Now that they'd been scratched, the piglets calmed down and grunted contentedly, gazing off into the distance as they rocked back and forth a bit before settling softly onto the ground. The little girl summoned up the courage to tug one of their ears and gently poke its belly. More contented grunts as both the little pigs started to fall asleep.
Having made up her mind to leave, the woman picked up the little girl, only to spark yet another tantrum. She put her down again, and as soon as the little feet hit the ground, they headed unsteadily right for the piglets; no more tears. A crafty smile spread across the peddler's face as he launched into yet another sales pitch.
“How much for one of those?” the woman asked him.
After a thoughtful “hmm,” he replied decisively:
“For anybody else, three hundred apiece, but you can have the pair for five hundred.”
“Can't you make it a little less?” she asked.
“Young lady, take a good look at those pigs. You don't see animals like that every day. They're purebred, living, breathing Yorkshires! Go to the toy section of any department store, and you'll find that a toy pig will cost you a couple of hundred! If my son weren't getting married and didn't need money to set up a household, I wouldn't part with these two for five thousand yuan, let alone five hundred!”
The woman smiled sweetly. “Slow down,” she said. “The next thing you'll be telling me is that they're a pair of unicorns!”
“That's not far from the truth!”
“I didn't bring any money with me.”
“No problem. I'll deliver them to your door.”
But when the peddler tugged on the tethers to leave, the piglets started scurrying back and forth, and he was forced to pick them up and tuck one under each arm. They squealed their displeasure.
“Stop squealing, little ones. Luck is with us today. You're about to become the happiest little pigs in the world. Joyful days are here for you two. Instead of squealing like that, you should be laughing.”
The peddler followed the woman into a lane, a pig under each arm. The little girl, who was perched on the woman's shoulders, turned around and laughed loudly at the sight of the pigs.
Old Ding watched the procession of pigs and people as long as he could with a growing sense of melancholy. Then he started walking again, all the way up to the middle of the overpass, where he stopped and thought dreamily about the captivating elegance of the young woman. The bridge too was crowded with little stalls, each one manned by a peddler who had the look of a laid-off worker. The overpass swayed slightly; gusts of hot wind hit him in the face. Cars whizzed back and forth on the sparkling asphalt below. He spotted his apprentice, Lü Xiaohu, wearing a yellow vest, speeding down the sidewalk across the way on his three-wheeled pedicab. A white canopy over the back shielded a stately young couple. They were traveling so fast he couldn't see the spokes in the wheels, which were just a silvery blur. The two heads behind the man up front touched from time to time. Sweat poured down Lü Xiaohu's face. He was no one to mess with, old Ding was thinking, but was a terrific fitter, and any fitter worthy of the name was good at just about anything he put his hand to.
After walking down off the overpass, he entered a farmer's market, filled with hope. The canopy over the market was made of green nylon, which gave the faces of all the vegetable sellers a green tint. The smell of vegetables, meat, fish, and fried snacks merged and engulfed him; so did the shouts of hawking peddlers. In front of one of the stalls he spotted Wang Dalan, the one-handed woman who had worked with him at the factory. She was watching over a pile of sticky strawberries.
“Ding Shifu,” she called to him warmly. “Where have you been keeping yourself?”
He stopped in his tracks. And when he did, he spotted three more former workers from the factory. They all smiled at him. Then they asked him to sample their wares.
“Have some strawberries, Ding Shifu!”
“How about a tomato, Ding Shifu?”
“Try one of my carrots, Ding Shifu!”
He was about to ask them how business was, until he got a good look at their faces. There was no need to ask. Life was tough, all right, but as long as you were willing to work hard and put your pride aside, you could always get by. But there was no way a man his age could compete with younger folks in opening a vegetable stall, let alone pedaling a pedicab like his apprentice. He also couldn't sell piglets out on the street; you couldn't call it hard work, but you needed the gift of gab, someone who could talk a dead man into coming back to life. At the factory, old Ding had a reputation for almost never having anything to say. This was all very disappointing, but he hadn't reached the point of despair. He'd take a look around and find something he could do. In fact, that's what he was doing now. He refused to believe that in a city this big, there wasn't a single thing he could do to make a living. And just as despair was beginning to creep in, the old man upstairs pointed out the way to riches.
Dusk was falling when he found himself in front of the hill behind the factory, where the blood-red rays of the setting sun danced on the brilliant surface of the man-made pond behind the hill. Carefree couples strolled along the path ringing the lake. After decades of working at the factory, this was the first time he'd ever made his way out to the hill, let alone strolled around the lake. For all those years, the factory had been his second home; the dozens of awards he'd earned represented buckets of sweat. He turned back to look once more at the factory: a workshop that had once buzzed with activity now stood quiet and deserted. The clang of steel on steel had become yesterday's dream; the chimney that had spewed black smoke for decades was now a sleeping volcano; the factory grounds were littered with tin can rejects and rusty cutting machinery; the yard behind the cafeteria was strewn with empty liquor bottles.
The factory was dead; a factory with no workers was nothing less than a graveyard. His eyes burned, his heart was filled with a mixture of sadness and anger. As the evening deepened, an eerie gloom rose above the hilltop thickets, heralded by the shriek of a bird that startled him. He massaged his sore leg and stood up. He walked back down the hill.
A cemetery occupied the area near the lake at the foot of the hill. It was the final resting place of over a hundred heroes from the life-and-death struggles of the city thirty years before. Lush green trees ringed the cemetery: there were pines, cypresses, and dozens of towering poplars. He walked over to the cemetery on a leg so sore he had to sit down on a stone marker. Crows saturated the night with caws from a nest in one of the poplars and magpies circled above as he massaged his leg. While he was rubbing it, his gaze drifted to the abandoned hulk of a bus on the ground beneath the poplar. No tires, no glass in the windows, and hardly any paint anywhere. Who, he wondered, left that thing here? And why? Occupational habit had him thinking how he could convert the thing into a living space. And at that moment he spotted a young couple skulking out of the cemetery, like a pair of specters, then slipping into the rusty bus. For some strange reason, he began breathing hard. One old Ding wanted only to get out of there as quickly as possible; a second old Ding couldn't tear himself away. While the two old Dings were engaged in a fierce battle of wills, a soft, lovely moan emerged from the bus hulk. That was followed by an irrepressible female scream, not all that different from the screech of a cat in heat, but distinct nonetheless. Old Ding couldn't see his own face, of course, but his ears were burning and even the puffs of air from his nose seemed overheated. There was a rustling noise in the bus just before the man popped out through the door. The woman followed a few moments later. He held his breath like a thief hiding in the bushes, not getting slowly to his feet until he heard a somewhat triumphant cough coming from the line of trees beyond the cemetery.