Yu Hua - The Seventh Day

I was about to go over to the cremation waiting room to see my father, but the arrival of this young man made me stop in my tracks. His body looked somehow flattened, with an odd stain on the breast of his jacket. After studying it carefully, I detected the marks left by a car tire.

“Can you remember the final scene?” I asked.

“What final scene?”

“Think about it,” I said. “What happened at the end?”

From his expression I could tell he was trying hard to remember. “All I recall was very thick fog as I waited in the street for a bus — I don’t remember anything else,” he said eventually.

I thought back to that scene in the thick fog when I left my rental room on the first day — how as I passed a bus stop I heard the roar of cars colliding and how one car sped out of the thick fog and then there was a clamor of screams.

“Were you standing next to a bus stop?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “That’s right, I was.”

“Did the sign list the 203 bus?”

He nodded. “Yes, it did. The 203 bus was the one I was waiting for.”

“It was a car accident that brought you here,” I told him. “There’s the mark of a car tire on your jacket.”

“I died in a car crash?” He lowered his head to look down at his chest and seemed to understand. “I do seem to remember something knocking me down and running over me.”

He looked at me and then at the skeletons close by. “You’re different from them,” he said.

“I just arrived a few days ago,” I said. “They’ve been here a long time.”

“Soon you’ll be just like us,” one skeleton said.

“Once spring is over — and the summer too,” I said. “We’ll be just like them.”

An uneasy expression appeared on his face. “Does it hurt a lot?” he asked.

“Not at all,” the skeleton said. “It’s just like tree leaves falling one by one in the autumn wind.”

“But a tree will always sprout more leaves,” he said.

“We’re not going to sprout again,” the skeleton said.

He nodded thoughtfully. “I understand.”

At this point a woman’s voice could be heard. “Xiao Qing!”

“I think someone is calling me,” he said.

“Xiao Qing!” the voice called again.

“That’s strange. There’s someone here who knows me.” He looked about in puzzlement.

“Xiao Qing, I’m here.”

Mouse Girl was approaching, dressed in a pair of pants so long she was treading on their cuffs. This young man looked at her in astonishment. He had heard her before he saw her.

“Hi, Xiao Qing! I’m Mouse Girl.”

“You don’t sound like her, but you do look like her.”

“I really am Mouse Girl.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Mouse Girl came up to us. “How come you’re here too?” she asked Xiao Qing.

He pointed at his chest. “Car accident.”

Mouse Girl looked at the mark on his jacket. “What’s that?”

“A car ran me over,” Xiao Qing said.

“Did it hurt a lot?” Mouse Girl asked.

Xiao Qing thought this over. “I don’t remember. I may have cried out.”

Mouse Girl nodded. “Have you seen Wu Chao?” she asked.

“Yes, I have,” he said.

“When was that?”

“The day before I came here.”

Mouse Girl turned around and told us that in the world over there Xiao Qing had been another member of the mouse tribe. She and her boyfriend, Wu Chao, had known Xiao Qing for over a year. They were below-ground neighbors.

“Does Wu Chao know what happened to me?”

“Yes, he does,” Xiao Qing said. “He bought a burial plot for you.”

“He bought a burial plot for me?”

“Yes. He gave me the money and asked me to buy you a burial plot.”

“Where did he get the money?”

When Mouse Girl fell to her death, Wu Chao was back home with his father. Later, the old man’s condition stabilized, but it was late at night when Wu Chao made it back to the underground rental in the city. He didn’t see Mouse Girl and he softly called her name a few times, but there was no answer. Their neighbors were all asleep, so he made his way along the narrow passageway, listening for the sound of human voices, thinking that Mouse Girl perhaps was chatting with someone behind a curtain. He heard nothing but snores and dreamy murmurs and the occasional baby wailing. It occurred to him that Mouse Girl might be in an Internet bar chatting with someone online. As he headed toward the bomb shelter exit he ran into Xiao Qing, just returning from his night shift. Xiao Qing told him of Mouse Girl’s death three days earlier.

Wu Chao at first did not seem to react when he heard that Mouse Girl had thrown herself off the Pengfei Tower, but a moment later his whole body started trembling and he kept shaking his head. “That’s impossible! Impossible!” he cried, and he dashed toward the exit.

Wu Chao ran into the Internet bar that was closest to the shelter, sat down in front of a computer, and read Mouse Girl’s log on QQ space. He also read a news report about her suicide. Now he knew for sure that Mouse Girl had left him forever.

Frozen in shock, he sat in front of the glaring monitor for many minutes, until the screen went black; only then did he get up and leave the Internet bar. When a stranger walked past in the late-night silence, Wu Chao turned to him and said, in a shaky voice, “Mouse Girl is dead.”

The stranger gave a start, as though he had run into a lunatic, and quickly crossed to the other side of the street, looking back at him warily.

Wu Chao roamed like a wraith through the night-bound city, in a piercing cold wind. He walked aimlessly, impervious to how far he had gone or where he was, and even when passing the Pengfei Tower he did not raise his head to look. As day broke he still had not emerged from his daze. Among the crowds of jostling people on their way to work, he kept saying over and over again, “Mouse Girl is dead.”

His words were greeted with indifference. Only one pedestrian took note of his emotional state and asked him curiously, “Who is Mouse Girl?”

He thought about this blankly for a moment before answering, “Liu Mei.” The man shook his head and said he didn’t know her, then disappeared around a corner. “She’s my girlfriend,” Wu Chao muttered.

It was not until the end of the day that Wu Chao returned to his underground home. He lay down distractedly on the bed that he and Mouse Girl used to share. Eventually he fell asleep, but he kept waking up, tears in his eyes.

The next day he neither wept nor sobbed but simply lay in bed, unable to sleep and with no appetite for meals, listening blankly to the sounds of his neighbors stir-frying and chatting and the noise of children running around and shouting. He didn’t know what they were doing or what they were saying, and was conscious only of their ebb and flow.

He sank into a deep crevasse of memory, haunted by sudden visions of Mouse Girl, sometimes buoyant, sometimes fretful. Eventually he came to the realization that his most pressing task now was to ensure that she could enjoy proper rest. During her short life she had had many dreams, but practically none of these had he enabled her to fulfill. She had often griped about that, but just as often she had forgotten to gripe, looking forward instead to new prospects. He now felt sure that having a grave of her own must have been her final wish, but this was yet another area in which he seemed likely to fail her.

At this point, amid all the background din, somebody’s words carried to him clearly. The man was talking about an acquaintance who had made over thirty thousand yuan from selling a kidney.