Wu Chao lowered his head in thought. “For my girlfriend,” he said.
“Same as me,” the other man said.
He had a steady girlfriend back in the countryside, he told Wu Chao. He wanted to marry her, but her parents insisted he needed to have a house first. So he took a job in the city, but the money he made was pitiful — he would need to work nine or ten years before he’d have enough to build a house, and his girlfriend would have married someone else long before that. Selling his kidney was the quickest way to finance the house construction.
“This money comes easy,” he said.
He gave a laugh. That’s just the way it was back home, he said — if you don’t have a house, you can forget about marriage. “Is it the same where you’re from?” he asked.
Wu Chao nodded. His eyes suddenly got wet, for he thought of Mouse Girl and how she had stuck with him through thick and thin despite his poverty and failures in life. He bowed his head, not wanting his tears to be seen.
After a moment he raised his head. “Didn’t your girlfriend want to leave and get a job in the city as well?”
“She wanted to,” the man said, “but her father was bedridden and her mother was in poor health too. She’s their only daughter — they have no sons — so she can’t get away.”
Wu Chao thought of Mouse Girl’s fate. “Maybe it’s better that way.”
Life on the fifth floor was a complete contrast to life in the basement. There was no foul air and the quilt was clean. There was natural light. In the morning Wu Chao could eat an egg, a meat bun, and a bowl of congee; at midday and in the evening he ate boxed meals with either meat or fish.
Wu Chao woke up in sunlight and fell asleep by moonlight—
sensations long denied him, since for a year or more he had woken and slept in an underground world with neither sun nor moon. Now he appreciated their beauty, and even when he closed his eyes he could feel how they brightened the room. Outside his window was a tree that had turned dry and yellow in the winter cold, but even so, birds would fly over and rest on its limbs, sometimes chirping away, then flapping their wings and soaring over the rooftops. He thought of Mouse Girl and how she too had never experienced this kind of life during their time together. He couldn’t help but feel sad.
Three days later, Wu Chao followed the middle-aged man into a windowless room. A man wearing glasses who looked like he might be a doctor asked him to lie down on a crude operating table. A powerful light shone in his face, and even after he closed his eyes they still felt sore. With the anesthetic, he lost consciousness, and when he came around he found himself lying on his bed on the fifth floor once more. The room was completely silent, for the man who had been there was now gone and Wu Chao was the only occupant. Next to his pillow lay a bag of antibiotics and a bottle of mineral water. At the slightest movement he felt an acute stab of pain in his left side, and he knew he’d lost his left kidney.
The middle-aged man came by twice a day to make sure he took the antibiotics at the proper time. The man told him that he would be able to go back home in a week. Wu Chao lay alone in the room; his only other visitors were the birds. Some would flit past his window, while others would linger briefly on the branches outside, their raucous jabber sounding to his ears like idle chatter.
After a week the middle-aged man gave him thirty-five thousand yuan in cash, summoned a taxi, and sent two of his underlings to see him back to his home in the bomb shelter.
Wu Chao’s neighbors, seeing two strangers carry him in and lay him on his bed, knew he must have sold a kidney so that Mouse Girl could get a proper burial.
Wu Chao lay in bed. After a few more days he had finished all the antibiotics, but his high fever had not abated and on several occasions he lapsed into unconsciousness; when he came to, he felt that his body was on the point of leaving him. His underground neighbors came to visit him and bring him snacks, but he was able only to swallow a very little bit of congee or soup. Several neighbors said they should take him to the hospital, but he shook his head emphatically, for he knew that if he was admitted to the hospital he could say goodbye to all the money he made from selling his kidney. He believed he could get through this, but his confidence weakened with every passing day, and as the frequency of his fainting spells increased he knew he wouldn’t be fit enough to make the selection of Mouse Girl’s burial plot. For this he cried tears of frustration.
Once, Wu Chao woke from unconsciousness and asked in a feeble voice of the neighbors who sat by his side, “Was that a bird?”
“There’s no birds,” the neighbors said.
“I heard a bird calling,” Wu Chao continued weakly.
“I saw a bat on my way here,” one of the neighbors said.
“Not a bat,” Wu Chao said, “a bird.”
Xiao Qing said that the last time he went to see him, Wu Chao found it hard even to open his eyes. It was then that he begged Xiao Qing to help. He told him that there was thirty-five thousand yuan hidden under his pillow and asked him to use thirty-three thousand to buy a burial plot for Mouse Girl, a good-quality tombstone, and an urn for her ashes. The remaining two thousand he said he needed to keep for himself, so that he could come out of this alive and sweep Mouse Girl’s grave at the Qingming Festival in future years.
After saying all this, he turned with a moan and had Xiao Qing take the money out from underneath the pillow. The words “The grave of the Mouse Girl I love” were to be carved on the tombstone, he instructed Xiao Qing, with his own name below. Just as Xiao Qing was leaving, money in hand, Wu Chao called him back in a whisper and told him to change “Mouse Girl” to “Liu Mei.”
Mouse Girl was weeping. The sound of her sobs spilled over every face and body here, like the patter of rain on plantain leaves. With the twenty-seven babies warbling in the background, her sobs seemed all the more wrenching.
Many of the skeletal people listened raptly and asked each other who was singing, singing so sadly. Others said it wasn’t singing but sobbing, it was the pretty girl — the new arrival — who was sobbing, the pretty girl in the man’s pants, pants that were long and wide. Every day she’d been walking back and forth and tramping on her pant legs, but now she was sitting on the ground and crying.
Mouse Girl sat amid the riverside greenery, her back against a tree, her legs screened by grass and blossoming wildflowers, the river gurgling close by. As she hummed her song of lamentation, the teardrops on her face looked like morning dew clinging to tree leaves. She was making a dress out of the pair of pants.
Xiao Qing stood close to Mouse Girl. As stationary as a street sign, he watched as skeletal people — and a dozen or more fleshed people — approached from all directions, forming an ever-denser throng. They stood close, listening attentively to Xiao Qing’s story. From his expression one could sense that Xiao Qing was on the road to forgetting, for his account was muddled, like an effort to piece together disjointed, incomplete dream sequences.
Everybody came over, excited by the knowledge that Mouse Girl could proceed to her resting place. They talked in hushed voices about how nobody so far had ever left this place and how Mouse Girl was the first, and how, moreover, her body and her beauty were fully intact.
Everyone in this huge crowd was eager to take a closer look at Mouse Girl as she sat sewing her dress among the grasses and beneath the trees, and so they circulated around her, interweaving in an orderly fashion, some pressing forward, others hanging back, like banks of waves forming in the ocean, every one of them blessing with a silent glance this lovely young woman who was about to proceed to her resting place.