* * *
Indeed he did not come. Having waited until two in the afternoon, the Mengs felt certain that he would not; they had become familiar with the pattern of Papa Qi’s visits. When the clock struck two, they looked at one another and smiled. Ningzhu said, ‘Like I said, he won’t come today.’
Meng replied, ‘He didn’t come today; he’s given us our Saturdays back.’ He’d meant to say it in a humorous tone, but could tell that somehow he’d sounded nervous, serious, anything but humorous.
Papa Qi did not come, and Saturday afternoon seemed very tranquil and empty. For a time, Meng didn’t know what to do with himself; it felt as if this interlude had been stolen from Papa Qi. Somehow, he couldn’t bear to fritter it away. He wandered around at home, and in the end asked Ningzhu, ‘Tell me what I should be doing.’
She said, not without satisfaction, ‘Anything you like. Why don’t you read? You haven’t read in six months.’
So Meng took a specialist book out, read a little and then raised his head, saying, ‘What’s that sound? I keep hearing something.’
Ningzhu put down her magazine, too, and said, ‘You’re right. It’s some kind of droning. I can hear it. Weird. The noise doesn’t seem to be coming from anywhere.’
Both their glances came to rest simultaneously on the shelf underneath the coffee table where the Philips razor lay silent. Since no one had switched it on, it couldn’t possibly be making any noise, and both of them knew that this incident could only be attributed to their own hypersensitive nerves.
Meng couldn’t remember at what time — perhaps it was three o’clock, perhaps four, in any case later than Papa Qi usually came — they suddenly heard the sound of a bicycle bell outside. Before Papa Qi knocked on the door he always rang his bicycle bell; it was practically a rule. Meng felt stunned for a moment; he watched Ningzhu jump up from the sofa. Panic-stricken, she grabbed his hand, and before he had worked out what was going on, she had pulled him behind her into the bedroom.
‘Don’t say anything.’ Ningzhu covered his mouth and hissed at him, ‘You mustn’t say anything — you mustn’t open the door to him. He’ll knock for a little longer and then leave.’
Meng felt like a burglar, his heart beat so fast it threatened to stop altogether. He stared at Ningzhu, wanting to laugh, but couldn’t get the sound out. ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ he mumbled as he put out his hand and quietly shut the bedroom door.
Outside Papa Qi knocked on the front door, and as he knocked he called out their names. Initially, the knocking was gentle and patient but gradually it became louder and more urgent, like thunderclaps they could hear all the way from the bedroom. Meng’s hand kneaded his chest while Ningzhu covered her ears. They looked at each another and saw the resolve on one another’s face. They waited for about five minutes until finally it was silent outside.
Meng sighed first and said to Ningzhu, ‘We’re going too far. He might realize we’re at home.’
She shook her head at him, and walked stealthily to the window. He understood what it was she intended to do as she carefully turned up a corner of the curtain to peer outside. Suddenly he had a premonition, but it was the kind of premonition that comes too late — already he could hear Ningzhu’s hysterical screams.
She later described to him the scene as her eyes met Papa Qi’s as he rang his bicycle bell about a metre from the window. When he saw her, his expression became vacant and confused, a sight that made Ningzhu feel so ashamed she wanted to sink to the ground. ‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ she said, choking on her sobs. ‘When I think of the way he looked, I regret everything. I went too far. oh, I’m so terribly sorry.’
Now that matters had reached this point, Meng had no way of consoling his wife, and when he imagined Papa Qi’s expression, he too felt wretched. He said, ‘There’s no point regretting it now. He gets it. He won’t come back to our home again.’
After that Papa Qi didn’t return; not on Saturdays, nor Fridays nor Sundays either, not to mention any other day of the week. Meng knew that he had lost his friend for ever. For a very long time after that he would imagine sounds every Saturday: the ringing of bicycle bells in the street always drew his attention, and between two and two-thirty in the afternoon he would dimly hear the buzzing of the razor. One day he took the head off and saw that there was a thick layer of stubble inside, looking just like black dust. He went outside his door, puffed out his cheeks and blew the head clean of stubble. If Papa Qi wasn’t going to come round any more, then the razor was Meng’s to use. Afterwards, without his even noticing, the imaginary sound disappeared.
How many people meet every day on trains, only to go their separate ways when they reach their destination? In the end, the relationship between Papa Qi and Meng confirmed the conventional wisdom. Of course it was sheer coincidence that they saw one another once more on a train platform; the difference this time was that Meng was getting on a train to go out of town on business while Papa Qi had come to the station to see off some guests. It was a group from the north-east, and Meng guessed that these were Papa Qi’s new friends.
Meng was positive that Papa Qi had seen him — his eyes skimmed past Meng several times, but his gaze deliberately blanked him out. Meng was too ashamed to greet him and kept his own head down, observing Papa Qi while he anxiously waited for the train to start. When it did, he saw Papa Qi waving from the platform but Meng knew that he was not waving at him; he was waving to those new north-eastern friends of his.
Thieves
‘The thief reminiscing in a box.’ An intriguing phrase like that doesn’t just come out of nowhere. In fact, it originated from a word game. It was late one Christmas Day and a few Chinese people, in an attempt to be trendy, had consumed a half-cooked turkey and quite a large quantity of red and white wine with surprisingly few ill effects. They chatted until at last there was nothing more to chat about, and finally someone suggested they should play a word game. The rules called for the participants to write down subject, verb and location on separate pieces of paper. The more slips of paper submitted, the greater the number of sentences that could be randomly assembled. They were all old hands at this, adept at choosing peculiar phrases. Consequently, the pieced-together sentences could be quite amusing, and sometimes there were real side-splitters. The participants wracked their brains before writing down the words on separate slips of paper and piling them all on the table. Afterwards one of them, a young man called Yu Yong, picked out the following three slips: ‘The thief/reminiscing/in a box.’
The game’s purpose had been achieved. The Yuletide merrymakers broke into uproarious laughter. Yu Yong laughed too. When the hilarity had died down, one of his friends teased him, asking, ‘Well, Yu Yong, do you have any reminiscences like that you can share?’
He responded, ‘What, you mean thieving reminiscences?’
And his friends all said, ‘Of course. Thieving reminiscences.’ They looked at him as he scratched his cheek, searching his memory, but he didn’t seem to be exerting himself unduly, and they were about to start the game again when Yu Yong cried out, ‘I’ve got one — a memory. I really do have a thieving reminiscence — there was something like that, a long time ago. ’