Yu Hua - The Seventh Day

“I saw Yang Fei,” he told Li Yuezhen, “on that very rock.”

He was in his final moments now, and he sank into the darkness as though sinking into a well, with silence all around. The lights in the tall buildings were extinguished and the stars and moon in the sky were extinguished too. Then, all of a sudden, it was as though the scene of my abandonment appeared in a brilliant shaft of light. He saw me, the four-year-old, sitting on the rock in a blue-and-white sailor suit, the one he had bought for me when he decided to give me away. A little sailor boy sat on the dark rock; he was happily waving his legs. “I’m going to get you something to eat,” my father said to me sadly. “Dad, be sure to get plenty,” I said to him happily.

But this radiant picture vanished in the twinkling of an eye, as a pair of coarse hands forcibly removed his uniform, briefly calling him back from the brink of death. His body was feeling numb, but remaining shreds of consciousness enabled him to realize what the vagrant was doing. The vagrant stripped off the tattered blue clothes he was wearing and put on my father’s brand-new uniform.

“Please,” my father said weakly. The vagrant bent his head to hear more clearly. “Two hundred yuan,” he heard my father murmur. The vagrant groped around in my father’s shirt pocket and pulled out two hundred-yuan notes. He transferred them to the breast pocket of the railroad uniform that had been my father’s.

“Please,” my father said once more. The vagrant stood looking at him for a moment, then squatted down and put the tattered blue jacket on him.

The vagrant heard his last words:

“Thank you.”

The darkness was endless. My father sank into a nothingness in which everything was erased, in which he himself was erased. Then it was as though he heard someone calling “Yang Fei!” and his body stood up, and when he stood up he discovered he was walking on an empty and desolate plain, and the person calling “Yang Fei!” was himself. He went on walking and went on calling, “Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei…” It was just that the sound of his voice got smaller and smaller. He walked a long way across the plain and didn’t know if he had walked for a day or for several days, but his endless calling of my name brought him back to his own city, and his call of “Yang Fei!” seemed to lead him like a road sign to our little shop. He stood on the street outside for a long, long time — two days or two weeks, he could not tell. The doors and windows of the shop remained closed throughout, and I never appeared.

As he stood there, the commonplace sights around him gradually took on an unfamiliar cast, the pedestrians and traffic circulating in the street grew indistinct, and he became aware that the place where he stood was becoming vague and dim. But the shop itself remained clearly recognizable and he continued to stand outside, looking forward to the door opening and me emerging from inside. Finally the door did open, but it was a woman who came out; she turned around and exchanged words with a man inside — a man who was clearly not me. My father bowed his head in disappointment and shuffled off.

“Yang Fei sold the shop and went to look for you,” Li Yuezhen told him.

He nodded. “When I saw someone else come out, I knew Yang Fei must have sold the place.”

Later, he kept on walking, kept on getting lost, and it was as he puzzled over his location that he heard a nightingale-like song. As he headed toward the source of the music, he saw skeletal people walking this way and that, and as he shuttled among them he entered a wood where the leaves grew bigger and bigger, where swaying babies lay on the broad tree leaves. The nightingale song was emanating from them. A woman in white approached — he recognized her as Li Yuezhen. She recognized him too, for at this point their looks were unaltered. They stood among the babies that were crooning like nightingales and exchanged accounts of their last moments in that departed world. He asked Li Yuezhen for news of me, and she told him of my visit to his old village — that was all she knew.

Very tired, he lay for several days in the grass beneath the trees, amid the warblings of the twenty-seven babies. Then he stood up, telling Li Yuezhen that he missed me and longed to see my face — even just a glimpse of me in the distance would content him. He resumed his endless journey, continually getting lost on unfamiliar roads, but this time he was unable to return to the city, because he had left that world for too long a time. He could only get as far as the funeral parlor, the interface between the two worlds.

Like me on my first visit there, he entered the waiting room and listened to the crematees as they discussed their burial clothes, cinerary urns, and burial sites, and he watched as one by one they entered the oven room. He stood rather than sat, and soon he came to feel that the waiting room should have a staff member in attendance, for he was someone who loved to work. When a late-arriving crematee entered, he instinctively went to usher him in and get him a number, then led him to a seat. This made him feel a lot like a regular assistant, and he went on walking back and forth in the central aisle. One day he found a pair of old white gloves in the pocket of the tattered blue jacket the vagrant had given him, and after putting them on he felt all the more like a full-time usher. Day after day he showed the utmost courtesy to those awaiting cremation, and day after day he felt an exquisite anticipation, knowing that so long as he kept on doing this, then eventually — in thirty or forty or fifty years — he would be able to see me.

Li Yuezhen paused at this point. I knew now where my father was — he was the man with the blue jacket and the white gloves in the waiting room of the funeral parlor, the man whose face had no flesh but only bone, the man with the weary and grieving voice.

My father had made a point of coming back from the funeral parlor to tell her about his new job, Li Yuezhen added. But he’d left as soon he’d shared this news with her, left in a great hurry, as though he never really should have taken a break.

The sound of Li Yuezhen’s voice was like a trickle of water, every word a little water droplet falling to the ground.

After many hesitant twists and turns, a young man made his way here, bringing to Mouse Girl news of her boyfriend in that other world.

Looking in dazed confusion at the green grass and the dense trees and the people walking about — many skeletal, some still fleshed — he said to himself, “How did I end up here?”

“It seems like five days now,” he went on. “I have been walking around all this time, and I don’t know how I ended up here.”

A voice piped up. “Some come here just a day after they die, but some take several days.”

“I died?” he said perplexedly.

“You didn’t go to the funeral parlor?” that same voice asked.

“The funeral parlor?” he asked. “Why would I go there?”

“Everyone has to go to the funeral parlor for cremation after they die.”

“You’ve all been cremated?” He looked at us in wonder. “You don’t look like ashes to me.”

“We haven’t been cremated.”

“Did you not go to the funeral parlor, then?”

“No, we’ve been there.”

“If you went, why weren’t you cremated?”

“We have no burial grounds.”

“I have no burial ground, either,” he muttered to himself. “How could I have died?”

“The people who come over after you will tell you,” another voice broke in.

He shook his head. “Just now I ran into someone who said he had just got here. He didn’t know me and didn’t know how I got here, and didn’t know how he got here, either.”