After the midday meal, the lamp was lit; three strange shadows swayed up and down upon the kang mat and against the wall. Before the afternoon was half over, the woman had already wiped the room sparkling clean. A few embers still burned in the stove, where the woman stood leaning against the wall; set against the dusky lamplight, her face flickered in the glow. Steeped in a warmth and tenderness that seemed a little strange to a body and heart that the years had ground down coarse and crude, he was inexpressibly moved in the dusky lamp shadows and flickering glow of the fire. Yet even this emotion felt strange.
Everything he should ask and everything he should say he had already asked and said. Even the few words he had managed after searching and scraping the bottom of his belly had been said, too. About all that was left had to do with, well, with that coming moment, with that. All those struts he'd brought out, knowingly or not, to prop himself up had lightly and easily drifted away, like late-autumn leaves, leaving the tree standing naked.
The woman was waiting. Her face, flickering in the firelight, maintained its look of calmly bowing to fate.
The child was oblivious to what was going on between the man and the woman. She was fiddling with his deer-hoof pipe, turning it over and over in her hands while now and then a childish sentence or two of some local dialect slipped out between her lips.
A surge of impatience and resentment rose in his heart. The look of calm on the woman's face made him uneasy, and with a sweep of his hand he snatched the grimy bandanna off of his head and ordered her: "Here, wash this!"
The woman came over with a smile and reached out for it; he clutched her shoulder and with one yank twisted her toward him.
"Mama, a gun!" the girl shouted in her broad accent, pointing to a long rifle propped against the wall.
The woman didn't struggle; she simply lowered her eyes. "Let's wait till she's asleep."
"No. The side room's empty." He flared up and, without knowing why, thought back to how the team leader had boiled her noodles the night before. I have to eat his leftover noodles, and she tells me to wait?
The woman didn't utter another word; silently, she pulled over a pillow for the child, took her into her arms, and laid her down, then pulled out a gummy piece of candy that had been stuck in her pocket for who knows how long and pushed it into the child's mouth.
Without lighting a lamp, he dragged the woman onto the kang as if she were his prey. And there, in that lacquer-black darkness, the flood waters that had been choked off and swelling his chest for twenty years came gushing out in a savage frenzy. Two lives were fused into one body in that primal darkness, where it was impossible to distinguish between you and me, between man and woman, between what was somebody else's and what was your own.
A rat scrounging for food lost its footing, slipped through the roof, and dropped down, screeching shrilly; in its frantic flight, it bumped into a scalding yet supple mound of flesh; it couldn't make out what this thing could be, and the scrabbling of its tiny, piercing claws on the kang mat left behind only its frightened, scattered soul.
On the first day, that is how it went.
On the second day, that is how it went.
On the third day, that is still how it went.
He could tell he was in the grip of madness, but he didn't have the strength to stop this gush of insanity surging from the very core of his body. And he had only to think of that night before the woman belonged to him, how another man had already boiled her noodles, for that gush of madness to swell ten times over until it was many times larger than his own flesh-and-blood body, as if a hairy monster, panting heavily, stood there confronting him.
But over time, this gush of madness spent itself, drop by drop, on the woman's warm and soft, broad and giving bosom. Once that rabid nature had calmed down, his masculine self-respect and confidence were reborn in his body. One day after he had finished breakfast, he waited until the woman had cleaned and tidied everything up and then pulled out ten yuan from his chest pocket.
"Here."
The woman stared blankly without taking it.
"Too little? Here's ten more."
The woman still stared blankly.
"Don't try to fool me. You've already got a home, you've got a man, he's not dead, you've got other kids, they're all back home waiting for you."
"No, no…" The woman shook her head, alarmed.
"Go fool your own devil!" His anger was rising. "You'll live here for three months, five months, maybe a year or more, but when you see your chance, you'll be gone, and here I'll be, all alone again. Right? What do you think I'm after? Feeding you two all for nothing? So go! Go, if that's what you want. I am a man, you hear, and no one's going to make a monkey out of me!"
Tears trickled from the woman's eyes.
For some reason, he actually got some satisfaction out of those tears. He'd been feeling like a fool for days, knowing he hadn't broken this calm woman. As for himself, he'd kept getting flustered, waiting for nightfall, and as soon as it got dark, he'd get skittish about doing it. But now everything was all right. He'd poked through the blank-paper window that seemed to veil her, and she was clearly under his control.
The woman sobbed and cried, "Elder Brother-"
"Oh, so now you call me Elder Brother." Deep down he laughed grimly. So you can't keep it up after all, can you? If you've got what it takes to pull off something like this, then you've got to have what it takes to keep it up right to the end. But he didn't say these words aloud; he just squatted on the kang and smirked, feeling that everything was firmly in his grasp.
"Elder Brother, we've had a terrible harvest at home this year. We had no choice. I know I haven't done right by you. If you don't want to let us stay here, then we'll go. And your quilt, I pulled out the padding and washed it yesterday, but I haven't had time to sew it back up yet. After I finish that, I'll go."
Suddenly, a gush of tears stung his eyes, and he fought mightily to keep it back. His quilt hadn't been washed since that day three years ago, on the eve of his second daughter's wedding. For the past few days, this woman had been working in and around the house as if there were no tomorrow; in town, everybody said he'd stumbled upon a god of wealth right in the middle of the road. To tell the truth, he'd also tossed around the idea of keeping the woman and her child tied down here. He'd even thought about going back with her to Hejialiang to get that letter of proof. She was a good woman, but then a sham was still a sham. What angered him was that she had faked it so realistically that she had stirred his heart.
Yet in the end, her eyes, puffy and soft with tears, softened his masculine heart.
"If you want to stay, stay. If you want to go, go. I can't tell you what to do."
The woman fell to her knees in front of him. "Elder Brother, the girl's father and I will never forget you."
His temper flared up again; he was in a rage. "You go back, and tell your man that maybe my bullets can't reach him, but if they could, the first person I'd shoot would be him. The bastard!"
"Elder Brother, he's just a poor wretch, too. I'll do up the quilt for you. We'll leave tomorrow."
The little girl didn't understand what was going on between the adults; all she cared about was holding her mama tight, crying and yowling.
He had thought that they might make a scene, but now that it was actually happening, he felt totally at a loss-what kind of show did he think he was putting on anyway? But as he recalled the two fingerprints stamped on the guarantee and thought of how this woman who should have been his wife had really been somebody else's wife all along, surge after surge of the wildfire in his heart rose to his head. Husband and wife-the whole show had ended as quickly as it had begun.
That night after dinner, it was time once again to light the lamp, but the two of them stiffly and wordlessly held their ground. The child had already flopped over to a corner of the kang to sleep.
The woman was waiting for him.
He smoked; his heart rankled. He couldn't let this night pass, he couldn't knowingly let go of this final opportunity. After this evening, who knows how many years he'd have to go parched with thirst all over again? Lighting his deer-hoof pipe, he satisfied his craving for a smoke. He smoked bowl after bowl, and bowl by bowl he knocked out the ashes against the edge of the kang. A hopeless hope was shattered; a sham that had been a sham from the start was over. But the heart of this lonely rod, who had endured somehow for twenty years, was suffering endless torment from the whole affair. And the greater his torment, the more agitated and rancorous he became. He did not know how he was going to release that agitation and rancor; meanwhile, the woman who would be leaving tomorrow was waiting for him. Abruptly, he snatched up his splendid pipe and smashed it against the stove, whirled around, and ordered: "Sleep!"