Yu Hua - Cries in the Drizzle

In the war-torn twilight my grandmother had unwisely parted from the throng of refugees and gone down to the river to wash her now weather-beaten face. The figures moving along the highway grew sparser, then faded from view altogether while she squatted by the riverside, lost in sentimental musings. She had to face the butcher alone. Beneath the darkening sky she kneeled at his feet, the sound of her entreaties quivering in the evening breeze like her body itself. She opened her bundle, offering its contents to him in exchange for her honor. The butcher gave precisely the kind of boisterous laugh that her mother-in-law abhorred. “Sure, I'll take these things off your hands,” he said to her, “but I'm going to fuck you too.”

The day my grandmother sat in her sedan chair, soon to become someone's wife, my grandfather, twenty-three-year-old Sun Youyuan, was on his way to a place called Northmarsh Bridge along with his father, the famous Stonemason Sun, and a team of apprentices. They were going to build a large stone bridge with thirty arches. It was a morning in early spring, and my greatgrandfather had rented a wooden boat to carry him and his assistants down the broad river. He sat at the stern, smoking a pipe and watching his son with a twinkle in his eye. Sun Youyuan stood at the prow, his jacket open, his chest flushed red in the cold breeze. The bow gently rose and fell, cleaving the river like a knife and propelling the water into rapid retreat.

That winter an official in the Republican government had announced his intention to return home and visit his family. Years ago, after setting fire to the house of some moneybags, he had swum across this wide river when fleeing the area, and had later gone on to make his fortune. Now, as he prepared to go home in a blaze of glory, the county administrator could not possibly expect him to swim across the river one more time. So some Republican silver dollars were transferred to the hands of my great-grandfather. He knew it was an important assignment and enjoined his subordinates: “This time it's a government bridge we're building, so I'm expecting your best effort.”

They arrived at their destination, which despite its name had no bridge at all. My great-grandfather was in his fifties then, a man with a lean build and a loud voice. He walked back and forth along the riverside, beginning the job in a seemingly offhand manner; close behind him walked my energetic grandfather. As he surveyed the local topography, my great-grandfather constantly looked back and — just as my great-grandmother might yell at chickens in her yard — barked out instructions to his apprentices. From time to time my grandfather would pick up a handful of soil and squeeze it between his fingers or test it with his tongue. After they had finished assessing the lay of the land on both banks and drawing up plans, Great-grandfather told the apprentices to put up a construction shed and start extracting stone, while he and my grandfather slung tools and provisions over their backs and headed into the hills.

Their mission was to extract the dragon-gate stone. These two ancestors of mine scurried across the slopes like feral cats, tapping away with their hammers and for three whole months giving the hills no rest. In those days, a stonemason's skill found its fullest expression in the dragon-gate stone, the keystone that at the culmination of the whole project was placed at the very center of a bridge, joining the two sides; it could not afford to be one inch too big or one inch too small.

My great-grandfather was the smartest pauper of his age; compared to my grandmother's father, he was dynamic and accomplished. He had spent his life roaming far and wide; he possessed both an artist's free spirit and a peasant's stolidity. My grandfather, whom he had sired and reared, was a remarkable man in his own way. The two of them extracted from the hills a square dragon-gate stone, and on its facade they carved a relief of twin dragons vying for a pearl; two stone dragons, their bodies writhing in the air, fought fiercely for the spherical stone pearl in the center. They were not the kind of masons content simply to lay a slab across a ditch; the bridge they were about to construct would be so exquisite that it would lord itself over their posterity.

After three months of work, having quarried all the stone required, the apprentices went into the hills to fetch my two ancestors. On a sweltering summer day my great-grandfather sat erect on the dragon-gate stone as the eight apprentices lugged it down from the hills on their shoulders. He was naked to the waist, puffing away at his pipe, contentment apparent in his squinting eyes, but he was not in the least triumphant, for this was all perfectly routine as far as he was concerned. My ruddy-faced grandfather Sun Youyuan marched steadily alongside, crying every few paces, “Here comes the dragon-gate stone!”

But this was not the most stirring moment. That came later, well into the autumn of that year, when the day finally came to close the gap in the middle of the bridge. Decorated archways were set up at the two ends, their colored bunting flapping in the wind like tree leaves; there were deafening peals of music and clouds of incense; a noisy hubbub rose from the ranks of country folk who had flocked to the scene from many miles around. Not a single sparrow was to be seen, the frightening din having driven them all to seek anxious refuge on trees far away. It has always surprised me that Sun Youyuan, having witnessed this splendid scene, could in his final years be so awed by my grandmother's wedding. Compared with this, her wedding was a nonevent.

It would never have occurred to my great-grandfather that his career would take a nosedive at this particular juncture. He had always been able to depend on his wits and his skills as he made his way in the world, but here in Northmarsh Bridge he came upon a cropper. He had in fact noticed that the soil was porous and that the bridge was subsiding. But he was a bit too confident, a bit too fixed in his judgment, thinking on the basis of past experience that some settling was inevitable. However, as the completion date grew closer, the rate of subsidence increased. By overlooking that point, my great-grandfather condemned himself to a miserable old age.

Although it was to end a fiasco, the sight of the eight apprentices carrying the dragon-gate stone onto the bridge was inspiring at the time. They marched proudly up to the apex and their work song died away. As they carefully lowered the dragon-gate stone toward the breach, the music hushed and the spectators went completely quiet. That was when my great-grandfather heard a grating scrape rather than the resounding clunk that he had anticipated, and knew, sooner than anybody else present, that disaster had struck. He had been watching from the decorated arch, and the unanticipated crisis left a smile frozen on his face. When that awful jarring noise reached his ears, he sprang to his feet, like a fish about to go bottom up — as my grandfather was later to tell us — with the whites of the eyes exposed. But he was after all a veteran of many adventures, and before the crowd had cottoned on to just what was amiss he had already come down from the decorated arch and walked away with his pipe pressed against his back, as though he was heading off to a tavern. He made straight for the hills, leaving his son and the team of apprentices to shoulder the disgrace.

The dragon-gate stone was tightly wedged inside the breach, and though the eight burly youths turned red in the face in their efforts to raise it out of its awkward position, it remained lodged there, immobile. As a wave of hisses swept over them, their eight faces shone like pig livers in the scorching sun. The dragon-gate stone lay tilted like a seesaw, unadjustable, unremovable.