Yu Hua - The Seventh Day

Wu Chao followed the meal-delivery man up the stained cement staircase to the fourth floor. The man knocked on a door, and when it was opened, Wu Chao found a middle-aged man sitting on a sofa inside the room. This person greeted Wu Chao warmly and had him sit down next to him, then began to explain that the human body actually requires just one kidney, so the other is redundant — like an appendix, which you can keep or remove as you wish.

Wu Chao was not interested in these issues. “How much will I get for my kidney?” he asked the middle-aged man.

“Thirty-five thousand,” the man replied.

Wu Chao thought this sufficient for his purposes, so he nodded.

“We pay top price here,” the man said. “Other places pay only thirty.”

No need to worry about the surgery, he assured Wu Chao, for the doctors they used were all from big hospitals and were just taking on these jobs for extra income.

“They say that it’s vets who do the operation,” Wu Chao responded.

“That’s bullshit!” the middle-aged man said, looking displeased. “Our doctors are all fully trained surgeons, and we pay them five thousand for every kidney removal.”

Wu Chao moved into a room on the fifth floor. It had four beds, only one of which was occupied. The person there was a man who had already had a kidney removed, and he gave his new roommate a friendly smile, which Wu Chao returned.

This man’s operation had been successful, and he was able to prop himself up against the bedstead to talk with Wu Chao. He said he no longer had a fever and would be able to leave in another few days. He asked Wu Chao why he was selling his kidney.

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 unconsciou sness; 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 unconsciou sness 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.”