The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories. Shouhua Qi
my butterfly. At this moment she is only five meters away from me, yet it is so far away. Bigger raindrops fall onto my glasses, splashing into my life.
Why? Why did we bring only one umbrella?
Then I see Yingzi again, in her white windbreaker, the umbrella above her head, crossing the road quietly. She is mailing the letter for me. The letter I wrote to my mother in the South. I stand blankly under the balcony and see, once again, Yingzi walking toward the middle of the road.
The rain wasn’t that big, yet it was the biggest rain in my entire life. Below is the content of the letter. Did Yingzi know?
“Ma, I am going to marry Yingzi next month.”
(2006)
Cold Night
Yu Dafu[2]
Have to tell her to go back first; with a promise to join her in half an hour.
Have had more than enough to drink. The neighboring rooms are completely dark now, their guests long gone, the servants having turned off their yellowish lights. Coal in the stove, once glowing red, has crumbled into a smoldering mess, and the small door below the vent, once so red hot, almost translucent, has turned pale, too.
Feeling woozy all the time, what with sleepless nights and then drinking all day long. Have really gotten into talking to Yusheng, but with her hanging at my side all the time, I can’t even stand up and to go take a pee.
Took me a while to talk her into leaving, on her condition of me joining her in half an hour. Shivered badly when, escorting her to the door, a gust of cold wind blew right in my face. With the door open, the reddish light from inside shone into the misty night, revealing snowflakes drifting down.
“Snowing again! Snow may prevent me from coming, you know!”
Half joking; half out of a genuine desire to go home and see if any important mail had arrived the past week.
“How come! No deal then, and I won’t leave!”
She opened her shawl, wrapped it around my body, and brushed her face, cool, smooth, and fragrant, and her soft, light breath and thin lips, against mine.
“Alcohol! Smells disgusting!”
She pretended to be angry and flashed me another stare. When she was about to brush her face against mine again, Yusheng cried out from inside the house:
“Stop it, Liuqing. Stop it! Having the audacity to do this in the courtyard! Ten dollars, fine!”
“I don’t care, I don’t. . . .”
She brought her face close to mine again, a laugh escaping her lips.
Wrapped in the same shawl with her, I cautiously treaded through the dark, slippery courtyard toward the gate, where the shopkeeper hollered “Cab!” Startled, I jumped out of the shawl and shivered again when another gust of cold wind blew into my face.
She turned her head and reminded:
“In half an hour. Don’t forget!”
And left without looking back.
Through shivering cold I took a few steps along the wall to a dark corner and peed. Then, as I walked back to the house, my face was once again greeted with icy snowflakes. I looked up into the sky and couldn’t make out anything except for a nebulous gloom; lowering my head somewhat, though, I saw a row of shingles on the rooftop: chilly, blurry, vaporous like beer.
Once inside the house, I noticed that Yusheng was already laying on the kang. A door behind me opened, and the shop clerk handed me a warm towel and a bill.
“Why the hurry? Want to go to bed, too? Go get me another pack o’ cigarettes!”
The clerk was unhappy with the request, but since I was a regular, there was nothing he could do but go and run the errand with a big smile on his face.
I lay on the kang across from Yusheng’s for who knows how long until the clerk shook me and woke me up, mumbling: “It’s snowing real hard outside. Shall I call Flying Dragon and get you a cab, so you won’t catch cold?”
“Fine!”
I woke Yusheng, wiped my face and hands with a towel, and had a smoke. We sat and waited for the cab, still very drowsy, neither in a mood to talk.
Upon hearing a sudden sputtering sound in the quiet air, I put on the coat and hurried outside with Yusheng. The courtyard was already too wet and slippery. More snowflakes hit my face.
“Snowing like this, I won’t be able to leave again tomorrow, I’m afraid.”
My voice sounded a bit odd to my own ears, like beating a drum wrapped with a layer of cloth.
The shops along both sides of the street had closed. All quiet, except for the cab’s wheels grumbling through wet mud. It bumped along; the street looked all but deserted. Inside the cab was complete darkness, the dome light broken, it seemed. The snowflakes caught in the beams of the headlights looked so gossamer, so faraway, like in a dream.
The cab squeaked as it turned, its lights shining on a white wall. When it neared Yusheng’s home, I became excited, suddenly, as if a pot of water was boiling inside me, something welling up in my eyes.
“Yusheng! Don’t go home! Let’s go back to Han’s Lake. Let’s go to Liuqing’s place and chat all night!”
I broke the silence and thus begged Yusheng as I half stood up from the seat, pounded hard on the glass window, and ordered the cabbie to take us to Han’s Lake.
(1926)
Sweetheart
Ku Ling
She didn’t know how he had fallen in love with her.
What he liked the most was to nestle in her arms and put his face to her chest to listen to her heart beat.
“Put his ear to his heart/Listen to the sound of its beat” is a line from a poem she wrote her first year in college. She had felt her heart beat faster than normal ever since she was small. Sometimes, while doing any physically intense activity, she would feel her heart all but bursting out of her mouth. As she grew up, whenever she had to walk up to the second floor, she would hear her heart beat so hard. It hurt badly.
When it hurt badly, she would feel her chest inside which the heart was beating intensely, and ask her parents. Her father would lower his head and sigh and her mother would sob with tears all over her face.
When she knew she was afflicted with congenital heart disease, she cried, too; tears gushing down her face. Gradually, however, she became stronger and was not afraid of the hospital bed, intravenous bottle hanging high, and the nurses’ white masks any more. Sometimes she could calmly gaze at the signals of her own heartbeat on the monitor dancing up and down and wonder when they would fall into a deadly horizontal line.
Perhaps God didn’t mean to take her back yet. In the year she turned 30, a heart donor for her was finally available. The day before the surgery she cried the whole night, her tears soaking the white pillow and sheet. She cried for finally having another shot at life and she cried for the donor who lost her own to save hers.
All she knew was that it was a married woman her age who had died in a car accident. Since she had no way of expressing her gratitude to the donor, she kept the clipping of the newspaper story of her heart transplant, which carried their pictures side by side.
Then he appeared. The first time he paced into the patient’s room hesitantly, she thought he was a reporter. Soon he became a regular visitor. Bored by long days of inactivity while recuperating from the surgery, she would often sit in her sickbed and comb and do her makeup with anxious expectancy. The joy of first love washed over her in waves. After all, thanks to her fragile heart, she hadn’t even kissed once.
Now she could kiss to her heart’s content. Another’s heart beat in her chest with