Niu Yueqing cried out, “Ma, did you hear that? Your son-in-law is saying that his fame is responsible for the Niu family prestige! I ask you, does he have the same renown that my father and grandfather enjoyed in their time?”
The old lady still lived in the house on Shuangren fu Avenue, refusing to move to an upstairs apartment in the Literary Federation compound, which forced Zhuang and his wife to travel back and forth between the two places. Every time he entered the street, images of the family’s history filled his mind. He’d stand by the sealed-up well and stare down at the saw-toothed grooves worn into the stone platform by ropes, trying to imagine how it had looked back then. But his wife was right to criticize him, he thought.
The sun beat down mercilessly as Zhuang rode his scooter into the street, engulfed in stifling heat. Sweat ran into his eyes. A stray dog lay panting in the middle of the road, its tongue lolling. Zhuang swerved to miss it and ran into a wall, managing somehow to stay upright, though he scraped some skin off his left thumb. Zhao Jingwu was inside talking to Niu Yueqing when he heard Zhuang ride in through the gate. He ran out to greet him. “It’s about time you got here.” He took the brick from the scooter rack and carried it inside.
“Don’t bring that filthy thing into the house!” Niu Yueqing complained.
“Look closer,” Zhuang said. “It’s from the Han dynasty.”
“You’ve piled up so many of those in the other house that people can’t get in the door; now you want to do the same here. You say they’re from the Han; well, the flies in the house are from the Tang!”
Zhuang cast Zhao Jingwu a pained look, but said, “That comment is pure art. Your art cells don’t catch fire till you’re angry.” He told Zhao to take the brick outside, tie it onto the back of the Magnolia, then come back inside.
It was an old house with large rooms, the walls and posts constructed of the best red pine. Though the carvings — portraits and nature images — were in bad shape, they attested to the original beauty of the place. The eighty-year-old matriarch, who was in her bedroom behind a dividing wall, summoned Zhuang when she heard his voice. She had lost her husband at the age of fifty, and by sixty-three was getting senile. Two years earlier, she had slept for two weeks straight; people thought she was about to die, but then she came back around. Ever since then, she had been spouting nonsense about death and ghosts and acting crazy. The winter before, she had abruptly demanded that Zhuang Zhidie buy her a red cypress coffin. “You’re in fine health,” Zhuang had said. “You’ll live another twenty years, so why buy a coffin now? Besides, underground burials aren’t permitted in the city.” She was unmoved. “I want a coffin as proof of my existence whenever I look at it.” She refused to eat or drink as a threat. Unable to say no, he asked someone to purchase a coffin on Mount Zhongnan. The old lady took her bed apart and put the bedding into the coffin, where she began to sleep. That caused a rift between her and her daughter, who complained that people might accuse them of mistreating her. But Zhuang told his wife that the old lady was probably suffering from narcissism and that they should let her do as she asked. Strangely, once she started sleeping in the coffin, she took to wearing a paper mask when she went out, so enraging her daughter that she kept her mother inside as much as possible. Zhuang, always ready to tease, said the old lady had special powers, and that if he had them he could write magic realist novels by sheer intuition, without imitating a foreigner.
He went into her room, where the window was tightly shut and the drapes were drawn. He was sweating the moment he stepped inside.
“You think this is hot?” she said. “When I was young, it got so hot on the sixth day of the sixth month, when the sun was bright red, that people hung their bedding out to dry, along with the old folks’ funeral garb. But your granddad walked out of the village under an umbrella without a word, so the villagers took in the laundry, some hurried, others slow, just before the sky opened up and rain pelted down. It’s not hot today. If you think it is, it’s all internal heat. Put some spit on your nipples and you’ll cool down.”
Zhuang merely smiled. The old lady spat on her finger and rubbed it on his nipples. A pair of chills entered his heart. He shuddered.
“Zhidie,” she said, “your father-in-law came back a while ago, sat where you’re sitting now, and told me he was upset. He can’t abide his new neighbors, says they’re always arguing and that their child is a handful, even comes over and steals food from them. I want you to light a stick of incense for him.” A funeral photo of Zhuang’s father-in-law stood on a table in the corner beside an incense burner filled with ashes. Zhuang lit a stick and looked up at a dust-filled cobweb in a corner of the room. He picked up her cane to knock it down.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “It’s his favorite place to sit.” Before Zhuang could say anything, she continued, “He came as soon as you lit the incense. Where have you been, damn you? How did you get here so fast?” Zhuang looked around but saw nothing. Smoke curled from the burning incense, rising like silk to the ceiling. She said that the old fellow was opening the box with the water district plaque. “That is the only antique that’s been passed down,” she said. “The mayor came to see it the last time he visited. Are you going to take it with you? If you do, what will I show him the next time?” She slipped the box, which she normally kept under her pillow, under her buttocks. That tickled Zhuang’s fancy; he was about to say something when his wife called to him: “What are you and Ma talking about in there? You’re free to leave when you’re done talking, but I’ll be afraid to go in there.”
Zhuang left the room. “Mother has some strange tales to tell, and I think she’s telepathic. The nineteenth is your father’s birthday, though we haven’t celebrated it for more than ten years, so this year buy some spirit paper for her to burn.” He turned to Zhao Jingwu. “Something on your mind?” he asked.
“Not really,” Zhao said. “I was just going to invite you to my place. It’s an old-style courtyard dwelling, one of many that the mayor wants to tear down to build a gymnasium. This might be your last chance to see it.”
“I keep meaning to go,” Zhuang said, “but I can never find the time. Let me remind you that you promised me some antiques.”
“No problem,” Zhao said with a laugh. “Anything I drag out from under my bed will be as good as your wall bricks. Your wife needn’t make lunch today. I’ll treat you both to a lunch of hulutou, that soup with pig entrails. There’s something important I want to talk to you about.”
“Hulutou, on a hot day like this?” Niu Yueqing said warily. “It’ll stink something awful. Count me out.”
“That shows how much you know,” Zhuang said. “It’s a Xijing specialty. Although it’s just steamed buns soaked in soupy intestines, the spices give it a unique flavor. The kind you get at Dongmen’s Fushunlai is inferior. The genuine article is served at Chunshengfa in Nanyuanmen, where legend has it that the ancestral founder was given a recipe by the famed Daoist healer Sun Simiao. You’ve never tasted anything like it. It could work wonders on your chronic constipation. You need to structure your diet for what your body needs. You really should try it.”
“Work wonders?” she replied. “Then why didn’t it work on Jingwu?”
“What about him?”
“He complained to me a while ago that he had his eye on a girl who lives on Tangfang Street, but he was embarrassed to tell her how he felt, so he watched her go to work in the mornings and leave in the afternoons. He mooned over her for a month. Then three days ago, while he was waiting, he heard firecrackers. He went to see what the commotion was about, and discovered it was the girl’s wedding — to someone else! Everything comes easy to Jingwu, everything but romance. Does he need to eat pig guts when he already has a pig brain?”