Water gourd. Sunflower. I’m sure she forgot that agreement long ago. I can imagine the belly laugh with which she’d greet this explanation. ‘You’re weird, Ku Dongliang,’ she’d say. ‘That’s a stupid limerick, it doesn’t make sense, like a fart in the wind. A water gourd loves water, a sunflower loves the sun. Not only that, but a water gourd lives on the river, a sunflower lives on the shore, so how could they ever come together?’
I’d stand there and take her mockery. Would it anger me? Sure. But mainly it would break my heart, the sadness emanating from both my rational nature and my inferiority complex. Only a deranged water gourd would fall in love with a sunflower. A water gourd that waits for a sunflower has lost its grip on reality. For me, this was the final pipe dream of my youth. My ruminations concealed my timidity, my obstinacy obscured my despair. I, Ku Dongliang, was a twenty-six-year-old man of average intelligence, with a well-developed body, a decent appearance and a fiery libido, yet I lacked the courage to tell a girl I was waiting for her. Kongpi, Kongpi, Kongpi, Kongpi! My life was enshrouded by that nickname, and I needed no one to waken me from that dream of mine. I was alert to the fact that waiting was, for me, kongpi.
Having grown used to that pointless waiting, I had gone to the barbershop to see a girl with love and sadness in my heart. That love and that sadness were simply kongpi. So too was my secret, since it could not be revealed. I certainly didn’t have the right to reveal it, but kongpi has the right to drift along. And it was this incredibly base right that I exercised on shore in the People’s Barbershop, waiting for and watching over Huixian.
I wasn’t conscious of my abnormal behaviour until one day when Desheng’s wife quietly summoned me to the stern of our barge. From where she stood on the bow of barge number eight, she said, giving me a strange look, ‘Did you go to the barbershop again today?’
‘I’m no counter-revolutionary,’ I said, ‘so I can go where I want. Is going to a barbershop against the law?’
With a grim smile, she said, ‘It’s not against the law, it’s just repugnant!’ Then she blasted me: ‘What crazy thoughts are running through that head of yours, Dongliang? What is Huixian to you? And what are you to her? As soon as you go ashore you run over to spy on her. Why?’
I was speechless. Spy? Yes, I was spying on her. Desheng’s wife had laid bare my secret with a single remark. Though I was in no mood to admit she was right, I realized the nature of the right that I had been exercising. It was to spy, that and only that. There was nothing false about her accusation. I’d been spying on Huixian.
Everyone said that Huixian had a secret, and I longed to find out what it was. My waiting may well have been kongpi, but I wanted to know the nature of hers; who was she waiting for? The fleet was a hotbed of rumours regarding her marriage prospects. Some views were based on gossip overheard on the shore, others sprang from the rumour-mongers’ own baseless thoughts. Some of what I heard was fine-sounding and utterly fantastic talk: Huixian was waiting for a singer in Beijing who had been her voice coach when she was with the district artistic propaganda team. Their relationship had developed to the point where the artist was waiting for Huixian’s twentieth birthday, when he would return and take her back to Beijing.
One of the other stories seemed credible. It also happened to be vulgar and sordid. Bureau Chief Liu’s grandson, the story went, had returned to Milltown and gone to see Huixian at the barbershop. A life of luxury had fattened him up and turned him so sluggish that she did not recognize him until halfway through the haircut she was giving him. How? Not visually, and not by smell, but with her breasts. All the time she was cutting his hair he kept brushing his arm against her full breasts. Finally, she grabbed his arm and said, ‘I know who you are. Everyone else may have forgotten me after all these years, but not you. You haven’t given up your desire for my breasts.’
Realizing what was happening, the people waiting their turn jumped up and surrounded Little Liu. ‘Chief Liu has been dead a long time,’ Old Cui said, grabbing Little Liu by the collar, ‘so there’s no reason to worry about offending him. The last time Chief Liu came to town, I gave him a shave, and not only did he refuse to exploit his authority, but he gave me a cigarette in thanks. How could a wonderful leader like him have a prick like you for a grandson?’ Together they hustled him out of the barbershop.
But before he was out of the door, his head half shaved, he apologized to Huixian and pleaded with them to let her finish the job. ‘I can’t go out looking like this,’ he said.
But Huixian stood by the door and said, ‘That’s exactly how you’re going out! Now you’ll know how it feels to be outside with half your head shaved. You people never gave me a thought when you treated me the same way — my life was in the same disarray as your head. Didn’t I go out into the world and keep on living?’
I recorded every rumour about Huixian in my diary. But rumours are just rumours. So I wrote them down in pencil, and rewrote them in pen and ink only when they proved to be true. Dark pencil, blue ink, even an occasional entry in red — a mix of colours that enhanced each other’s beauty. But that wasn’t why I did it. I owed it to Huixian, and I owed it to myself.
What I needed was facts, the truth. But I lived on a barge and she lived on the shore. How could a ship’s mast observe flowing water? And how could flowing water keep watch over the banks of a river?
I continued to observe Huixian, but I did not learn any of her secrets.
Secrets
BECAUSE OF Huixian, though I lived on a boat, my heart was on the shore.
I refused to let Father witness my suffering, half of which came from the secret buried in my soul, the other half from the secret my body held. As far back as my youth, erections had been a constant worry. Maybe it was the enduring loneliness of being aboard a barge, or maybe I was simply oversexed, but my genitals were like a volcano about to erupt. Day or night, it made no difference: if I let down my guard even for a moment, the volcano erupted. I had observed Chunsheng and Dayong when they were looking at girls on the shore. Their eyes blazed as unhealthy thoughts ran through their minds, but the front of their trousers stayed flat. Not me. I dreaded the summer, when Huixian dressed in skirts that exposed her knees; one look and I lost control. I wondered if I had a sickness. I know Father thought so. But he did not think it was physical; as he saw it, it was a character flaw.