I saw the woman’s detached glanced sweep over us and a snort issued from her nostrils. ‘Taking your son with you on business! Is that any way to go about things?’
My father was in no mood to justify himself. Carrying his black briefcase, he sprinted up the stairs and left me alone in the strange concrete building, standing in a strange woman’s cold glare.
I saw that there was a pot of water in the registration room giving off puffs of steam, and that the water was boiling over a little. The several red flags and the portrait of Mao Zedong on the wall seemed damp and hazy. Beneath her desk, the woman was making some kind of mechanical movement with both hands; occasionally she looked at me askance. I very much wanted to know what she was doing and so, supporting myself on the sill, I jumped up to see. One pale hand gripped a circular embroidery frame, while the other pale hand held a needle and thread. I even saw the red flower on the white silk; a large, half-finished red flower.
‘What are you doing?’ The woman had noticed my hop, and with an action that was almost fearful, she threw down the things in her hands. Then she stuck out one hand to grab me by the arm, but I managed to escape her. Something ferocious lit up in her eyes as she picked up a piece of chalk from her desk and threw it at me, and with great anger in her voice she said, ‘You little spy! You little mole! Nasty brat! Get lost!’
I ran to the other side of the road. I thought the woman very weird: weird for secretly embroidering under the office desk and weird for her volcanic anger. What did I care what she was hiding her hands for? She was just embroidering a flower. Why did she have to do it on the sly? If I had known she was just embroidering, I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to look. The problem was that she didn’t know what I had had in mind. In fact, when I had lifted myself up to look at her hands, I had hoped to see a playing card; maybe even the Q of Hearts.
And so it was that the first time I went to Shanghai, I was filled with an immense sense of loss. My father took me by the hand and walked me angrily through the streets. He said, ‘Playing cards! Playing cards! Don’t you know that’s the feudocapitalistic plaything of revisionists? A very bad thing!’
I am now certain that the hostel we stayed in on that occasion was near the Bund or the Huangpu River, because during the night I heard the great Customs House clock strike and the sound of whistles from the little steamboats and cargo ships. I also remember that there were three beds in the hostel, and over each bed was hung a tent-like mosquito net which would usually be for summer use. Besides my father and me, there was another man with a northern accent and a full beard as hard as hog bristles.
Initially, I slept by myself in one bed. The light was on, and outside my window, the wail of the city descended into darkness. I couldn’t see anything outside; I could only see through the mosquito net to the wall of the room. The wall was off-white, and on it was a Patriotic Hygiene Month propaganda drawing. It seemed to me that the man grasping a fly-swatter on the drawing looked a lot like Cathead from our street — Cathead might also have been connected with the stolen Q of Hearts, another likely suspect — and so I pondered the question of Cathead and the Q of Hearts. Then suddenly I saw the bloodstain. It was like a map that had been printed on the wall, right against the mosquito net and only a palm’s width from the edge my pillow.
‘There’s blood on the wall!’ I cried out loudly to my father, who was lying on the next bed over.
‘What blood?’ My father raised himself up slightly on his bed and gave it a cursory glance. ‘It’s mosquito blood,’ he said. ‘Someone killed the mosquitoes in summer and the blood stuck to the wall.’
‘It’s not mosquito blood.’ I examined the bloodstain with no little fear. ‘Who ever heard of so much blood coming from a mosquito?’
‘Don’t worry about it. Close your eyes and have a good sleep. They’ll turn off the light in a second,’ my father said.
I saw the hog-bristle man extract himself from the mosquito net. He ran over to my bed in a few steps and lifted the mosquito net up over my bed. ‘You mean this bloodspot?’ First he glanced at me, and then he directed his shining gaze at the bloodspot on the wall. I saw him make an alarming action: he put his index finger in his mouth and kept it there for a moment. Then, he cold-bloodedly extended it to scrape off some of the blood before returning it to his mouth. Next I saw him frown slightly and spit on the floor.
‘It’s human blood.’ He jumped back into his own bed and chuckled from inside the net. ‘Human blood. As soon as I saw it, I knew that’s what it was.’
For a moment, the dread made my heart beat madly in my breast and I threw myself into my father’s bed and said nothing, covering myself under his blankets.
‘It must have spurted up from someone’s head; I could tell as soon as I saw it,’ the hog-bristle man said. ‘If you use an awl to crack open someone’s head, that’s exactly what the blood looks like when it spatters on the wall. And if you swing your belt at someone it’s about the same. I could tell as soon as I saw it. They must have detained somebody here.’
‘Impossible. This is a hostel,’ my father said.
‘You think you can’t detain people in hostels?’ The hog-bristle man emitted another contemptuous laugh and said, ‘I guess you haven’t been around for much of all this. They detained someone in our unit’s bathhouse, and the blood there isn’t on the wall, it’s on the ceiling. On the ceiling! Do you know how human blood gets on a ceiling? If you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, you’ll never guess.’
‘Never mind that. I’m with my son.’ My father said, interrupting his monologue. ‘I’m with my son and kids are easily frightened.’
Then the man stopped speaking. The lights were turned off and the hostel rooms suddenly sank into darkness. Even the bloodspot on the wall fell into the oblivion. Except for an unclear whitish glare, I could see nothing on the walls now. I heard the hog-bristle man on the bed across from me snoring thickly, and then my father started snoring too.
Kids are easily frightened. The whole night I clasped my father’s arm, imagining the events that had happened in the hostel, imagining one person bleeding and another one holding an awl or a belt. For a long while I couldn’t fall asleep. I remember clearly being in Shanghai and hearing the midnight toll of a clock and thinking that it must be the sound of the famous clock on the Customs House.
The next day there was no sun in Shanghai, and the sky looked like a greyish iron sheet covering the tops of the high buildings and telephone poles. My father, grasping a slip of paper, took me back and forth through an enormous emporium. On the paper was a list of knitting wool, bedsheets, leather shoes including sizes, plus other such products — a list entrusted to my father by my neighbours, for him to make purchases on their behalf. In that building, which still held obvious traces of colonial taste, the people were as many and as jumbled as the goods for sale. At the leather shoes counter, I very nearly lost my father. I had gone up to the stationery counter, mistakenly thinking that a box of paper clips might contain playing cards. When I returned, crestfallen, to sit on the shoe-trial stool, I saw that the person sitting next to me was no longer my father, but a stranger in a blue woollen tunic suit.