gone.

Like a river, time flows on and on. We are now in the waning days of the year 2000. Gaomi County was celebrating the dawning of the new millennium with lights and streamers in front of every house in the city. Towering count-down clocks had been erected in the train station square and Tianhua Square, where pyrotechnic specialists waited to have their fireworks light up the sky at the stroke of midnight.

As evening settled in, snow began to fall, with flakes dancing amid the bright lights and turning the night into a thing of beauty. Just about everyone in the city walked outside, some heading toward Tianhua Square, others for the train station square, and some just strolling up and down People’s Avenue.

My friend and Huang Huzhu were among the few people who stayed inside. Here permit me to add a comment: They never did register as husband and wife. It didn’t seem to make any difference to either of them. Well, after making some pork-filled dumplings they hung a pair of red lanterns outside their door and stuck some of Huzhu’s paper cutouts in the window. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and everyone else has to keep on living, whether they do so by crying or laughing. That is what my friend often said to his partner. They ate the dumplings that night, watched a bit of TV, and, as was their habit, memorialized the dead by making love. But only after brushing Huzhu’s hair, as we’ve already seen. What I want to say here is, in the midst of their mixed sorrow and joy, Huzhu abruptly rolled over in bed, wrapped her arms around my friend, and said:

“Starting tonight, we can be human again. . . .”

Their tears wetted one another’s face.

At eleven o’clock they were jolted out of their sleep by the ringing of their telephone. It was the train station hotel. A woman on the other end told them that their daughter-in-law, who was in Room 101, had gone into labor, news that first puzzled them. Finally, it dawned on them that the woman about to give birth was Pang Fenghuang, who had been missing all these months.

Knowing there was no one they could call for assistance, and not really wanting to call anyone in the first place, they made their way to the square as fast as their frail legs would take them. Breathlessly, they ran and walked, walked and ran, making their way through crowded streets. There were people everywhere, on wide avenues and in narrow lanes. At first the crowds were heading south, but once my friend and his woman crossed People’s Avenue, the crowds were heading north. Their anxieties quickened, their pace did not, as snow fell on their heads and blew into their faces. The swirling snowflakes were like falling apricot petals. The old apricot tree in the Ximen family compound had shed its flowers, so had the apricot trees at the Ximen Village pig farm, and all of them were being blown into town; all the falling apricot petals in China were blowing into Gaomi County, into the city.

Like a pair of lost children, they elbowed their way into the square, where young men and women were dancing and singing atop a tower that had been thrown up on the eastern edge. Apricot petals were dancing in the air. A thousand heads were bobbing on the square. The people, in new clothes, were singing and jumping and clapping and stomping their feet along with the music coming from the tower. Apricot petals were swirling among the dancers, who were dancing amid the swirling apricot petals. The digital clock was counting down, second by second. The climactic moment was approaching. The music and the singing stopped; the square was silent. My friend and his woman took the stairs down to the hotel basement. She hadn’t had time to put her hair up; it trailed behind her like a tail. They opened the door of Room 101 and saw the face of Fenghuang, as pure as an apricot blossom. They also saw that the lower half of her body was covered in blood, in the center of which lay a chubby little baby boy. At that moment, fireworks lit up the sky of Gaomi County’s new century, the first of a new millennium. The baby was a millennium boy; he’d come into the world via a normal birth. Two other babies had arrived as millennium babies in Gaomi’s hospital, but they’d been delivered by caesarean section.

My friend and his woman picked up the baby, their grandchild, who bawled in Huzhu’s arms. As his tears fell, Jiefang draped a dirty sheet over Fenghuang. She was virtually transparent, since all the blood had flowed out of her body. Her ashes, of course, were buried in the now famous family cemetery, next to Lan Kaifang.

My friend and his woman raised the big-headed baby with great care. He’d been born with a strange bleeding disease that the doctors called hemophilia, for which there was no cure. He would die, sooner rather than later. But when he bled, Huang Huzhu pulled a hair from her head, turned it to ashes under a flame, and put some of it in his milk and sprinkled the rest over the injury. While this was not a cure, it worked as an emergency treatment when needed. And so this child’s life was tied inextricably to the hair of my friend’s woman. As long as the hair held out, the boy would live; when it was gone, he would die. In this case, the heavens took pity, for the more hair she pulled out, the more hair grew in. So we needn’t worry that the boy will die young.

He differed from other children right from birth. Small in body, he had a remarkably big head, in which near total recall and a extraordinary gift for language existed. Although his grandparents could not help thinking about his unusual entrance into the world, after talking it over, they decided he deserved to be given the family name Lan. And since he’d been born as the clock rang in the new millennium, they called him Qiansui, or “Thousand-Year.” On the day of his fifth birthday, he summoned my friend, his grandfather, spread his arms like a storyteller, and embarked upon the narration of a long tale:

“My story begins on January 1, 1950. ...”