Yu Hua: Cries in the Drizzle

What happened later made me realize that Mother's nonchalance was simply a cover for her burning indignation. Her hostility to the widow, to my mind, demonstrated the narrow-mindedness of women. Inwardly I admonished my mother over and over again: it should be Father you resent, not the widow. When he climbs out of the widow's bed and makes his way over to you, you should refuse him. No matter what happened, she would never reject him, but always let him have what he wanted.

Mother's rage finally exploded one day when she was fertilizing the vegetable patch. The widow was walking along the path between the fields, looking very pleased with herself, and her manner instantly made Mother tremble all over with long-suppressed rage. She swung the dung ladle in her hand, and filthy water splattered over the widow's smug figure. The widow's voice rang out like a trumpet. “Are you blind?”

Beside herself with anger, Mother cried out in a voice shaking with emotion: “The town's the place for you! You can lie down on the sports ground there and have the men line up to fuck you.”

“Hah!” The widow gave as good as she got. “What makes you think you have the right to say that? Shouldn't you go on home and give yourself a good wash? Your man says that thing of yours stinks to high heaven!”

When these two sharp-tongued women laid into each other with such crude obscenities, quacking like two noisy clucks, the village — usually rather quiet at lunchtime — was thrown into disarray After some further exchanges, my mother, forgetting how thin and frail she was, charged fearlessly toward the widow and attempted a head butt.

Just at this moment Sun Kwangtsai happened to arrive back from town, a bottle of spirits swinging behind his back. All he saw at first, off in the distance in the vegetable patch, were two women wrestling with each other, hair all over the place, and this spectacle tickled him no end. After advancing a few steps and recognizing the combatants, my father, flustered, climbed onto a path between the fields and tried to beat a retreat. One of the villagers blocked his escape route, saying, “You'd better go and sort it out.”

“No way!” My father shook his head vigorously. “One's my wife and the other's my mistress, and I can't afford to get on the wrong side of either of them.”

By this time my mother had already been knocked off her feet and her adversary's large bottom had pinned her to the ground. When I saw this from my distant vantage point I was stricken with heartache. After all the humiliation Mother had suffered she had finally blown her top, only to suffer further ignominy.

Several of the village women, who perhaps found this onesided contest too embarrassing to watch any longer, ran over and dragged the widow off. She swaggered home victoriously, nose in the air, saying as she went, “What a nerve! That'll teach you to provoke me.”

Back at the vegetable patch my mother burst into tears and wailed: “If Sun Guangming were still alive, he wouldn't let you get away with this!”

My older brother, who had at one time brandished the cleaver so gallantly, was nowhere to be seen. Sun Guangping had shut himself in his room. He was perfectly aware of what was happening outside, but refused to get involved in what was to him a pointless squabble. Mother's weeping only intensified the shame that he felt for his family and did not stir him to indignation on her behalf.

In her defeat, the only champion Mother could imagine was my little brother, now no longer with us. It was the one straw that she could clutch at in her moment of despair.

My older brother's unresponsiveness I first interpreted as a reluctance to show his face when our family scandal was gaining such wide publicity. After all he was no longer the Sun Guangping of the private plot fracas. He had sunk into a deep gloom and his dissatisfaction with our home life was more and more evident in everything he did. Although he and I were still at odds with each other, our shared discontent made it possible for us to feel a subtle empathy at times.

Not long afterward — shortly before I left Southgate — I watched as late one evening a figure emerged from the widow's window and sneaked into our house. I recognized the arrival right away as Sun Guangping. Then I realized there was another reason he had been so passive during the altercation between Mother and the widow.

The day that my brother saw me off to the bus station, he carried my bedroll on his back, and Mother accompanied us as far as the entrance to the village. She stood there in the morning breeze and watched us walk away — a little lost, it seemed, as though still unsure what to make of the hand that fate had dealt her. When I looked at my mother for the last time I realized that her hair was streaked with gray. “Good-bye,” I said.

She showed no reaction, and her gaze seemed to be directed elsewhere. In that moment a warm feeling surged over me, for this image of my mother tugged at the heartstrings. But as I walked on, her fate seemed to change into a breath of wind and dissipate at once, leaving no trace behind. My feeling at the time was that I was never coming back. But, like Sun Guangming, I forsook her in a less callous fashion than my father and Sun Guang-ping, who not only deserted her but went to bed with her archrival, the widow. Unaware of that second betrayal, Mother was still devoting herself heart and soul to the family.

After I left, my father went full speed ahead in his campaign to be an utter scoundrel. At the same time he began to perform a deliveryman's duties, transferring a number of items from our house to the sturdy widow's, thereby lubricating their relationship and keeping things ticking over nicely. His show of loyalty was rewarded by a comparable demonstration on her part, for around this time her omnivorous tendencies moderated and she became quite abstemious. Now rounding on fifty, she was no longer inspired by the same lust that once used to sweep all before it.

Having lost the courage that he had at fourteen, Sun Guang-ping took his cue from Mother and swallowed his rage, watching in silence as my father did as he pleased. When Mother, much distressed, told him about this or that item that had been removed from our home, he would say consolingly, “We can always buy another one.”

As a matter of fact, Sun Guangping never harbored much resentment against the widow, and actually felt some gratitude.Those nights he made his way in and out of her rear window left him on tenterhooks for a long time afterward, and it was his nervousness on this score that explains why he could be no more than a spectator to my father's misdeeds and never once interfered. The widow, as it turned out, told no one about their affair, but this may simply be because she had no idea which young man it was who was sneaking in to see her. She was not in the habit of questioning the men who had designs on her body and could identify her visitors only in cases like that of Sun Kwangtsai, who bedded her in full daylight.

By the time Sun Guangping graduated from high school and returned home to work the land, his self-confidence had sunk to a new low. In the first few days he often just lay in bed, staring into space. His dazed look told all. Given my own mood at the time, I had no trouble figuring out that his most ardent wish was to leave Southgate and start a new life. More than once I saw him stand at the edge of a field, gazing as though in a trance as an enfeebled old man, his face lined with wrinkles, his body caked in mud, trudged across the farmland. I noted the misery in my brother's eyes. This grim sight struck a chord in him, making him wonder about the latter stages of his own life.

Once he had come to terms with reality, Sun Guangping soon became aware of a vague but persistent craving for a woman. It was a need quite distinct from that which the widow had satisfied. What he needed now was a woman who would stand by him and take care of him, a woman who could put an end to those nights of restless agitation and bring him contentment and peace of mind. So he got engaged.