Later my mother appeared by my bedside and said some-thing or other, then went out. Next time she appeared Dr. Su was by her side. He placed the palm of his hand on my forehead, and I heard him say, “Must be a hundred and two.”
After they left, the noise in the sheep pen went up a notch. Though the doctor had just laid his hand lightly on my forehead, it felt to me like a tender caress. Before long I heard the voices of the Su brothers outside; only later did I realize that they were delivering medicine.
Once I was on the mend, feelings of dependency began to stir. I had been close to my parents until I was six, when I left the village, and later, during my five years in Littlemarsh, Wang Liqiang and Li Xiuying had provided their care and support, but since my return to Southgate I had found myself suddenly abandoned and unprotected.
So around this time I would often stand by the roadside and wait for the doctor to pass on his way home from work. I watched as he approached, imagining the heartwarming things he might say to me, anticipating how his broad hand would pat me on the forehead.
But the doctor never paid me the slightest attention, and I realize now that there was no reason he should have given any thought to who I was or why I was standing there. He would brush past me, and if on occasion he threw me a glance it was only as one stranger looks at another.
Su Yu and Su Hang, the doctors two sons, soon afterward were inducted into the ranks of the village children. My brothers were trimming grass from the bank of earth between the fields, and I watched as the Su brothers walked hesitantly toward them, debating some point as they went. My older brother, who in those days tended to think he could take charge of anything, waved his sickle at them and said, “Hey, do you want to cut some grass?”
In the short time Su Yu spent in Southgate, he came over to talk to me only once. I still remember his shy expression, the unmistakable timidity in his smile as he asked, “You're Sun Guangping's younger brother, right?”
The Sus lived in Southgate for only two years. The sky was overcast on the afternoon they moved out. The very last cart of furniture was hauled away by the doctor himself, with the two boys pushing, one on either side, and their mother brought up the rear, clutching two baskets full of odds and ends.
Su Yu died of a brain hemorrhage when he was nineteen. I didn't hear the news until the day after it happened. On the way home from school I passed the house where the Sus had lived and sorrow surged through my heart, bathing my face in tears.
When my big brother went to high school his behavior changed quite markedly. (I find I now recall rather fondly my brother at the age of fourteen. Though he was a real dictator, there was something unforgettable about his arrogance. Sitting on the bank, directing the Su brothers’ grass-trimming activities — for a long time this was the image of him that was foremost in my mind.) Once he began to mix with the children from town, he became increasingly standoffish toward the village boys. As his town classmates became more regular visitors to our house, my parents felt that this reflected very well on them, and there were even some senior residents of the village who predicted that my brother would have the brightest future of any of the village children.
During this period two teenagers from town often came running out to the village early in the morning, shouting at the top of their lungs just for the heck of it. They yelled so much that they became hoarse, and their screeches made our hair stand on end. The villagers thought at first theywere hearing ghosts.
This made a deep impression on my brother, and I once heard him say darkly, “Here we are, wishing we could be townsfolk, but its entertainers that the townsfolk want to be.”
My brother was definitely the quickest of the youngsters in the village to spot developing trends, for it was already dawning on him that all his life he would never be able to compete with his classmates from town; this was his earliest sensation of inferiority. But at the same time his friendship with the town boys was a natural extension of his customary self-regard: their visits unquestionably raised his standing within the village.
My brother's first love interest appeared when he reached the second grade of high school. He took a fancy to a strongly built girl, the daughter of a carpenter. Several times I saw him in a corner, taking a bag of melon seeds from his satchel and slipping it into her hands.
She would often emerge on the playground, munching our melon seeds, spitting out the shells with such gusto and expertise that you might have taken her for a middle-aged matron. Once, after she spit out a shell, I noticed that a long thread of saliva trailed from the corner of her mouth.
Around this time girls began to figure as a theme in conversations between my brother and his classmates. I sat by the pond behind the house, listening as they explored territory entirely new to me. Out of the window drifted brazen commentary on breasts, thighs, and other body parts, provoking surprise and arousal in me. In due course they moved on to their own experiences with girls. My brother kept quiet at first, but under pressure from his classmates he soon revealed his dalliance with the carpenter's daughter. So taken in was he by their vows of confidentiality that he let himself get carried away: it was obvious that he was exaggerating their intimacy.
Not long after that, the girl stood in the middle of the playground, surrounded by several other schoolgirls, all just as full of themselves as she was. She called him over.
My brother walked toward her nervously, for he may already have had some inkling of what was about to happen. It was the first time I saw him afraid.
“Did you say I have a crush on you?” she asked.
His face turned bright red. I did not stay to observe how my brother, usually so self-assured, now found himself reduced to helpless embarrassment. Encouraged by her classmates’ chortles, the girl threw the melon seeds in his face.
My brother returned home from school very late that day and lay down in his bed without having anything to eat. I was dimly aware of him tossing and turning practically the whole night through. Still, he managed to swallow his pride and go off to school as usual the following morning.
My brother knew that the town boys had sold him down the river, but he never showed any signs of resentment or even allowed the faintest hint of reproach to appear on his face. Instead he continued to fraternize with them as before, for he would have hated to let the villagers see that his townie classmates had dropped him all of a sudden. But in the end my brother's efforts all came to naught. After they graduated from high school, the town boys were assigned jobs one after the other, thereby forfeiting the freedom to loaf around, and the time came when he found himself ditched.
Late one afternoon, when my brother's classmates were no longer gracing our home with their presence, Su Yu arrived quite unexpectedly, the first time he had returned to Southgate since his family moved away. My brother and I were in the vegetable plot and only my mother was home, busy preparing dinner. When she saw Su Yu, she assumed he had come to see Guangping. Now, so many years later, I am still stirred by the memory of her standing at the edge of the village, calling him eagerly at the top of her voice.
My brother hopped onto the path and hurried home, but Su Yu's first words to him were, “Where's Sun Guanglin?”
My mother realized with astonishment that Su Yu had come to see me. My brother managed to take this in stride and he answered casually: “He's over in the vegetable patch.”
It didn't occur to Su Yu that he should take a moment to chat, and without further ado he turned his back on them and headed for the field where I was working.