Yu Hua: Cries in the Drizzle

Wang Liqiang did not go to his office: instead he unlocked the door to the armory. He picked up two hand grenades and went down the stairs. Sticking close to the wall, he walked quietly over to the dependent housing, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and came to a stop outside a window on the west side. He had visited this apartment on a number of occasions and knew where his colleague's wife slept. He pulled the pin on one of the grenades and then smashed the window and tossed the grenade inside. As he dashed toward the staircase, the grenade detonated, and a huge roar shook the old building so that it swayed back and forth, throwing up clouds of dust that settled on Wang Liqiang as he ran. He fled all the way to the perimeter wall and squatted in the shadow there.

The security department was thrown into such uproar it was almost as though war had broken out. He heard the commissar, now awake for the second time, heaping curses on the negligent soldier, and he heard someone crying for a stretcher. To Wang Liqiang, straining his eyes to see, the chaotic scene might as well have been a churning mass of locusts. Later he saw three stretchers being carried out of the building and heard someone shout, “Still breathing, still alive!”

He gave a start. When the stretchers were carried into an ambulance and driven out of the compound, he clambered over the wall and jumped down the other side. He knew he had no time to waste.

In the early hours a man with a grenade in his hand and a look of raw menace on his face appeared at the town hospital. The surgeon on duty when Wang Liqiang entered was a northerner with a beard. As soon as he saw the visitor, he knew that he must have something to do with the three patients who had just been carried in, and he fled down the corridor in panic, crying, “Help! The killer!”

The doctor was too flustered to express himself clearly, and it was a good half hour before he had calmed down. Now he stood next to a trembling nurse, and they watched as Wang Liqiang moved from room to room, grenade in hand. A sudden spark of courage led the doctor to propose that the two of them jump him from behind, and part of this idea certainly registered with the nurse, for as Wang Liqiang came ever closer she turned to him fearfully and implored, “Quick, you grab him now!”

The doctor thought for a moment and said, “Maybe I should report to the leadership first.” So saying, he opened a window, jumped out, and made his escape.

Wang Liqiang moved along the corridor, searching room by room. The shouts of panic grated on his nerves. When he pushed open the door to the nurses’ station, it snapped back and dealt his left wrist a stinging blow, pinning it against the jamb so painfully that he grimaced. By throwing all his weight against the door, he succeeded in knocking it open, to find four nurses weeping and wailing inside, but no sign of his quarry. He tried to calm the nurses, promising not to harm them, but they just continued to shriek, oblivious to everything he said. Wang Liqiang shook his head helplessly and withdrew. Then he went into the operating theater, abandoned long before by the terrified staff. He saw two boys lying on gurneys and recognized them as the woman's sons. They were dead, their bodies mangled. Wang Liqiang gaped in shocked disbelief that this could have happened. He retreated from the operating theater; with the deaths of the two boys, he had lost interest in searching for their mother. He slowly made his way outside and lingered momentarily by the hospital entrance, thinking that he ought to go back home, but then he said to himself, “Forget it.”

Soon he found himself surrounded. As he leaned back against a power pole, he heard the commissar yell, “Wang Liqiang, drop your weapon! Otherwise, you're a dead man.”

Wang Liqiang called back, “Sir, when Lin gets back, please tell him for me, I know I did him wrong. I didn't mean to kill his sons.”

The commissar thought this beside the point. Again he shouted, “Put down your weapon. You're a dead man if you don't.”

A wry answer came back. “Sir, I'm a dead man already.”

Wang Liqiang, who had shared his house with me for five years, who had loved me and disciplined me like a true father, suddenly found the pain in his injured wrist almost too much to bear, and in the moments before his death he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and meticulously dressed his wound. No sooner had he finished than he realized this made no sense and muttered to himself, “Why bother?”

As he looked at his neatly strapped wrist he forced a smile, and then he detonated the grenade. The force of the blast snapped the power pole behind him, and the brightly lit hospital was plunged into darkness.

The woman whom Wang Liqiang had been so determined to blow to pieces had emerged from the explosion with just some cuts and bruises. On the afternoon following Wang Liqiang's suicide, she left the hospital weeping and sobbing, still badly shaken. But before long she recovered her former self-confidence, and six months later, when she left the hospital once more, she was positively jubilant. The gynecologist's examination had confirmed that she was pregnant again, with twins to boot. During the next few days her standard greeting was, “He thought he'd got rid of my sons, but now their replacements are on the way!”

Li Xiuying was left to cope with the calamity of Wang Liqiang's death. Frail though she was, at first she seemed untouched by the enormous strain this placed on her. When one of Wang Liqiang's colleagues came to break the news on behalf of the security section, she managed to weather the initial blow. Keeping her composure, she simply scrutinized her visitor, so he was the one who was thrown off balance. Then she gave a piercing shout: “You people killed Wang Liqiang!”

The man had not anticipated this, and he began to repeat the story of how Wang Liqiang had taken his own life. Li Xiuying waved her slender arm dismissively and came out with an even more awful accusation. “You people — all of you — killed Wang Liqiang, and that's a fact. But it's me you really want to see dead.”

Her bizarre logic made the visitor realize to his dismay that it was going to be impossible to conduct a normal conversation with her. But there was a practical matter he needed to attend to. He asked her when she would like to collect Wang Liqiang's body.

Li Xiuying took her time to answer this. Then she said, “I don't want it. If he'd committed another kind of error, I'd say yes, but since he committed this kind of mistake, I'm not interested.”

That was the only thing she said that one could imagine an ordinary person saying.

After the man had left, Li Xiuying turned to me — I was still dumbstruck — and said resentfully, “They took a live man away from me, and now they're trying to fob off a dead one on me!”

She tilted her head up and said defiantly, “I refused.”

What a trying day this was — a Sunday, too — when I could only stay at home, whirled around in a jumble of emotions: bewilderment, anguish, and fear. I found it hard to accept that Wang Liqiang was dead; the whole episode had the unreal quality of a secondhand report.

Li Xiuying spent the whole day in her room, carefully attending to her underwear and adjusting the little stools’ positions in the shifting sunlight. But from time to time she would issue a scream so bloodcurdling it made me quake — the one way she could express her sorrow and despair. So piercing were her screams, they conjured up images of shards of glass whistling through the air.

Though it was daytime, I was petrified by the sound of these wild cries. Later I could not restrain my curiosity and surreptitiously opened the door to her room, to see her figure crouched over her underwear. Every so often her body would straighten, and she would raise her head and scream, “Aaaah!”