Cries in the Drizzle Read online

  One particular summer—this was Feng Yuqing's last year in Southgate—I felt a different sensation as she walked by at midday. I caught a glimpse of her breasts quivering inside her floral blouse and my scalp went numb. A few days later, as I passed her house on the way to school, she was standing in the doorway, combing her hair in the first rays of the sun. Her head was slightly tilted to one side and the early morning sunshine bathed her sleek neck and caressed her shapely figure, while her raised arms clearly exposed to the daybreak breeze the lighter shade of hair in her armpits. These two scenes kept replaying in my mind, with the result that when I next saw Feng Yuqing I was conscious that I kept averting my gaze. My feelings for her were no longer as straightforward as they once had been, for budding desire was now bundled up with them.

  I was surprised by something my brother Sun Guangping did one evening not long afterward. Now fifteen, he undoubtedly noticed her physical appeal earlier than I did. It was a moonlit night, and as Sun Guangping headed home with a bucket of water Feng Yuqing was walking in the direction of the well. In the instant when they passed each other, Sun Guangpings hand darted toward her breasts, only to rapidly withdraw. He then hurried homeward, while she was so shocked by his gesture that she stood there paralyzed, regaining her composure only when she saw me, at which point she continued on toward the well. I noticed that as she drew up the bucket she made a point of tossing her braid back over her shoulder whenever it fell over her chest.

  For the next few days I was sure that Feng Yuqing would come to our house to lodge a complaint, or at the very least that her parents would. Sun Guangping often cast anxious glances out the door. But as time went on and the moment he was dreading never materialized, he gradually recovered his usual confidence. Once I saw him run into Feng Yuqing, and he gave an ingratiating smile while she simply brushed past him with a scowl.

  Even my younger brother Sun Guangming was not immune to Feng Yuqing's charms. Ten years old, still clueless about sex, he greeted her once with a shout of “Big breasts!” He was sitting on the ground at the time, a grimy little boy toying with a scrap of brick. He gave a silly smile, and a thread of saliva dripped indiscreetly from the corner of his mouth.

  Feng Yuqing, blushing, continued on toward her house, her head lowered. Her mouth was bent a little out of shape, and it was obvious that she was trying to stifle a laugh.

  In the autumn of that year Feng Yuqing's life took a new turn. I remember it all so clearly: how, as I crossed the wooden bridge on my way home from school one lunchtime, I saw a profoundly altered Feng Yuqing, clinging tightly to Wang Yuejin and surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. To me this scene came as a great shock. The girl who was the focus of all my desires eyed the spectators with a pleading, anxious look. They gave no sign of extending to her the sympathy she deserved, for they were animated by curiosity more than anything else. Wang Yuejin, still in her iron grip, said to them facetiously, “Just see how shameless she is!”

  The laughter of the audience had absolutely no effect on Feng Yuqing, except perhaps to render her expression all the more sober and obstinate, and for a moment she closed her eyes. In that instant, a hundred thoughts ran through my mind. She was clinging to something that was not hers: it was just a matter of time before it would slip from her hands. When I gaze back at the past, it's as though I see her clutching not a man, but air. Feng Yuqing was quite ready to cast aside her natural reserve and forfeit her reputation in order to hold that vacuum in her arms.

  Wang Yuejin tried everything under the sun, hurling abuse at her one minute, cracking jokes the next, but nothing he did succeeded in loosening Feng Yuqing's grip. He looked helpless and gave a sigh. “What a woman!”

  Feng Yuqing never said a word in response to his insults. Perhaps she realized that she had no hope of winning the bystanders’ sympathy, for instead she shifted her gaze to the river's restless flow.

  “What the hell does she want?” Wang Yuejin bellowed, angrily tugging at her hands. She was gritting her teeth as she turned her head.

  When this effort failed, Wang Yuejin lowered his voice and said, “Come on, tell me. What is it you want?”

  She answered quietly, “Come with me to the hospital while I have a checkup.”

  She said this without any embarrassment, utterly serene, as though she felt reassured that she would achieve her goal. At that moment she glanced at me and I felt my body tremble under her gaze.

  “You have to let go,” Wang Yuejin said. “Otherwise there's no way I can take you anywhere.”

  Feng Yuqing hesitated for a moment, then relaxed her grip.Wang Yuejin, free at last, immediately took to his heels, shouting back at her as he left: “You want to go—then go by yourself!”

  Feng Yuqing frowned as Wang Yuejin made his escape, then took a look at the people standing around and saw me a second time. She made no attempt to pursue Wang Yuejin, but set off alone for the hospital in town. A few village kids, back home after school, followed her all the way to the hospital, but I did not go with them; I simply stood on the wooden bridge and watched as she receded into the distance. As she left, her braid, disheveled in the tussle, unraveled, and I saw how she deftly reorganized her long black hair, tying her braid as she walked.

  Feng Yuqing, normally so bashful, now seemed completely poised, and her inner turmoil was reflected only in the paleness of her face. She let nothing throw her off balance, and when she registered at the reception desk, she asked for an appointment with a gynecologist as calmly as a married woman might. She answered the doctor's questions just as calmly, saying, “I need a pregnancy test.”

  The doctor noticed that she had checked the “Single” box on the medical form and asked, “You're unmarried?”

  “That's right,” she said, nodding.

  The three boys from my village saw her go into the women's toilet, clutching a tea-colored glass bottle. When she emerged, her expression was grave. As she waited for the results of the urine test, she sat on the bench in the corridor like any other patient, gazing blankly at the laboratory hatch.

  Only later, when she learned that she was not pregnant, did she slowly lose her composure. She walked over to a cement power pole outside the hospital, leaned against it, buried her face in her hands, and wept.

  Her father, once a young man who could consume a couple of bottles of spirits in no time at all, now an old man who could still put away well over a bottle, stood outside the Wang residence that afternoon as the sun went down, stamping his feet and unleashing a string of curses. Carried by the evening breeze, his obscenities drifted through the whole village. But as far as the younger folk were concerned, all his swearing paled in importance compared with his single bitter complaint, “You went all the way with my daughter!”

  Deep into the night, this line lingered like snot on the lips of the village children. When they spotted him, they would chant from a safe distance, “You went all the way with my daughter!”

  Of the weddings I witnessed in Southgate, Wang Yuejin's was the most memorable. This powerfully built young man, once forced to run for his life from Sun Guangping and his kitchen cleaver, wore on that morning a brand-new Mao jacket, and his complexion was as ruddy as that of an official from town. He was getting ready to go across the river and fetch his new bride. Everyone in his family was running around, hectically engaged in the final wedding preparations, while he, already dressed in his smartest outfit, was the one person who seemed at a loss for something to do. As I passed his house on the way to school, he was trying to persuade a young man from the village to accompany him on the trip to fetch the bride, saying to him, “Nobody else will do. You're the only bachelor.”

  “I'm no virgin,” said the other man.

  Wang Yuejin's attempts to persuade him were offhand and perfunctory, and it wasn't as though the other man was unwilling to go—he simply wished to register a certain lack of enthusiasm.

  On the village drying ground, two pigs were slaughtered and several dozen grass carp met their
end. Sprinkled with pig's blood and fish scales all morning, the ground had been swept clean by the time we came home from school and was now covered with twenty round tables. Sun Guangming's face was festooned with fish scales and he exuded a fishy odor. He walked over to Sun Guangping, saying, “Can you guess how many eyes I have?”

  Sun Guangping adopted my father's dismissive tone: “Go wash your face.” I saw him grab our little brother by the collar and haul him off toward the pond. Guangming's pride was cut to the quick, and in his shrill little voice he cursed: “Sun Guangping, I fuck your mom!”

  The wedding party had set off that morning. Amid a discordant clamor of gongs and drums, this purposeful but undisciplined band crossed the river that would later take Sun Guangming's life and marched off to collect Wang Yuejin's bed-mate.

  When the chubby bride, who hailed from one of the nearby hamlets, coyly entered the village, she seemed to think that nobody knew how often (under cover of darkness) she had been a visitor during the preceding weeks, and she put on a bold and confident show of looking timid.

  At the wedding feast Sun Guangming must have consumed over one hundred and fifty broad beans, with the result that he kept letting off the foulest farts, even when he was sound asleep that night. When Sun Guangping pointed this out to him the following morning, Sun Guangming had a fit of the giggles. He was pretty sure that he had eaten five fruit candies, but hadn't bothered to count all the beans. On the day before he died, my little brother would sit on the threshold and ask my big brother who else was going to get married soon, vowing to eat ten fruit candies this time around. As he said that, a dribble of snot was working its way toward his lips.

  I often think of my little brother, who died so young, and his gritty performance that afternoon as he fought for the candies and beans. When Wang Yuejin's sister-in-law came outside, basket in hand, Sun Guangming was not the quickest to react, but he was the first to fall flat on his face. She dumped the basket's contents in front of the assembled children as though she were feeding hens, and a cascade of beans tumbled to the ground along with just a few dozen candies. As my older brother bent down, another boy accidentally kneed him in the face. Always hot tempered, Sun Guangping concentrated on clobbering his assailant, with the result that he missed out on the plunder. With Sun Guangming, it was a different story: he threw himself on the candies and beans and withstood no end of pummeling. Afterward he just sat there, his face streaked with mud, grimacing as he rubbed his head and his ears, and he told Sun Guangping that his legs were covered in bruises.

  Sun Guangming came away with seven fruit candies and a full handful of broad beans. He sat there meticulously removing earth and gravel from his booty. Sun Guangping stood off to one side, glaring at the children who gazed enviously at his little brother, deterring them from grabbing the delicacies he had claimed.

  Of these items, Sun Guangming allocated to his big brother a small bunch of beans and a single candy. As he took them, Sun Guangping said in an aggrieved tone, “That's all I get?”

  Sun Guangming rubbed one of his chafed ears and looked at Sun Guangping uncertainly, then offered an additional candy and a few more beans. When his big brother showed no signs of leaving, in his piping tone he delivered the following threat: “If you ask for any more, I'll cry!”

  The bride had entered the village at noon. Though this round-faced, round-bottomed girl kept her head bowed, it was clear from her smile that she was pleased with the match. The bridegroom, buoyed by satisfaction as well, appeared to have forgotten all about his tussle with Feng Yuqing several days earlier, and when he came walking up, brimming with good spirits, he raised his right hand and waved it clumsily in our direction. At that moment I rejoiced: no longer would Wang Yuejin besmirch the Feng Yuqing whom I so worshipped. But when my gaze shifted to the house where she lived, an indescribable distress welled up within me, for I saw that the object of my fantasies had her eyes fixed on where we were. Feng Yuqing was standing in front of her home, disconsolately watching the ceremony in which she played no part. Of all those present only she felt the sting of exclusion.

  Later the wedding guests sat out on the drying ground, eating and drinking. My father Sun Kwangtsai had sprained his neck when sleeping, and was sitting there, one shoulder bared, like an outlaw hero of old. My mother, standing behind him, swigged a mouthful of celebratory liquor and spat it onto his back. Kneaded and massaged by Mothers hand until he swayed back and forth, he emitted moans of pain that made him appear touchingly vulnerable, but this didn't get in the way of his doing some serious drinking. As he lifted his chopsticks and transported a large chunk of meat into his mouth, Sun Guangping and Sun Guangming stood off to one side, their mouths watering. Sun Kwangtsai constantly turned his head to shoo away his sons. “Get lost!” he said to them.

  They ate from noon straight through to dusk, which was when the climax to the wedding took place. It was then that Feng Yuqing appeared unexpectedly, a rope in her hands. Wang Yuejin didn't see her approach because he was busy clinking glasses with another fellow from the village. By the time somebody tapped him on the shoulder, Feng Yuqing was standing right behind him. He instantly turned pale. I remember how a hush fell over the drying ground, which only seconds earlier had been buzzing with noise. The result was that, even from my distant observation post, I could clearly hear Feng Yuqing's words. “Stand up!” she said.

  Wang Yuejin performed a replay of the panic he showed that day Sun Guangping pursued him with the cleaver. He rose to his feet as slowly as an old man. Feng Yuqing walked off with the stool he had been sitting on and set it down underneath a tree beside the drying ground. In full view of the assembled audience she clambered onto the stool. Under the autumn sky she stood tall, her figure, with its upturned curves, unutterably beautiful to my eyes. She tied one end of the rope to a tree branch.

  That was when Old Luo yelled, “She's going to kill herself!”

  Feng Yuqing, from her elevated perch, looked at him in seeming astonishment, then deftly looped the rope so that it formed a noose big enough to accommodate a human head. She jumped off the stool with a flourish and made a solemn exit.

  On her departure, the drying ground once again buzzed with noise. Wang Yuejin, pallid and trembling, began at last to curse, but his outrage lacked conviction. I expected that he would go over and remove the rope, but instead he sat down on a stool that someone lent him and did not stand up again. His bride, who had put two and two together, was at this point distinctly more collected than he was. She sat there, eyes straight ahead, and her only action was to down in one gulp a bowl of spirits while he sneaked furtive glances at both her and the rope. Later his older brother removed this ghastly decoration, but it continued to prey on his mind and things continued in uneasy limbo for some time. The rope had come to the village just like a movie brought by a mobile projection team, introducing itself into the wedding to stunning effect, throttling the life out of the wedding while it was still in its prime.

  Before long the bride was drunk. She gave a spine-chilling cry, rose unsteadily to her feet and announced, “I'm going to hang myself!” As she stumbled over to where the rope had once hung, she was firmly held back by Wang Yuejin's sister-in-law, a mother of two. “Hurry up and help her inside,” she shouted at Wang Yuejin.

  As the bride was hustled into the house, she continued to yell stubbornly, “I'm going to hang myself!”

  It was quite some time before Wang Yuejin and his friends reappeared. No sooner were they out of the house than the bride herself emerged, now brandishing a cleaver, which she pressed against her throat. People couldn't tell if she was crying or laughing, and all they heard was her shout, “Just watch me!”

  Feng Yuqing sat on her doorstep, viewing these events from a distance. I will never forget her meditative look, her head slightly tilted, her chin cupped in her right hand, as the breeze blew her hair back and forth in front of her eyes. It was as though she was not so much watching this chaotic scene as looking at herself in a
mirror. At that moment Feng Yuqing no longer cared about the wedding she was witnessing; she was perplexed about where her own life was taking her.

  A few days later, a peddler appeared. A man in his forties, dressed in gray, he set down his load in front of Feng Yuqing's house. Speaking in an alien accent, he asked Feng Yuqing, standing in the doorway, for a bowl of water.

  Village children gathered around in a circle and watched him for a while before dispersing. It must have been sheer happenstance that had brought the peddler into the village, for it was too close to town to be a worthwhile business destination for him. Nonetheless he sat there in front of Feng Yuqing's house until nightfall.

  I walked that way several times that afternoon, and each time I could hear him describing wearily, in a hoarse voice, the hardships of his nomadic life; he looked pained even when he smiled. Feng Yuqing sat on the threshold with her chin in her hand and listened raptly to his stories, an opaque expression on her face. Only now and again, as though by accident, did the peddler turn his head to look at her.

  That evening, as the village lay bathed in moonlight, the peddler left Southgate. His departure coincided with the disappearance of Feng Yuqing.

  PASSINGS

  One lunchtime that summer my little brother, Sun Guangming, who had learned how to swagger from my older brother, walked toward the river to catch snails. In my mind's eye I glimpse the scene once more. Dressed in shorts, he picks up his basket from the corner of the room and steps outside. The sunlight beats down on his bare back, so tanned that it seems to be glistening with oil.

  A blurry picture appears before my eyes, as though I can see time in motion. Time becomes visible, a translucent gray whir, and everything has its place within that dark expanse. Our lives, after all, are not rooted in the soil as much as they are rooted in time. Fields, streets, rivers, houses—these are our companions, placed like ourselves in time. Time pushes us forward or back, and alters our aspect.