It was because he was afraid of being seen that Chief Liu had gotten out of the car before reaching the city gate, in order to cross the old city streets on foot. However, the street was completely empty and there was no one to be seen. No one was there to recognize him, as people would have done in the past. Chief Liu craved that sort of recognition. This was his county seat, and Shuanghuai was his county. In Shuanghuai, there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know who he was. When he walked down the street, everyone should have reacted in surprise. Today, the street was nearly completely still. Occasionally he would see someone, but he or she would quickly scurry away, hurrying home without even glancing back. At one point he saw a woman, but when she opened her door to call her children to come home and eat dinner, she gazed at Chief Liu for quite some time, acting as though she didn’t really recognize him, and proceeded to call out, then closed her door and went back inside.
The old city could not compare with the new one. The street was full of houses with broken bricks and cracked tiles, though occasionally there might be one or two houses with new tiles. Those houses were square-shaped with redbrick walls, and on this winter day they were like red pine coffins that had just been completed and had not even been painted yet.
Chief Liu walked alone, feeling that he had entered a graveyard, as if he had died and been brought back to life. Therefore, when people saw him, they didn’t dare look him in the eye.
At one point, two people walked by him bearing shoulder poles full of fruit, heading to the market to sell their produce. Needless to say, they were both from Shuanghuai, and probably were from families that had been living there for many generations. Chief Liu told himself that as long as they recognized him as the county chief, and stopped and greeted him by name, the next day he would make sure to appoint one of them to be deputy director of the business bureau and the other to be deputy director of the foreign trade bureau. He was still Shuanghuai’s county chief and Party secretary, and if he wanted to appoint someone to a certain position, there was nothing to stop him. Not only could he appoint them to serve as deputy directors, he could even appoint them to serve as bureau directors. All he wanted was for these two fruit-sellers to recognize him, put down the produce they were carrying, bow to him, and address him as Chief Liu, just as people used to do when they encountered him in the street.
Chief Liu stood there without moving, waiting for the men to recognize and address him.
The men only glanced at him before walking past. The rattling of their carrying poles gradually died off as they moved away, until eventually it could no longer be heard.
Chief Liu stood there in shock, watching the two figures as they disappeared into the darkness. They hadn’t recognized him as the county chief! This made him feel as though there were snakes and bees in his heart. However, he continued smiling. It occurred to him that these two men would feel utterly wronged3 at having missed out on their chance to be named deputy director.
Chief Liu walked all alone from the old city to the new one. Whenever he encountered someone, he would stop and wait for them to recognize him. If they did, he was prepared to promote them to the position of bureau chief or something. In the end, not a single person recognized him. Unlike the past, not one person, when they saw him, rushed over to stand by the side of the road, wearing a broad smile, nodding or bowing to him, and intoning softly, “County Chief Liu.” By this point the sky was already dark, and he had moved from the city streets to a series of rural alleys. Not until he reached his family’s courtyard did the street lamps behind him finally come on.
Chief Liu had never before been so anxious to have someone recognize him and call out to him by name. He had originally decided to return to the city under the cover of darkness because he had been afraid of running into anyone, but when no one ran into him — or if people saw him, they didn’t recognize him — his heart felt as empty as a warehouse that had been robbed clean, to the point that only the empty building remained. At the very least, he told himself, the doorkeeper of his family’s courtyard would recognize him and would hurry out to greet him, but when he arrived at the entrance, the gatekeeper didn’t come out to meet him as he normally did. From a distance, Chief Liu had seen a light on inside the house, but when he arrived the entranceway was as quiet as a tomb.
He had no idea where the old gatekeeper had gone. The gate was open, but no one was there.
After dusting his feet in the entranceway, Chief Liu walked into the courtyard.
He had to return home.
He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he was last there. It seemed like a long, long time ago. His wife had told him that, if he could, he should stay away for three months, and he had replied, “Just watch me! I’ll stay away for half a year.”
It seemed that he had in fact been away from home for half a year. It was early spring when he left, and now it was the dead of winter.
Between visiting the countryside, attending meetings, and staying at the construction site of the Lenin Memorial Hall, it seemed that it had already been more than half a year. In fact, it was almost as if he had been away for several years. Sometimes he would be in the county seat, but he would prefer even to stay in his office rather than return home. And now, as he walked into his family’s courtyard, he suddenly felt he couldn’t remember what exactly his wife looked like. He couldn’t remember whether she was thin or fat, light- or dark-skinned, or even what kind of clothes she liked to wear.
By this point the sky was already dark but the moon and stars were not visible, as clouds covered the sky like black fog. As Chief Liu stood in the dark entranceway, he concentrated for a while until he finally remembered that his wife was in her mid-thirties, was short, and had a white face with jet black hair that she would often wear down to her shoulders. He remembered that she had a mole on her face, or what people called a beauty mark, and that it was black and brown, but for the life of him he couldn’t recall whether it was on the left or right side of her face.
The first thing he wanted to do as soon as he walked in was to check and see which side of her face the mole was on. He glanced up at his house, where he saw his wife’s sparrowlike shadow flit past the kitchen window. It passed in an instant, and his heart felt as if it had been gently stroked by something. He immediately strode forward.
He wanted to return home.
After walking only a few steps, he turned left, thinking that he should stop first at his Hall of Devotion to pay his respects. It had been half a year, or perhaps even several years, since he was last home, and who knew what condition the hall was in.
He therefore went first to his Hall of Devotion. He opened the door, closed it behind him, then turned on the lights. When the lights came on, he gazed at the portraits on the wall, but no longer felt the sense of livening that he used to feel when he looked at them. The portraits of Marx, Engels, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Hoxha, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, and Carlos Mariátegui were still hanging on the wall, just as before, and those of China’s ten great military leaders were still hanging below them. The only difference was that Chief Liu’s portrait was no longer on the second row where Lin Biao’s had been, but rather was now on the first row behind those of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.
Chief Liu stood in the center of the Hall of Devotion for what seemed like an eternity, letting the time in the room slowly flow past. In the end, he removed his portrait from its position behind Mao’s, and instead placed it in front of Marx’s, hanging it at the very front of the first row. Then, he filled in all of the empty rows on the sheet below his portrait, underlining them in red, and in the final space he wrote two rows of characters: