I suddenly realized that the movement I had been doing was straight out of The Red Children. This was a dance for twelve, six boys and six girls, holding brooms, mops and rags, and making cleaning movements. It was always the finale of our school’s performance, but now the window-cleaning boy had changed schools, so Xiaoguo and I were being called in to substitute. Ms Duan said, ‘Now you two make certain you practise, and whoever dances better will be selected for the performance.’
Only many years later did I realize that what she had meant was for us to compete. I didn’t catch on at the time; back then all I knew was how much I hated Xiaoguo. I was just itching to ask Cat Head, Jia Lin and some of the others in the big kids’ gang to break his legs. No doubt Xiaoguo’s thoughts were equally truculent. ‘The east wind blows, the war drums boom, now we’ll see who’s scared of whom.’ There was a song that went like that.12
I was in fact only provisionally a member of the cultural propaganda team; not really so very glorious a position. The thirteen children of the cultural propaganda team gathered in the big classroom on Wednesdays and at weekends, and, at the sound of the music, began dancing around Ms Duan like chicks around an old hen. I mingled among them, filled with the kind of joy you don’t ever forget.
What I will relate next concerns the dancing of another child. She was an extraordinarily beautiful little girl and her name was Zhao Wenyan, which means swallow. Later, when I read about the art theorist Cai Yi’s ‘typical image’,13 I felt that he must have had someone like her in mind; no doubt this association was inspired by impressions of her back then. For me, she was an archetype.
And she was the Red Child who held the mop.
Wenyan’s mother had been a dancer, but afterwards, why I never knew, she kept trying to hang herself. This happened over and over again, but she never actually succeeded in taking her life. From what I heard, it was always Wenyan who found her and, screaming and wailing, would slide a chair under her mother’s feet. Her mother then had no choice but to resign herself once more to soldier on. I had seen her mother on the street before; she looked almost identical to Wenyan, except she was a little taller and a little older. She had two maroon stripes on her neck, groove-like scars, left from the noose.
Once Wenyan had her make-up on, she had the power of an angel to induce love and pity, but as soon as she came on stage she began to get nervous. And as soon as she was nervous, she squatted down and peed onstage. This is called urinary incontinence, and I’ve heard that many beautiful girls are afflicted with this peculiar illness in their childhood. That the propaganda team had not dropped Wenyan was in the first instance because of her extraordinary beauty and in the second because Ms Duan couldn’t bear to part with her. Ms Duan said, ‘She’s had so many frights, poor child.’
I’ve never met another girl like her; she was a little child of glass. Yes, exactly, a little child of glass, beautiful in her sorrow, glowing cautiously with some emerald light. She wore a little patterned dress, and when she ran to centre stage, radiating her innate beauty, she held her mop with such natural elegance that it might have been a bouquet of fresh flowers. But as soon as you saw her squat down, you knew that before long the cotton dress would be wet. Even someone who was only a little boy at the time could never have forgotten this archetypal image of her, and that’s all there was to it.
Then, on another enchanting spring afternoon, I fought with Xiaoguo. I made his little garlic-bulb nose bleed, while he kept trying to pull down my trousers and rip them. I had to cover up the seat of my pants with my school bag all the way home that day.
Analysis today would conclude that I lost. Xiaoguo was a wily old fox.
The east wind blows, the war drums boom. Spring passed very quickly.
Only seven or eight days before the performance, Ms Duan called me aside and whispered secretly into my ear, ‘Dance nicely and I’ll let you go on.’ That was precisely the whispering-in-your-ear kind of woman Ms Duan was, a rare kind of woman for this world. Her waist was more supple than an eight-year-old’s, her dance steps more graceful than the bending of a willow in the wind. She had danced that way since her youth and forgotten to get married or have children, so that she was an old maid.
That whisper was the last time she ever spoke to me. During the rehearsal that followed, something terrible happened. On that day Ms Duan’s cheeks were flushed; as always, she was leading the team in our dance like an old hen with her chicks: ‘Arms a little higher.’ And then, ‘Why do you always forget to smile? You must smile. Smile beautifully like little red flowers.’ I remember Ms Duan gripping Xiaoguo’s arm to prevent it stiffening, but Xiaoguo was a born nincompoop, and his arms kept flailing randomly in the air like wooden rods. Ms Duan leapt in and out of our dancing ring, hopping about and mimicking window-cleaning movements. I saw her as she suddenly stopped moving, and her two lovely arms hung in the air freeze-framed. During the space of that moment, the light in her eyes slackened, then I watched as her plumpish body fell backwards.
Wenyan was the first one to burst into tears; before the rest of us reacted, she cried out, ‘Ms Duan’s dead!’ and ran down to the office to fetch a teacher. After a spell of confusion, we thirteen children went along to see Ms Duan at the hospital.
It was called cerebral thrombosis: a sudden attack brought on by high blood pressure. Given how much we understood of the workings of the world, we children were unable to comprehend the connection between haemorrhage and death. I had always assumed that school teachers were immortal; that if Ms Duan had passed on for a moment, she would return to life a second later. But the next day, as soon as I arrived at school, I heard that Ms Duan had died. Wenyan was bent over her desk, bawling her heart out. Her school bag was flung out on the desk, and inside was a pair of white running shoes — they had dropped off Ms Duan’s feet on the way to the hospital.
The concept of a connection between death and dancing was even harder to grasp. It was as if Ms Duan was leading us as we danced, but how was it that she suddenly had one foot in the Kingdom of the Dead?
People die all the time. Sometimes it comes heavy as a mountain, sometimes as light as a goose feather.
After Ms Duan’s death, I assumed the propaganda team had been disbanded because no one called me to practices. Those were enchanting spring afternoons — in simple stories, it is best to use phrases like ‘enchanting spring afternoon’ quite frequently in order to avoid complicating a simple matter. The redbud tree blossomed. Wenyan started to wear skirts. And that’s all there was to it.
One day, as I walked past the window of the big classroom, I discovered to my amazement that Wenyan, Xiaoguo and the others were rehearsing; the principal and a strange woman were conducting them. There were twelve children — six boys, six girls — but not me.
What about me? Hadn’t they said I would go on and Xiaoguo would go to hell? I leaned on the windowsill and peered in at them; I wanted to go in, but didn’t dare. I couldn’t understand how they could have dropped me and picked Xiaoguo, that champion nincompoop. It was the first time in my life that I felt a sense of loss. I was twelve at the time. A sense of loss at that age! And dance being to blame. First they say they’ll let you perform, then they suddenly don’t even want you at rehearsal; how could you not feel hurt?
On yet another enchanting spring afternoon, I fought Xiaoguo again. This time I held him down in the sandbox so he couldn’t rip my trousers. With superhuman strength, I began to fill Xiaoguo’s mouth with sand, then suddenly I remembered what Ms Duan had said, ‘Dance nicely and I’ll let you go on.’ So I let Xiaoguo go and instead broke into tears myself. I was facing a broken-down wall, and vaguely through my tears I saw that outside the wall was a rapeseed field filled with grieving golden flowers. This time I had won the fight, and yet incomprehensibly I was the one who had ended up in tears. It was the most embarrassing incident in all the historical records of my brilliant youth.