Yu Hua - Cries in the Drizzle

In the darkness, Su Yu's face was indistinct but his voice was clear. When the moon pierced the cloud its light suddenly exposed his face, and he broke off to look up at the sky once more.

Then the moon sidled up to another cloud and slipped out of sight again. “It wasn't like putting my arm on Zheng Liang's shoulder,” Su Yu said. “It was like putting my arm on your shoulder. That was what I thought.”

Su Yu's face suddenly brightened and in the returning moonlight I saw him smile. His smile and bashful voice warmed me and sustained me that evening when the moonlight came and went.

THE DEATH OF SU YU

Su Yu, who always woke so early, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage one morning and fell into a coma. His mind, though weakening, forced his eyes partially open, sending out to the world through their feeble glance a final cry for help.

My friend used his life's fading light to gaze at the room in which he had lived so many years. It was a narrow and confining space in which to catch one's ultimate glimpse of the world. He was vaguely conscious of Su Hang's figure, still sleeping soundly in his bed, like a boulder blocking his exit. He was falling into a bottomless crevasse, but it seemed as though a luminous glow somehow held him loosely in its grip, slowing the pace of his descent. The brilliant sunshine outside was drawn to the blue curtains, making them glimmer with light.

After Su Yu's mother woke, she came tramping down the stairs. The sound of her footsteps triggered in Su Yu's failing life a fleeting throb, a longing for normality. When she picked up the empty thermos and discovered that Su Yu had not gone to the teahouse as usual to fetch hot water, she lost no time in registering her dissatisfaction with him. “Oh, for heaven's sake!”

She didn't even look at my friend as he struggled for survival.

The second person up was Su Yu's father. He had not yet washed his face or brushed his teeth when his wife told him to fetch the hot water. He gave a yell. “Su Yu, Su Yu!”

Su Yu heard a powerful noise coming to him from somewhere far away. His sinking body rose rapidly, as though a breeze propelled him up toward the surface. But he was unable to respond to the rescue call. His father strode over to his bed and fixed his gaze on him. Seeing that Su Yu's eyes were slightly ajar, he chided him. “Hurry up! Get out of bed and go fetch the water.”

Su Yu was incapable of answering and all he could do was look at his father in silence. The doctor had always been irked by Su Yu's uncommunicativeness and now he found his demeanor exasperating. He went into the kitchen, picked up the thermos, and said heatedly, “Where did this kid learn his manners, huh?”

“Oh, he got them from you, no?”

Everything disappeared, and Su Yu's body started sinking once more, like a pebble tumbling down through the air. Suddenly a beam of light shone in and stopped him in his tracks, but the brightness was instantly extinguished and Su Yu had a feeling of being hurled beyond its reach. When his father left, thermos in hand, it was as though the room had plunged into a fog. The noise his mother made in the kitchen was like a boat's sail far off in the distance, and Su Yu felt that his body was floating on some watery substance.

By now Su Yu could not distinguish among the different sounds in the kitchen. When his father came back, the sunlight from outside briefly shone in through the door and his body was momentarily uplifted. His parents’ conversation and the clatter of bowls and chopsticks caused him to linger in a field of gray. My friend lay becalmed in the quiet, just before the point of no return.

After they had finished breakfast Su Yu's parents passed by his bed, but they didn't give him another glance before going off to work. When they opened the front door, my friend once more was boosted by the sun's rays, only for the door to close again immediately.

Su Yu lay forever in the gloom, feeling his body slowly sinking as his life wearily approached its end. His brother slept right through till ten o'clock. When he got up, he went over to Su Yu's bed and asked him in surprise, “So you're sleeping in late today too, are you?”

Su Yu's eyes were already dim. To Su Hang, his expression was baffling. “What are you playing at?” he asked.

He turned and went into the kitchen, where he began a lengthy process of brushing his teeth and washing his face. Then he ate his breakfast. Like his parents, he crossed the room without giving his brother a second glance and opened the front door.

That was the last flood of light to enter the room, and it triggered a fleeting recovery of consciousness. Su Yu sent his brother a mental cry for help, but all that happened was that Su Hang closed the door behind him.

Su Yu's body finally found itself in an unstoppable fall that accelerated and turned into a tailspin. A stifling sensation held him in its grip for what seemed like an eternity, and then all of a sudden he attained the tranquility of utter nothingness. It was as though a refreshing breeze was blowing him gently into tiny pieces, as though he was melting into countless drops of water that disappeared crisply sweetly into thin air.

Su Yu was dead by the time I arrived. Noticing that the door and the windows were shut, I stood outside and called, “Su Yu. Su Yu!”

No sound came from within. I assumed that he must have gone out and I went away, crestfallen.

THE LITTLE COMPANION

In my last year at home, walking back to Southgate from school one afternoon, I came across three boys fighting outside a pastry shop. A small boy with blood dripping from his nose clung tightly to the waist of an older boy who was trying his best to pull the other's hands away, while the third boy stood to one side and shouted threateningly, “Are you going to let go now?”

Although little Lulu saw me approaching his jet black eyes gave no sign that he was appealing for help, and instead conveyed a total indifference to the prospect of impending punishment.

The boy who was being held said to his friend, “Hurry up and get him off me!”

“I can't pull him off. You need to shake him off.”

So the other boy swiveled around in an effort to dislodge Lulu. Lulu's feet left the ground but his hands maintained a tight grip on his adversary. He closed his eyes to avoid feeling dizzy. Despite spinning around several times, the boy failed to get rid of Lulu and succeeded only in tiring himself out. Panting, he cried to his buddy, “Get… him … off!”

“How?” The other boy was just as powerless.

At this moment a middle-aged woman emerged from the pastry shop and shouted at the children, “What, you're still at it?”

She turned to me and said, “They've been fighting for two hours already, can you believe it?”

The captive boy said in his own defense, “He won't let go of me.”

She began to reproach them. “You two shouldn't gang up on a smaller boy.”

“He hit us first,” the other boy replied.

“Who are you trying to kid? I could see perfectly well that you two were bullying him.”

“Well, he was the first to start hitting.”

Lulu looked at me again with his dark eyes. It seemed never to have occurred to him that he needed to tell his side of the story, as though what the other boys said was of absolutely no interest to him. All he did was look at me.

The middle-aged woman gave them a push. “I don't want you fighting in front of my shop. Clear off, the lot of you.”

The pinioned boy began, with great difficulty, to edge forward; Lulu hung to him grimly, his feet scraping along the ground. The other boy brought up the rear, with their two satchels in his hand. Lulu was no longer looking at me but was craning his neck around to look at his own satchel, which lay in the pastry shop doorway. When they'd gone some ten yards or so, the pinioned boy came to a halt, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and said to his buddy in annoyance, “Come on, get him off me, will you?”