At this point I opened my mouth wide, stood on the chair and wailed. My bewildered father rushed over, threw down what he was carrying and gave me a couple of spanks. He said, ‘I told you not to run off, and what did you do? How many times have I told you? This is Shanghai. If you get lost, no one will find you.’ I said that I hadn’t run off, I had been looking for some cards. My father made no further recriminations, but took me by the hand, and in silence we set off towards the exit. ‘There aren’t any cards in Shanghai, either,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Maybe you can get some in the little towns and villages. When I get sent to Jiangxi I’ll take a look for you, OK?’
To cheer me up my father took me to the banks of the Huangpu River to look at the boats. When we reached the river, a slushy rain began to fall and there were few pedestrians along the Bund. We walked along the iron railings, and I saw for the first time the river heading out to sea. The water was a greyish yellow with ripples of oil; I was thoroughly disillusioned, for it was the complete opposite of what I had imagined. I also saw a great many gulls, with their slender, nimble wings; their cries were a hundred times more sonorous than those of the sparrows outside our eaves in the trees of Mahogany Street. It was the boats that excited the most profound excitement though, both those moored and those moving about the river; their masts, portholes, smokestacks, anchor posts, not to mention the colourful flags whistling in the wind. It seemed to me that they were no different from those I had drawn in my sketchbook.
After that, it was just rain and snow swirling down onto the Shanghai streets, all the way until my father climbed onto the short-distance train, which was the abrupt conclusion to my Shanghai trip. Also, the wretched weather made the afternoon darken prematurely, and my impressions of the road home are of gloom and cold.
The carriage was almost entirely empty, and every wooden seat seemed to exude its own chill. We started off sitting in the middle of the carriage, but one of the glass windows had been shattered and so my father led me to the back, near the bathroom, where the faint smell of piss could be detected, but it was warmer. I recall that when my father took off his blue woollen tunic suit to drape over me, I asked him, ‘Isn’t there anyone on the train? Just us two?’ and my father said, ‘The weather’s bad today and it’s a slow train, so there aren’t so many people.’
Just as the train was about to depart, four men suddenly boarded. Carrying with them the outside chill they burst into the carriage; the three young men were wearing padded army overcoats, and only the old one, who was wearing a gauze mask, had on a blue cotton tunic suit like my father’s. As soon as they came in I knew that it was snowing hard, for I saw that their hats and shoulders were covered in large flakes.
This is what I wanted to tell you about: these sudden arrivals, especially the man in the mask, who was constantly being pressed and jostled by the three others. They passed us and chose the seats in the middle of the carriage, where we had been sitting before; they didn’t seem to mind the cold. I saw the old man sitting between two of his companions. He began to turn his head towards us, but before he could finish this movement his grey head was jerked back by something. Across two rows of seats, I could see his stiff back; one of the others took his hat off to shake the snow off, but that was all — I didn’t hear them speak a single word.
‘Who are they?’ I asked my father.
‘I don’t know.’ My father, too, watched detachedly, but he wouldn’t let me stand up to have a closer look, just saying, ‘Sit down. You’re not allowed to walk over there; and don’t stare.’
The train sped through the wind and snow of 1969, along open country. Outside the window was almost nocturnal darkness, and a thin cloth of snow already lay on the idle winter fields. My father told me to look at the snowy landscape outside, so I peered out of the window. Suddenly, I heard a sound in the car. It was the four of them standing up; the three wearing overcoats clustered around the old man in the mask. They walked into the aisle towards us and I quickly realized they were heading to the bathroom. What astonished me, however, was the man in the mask. He was being propped up and pushed forward and as he glanced from behind his companions’ shoulders, he was staring at my father and me. I saw his tears clearly; the old man in the mask had eyes filled with tears!
Although my father pulled me forcefully towards the window, I nevertheless saw how three of them entered the bathroom, and that one of them was the masked old man. One of the young men stayed outside the door; he wasn’t much older than my brother but he threw me a frosty glance that frightened me. I drew back my head and quietly told my father, ‘They’ve gone into the bathroom.’
Three of them went into the bathroom, but the old man in the mask did not come back out, only the two young men. Then I heard the three men in overcoats whisper to one another as they stood by the carriage links. I couldn’t help but turn my head towards them, and what I saw was how the three men in overcoats, one of whom was straightening out his collar to protect his ears, opened the door to the next carriage and disappeared from my field of vision.
I didn’t know what had happened to the old man with the mask. I wanted to have a look in the bathroom, but my father wouldn’t let me move a muscle, saying, ‘Sit down. You can’t go anywhere.’ It seemed to me that my father’s manner and voice were very nervous. I don’t know how much time went by before the conductor led a cultural propaganda team into our carriage, carrying drums, gongs and copper cymbals. Only then did my father relax his grip on my hand, which he had been holding throughout. He sighed with relief and asked, ‘You need to go to the bathroom? I’ll take you.’
The bathroom door was unlocked and as we opened it a fierce gust made me shiver. With one glance, I saw that the little bathroom window was open and that wind and snow were blowing in. There was no one in the bathroom. There was no masked old man.
‘The old man isn’t here,’ I cried out. ‘Why isn’t he in here?’
‘Who’s not here?’ my father asked, avoiding my eyes. ‘They went into another carriage.’
‘The old man isn’t here. He was in the bathroom,’ I yelled. ‘How come he isn’t here?’
‘He went into another carriage. Don’t you have to pee?’ my father said, looking at the swirling snow outside the window. ‘It’s so cold here; hurry up and take a pee, all right?’
I did have to pee, but suddenly I saw that on the wet, grimy floor was a playing card. If I tell you, no doubt you won’t believe me, but it was a Q of Hearts. As soon as I saw it, I knew that it was a Q of Hearts, the very Q of Hearts I had lost and been unable to find. I’m sure you can imagine what I did — I bent down and picked up that card from the ground or, to be more accurate, I scraped it up and wiped the muddy snow off it. I waved it at my father, ‘The Q of Hearts! It’s the Q of Hearts, the one I needed!’ I remember how my father’s expression altered rapidly — astonishment, confusion, shock and fear — but in the end it was nothing but fear; in the end my terrified father snatched the Q of Hearts out of my hand and threw it with one gesture out the window, yelling confusedly, ‘Throw it out! Hurry! Don’t just hold it, blood! There’s blood on the card!’
I would wager that there wasn’t one trace of blood on that card, but on the other hand, it isn’t as if my father had been speaking deliriously, either.
That 1969 trip to Shanghai acquired in my memory a mysterious postscript — the old man in the mask, the Q of Hearts. Through my entire childhood, my father refused to discuss what happened on the train, and for that reason I’ve always believed that the man on the train must have been mute. Only a few years ago, when my father was able to talk about events now long in the past, did he correct this error in my memory. ‘You were still a kid then, you couldn’t tell,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t mute. No way he was a mute. You didn’t see it, but the mask was moving — his tongue, his tongue had been. they had. had. ’