“You’ll never regain your position as deputy county chief, my friend, and restoring your membership in the Party is unlikely. But I think we can find you a government job to keep you going.”
“I’m grateful for the thoughtful consideration of our leaders, but there’s no need for that,” Jiefang replied. “I’m the son of a Ximen Village peasant, and this is where I want to live out my days.”
“Remember the old Party secretary Jin Bian?” Sha asked. “Well, here’s what he had in mind. He and your father-in-law Pang Hu are good friends, and if you two were to move into town, you could look after your father-in-law. The Standing Committee has approved your assignment as assistant director of the Cultural Exhibition Center. As for Comrade Chunmiao, she can return to the New China Bookstore if she’s willing. If not, we can find something else for her.”
Dear reader, returning to town was not something Jiefang and Chunmiao ought to have considered; but the opportunity to be working for the government and to look after her aging father was too good to pass up. Keep in mind that those two friends of mine were ordinary people not blessed with the ability to look into the future. They returned to town without delay. Since it was ordained by Fate, they could not have done otherwise.
At first they moved into Pang Hu’s house. Although he had once publicly, even heroically, disowned Chunmiao, he was, after all, a loving father, an old and ailing man, like a candle guttering in the wind, so he grew teary and his heart softened, especially after learning how difficult life had been for his daughter and the man who was now her legal husband. He put the ill will of the past aside, threw open his door, and welcomed them into his house.
Early each morning Jiefang rode his bicycle to the Cultural Exhibition Center. Given the cheerless, shabby layout of the center, assistant director was a title, not a job. There was nothing for him to “direct,” and all he did all day long was sit at his three-drawer desk, drinking weak tea, smoking cheap cigarettes, and reading the newspaper.
Chunmiao decided to return to the children’s section of the New China Bookstore, where she dealt with a new generation of boys and girls. By then the clerks she’d worked with before had retired, their places taken by young women in their twenties. Chunmiao also rode a bicycle to work; in the afternoon she’d swing by Theater Street to buy chicken gizzards or sheep’s head meat to take home for her father to enjoy with the little bit of liquor he and Jiefang, neither of whom could handle much alcohol, drank before dinner. They’d talk about little things, like brothers.
Chunmiao discovered she was pregnant around lunar New Year’s. Jiefang, who was in his fifties, was overjoyed. The news also brought tears to the eyes of Pang Hu, who was approaching eighty. Both men envisioned the joy of life with three generations living under one roof. But that image would quickly fade in the face of a looming disaster.
Chunmiao had bought some stewed donkey meat on Theater Street and was on her way home, singing happily to herself as she turned into Liquan Boulevard, where a Red Flag sedan coming from the opposite direction ran into her. The bicycle was turned into junk, the meat splattered on the ground, and she flew over to the side of the road, where she hit her head on the curb. She died before Jiefang arrived on the scene. The car that had hit her belonged to Du Luwen, onetime secretary of the Lüdian Township Party Committee, now deputy head of the county People’s Congress; it was driven by the son of one of Ximen Jinlong’s youthful pals, Young Tiger Sun.
I simply do not know how to describe what Jiefang felt when he saw her lying there; great novelists have set too high a standard in dealing with such traumatic moments.
Jiefang buried Chunmiao’s ashes in his father’s notorious plot of land, near Hezuo’s grave site; no marker was placed at the head of either grave. After weeds grew around Chunmiao’s grave, you could not tell them apart. Pang Hu died not long after his daughter was buried. Jiefang took the urns containing both his and Wang Leyun’s ashes back to Ximen Village and buried them next to his father, Lan Lian.
A few days later, Pang Kangmei, who was serving a prison term, went slightly mad and stabbed herself in the heart with a sharpened toothbrush. Chang Tianhong retrieved her ashes and went to see Lan Jiefang. “She was, after all, a member of your family,” he said, and Jiefang understood what he was trying to say. He took the ashes back to Ximen Village and buried them behind the graves of her parents.
55
Lovemaking Positions
Lan Kaifang rode his father, my friend Jiefang, over to the house on Tianhua Lane on his motorcycle. The sidecar was filled with his daily necessities. This time, instead of holding on to the metal bar, Jiefang wrapped his arms around his son’s waist. Kaifang was still very thin, but straight and strong as an unbending tree branch. My friend wept all the way from the Pang house to 1 Tianhua Lane; his tears wetted the back of his son’s police uniform.
He was understandably emotional as he stepped in through the gate for the first time since the day he’d left it supported by Chunmiao. The limbs of the parasol tree in the yard had reached the wall, with branches reaching over to the other side. As the old saying goes, “If trees can change, why can’t people?” But my friend had no time to ponder such thoughts, for he’d no sooner stepped into the yard than he saw through the gauzy covering of an open window in the east-side room, which had once been his study, a familiar figure. It was Huzhu, sitting there making paper cutouts, oblivious to all around her.
No question about it, this had been Kaifang’s doing, and my friend realized how lucky he was to have such a kind and considerate son. Not only did he bring his aunt and his father together, he also took Chang Tianhong, who had fallen into a depression, back to Ximen Village on his motorcycle to meet Baofeng, who’d been a widow for many years. He had once, long ago, been the man of her dreams, and he’d always had feelings for her. Her son, Gaige, was not a man with great ambitions; rather he was an honest, upright, hardworking peasant. He was happy to approve the marriage of his mother to Chang Tianhong, so they could live out their lives as a contented couple.
My friend Jiefang’s first love had been Huang Huzhu – to be fair, it was her hair he’d fallen in love with, and now, after lives marked by sadness and pain, the two of them were able to walk through life together. Kaifang spent most of his nights in a dormitory room and seldom came home to the house on Tianhua Lane, not even on weekends, owing to the demands of his job. That left only Jiefang and Huzhu in the house; they slept in their own rooms but ate their meals together. Huzhu, who’d never had much to say, spoke even less now, and when Jiefang asked her something, she replied only with a weak smile. For six months or so that is how things went, and then everything changed.
After dinner one spring evening, as a light rain fell outside, their hands touched while they were clearing the table. Something happened to their mood; their eyes met. Huzhu sighed. My friend did too. In a soft voice, Huzhu said:
“Why don’t you come in and comb my hair…”
He followed her into her room, where she handed him her comb and carefully removed her heavy hairnet. Her miraculous hair fell like waves all the way to the floor. For the first time in his life my friend was able to touch hair that he had admired from afar since his youth. A delicate citronella fragrance filled his nostrils and reached deep down into his soul.
Huzhu took several steps forward in order to let her hair out all the way, and when her knees touched the bed, my friend scooped up her hair in one arm and with great care and great tenderness began to comb. In fact, her hair did not need to be combed; thick and heavy and slippery, it never had split ends; it would be accurate to say that he was stroking it, fondling it, sensing it. His tears fell on her hair like drops of water splashing on the feathers of Mandarin ducks, and rolled off onto the floor.